They should have done Duel of the Fates instead
see i like this art but honestly given the leaked script dont think that movie would have necessarily turned out better. these two photos are also old ideas we have already seen; Rey and Kylo Ren fighting and a "new" Dark Rey costume that just steals another thing of Luke's, this time from
ROTJ. the double saber is cool but again Darth Maul. where is something genuinely new? the grey Jedi stuff, i don't buy it. never thought it was interesting.
No, it's not bad and Abrams did as much as anyone could to undo Last Jedi. It's just a very forgettable movie required to do too much and saddled with too much baggage.
It made for an amicable separation.
i agree w this take, except for the bold. it is a common thing to say JJ "undid the Last Jedi" or "didn't like it" or "tried to appease haters". i might agree with the very last one there, but imo he merely tried to continue from there, to pay homage to Rian's film, by returning to ideas he introduced, rather than ignoring them entirely. he goes back to Rian's island, to cement the important of that place, where Luke apparently is trapped forever now (like he was in Rian's movie), and where he does believe in the Jedi continuing, like he does at the end of his character arc in
the Last Jedi. remember? he tells Kylo "I will not be the last Jedi", it's part of his big speech of how he "owns" Kylo in a Twitter rant about how the war will always go on and how Rey has the Jedi texts and will continue that path. so yes, them revisiting that planet is a direct homage to Rian's idea.
the revelation that Luke trained Leia and the whole flashback and her secret lightsaber, again, all of that is building off what Rian did with Leia in the last movie. her whole Mary Poppins sequence where she shockingly reveals that she has been trained in the force is paid off by JJ with this whole plot point. it is one of the few connecting tissues that remain solid and which goes some way to paying off the whole "Skywalker" bloodline theme.
when Leia died, i had thought that she was doing a form of Force Projection, that she was sending herself to Kylo. similar to what Luke did in
TLJ but more her life force (a concept introduced in
TROS). Leia and Kylo die at the same moment, except Leia is sending her life force to Kylo, so in one way, she lives through Kylo. from this moment on he is Ben Solo, he is his mother's son, and possibly, her force spirit as well. the transferring of life force idea imo has a lot of potentials for interperetation, and the way i saw it, by the time Rey has been killed and healed by the sacrifice of Kylo's life force, it is somewhat implied that Rey is herself the vessel for Leia's life force, passed to her from Kylo Ren. Ben Solo sacrificing his life for that of a stranger, who in reality turns out to be his mother in another body? it certainly sounds like a Greek myth or something. i find that satisfactory.
JJ paid tribute to
TLJ very much, it is just that
TLJ warriors have such thin skins that any commentary on their beloved masterpiece is to be mocked or blown out of proportion as some toxic ploy. people liked the flashy visuals of Holdo's lightspeed? then let's have the Emperor shooting lightning at a thousand spaceships. it just so happens that yes JJ just isn't that great a writer, but he was trying to build from what Rian was doing in good faith. this is why he put in the Holdo explanation, how small a chance that was, highlighting that she knew it was probably certain death and made the sacrifice in light of that. is that not honoring it? yet people said it was a dig at the movie.
even the much-derrided Kylo-Rey kiss, that is there purely to satisfy the Tumblr feeds and Twitter threads and animated GIF tributes to Reylo. which was a movement almost entirely inspired by the deliberately sexy (Rian went on and on about that damn hand scene) pairing decision he bizarrely chose to go with. these are people who edited the scene where Rey and Kylo are on an elevator so that the two of them are closer to each other, and now that is the most popularly posted version of that scene. all those fans tweeting hashtags, those people who love
TLJ to death and were the Tweet army, many of whom ended up harassing the actors and director of
TROS, those are the people to blame for the Reylo kiss.
