Plotting a Trilogy

The new Star Wars came out this weekend! I have not seen it, because I generally don’t see movies on opening weekend. Regardless, I had a lot of thoughts on it. But please, no one give me spoilers yet? I’m just going off of a couple of spoilerless reviews when I talk about it in this week’s Note.

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Plotting a Trilogy

Looking at several different reviews, one thing that’s stuck out a few times is that critics have said that this new film doesn’t really fit alongside the last one; it feels like it’s trying to correct the perceived mistakes of The Last Jedi rather than continue going with those plot developments. Some have commented that Rise of Skywalker makes it clear that Lucasfilm didn’t go into this trilogy with a plan, making it up as they went along.

Which, uh, we been knew.

And to be fair, much of the beloved original trilogy wasn’t planned either. George Lucas has waffled a bit on how much was planned, how much wasn’t, and is generally just an unreliable source on what happened in the production. But it’s a bit more forgivable for a couple of reasons: A) he was inventing a universe for the first time and B) he seems to have at least had a general idea of where things were going. No, maybe he didn’t know where Vader stood in Imperial Hierarchy, and maybe he didn’t know that he was Luke’s father, but he knew that at the end of the day, the Emperor was the Big Bad (more or less) and had to be defeated and where the other characters stood in relation to that.

The sequel trilogy doesn’t have that certainty. And part of that is J.J. Abrams’s approach to storytelling: making the audience ask a lot of questions from the get-go, so that they’re invested in finding out more. The problem is that with The Force Awakens, he didn’t have any answers in mind to the questions he had us asking, so we got The Last Jedi, which more or less told us that the questions we were prompted to ask weren’t important.

Another part of that was the approach Lucasfilm had with these movies. The original plan was that all three movies were to be directed by different directors, each of whom could leave their own stamp on their individual films. And that’s not a bad idea for their anthology films, which are meant to tell different kinds of stories that don’t fit in the main saga films, but for a unified trilogy where everything is meant to feel tightly connected, asking individual directors to go nuts with their styles isn’t really that great of an idea. Especially when it’s not just a question of style, but Plot and story.

DC’s currently using that approach with its movies, since the Avengers-style films didn’t quite work out for them. They’re letting each director do his or her own film in whatever style, to do whichever story, and they’re not even concerned with making sure their carry strong continuity. Just watch Arthur Curry and Mera’s characterization in Justice League versus Aquaman, or how Joker doesn’t seem to fit in any continuity at all with the character shown in Suicide Squad. And it doesn’t have to, because it’s not meant to be one continuous story, it’s meant to be a bunch of one-shots. So one can be a psychological character study, another can be an 80’s action fantasy, another can be a globe-trotting adventure film, and so on and so forth.

Star Wars doesn’t have anything like that excuse. By all rights, they should have had a plan to start with. When planning a massive epic trilogy of films, I should not be sitting here wondering how so little story information about basic ideas has been filled out. 

It’s abundantly clear that this is being made up as it goes along, especially in tie-in material. Star Wars: Resistance is ending after only two seasons because after taking place concurrently to the events of The Last Jedi, it can’t go any further without the events of Rise of Skywalker coming up. I recently read Resistance Reborn, and Rey asks Leia how Kylo Ren turned to the First Order in the first place, only for her to dodge the question like she doesn’t know all the details, despite the fact that the basics of it should be common knowledge. In both cases, it’s like the writers and producers are waving their hands and saying, “Don’t worry, it’ll be revealed somewhere else!” I don’t even blame the writers that much (because Dave Filoni and Rebecca Roanhorse are awesome by the way) as much as Lucasfilm for making this bloated thing that they have no way of sustaining.

Look, I talked a lot of shiz about Marvel Studios and their approach to movies and continuity. But I never got the impression that there wasn’t an overarching plan, story-wise. By 2012’s Avengers, it was clear that they were going somewhere, that they were going to tell the story of Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet. Now maybe I disagreed with how they got there, or how they told the story--Thanos was, up until Infinity War, a very incompetent villain--but it was a story that they had planned. They didn’t know all the steps of how to get there, but they knew where they were going.

I don’t think that you need an end goal in mind when you start a story, like a novel or a movie. But if you’re plotting an epic trilogy, like Star Wars, or even Avengers, it’s good to have at least a strong idea of where things are going, and making sure that the audience knows that you’re leading them to a conclusion that they care about. 

The sequel trilogy doesn’t have that at all. And it suffers from it. Now I could be wrong, I could watch The Rise of Skywalker and be blown away by how it all fits together, regardless of what critics think. I’ve disagreed with critical consensus plenty of times before. But if I did, I still don’t think I’d look back on the trilogy that fondly, considering that while it was going on I thought of it as a pretty obvious attempt to cash in on nostalgia without an actual story that was meant to be told from the get-go. 

Which is a bummer, because Star Wars is kind of the quintessential modern epic, the big story that everyone wants to be. And no, this isn’t the first time that a film trilogy from this property has gotten a critical bashing or rejection from fans, but this time one of the reasons is that it wasn’t planned out. And that’s obnoxious, because that should have been one of the very first things that they did.

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