If one wanted a cogent, concise summation of the many failings of the Disney STAR WARS trilogy from 2015 to 2019, I for one would recommend this Youtube video by "So Civilized," entitled THE STAR WARS SEQUELS: DISNEY'S ANTI-TRILOGY. SC lays out the many missteps made by the creative teams, which I will abbreviate to the respective directors: J.J. Abrams for THE FORCE AWAKENS and THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, and Rian Johnson for THE LAST JEDI.
I fundamentally agree with SC on his essential thesis, which I'll boil down to "Abrams was too respectful of Lucas's NEW HOPE and EMPIRE; Johnson was too disrespectful of the whole mythos with nothing to put in its place." He doesn't elaborate what virtues of George Lucas these two latter-day creators fail to emulate, though a separate video, THE PERFECT STORYTELLING CLARITY OF STAR WARS, provides a good counterpoint to the ANTI-TRILOGY essay.
But, now that I've agreed with SC about all the storytelling flaws of both Abrams and Johnson, how do I make them line up with my own estimation of the three Disney flicks, since I rated the mythicity of LAST JEDI as "poor" while I deemed FORCE and RISE as "good."
Of course, I've championed a lot of works that have all sorts of surface flaws-- as seen recently in my reviews of grungy trash-films like BLOOD SABBATH and BLINDMAN-- because I consider that mythopoeic discourse can be formed even in the near-total absence of dramatic or didactic excellence. My criterion for mythopoeic discourse is that I have to be able to find a "master thread" around which the author(s) organize(s) his symbolic correlations, as explained in my essay series on the subject, starting here.
Interestingly enough, So Civilized has nearly nothing to say about the thread that most interested me, as I noted in my review of FORCE:
... it’s an interesting psychological touch that the script, by having Luke be Kylo’s teacher, makes him the symbolic offspring of the Luke-Leia-Han triangle
And this concatenation is echoed in Abrams' conception of Rey:
...Rey displays aspects of all of her parental influences, combining Han’s talents for piloting and scrounging, Leia’s feminine hauteur, and Luke’s instinctive connection with the Force.
I didn't comment in the FORCE review about the intimations of a romance-arc between Kylo and Rei. Yet this comes to fruition in JEDI, and I find it significant that even though Johnson downgrades almost every conceit Abrams raised-- Rei's mysterious parentage, the future significance of the Jedi, et al-- he never seeks in any way to tear down the blossoming quasi-romance between these two offspring, both literal and figurative, of the Luke-Leia-Han triangle.
I failed to note this thread's development in my 2019 review. But in my recent re-screening, I must admit that Johnson seems fully aware that he cannot undo the growing "fellow feeling" between Rei and Kylo, even though she's seen him ruthlessly cut down a man who was Kylo's real father and Rei's wished-for surrogate parent. Johnson seems at least moderately aware that when he has Kylo betray and murder his mentor Snoke and invite Rei to join him in ruling the galaxy, he has fulfilled the intimations of a similar ambition voiced by Darth Vader to Luke in EMPIRE-- even though RETURN OF THE JEDI patently ignores Vader's earlier scheming against his mentor Palpatine.
In RISE, Abrams re-asserts his trope about Rei's special destiny, though in much the same way that Luke's destiny had dark roots. Just as Luke found out that he was the seed of an evil father, Rei learns that she's the granddaughter of the source of all Sith evil. I didn't feel that Abrams cared that much about that big revelation, and Palpatine's whole rap about "strike me down with your hate and I'll be reborn" fails to carry much resonance. But the repeated encounters of Rei and Kylo make up the trilogy's master thread, and Abrams puts far more effort bringing this trope to life than any of the pallid plotlines about Finn or Poe or even Threepio's supposedly comical loss of memory. In my review of RISE I noted:
As soon as renegade Kylo Ren encounters Rey, it's clear to every SW-savvy character that he's going to seek to convert her, as Palpatine successfully swayed Anakin Skywalker and as Anakin, in the guise of Darth Vader, failed to suborn Luke Skywalker. I suspect that Abrams may have formulated some specific ideas about Kylo's personal motives, and that Disney executives didn't want to delve into LOST-style psychodrama, so that in a psychological sense Kylo appears half-formed at best. However, Abrams does succeed in making Kylo a metaphysical complement to Rey, particularly when Kylo himself tells Rey that they comprise a "dyad," like the two sides of the Force. This yin-and-yang unity, though true to some of George Lucas's real world inspirations for the fictional Jedi, resembles nothing in the way Lucas treated the interactions of Palpatine-Anakin and of Vader-Luke, where it was clear that one character would dominate the other. Kylo, in his ceaseless attempts to draw Rey into his sphere, seems to be seeking some deeper consummation. To be sure, Abrams backs off on making the sexual aspects explicit, save for a suggestive final kiss between young Jedi and young Sith as the latter is about to perish.
I don't know how much of a Freudian J.J. Abrams may be now or has been in the past. He's written scripts that suggest Freudian content, particularly for LOST, but he's certainly done other scripts that don't pursue that sort of content. But it seems logical to me that either he or his collaborators on FORCE looked at the way Lucas had resolved the romantic angle of his original trilogy and wondered what might have happened had some of the offspring of both Light and Dark sides of the Force came together as Luke and Leia had not. I'm not saying that Abrams was engaging in nothing more than "shipping" forbidden romances, though there were be nothing wrong with it if he were. Rather, I think he had some notion of showing the dramatic costs of Rei's choice to pursue the rigorous destiny of a Jedi, which arguably put her apart from ordinary humankind. This gave Rei a kindred nature with the obsessed Kylo, who certainly had been all but overwhelmed by the weight of his heritage, and who may have chosen to imitate Darth Vader as an act of rebellion against his father, mother and uncle. I'm not saying Abrams totally succeeds in evoking all the dramatic potential of this psychology, but there's something more than mere imitativeness in his attempt to capture the complexities of Lucas's wonder child.
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