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Comment by chungy | Hacker News Reader

> I think the modern pressure to have a "canon" which explains absolutely everything that goes on in the world can lead to sterile and unbelievable worlds as well if a worldbuilder gives in too much.

I agree with that. Leaving room for expansion, and mystery, feels like a more "real" world than one where everything has already been explored and done.

Fandoms sometimes put themselves into a corner, too, when they start making assumptions that all that can be said and done already has been. The Star Wars sequel series (episodes 7, 8, 9) come to mind. I think the majority of complaints came about because they dared to do something new to Star Wars. (Some of it was already hinted in the original films, too; as an example: Leia being force-sensitive)

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> The Star Wars sequel series (episodes 7, 8, 9) come to mind. I think the majority of complaints came about because they dared to do something new to Star Wars.

(Warning, Star Wars rant follows)

Interesting to hear this direction of criticism.

My personal impression from watching The Force Awakens was the opposite: It felt like the movies where at the same time obligated to continue the story of the original trilogy (due to them being sequels) but at the same time not allowed to introduce any substantial new ideas.

That led to a very strange kind of "rhyming" history which really strained my suspension of disbelief:

Even though the Empire had been defeated and the Death Star blown up (twice), 20 years later somehow nothing noteworthy has happened except that a new Empire has sprung up - which looks and behaves exactly like the old one, has its own copies of Darth Vader and Darth Sidious and somehow can't think of anything better than building a third Death Star - which is promptly blown up again!

Same on the side of the good guys as well: Last time we saw them they were celebrating victory with flying colours, having freed the galaxy from the grip of evil, ready to usher in an exciting era of a nascent new galactic republic.

But sure, let's skip all that and fast-forward to a point where the good guys somehow ended up again as the scrappy underdogs, fighting against an overwhelming enemy. Nevermind even explaining what went wrong.

If the heroes do everything right, archive full victory - and still end up in the exact same place as they had started, I can't help but feel dreadful.

I'm sure the restrictions here didn't really have to do with canon: They were sequels, so strictly speaking there was no canon to respect, and the Extended Universe canon that did exist actually was a lot more daring and interesting than what the movie attempted. So my guess here is that the restrictive approach came from the producers who didn't want to risk their investment by trying out anything new.

> My personal impression from watching The Force Awakens was the opposite

Totally fair, it really is a remake of A New Hope. I think the same could be said of The Phantom Menace, for better and worse, but there is precedent in how to start a trilogy ;)

Episodes 8 and 9 do a lot more to stuff new ideas. Episode 8 still felt obliged to repeat the major plot points of 5 and 6 (I'll ding it for that), but once those were out of the way, the plot could really do its own thing.

> But sure, let's skip all that and fast-forward to a point where the good guys somehow ended up again as the scrappy underdogs, fighting against an overwhelming enemy. Nevermind even explaining what went wrong.

It's not the reading I came away with. The good guys won, set up the New Republic, became a bit too complacent. Despite Leia and others warning about the First Order faction springing up out of the ashes of the Empire, they weren't taken seriously. These are the resistance the films focus on.

The First Order showed that it was serious business by blowing up Coruscant, capital of the New Republic (as well as the Old Republic and the Galactic Empire).

> The First Order showed that it was serious business by blowing up Coruscant, capital of the New Republic (as well as the Old Republic and the Galactic Empire).

No, it's just comically bad writing. A city-planet that has existed for thousands of years is blown up by the remnants of the "evil empire" which was anihillated 20 years before?

Star Wars in general is pretty poorly written and always has been. It made sense for the first film to be so successful, it was pretty nice for 1977. But I don't get how people can become immersed in this as an extended universe; the worldbuilding is atrocious.

> The Star Wars sequel series (episodes 7, 8, 9) come to mind. I think the majority of complaints came about because they dared to do something new to Star Wars.

My takes:

VII — Lame soft-reboot story, typical so-lazy-that-it's-bad JJ plotting. Bad, but not so bad it's not salvageable if the next two are good.

VIII — Oh thank god, easily the best Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, might even be better than Jedi—oh, wait, everyone hates it? WTF?

IX — One of the biggest train wrecks of a movie I've ever seen with a budget anywhere near this large. Fascinatingly bad. I was quite entertained, but not because it was good. It was like a 7-year-old who loooooved the original trilogy wrote their own sequel, complete with messed-up pacing, nonsense plot beats, confusing geography, a bunch of stuff that goes nowhere, and bizarre mash-up action. It was a fun watch in a "laughing at it, not with it" sort of way, but a really bad movie.

"Doing new stuff" wasn't the problem. Biggest problem overall was probably that JJ shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a plot, ever. He can punch up dialog (if we must do the modern "quips, quips as far as you can see in every direction" writing, anyway, which apparently we do), direct, and definitely do casting. No touching the plot.

On the plus side, only one of them's bad enough that it should be ranked down with the prequel trilogy. But another's not very good, and the other's the middle entry, so hard to recommend when the other two aren't good.

> VIII

What did you like about it? I honestly can’t think of anything that landed.

Story, narrative structure, and themes were a lot more interesting than maybe any other Star Wars film. The remixed Empire elements were much better- and more-thoughtfully-used (and more-subtly-) than VII's retelling of IV's plot. Despite including those elements, it took a lot more inspiration from the kinds of sources that went into the original Star Wars movie than the other two in its trilogy do, rather than leaning mostly on other Star Wars films and mainly including a kind of filtered-through-previous-Star-Wars version of those influences.

IMO its biggest flaw is that the climax goes so entirely counter to what been foreshadowed hard the entire film, and cuts off any of several directions that alternative-version of it might have gone that would have been much better as far as storytelling possibilities in IX. I mean the part where Kylo offers to partner with Rey and she flatly rejects it. Almost any other way for that to have gone would have been more interesting and fit better with the way the film had been heading—Rey makes the offer to Kylo but he rejects it in favor of a face-turn; Rey accepts it; Rey rejects it, but because she doesn't trust him and wants to take over herself (to "do it right", of course)—anything like that would have been better. It's either a weird miss for the writer, or studio meddling, I reckon—and I'd bet on the latter, because damn does the rest of the script feel like it's going that way, to the point that I was kinda dumbfounded when it did the most boring possible thing instead.

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