Rian Johnson thinks pandering to fans is a “mistake”

Two years ago, Star Wars: The Last Jedi came out in theaters, and immediately, people were divided. Critics and many fans loved the film for taking the series in bold new directions. Others loathed it, decrying the movie for dropping plotlines developed in 2015’s The Force Awakens and for taking the series in the wrong direction, bold or not.

Disney heard the complaints loud and clear, and brought back Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams — who has a track record of pitching stuff more down the middle — to helm The Rise of Skywalker, the final film in the sequel trilogy. Speaking to The New York Times, Abrams sounded like he saw where the complaints about The Last Jedi were coming from. “[The Last Jedi was] full of surprises and subversion and all sorts of bold choices,” Abrams said. “On the other hand, it’s a bit of a meta approach to the story. I don’t think that people go to Star Wars to be told, ‘This doesn’t matter.'” Stars like John Boyega (Finn) were expressing some misgivings about The Last Jedi, too.

Honestly, it was starting to look like an inter-family conflict. What kind of series should Star Wars try to be: one that challenges its audience or one that gives them what they want?

Johnson stuck to his guns. Speaking with Radio.com last week on the Swings & Mrs. podcast, he cautioned against swinging too far in the other direction, to a place where Star Wars wasn’t challenging at all and providing fan service just to do it. “I think approaching any creative process with [making fandoms happy] would be a mistake that would lead to probably the exact opposite result,” he said. “Even my experience as a fan, you know if I’m coming into something, even if it’s something that I think I want, if I see exactly what I think I want on the screen, it’s like ‘oh, okay,’ it might make me smile and make me feel neutral about the thing and I won’t really think about it afterwards, but that’s not really going to satisfy me.”

"I want to be shocked, I want to be surprised, I want to be thrown off-guard, I want to have things recontextualized, I want to be challenged as a fan when I sit down in the theater…What I’m aiming for every time I sit down in a theater is to have the experience [I had] with Empire Strikes Back, something that’s emotionally resonant and feels like it connects up and makes sense and really gets to the heart of what this thing is and in a way that I never could have seen coming."

That brings us to today, with reviews for The Rise of Skywalker rolling in. While critics have plenty of nice things to say about the movie, it’s still the worst-reviewed Star Wars movie since The Phantom Menace, and one of the chief complaints is that it doesn’t take enough risks, instead trading on nostalgia in a shallow way that just isn’t very satisfying. Does that vindicate Johnson’s point of view?

One thing that always baffles me with these discussions is that it sounds like the directors were allowed to make up the story as they went. Like, Abrams is the guy who kicked off the Star Wars sequel trilogy, but it sounds like he was surprised by some of the plot decisions that Johnson made. And while he enjoyed The Last Jedi, it now sounds like he’s coming back in and putting things back the way he likes them. Here’s what he said to Yahoo Entertainment a couple weeks back:

"Rian is an incredibly talented director…Just an incredibly talented guy and a great storyteller. So when he came on to work on the next film, and we were just starting to shoot [The Force Awakens], I was really excited to see where he would go and what he would do. And it’s funny because one of the things that I was [thinking] at first [was], ‘Oh, I really want to see all the friends together.’ And in his story, they really weren’t. [Rey] doesn’t really meet Poe until the end. Rey and Finn are not really together in the movie. So in a way the story that he told in a lot of ways helped set up what we’re doing in IX [The Rise of Skywalker]. But it also allowed Episode IX to have the group together and out on an adventure in a way that weirdly, even though it’s the third film, it’s the first time they all get to be together."

Did no one outline this story ahead of time? It’s a multi-billion dollar franchise, for heaven’s sake. If Abrams wanted it to be about these three friends, why didn’t he and Kathleen Kennedy and other people at Disney at least set down the big plot points in advance? Why wasn’t Rey’s parentage figured out at the very start? It just confounds me that different people were allowed to make it all up as it went along. It’s no wonder the trilogy ended up being at odds with itself.

In any case, The Rise of Skywalker opens today. Audiences will finally get a chance to see the movie, and the debate will begin anew.

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h/t The A.V. Club, IndieWire