Mark Hamill said Lucas's plan was for Luke to die at the end of Episode IX. Or so I've heard.
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JJ Abrams: “There was a plan”
- Thread starter Halbrand
- Start date
Mark Hamill said Lucas's plan was for Luke to die at the end of Episode IX. Or so I've heard.
That sounds exactly like something Lucas would do. Anakin/Darth Vader died at the end of the original trilogy, Darth Vader was born at the end of prequel trilogy, and so it follows that Luke would die at the end of the sequel trilogy.
Lucas's plan also involved Palpatine not being defeated for good until Episode IX (rather than dying in Episode VI). Vader would die in Episode VI. Luke would meet a female Jedi in the sequel trilogy and she would be the main focus.
No, supposedly he was going to meet his sister in the sequel trilogy (who wouldn't have been Leia)
That what people complain about her.
Well, JJ said we will know why Rey can use the force quickly.
I thought they said she downloaded Kylo Ren's abilities from their mind meld... or something.
They should examine why instead of being insecure about seeing a woman succeed at one thing that she shouldn't have had any trouble with based on the character and how things work in universe. 🤷♂️
Yeah, She does that but it looks like there a reason why she can do that.
He also planned for Jar Jar Binks to be the key to the PT but the backlash against him was so fierce that he had to basically remove any trace of him from the movies.
-No, i'm just calling a spade a spade. It was a question lingering from TFA that JJ confirmed. If you don't like the term, get a new one and hope it catches on. Would you prefer Gary Stu?
[/QUOTE]
-You're right. This is the scene when Rian Johnson actually could have changed Star Wars for the better/interesting. And we end up rehashing the same old same old. Not even in an entertaining way, just a shitty way. Which is the entire point.Out of all of the main characters Kylo literally gets the least amount of character development in TLJ and that's by design because his "let's start something NEW" speech included this:
where have we heard this before...
well surely it's just a coic--
it's almost like anyone who was paying attention could easily figure out that he wasn't presenting anything new and never was, just the status quo from someone doing his best attempt at emotional abuse.
-It's not even "answering fan theories in a different way", it's not answering them at all. I'm supposed to buy Snoke is this big bad something or other who "Gets to Kylo first", and there's a huge ??? as to what he is. And TLJ...does nothing before it kills him off. We know nothing about this central mystery character who has begged several questions, and the movie doesn't bother to have him do anything other than cliche villainy.
-One mistake=/=Stanning for a bad movie
I honestly don't know about that, but we do know they talked to George, and then made their own story. To be honest, I was always surprised when some people were upset that Luke died in TLJ. I was expecting it since after TFA. It was clear to me they would had some kind of send-off to all three original protagonists in each movie. Don't know what happens to Leia now because they can only use scenes from TFA.
What if I, someone who does not write for a living but instead obsessively consumes media, told you that you are actually wrong and there is a technically "right" way to write stories and anyone who deviates from this is incorrect and therefore their stories are stupid
I'm totally kidding, I am a writer myself and I completely agree. The idea that there had to be some meticulously plotted outline for all three movies for the sequel trilogy to be any good is ridiculous and nothing more than people who don't like the current movies trying to find something objectively wrong with them. Because you know, we can't just all have opinions, they have to be the right ones!
Your point on Carrie Fisher is well-taken. It was established a while back that 7 was supposed to be Han's movie, 8 Luke's and 9 Leia's. Hey, all the "tHeY nEeDeD a PlAn" folks, how did that work out? People also like to highlight the MCU's approach to story-telling, while ignoring that Marvel has a catalog of popular stories they can pick and choose from and that the MCU has also had to deal with curve balls. Just look at all the drama surrounding Spider-Man. There's no such thing as a foolproof plan.
Well and also the "They killed Luke, those bastards!" takes are supremely dumb in the context of friggin' Star Wars. He'll become a ghost and come back in the next movie. How is this not the most obvious thing in the world?
It also contradicts what he said in person, at a Q&A I attended. I remember being pretty struck by his description of the scripting process for this new Star Wars trilogy, which was essentially J.J. wrote a script, threw the football to Rian (once he was on board the sequel, of course), Rian wrote a script, he threw the football back. Not to say that there was no communication, but he certainly didn't describe a master plan; I remember being surprised at how quaint and human that process sounded for movies being churned out by a mega-corporation that owns an uncomfortable amount of our pop culture.
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I'm hoping that ROS somehow retroactively makes TLJ a lot better.
You're right that there was no plan for a trilogy so it's not a 1:1 comparison but we all know how TFA was rolled out...they had to meet a release date. There wasn't enough time to plan out a trilogy. I also don't think it's necessary to have a plan to make a good trilogy anyway. There's no guarantee things would have turned out better that way.
A plan to have a plan was loosely made.
Making a trilogy of movies where a different director does their own shit is such a dumb idea.
If you have one solid story and then let different directors do different parts sure why not, fuck it.
But letting people just jam shit together . . I mean its star wars so quality was long off the table but god damn
Making a trilogy of movies where a different director does their own shit is such a dumb idea.
If you have one solid story and then let different directors do different parts sure why not, fuck it.
But letting people just jam shit together . . I mean its star wars so quality was long off the table but god damn
Again, exactly how is she a Mary Sue? Like, under any definition of the term she doesn't fit that category.
Not even a Rifftrax could save TLJ.
Like come on are you even trying
The OT at least had Lucas running in the background to make sure everything went smoothly, he had a vision and let others do it and it worked out amazingly.
The PT had Lucas do it all himself. He had a vision, and it worked out...questionably.
The ST has said "Fuck it YOLO" and made it up as they went along. It worked out for the first movie and didn't for the second.
I did say
Like come on are you even trying
"I mean its star wars so quality was long off the table but god damn"
Theres no reason with all their access to talent and resources they had to slap together a shitty series, trying too hard to emulate Lucas there
Nah you're just being insecure fam.
Poe has no one go on the trip to Canto Bight, which means this dude never gets recruited:
and the resistance's plan is never revealed to the first order, meaning that literally the entire climax of the film, from the moment the FO starts firing on the resistance transports to Poe's conflict with Holdo being dependent on the progress of the mission vs. the urgency of the FO's attacks and remaining fuel to the battle on Crait happening in the first place to Finn's arc being based around the core theme of the film....Finn is a major character in TLJ by every definition of the term.
You just argued that if a character crucial to the film's events was absent then it wouldn't really change in any major ways. So 🤷♂️
You weren't paying attention to the messages of the film. Instead you were taking the space nazi at face value.
Which is not an inherent fault of a narrative. No story is obligated to fit neatly into wiki lore videos.
Literally not a single character in TFA ever questions the identity of Snoke.
Imagine living in such a bubble that you think TLJ is considered to be a bad movie by any possible metric. While also arguing that not answering fan theories is a fault of the film. Your method of arguing works much better in places like STC.
Ah yes, the vision went so smoothly that there was unintentional incest and an ending film that the people working on it felt was very disagreeable with the original outline that was written and then thrown out partly because of a desire for more toy sales...
"We had an outline and George changed everything in it," Kurtz said. "Instead of bittersweet and poignant he wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn't want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales and that was a reason."
That's on top of major rewrites for characters, (I am your father---->A CERtAiN POiNt of ViEw LUkE), and moments literally made because they weren't sure if a major actor would come back:
Leading to a very awkward opening of the next film comprising of multiple attempts to resolve this plot line before Luke arrives with an awful plan that could've been easily foiled if literally anyone tried to shoot him..
But please tell me more about this grand vision.
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I have a lot of problems with TLJ, mostly to do with the execution of the Finn/Rose subplot being very subpar and the Poe/Hondo stuff being full of holes. But every 'subverted expectation' landed for me: Luke's cynicism, Snoke's death, Rey's parentage, the general 'democratization' of Force sensitivity. All great. If JJ backtracks on any of them, I'll be quite disappointed.
A plan definitely isn't necessary. But when you want to have three different directors and want to cut the time between films by a whole year, a plan definitely helps. Or hell, not even a full plan but a strong authorial voice that can create a cohesive vision for the trilogy. I thought Kennedy was supposed to have that role but perhaps I was wrong. Between Abrams playing it too safe, Johnson's antithetical approach and Trevorrow being dumped, some sort of leadership was missing to address and correct the chaos.
That's how I feel at least. The trilogy thus far feels like it lacks vision. Perhaps Abrams can fix that since he is bookending the trilogy, but I am dubious. I'm interested in seeing what happens, but I feel like the best result will be two samey, safe movies sandwiched in between something very unlike the other two films.
The whole "There was a plan, but no scenario" makes it seems like the plan was bare basic "I want Episode 7 to start the trilogy, I want Episode 8 to show further stuff regarding the characters introduced in Episode 7, and I want Episode 9 to bring it all to some sort of conclusion.....now, how do we do all this?!"
People, please listen to this person! They know what they're talking about. Some of you are acting like George Lucas had all the OT planned from the get go.
I mean, he said for YEARS that was the case.
"This story is The Adventures of Luke Skywalker"
"I have TWELVE episodes planned out for Star Wars."
"No, actually its The Tragedy of Darth Vader and that has ALWAYS been the case"
"There is NO story beyond RotJ. Star Wars ends there."
"So I have this sequel trilogy in mind..."
On and on for almost 40 years now. The man just cannot admit to people (and possibly himself, I guess?) that he was making this shit up on the fly.
Yeah I don't think it's widely appreciated just how irrelevant the first ~40 minutes or so of Jedi are in relation to the rest of the movie. It's a really cool opening setpiece (I've always felt Jedi has a strong opening, sloggish middle and great ending), but "the gang rescued Han" conveys everything you need to know in order for the remaining plot to make sense.
Hot take, it is the OT's Canto Bight. You can't just cut it wholesale, but it still arguably takes up way too much time.
There are definitely some versions of the George Lucas myth that go something like "he had an idea for a movie that was so expansive, he just split it up into three parts." He was even winging it with the prequels to some degree, Jar-Jar was intended to be much more important but he fades into the background in Episode II and totally disappears in Episode III because people hated him.
I can't help but think large sections of that film are going to be in the end. When someone eventually tries to combine these films into a giant mega film I fully expect The Last Jedi to be significantly cut down when it comes to just focusing on the content you need to watch and know about.
It's complete malpractice that there wasn't a full outline of all three films done and looked over several times and locked in before they even started work on the first film. I say outline because you should know all the major story beats you want to hit when you fully know you're committed to doing a trilogy. An outline leaves you room to alter things if say a character or actor ended up a big hit. Or something really didn't work. Or you need to condense a story. You have room to retool. To have nothing really or make it up as you go or to have something and allow it to be tossed is just ugh.
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Right???
I got into an argument about this recently with some fanboys talking about "there are strict rules you need to follow when creating a successful cinematic universe" and it's like sure, if you see them exclusively as product. Which to be fair, they are to Disney, but let's try and pretend some artistry can happen within corporate guidelines.
Funny how OUTRAGED and UPSET people get by Abrams "throwing out" everything Lucas came up with for his own version of Episode VII, when a lot of the broad strokes seem to be there (young female Jedi who finds Luke's lightsaber and seeks training).
Nah bro he had this vision in mind. 🙄
At the very least Canto Bight was the catalyst for the character arcs.
Nah bro he had a vision and was totally not winging it for the prequel trilogy. That's why there are so many things in the PT that directly contradict or don't make sense in the context of the OT right down to only twenty years passing contradicting the original plan where the Empire was around long enough for there to have been multiple emperors and thus we somehow get this bright eyed boy on a planet where you apparently age like this:
You can tell they had a plan cuz rian when through all the trouble to get kylo out of the helmet, only for jj to put him back in it.
I seriously can't fathom how people can't see that that is EXACTLY the type of thing Kylo would double down on after being rejected by Rey at the end of TLJ.
You can tell they had a plan cuz rian when through all the trouble to get kylo out of the helmet, only for jj to put him back in it.
If there's a better term, please, let me know. Rey isn't a Mary Sue in the "She's a perfect woman" variation, but rather her lack of struggle in both movies. Her character flaw is overly trying to redeem Kylo for little to no reason other than...compassion, I think?
It's her sudden spike of Power from Zero to Jedi with next to no training in TFA. TLJ [force] handwaves this by explaining that because Kylo is on the Dark Side, Rey is his counterpart on the Light side? "Overpowered because the plot says so for our protagonist" may not be the largest Mary Sueish of traits, but it's the one that sticks out the most. She's more versed in using the Force at the end of TFA than Luke was at the end of ANH, and that's with Obi-Wan's training. Her powers come across as completely unearned, and it turns out she doesn't need to train to be on equal footing as Kylo, she just suddenly has raw strength in a franchise where that doesn't make sense. At all.
That argument insinuates that if you didn't have Finn, the writers couldn't write another reason why you get to Crait. There's a lot of reasons they could have pulled, and a lot of them hopefully would not have Rose or Canto Blight. Instead of convoluted runarounds that are only meant to pad the movie out, actually having a decent story here would have been interesting. Then again, expecting decent writing from Rian is clearly setting the bar way too high.
Maybe the film should have had a message. "Learn from your failures"? Maybe if they learned anything,. The only thing this movie educated us on was that Rian Johnson and Star Wars are as compatible as Donald Trump and Politics.
It's not even Wiki lore. It's filling in the blanks for your character relationships to make them enticing to the viewer. They fail to do this between Finn and Phasma, for example, and it's just a shame to see Gwendolyn Christie get a worse character arc than she did in GoT s8. She deserves better.
Yes, because in TFA, the people who know about him already have an unspoken history with him. He's bad news to our OT heroes, which in itself sets up the mystery to the viewer. But hey, who needs an interesting villain when you can kill him off and have a generic villain just take over with no fanfare?
Imagine living in such a bubble that you think TLJ is considered to be a bad movie by any possible metric. While also arguing that not answering fan theories is a fault of the film. Your method of arguing works much better in places like STC.
Ah yes, the vision went so smoothly that there was unintentional incest and an ending film that the people working on it felt was very disagreeable with the original outline that was written and then thrown out partly because of a desire for more toy sales...
"We had an outline and George changed everything in it," Kurtz said. "Instead of bittersweet and poignant he wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn't want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales and that was a reason."
That's on top of major rewrites for characters, (I am your father---->A CERtAiN POiNt of ViEw LUkE), and moments literally made because they weren't sure if a major actor would come back:
Leading to a very awkward opening of the next film comprising of multiple attempts to resolve this plot line before Luke arrives with an awful plan that could've been easily foiled if literally anyone tried to shoot him..
But please tell me more about this grand vision.
Imagine thinking TLJ is a good movie. It's one of the few movies I think might have been better off being directed by literaly anyone else. "Untitled Tommy Wiseau Movie" would get more excitement from me. There might be enough booze in the world to make me enjoy it over the Holiday Special, but Luke was written as Luke, not the polarizing mess we got.
AGAIN, not answering fan theories =/= a flaw of the film, nuking them off the face of the planet is. Rian's entitled to not like JJ's mystery boxes, but for a man whose latest movie is a Whodunnit, i'd like to have faith that his answer isn't "Who cares" or "The Butler". It's seriously not that hard to pass the buck back to JJ instead of not answering the questions presented in TFA.
Do you know what editing is? One of the major reasons the PT isn't so great was because they're 100%, unfilltered Lucas. Said "editor" to his visions are the respective directors of the OT. That way, when these things come up, you know how to handle them. I'd say it went smoothly as far as the OT is concerned. The final product is historically cohesive.
I'm not saying EVERYTHING has to have a "grand vision", but at least have more ideas for your trilogy in the outlining phase. TFA at least gave the impression there was one, and TLJ tossed all that out. It's like in Arrow Season 4: The first episode of said season ends with Green Arrow attending someone's funeral, and there's a seasonwide mystery on who's in the casket. When the writers/showrunners weren't sure halfway through the season, that was a red flag for me. TLDW, the resolution to that arc makes Season 4 the worst season by a large margin.
If a character is so crucial to plot events that the entire film and climax requires massive rewrites, than yes, that character is a major character. The character played by Carrie Fisher's daughter, THAT'S a side character. Nothing changes if she's written out. End of story.
I like how this snark is literally followed by you typing out the message of the film. You do not think things out before typing them.
So I and the majority of the audience just imagined the scenes where all of the characters have a defining moment where they directly SHOW that they've learned from their earlier failures in the film.
We don't need to know the explicit details of Snoke for his presence as a stepping stone for Kylo's development to be enticing.
To a specific subset of viewers who need expositional dumps for everything. Meanwhile, the actual character who has a direct relation to our heroes and is the person we're paying attention to is front and center in the story.
It's not that hard honestly. I mean, it's really easy to not regularly visit saltierthancrait and then have that bubble convince you that your opinion is the majority instead of having the self awareness to realize that you're part a very vocal minority, a large chunk of which is comprised of incredible toxic racist and sexist people who try to normalize bad faith arguments under the guise of being "liberal." 🍵
no problem! I mean, it's just my process, but I think it works for me. Sometimes I'll write scenes that stick with me, then later realize that it doesn't fit with the overall flow of my story/themes, and have to scrap them. XD
I think every writer just does what works for them, and has their own ways of tackling a story. I just feel like the "no plan" hot takes show a lot of ignorance of the creative process. Especially when it comes to an IP as massive as Star Wars. At the bare minimum, I have no doubt the broad strokes of the trilogy were planned. Ie, "Where do we want Rey, Ben, Finn, and Poe to be by the end of the third film?" The "How do they get to that point," is the part that is being left to the individual filmmakers.
Then the realities of film production/management dictate the rest. The unpredictable circumstances. Like the firing/replacement of a director and his creative team, or the death of one of the primary cast members. "The best laid plans," and all that jazz.
I remember this one story I was writing, I had it completely plotted out. Each issue of the comic, I knew where it was going. Then, during scripting, a sequence happens, and it became clear to me while writing that a key character wouldn't possibly be able to survive this scenario. It just felt more natural in that moment for the character to die. I twisted myself in knots trying to come up with a solution to keep them alive, because I liked the character, but that felt forced and hollow, so they had to go. Lol. Obviously, that changed the plot I had meticulously thought out, so I had to adapt the story to the loss of that character. It ultimately worked in the story's favor, and I think it ended up better by letting the narrative organically evolve, despite the plot outline.
That happens a lot when writing sometimes. You want to go one way, but your characters/story decide to go another. I think it's fun, and makes the writing process more fun when it takes on a life of its own.
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Rey is an angel and just fucks off at the end. Kylo shoots himself in the head.
I mean, maybe don't try and force possible issues into a single word, especially a word that has a very different connotation that what you want. And I'd have to disagree with her lack of struggle and lack of character flaws. At no point does she have it "easy" compared to other characters in the trilogy. She also has the least accomplishments out of the main trio.
And her flaw is her desire to be someone special. It causes her to be reckless and captured/nearly killed in both movies. It's why she wants to redeem Kylo because it will make her someone. It's why Kyle causes her pain to tell her that her parents were nobodies and she was left to die. Her desire to be someone is her main flaw that causes her the most mistakes. It's also her driving force for her to act.
Imagine saying that you can understand character arcs while simultaneously admitting that you don't know the reasons why Rey wanted to redeem Kylo and that a character hasn't struggled enough because she doesn't have enough training arc scenes. That's unfortunately the level of "critique" we're always dealing with whenever someone tries to criticize the ST....
One day i'd lvoe to get into the themes of the ST without someone saying "WEll thErE wAS nO TheMes huRRR" followed by recommendations of "DisNey doEsn't gET LiGHTsaBeRS"
People constantly knock on George RR Martin for not finishing his books in a timely fashion but they never seem to realize that he's taken this process to it's natural extreme with such a huge slew of characters all with valid character motivations and depth in a large overarching political plotline that we as an audience already know the original ending idea of, as the showrunners stuck very rigidly to reaching that ending regardless of whether or not it felt organic. Meanwhile you have writers talk about shows like BB and how they struggled to come up with a plotline for a pivotal moment since it had to reach that point organically. Or JK Rowling's regrets about the HP ending and how it didn't line up with the tone of the later books since she before they were written and decided to stick to reaching that ending no matter what. There are countless similar stories from writers and hell SW is one of the best examples of how rigid writing can lead to disaster:
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Luke gets like, what, hours at most then is capable of using the force to blow up the most dangerous weapon in the galaxy?
Hey hey hey now, he had that one line of exposition, thus he shouldn't be questioned, ever. Meanwhile Rey's understanding of the force makes ZERO sense. Especially not in the series where literally babies with no training can use it no problem.
lol! Right? The OT was definitely not planned. Thank god Alec Guinness was such a fantastic actor that he played Obi-Wan in such a clever way that revisiting the film after seeing ESB gives off an air of planning and foresight on Lucas' part. The Leia sister thing is probably the biggest hole punch into the "Lucas had it all planned" theory, because there's no way in hell they'd have laid on the live triangle between Luke, Leia, and Han so thickly if they did.
I wouldn't be surprised if the crux of the Lucasfilm story group meetings about the ST focused mire on the character arcs than, say, the intergalactic conflict parts. And played out something like this:
"Episode VII.We meet Rey, a lonely scavenger on Jakku with a troubled backstory fueling her fear of abandonment and sense of belonging. Unbeknownst to her, she has some latent Force potential that puts her on conflict with Kylo Ren, a powerful Dark Side user with delusions of grandeur, desperate to live up to the legacy of his grandfather, Darth Vader. By the end, Rey embraces her Force potential, and saves the day with the aid of an AWOL Stormtrooper who is wrestling with the realization of working for the baddies. Luke Skywalker is missing, as his presence any earlier in the film would take away from our goal of telling a story with new characters, no matter how compelling they may be. At the very end, Rey finds Luke. Roll credits."
"In Episode VIII, Rey is on a search for guidance from Jedi Master Luke Skywalker. Luke, much like Yoda before him, teaches Rey about the Force, as Kylo REN continues his descent towards the Dark Side under the tutelage of his master, Snoke. By the end of the film, Rey's heroic resolve is strengthened, while Kylo's villainous destiny is cemented. Roll credits."
"In Episode IX, Rey and Kylo are heading towards a final confrontation between the light side and the dark. Spoiler alert, the good guys win, because that's what heroes do." (I kept this part even simpler, because I haven't read spoilers, and don't even want to speculate on them, but it's kind of a no brainer that the good guys will ultimately triumph).
Honestly, you don't need much more than that to get the backbone of a trilogy. How those pieces fit together can be left up to the individual creative teams to do with as they please, but that core is enough. Oh, and my hypothetical story meeting didn't even go into the discussions around Finn, Poe, Han, Leia, and Luke, who would also have their broad character arcs discussed in some fashion.
The point I'm trying to make is that a long form story doesn't need to be meticulously planned, but it's disingenuous to suggest that there was no plan at all.
