Having "reopened" my blog with a lengthy post on Christopher Nolan's next movie, Tenet, I thought I'd finally say my piece on the new Star Wars trilogy, something I'd been contemplating ever since it ended last December with Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker.
Having reviewed all three of the movies since The Force Awakens came out in December of 2015, I really don't feel like revisitng the individual films, whether it's to defend them or condemn them. The issues of the new trilogy have been raised ad nauseam by any number of bloggers and Youtubers, so I don't feel like reechoeing them either, except to say that I never really got over the fact that John Boyega's Finn was falsely advertised as the new protagonist of the series, especially considering how, over the course of the trilogy, his character was pushed further and further to the fringes in favor of the vomit-inducing "ReyLo."
With that out of the way, I will devote this post to one singular notion that I'd been ruminating on since watching the last movie in the trilogy, one I feel could have been instrumental in curing a lot of what was wrong with the new trilogy.
This post will very obviously contain spoilers for the new Star Wars trilogy, so if you haven't seen it yet and plan on doing so I would suggest you stop reading here.
I respectfully submit that Star Wars: Episodes VII to IX would have worked much better as a trilogy and as a resolution to the Skywalker Saga if they had been written with the single, underlying theme of defining one's self by one's actions and choices rather than one's past or one's lineage.
This really hit home to me with the revelation in Episode IX that the trilogy's main protagonist, Rey, was descended from Emperor Palpatine, the villain of both the original trilogy and its prequels.
It was a nice, meaty story twist, that went a long way towards addressing a lot of questions I had about Rey and for me, at least, dealt with the whole "Mary Sue" issue quite effectively. More than that, though, it opened up a really interesting possibility for introducing some serious conflict for Rey to grapple with, something she had never really done in the two previous films. Unfortunately, though, this potential was never realized. The closest we got to Rey having any conflict was some kind of hallucination/ vision of her "evil self" which actually looked pretty cool but which, again, never went anywhere beyond one scene.
Though the filmmakers made a hash of it, the idea itself, that Rey was directly descended from the consummately evil Palapatine, was a potentially powerful one. It would have fit in nicely with Finn's past as a Stormtrooper dating back to the first movie and even with Poe Dameron's past as a smuggler, also mentioned in the third movie (although that basically made him even more of a Han Solo clone). Taken together, the new "trinity" of Star Wars, had their dark pasts been developed, could have stood in stark juxtaposition to their more virtuous counterparts from the original trilogy, especially as they faced off against the Skywalker legacy embodied by Kylo Ren.
If, rather than simply start his story with his mutiny, the filmmakers had actually shown Finn serving as a stormtrooper for the Emp--err--First Order and doing horrible things before having his epiphany, if they had shown Rey agonizing over whether to embrace her destiny as Palpatine's granddaughter, and if they had shown Poe plying his trade and making a bundle from payments from the First Order, they would have set up epic paths to redemption for the three of them. Rey could still have been the lead, and Kathleen Kennedy could still have had her "Force is Female" cake and eat it too, but the difference would have been that the story undergirding this advocacy would have been so strong that only the most incorrigibly misogynistic Star Wars fans would have taken issue with it. In fact, the sexual tension of "ReyLo" could have ended with Rey ultimately rejecting the evil that Kylo Ren had embraced, and Kylo Ren by extension. This could have made him question his own life choices instead of having his mommy and daddy telling him not to be a bad guy anymore, or it could have just set up a showdown. Either way, the narrative journey would have been so much more potent than what we finally got. Finn, instead of meeting up with a small posse of fellow ex-stormtroopers, could have led an entire stormtrooper uprising which could have helped the Resistance out when all seemed lost. Poe could have rallied all of his smuggler buddies into abandoning the First Order so that the final fight in The Rise of Skywalker wouldn't have looked like a direct rip-off of the "Portals" sequence in Avengers: Endgame.
Also, the underlying theme of "bad guys being redeemed" could have easily integrated story elements from the entire trilogy; little would have gone to waste, including a lot of the heady ideas introduced by Rian Johnson in The Last Jedi, like the "democratization" of the Force, and the notion that both the good guys and the bad guys go to the same weapons supplier, and the whole socio-economic class divide, among others. If anything, these ideas could have added some nice nuance to the journey of redemption by reinforcing the biasees Finn and Poe may have had for the lives they were leading and effectively almost luring Rey over to the Dark Side before they would all see the proverbial light.
I have no interest in "rewriting" the script of each of the sequel trilogy's installments or going detail-by-detail on how each film could have been better, but I firmly believe that having an underlying theme would have helped form a solid foundation for the narrative of the new trilogy, one which could have withsthood all kinds of unforeseen circumstances. Had Kennedy, her writers and directors focused on this theme of actively choosing one's path over one's pre-charted destiny, which they touched on in their movies, the storytelling could have easily been adapted to accommodate Carrie Fisher's death and we wouldn't have had the absurd situation of stiching old footage of her together and having her speak in non-sequiturs in The Rise of Skywalker.
It's obviously too late to undo the last trilogy, but the idea of a theme underlying another series of films is something that I honestly hope the powers-that-be at Lucasfilm consider while preparing their next series of movies.
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