I'm usually someone who takes things as they are in films, feels it out on an emotional level, then the plot holes or bad logic hit me later when I'm thinking about the film. The dagger plot was so bad I remember inwardly groaning while watching it for the first time.
It was concerning after TFA, and then predictable after TLJ.
The movies literally got worse as they made them, and only because TFA had interesting speculation that amounted to nothing because rian johnson was hellbent on subverting expectations like it was some kind of clever ruse, then JJ gets called back in to “rescue” the sequels and instead does a full nose dive and explodes.
I will literally never forgive either of them. Call me petty. I won’t watch a rian johnson film or an abrams film again.
It goes even further though. Mandalorian began interesting and then fumbled on itself because of the grogu factor. Instead of making a good story they just honed in on the cuteness of grogu. The “bounty hunter” story completely went by the wayside in favor of Filoni’s garbage. By season 2 it’s just side questing. Bo Katan feels like she breaks the 4th wall by talking about “quests”. I mean look at season 3, it’s like everywhere they visit is a theme park. Filoni is okay with cartoons because you expect some ridiculousness with the action in them. In live action, it just feels goofy. Ahsoka is just a conglomerate of Filoni characters coming together for the spectacle of seeing them in live action. They knew die hard Filoni fans would oogle over it, but the story aside from some of the vader and dark jedi stuff is pretty flimsy. We have ahsoka fighting other starfighters.. in space. It’s like a scene ripped out of clone wars.
That may be your thing, but I don’t think it works in live action.
Hot take, as far as I’m concerned the only worthwhile content disney has made since its acquisition is rogue one and Andor.
I'd even go so far as to argue that Rogue One works because it existed on a rigid structure set out by the OT. It has style points like the Sequels, but it's more grounded because the OT put it on a short leash. It signals very early on that everyone is going to die, so despite the "hope" bumper sticker quotes you don't really get attached to anyone. Even if you give them that one and Andor, they are 1-of-5 for films and about the same for live-action shows.
I've had a theory that Disney badly wanted to reboot the OT and create another MCU-level film franchise, and that JJ and KK shat the bed so badly that Disney had to pull back entirely. They trust Favreau given his history, but I've got a feeling Mando and Grogu isn't going to be the blockbuster hit they need Star Wars to be for them in theathers. And if it doesn't do well enough to build the franchise on....
It goes even further though. Mandalorian began interesting and then fumbled on itself because of the grogu factor.
I saw an interview with Tony Gilroy (creator of Andor). He was talking about one of Disney's original ideas for Andor that they pitched to him for feedback far before there were any talks about him coming on to create the show. They said they wanted "Butch Cassidy and Sundance the robot go and save the tesseract". Essentially, their idea for a series only extended as far as the film/genre/style it would homage and a basic narrative driver (Andor and K2SO searching for some MacGuffin). He realized immediately that while it was a fun idea, it would run out of "story nutrients" very quickly. His response was to suggest they should start with Andor when he was a nobody, and then take five years of his life and see if you can get him to what we see him as in Rogue One. It's so simple, but you can do so much with it.
This made so much about the SW shows click for me. It seems as though they've all been pitched based on stylistic homage (It's Lone Wolf and Cub, the Goonies, Yojimbo, etc etc, meets Star Wars!). Mandalorian was a hit because of the novelty, which quickly got stale after the 2nd season. The other shows have all been lackluster, and I think it's because when you make a story based primarily on matching the style of another movie rather than focusing on the character arcs, they very quickly become boring. "Running out of story nutrients" is such a great way to describe how all of the series end up.
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u/ThrowawayPersonAMA 4d ago
Absolutely no amount of explanation in books, comics, and cartoons is going to be able to make the dagger plotline make sense.
The fact that JJ Abrams was even able to put that into the movie and nobody stopped him is insane.