I’ve been thinking about it, and TLJ--or something like it--should have been the first movie in the new trilogy. Here’s why I think so:
1) Luke
I actually think it’s an interesting and valuable idea to take on the idea of Luke as a mythic hero: especially if the new characters see him the way the audience does, and a deconstruction of that. (Not to mention Mark Hamill acted the hell out of it.)
Luke, as much as anyone except perhaps Anakin himself, knows the failures of the Jedi. As such, you know what? One flashback doesn’t do it for me. I’m sorry, I’m that teacher you hated growing up who wouldn’t give you credit for the answer because you needed to show your work.
No, actually, I’m a lawyer, and the truth is I think it’s good for storytellers to have to make their case. Lay it all out for me. It doesn’t mean your end point is wrong, which seems to be the primary debate about Luke in the Star Wars fandom at this moment--Luke would never do this vs. Obviously Luke totally would! Either conclusion is fine. Make Luke that person, but show me what happened over thirty years, for goodness’ sake.
If we know from movie one the direction that this trilogy intends to take with Luke, we have that much more time to make that case.
2) The “mystery boxes” (who is Snoke, why is his face like that, Rey’s parentage, the Knights of Ren, etc.).
If you introduce these questions, it’s better writing to answer them in a way that makes sense rather than “Psych! It doesn’t matter.” Don’t ask the question if you don’t feel like answering it in a way that follows from the clues the story went to the trouble of laying out.
Rey Random is a fantastic idea. Everyone making the points about why that works is right! But they’re not addressing why it couldn’t have been done in movie one. It changes nothing about her arc in the first movie: waiting for someone she knows in her heart will never return, and finally moving past that hurt.
Look, I get it, JJ Abrams loves his mystery boxes, but not everyone wants to watch Lost and there’s no need for Star Wars to be Lost. Maybe you don’t care about the mysterious questions- Rian Johnson certainly doesn’t, and gleefully does away with them as fast as he can. Great! But decide up front what kind of trilogy this is going to be. Have the boxes or don’t have them, but decide and stick to it. Otherwise they just look like dropped story threads (which is not the same as “subversion”; for some reason people keep conflating the two) and make the trilogy as a narrative whole seem poorly thought through.
If TLJ is the first movie? Problem solved. There’s no need to get invested in questions of Rey’s parentage, or where Snoke derives his power from because TLJ, unlike TFA, never leads you that direction. This isn’t a mystery box trilogy.
3) The role (if any) of nostalgia
It’s not that I think TFA and TLJ are at complete odds on this—TFA borrows heavily from A New Hope; TLJ riffs on The Empire Strikes Back. But I do think TFA intended to fondly embrace the original trilogy, while TLJ persuasively argues we should let it go. It wasn’t necessary to set TFA up so that the original trilogy heroes still exist. But they did, in what, let’s face it, seems like a clear-sighted decision to leverage nostalgia for the original films into shiny dollar bills.
The time to make the statement “move past the original trilogy!” to me, is not shortly after the first return to the franchise in ten years lovingly sidled right up to it. Be brave! Do it as you begin the new trilogy. Do it in that first return to the franchise.
This has the added benefit, too, of giving you plenty of space to better develop the new planets, new characters, and new droids without getting bogged down by including all of the old. I mean come on, it’s very hard to take seriously a movie about moving past the past while Leia, C3PO, Chewie, and the rest keep popping in. It just seems like you’re leaning on nostalgia to get butts in seats, and then scolding the people who that worked on.
4) Kylo Ren
TLJ isn’t just a rehash of TFA in terms of who Kylo Ren is and what he believes in, but the broad strokes are essentially the same: he appears conflicted, someone believes he can come back from his misdeeds, he proves them wrong and embraces the Dark. It’s more compellingly done in TLJ and frankly, there is no need to see those broad strokes twice.
5) Finn
Finn has a central place in TFA and fundamental pieces of the story action unfold directly, solely, as a result of his actions. This only makes sense given he’s treated as one of the film’s leads.
Rian Johnson--as is his right--seems far less interested in Finn. Finn’s actions are given significantly less narrative weight, aside from a muddled lesson in failure that could have been lifted out of the movie with little plot impact. You could argue his story line is about those character changes rather than plot-driven, but TFA--while imperfect--managed to do both.
From what I understand JJ Abrams personally was instrumental in getting Disney on board with John Boyega as Finn, as the character was initially conceptualized as white. Perhaps if TLJ with Johnson at the helm had come first, Finn wouldn’t have existed in his current form to be sidelined at all.
I’d have preferred that to getting invested in the character as TFA clearly intended, and then seeing TLJ.
6) Characters of color/representation
As a fan of color, representation is an important consideration for me. TFA was imperfect but gave me cautious hope. TLJ, despite having characters of color, does a poor job with them. There are better posts by other POC on this that you can look up, and I’m not going to rehash them here.
But if TLJ is how characters of color are going to be treated in the sequels, I’d have preferred to be on notice from movie one.
7) Poe Dameron
I don’t think it’s necessarily true that Poe was ‘OOC’ in TLJ. The comics don’t factor in for me, because most members of the audience aren’t going to read those and it’s silly to expect them to know it or hold the movies to them. Sure, TFA doesn’t necessarily lead you to believe that the Poe would be the way he is in TLJ, but neither does it expressly contradict that.
But if TLJ is the first movie in the series, you get rid of that issue. It’s much clearer that Poe is this guy if he expressly starts out as this guy. (But also, see #6- setting it up from the beginning doesn’t immunize the movies from the unfortunate implications of having a Latino actor play a reckless, possibly chauvinistic, hothead).
Also, if TLJ came first and wanted to do that storyline for Poe, while they’re at it they could have also made him at least ten years younger. This was the arc of a child, not a thirty-year-old grown ass man who’s somehow attained a couple trusted leadership positions despite being this guy.
..........
Overall it’s clear to me that JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson were trying to make two different kinds of movies, and have different answers to the question: what should the Star Wars franchise look like today? When really the trilogy as a narrative, cohesive whole is better served in choosing one answer.
I think both answers have their merits and in those areas I think Rian Johnson’s version is narratively lacking, making his the first film gives his vision enough room to breathe. He can develop Canto Bight--a compelling idea that simply doesn’t get the time it needs to make it a worthwhile telling. He can lay out his case for Luke. We can get more background on Rose, or heck, even some interaction between her and her sister, giving Paige’s subsequent death that much more emotional weight.
So much of the excitement about TLJ is about how it feels like a new kind of Star Wars movie. So what better way to have kicked off the sequels?
One thing I do hope comes out of these mixed reactions to the revival is a re-evaluation of the S7 finale, which I personally find truer to the Gilmore Girls I fell in love with--quirky, charming, optimistic, and more interested in the fallout from life bombshells than the immediate shock value of said bombshells.
I’ve said this before, but people kept saying ASP would “fix” Gilmore Girls when she, in fact, is the one who broke it in the first place and S7 did its best to put the pieces satisfyingly back together. Having now gotten a look at both attempts, I gotta say--I prefer David Rosenthal’s.
there are tons of posts out there about how important it is to leave comments on fanfic, how authors thrive on them, and i just want to say i 100% adore and support those posts. but can i say something else? getting a thank you or acknowledgement from the author after leaving a comment? feels so great too. and i have struggled with this myself when people left comments on my fic because i didn't want to be like "yes, i AM great, la di da" but if we're being super honest here i also, in my younger and more vulnerable years, felt crushed when the author said nothing in response to a detailed flail i left on their writing. ooh, especially when they skipped my over my comment to respond to everyone else's, that, felt great. and maybe you're like, wtf ren, i just delivered 12k BLOOD SOAKED words, free of charge for HUNGRY READERS TO JUST GOBBLE UP i don't owe ANYONE SHIT, especially those JERKS who write "UPDATE PLS" within 30min of my chapter that took TWO MONTHS TO WRITE being posted and like, you're right? you don't? but i have always thought the best part about fandom is that it can be an ongoing conversation. unlike published works, you can have a back and forth with the author- in fact the fic is often, itself, part of a fandom conversation that took place elsewhere, like a headcanon post "au where..." discussion or gifset or fic challenge. like, the great thing about fic in the days of LJ was that the comments were like a giant party of flail and headcanons and idea swaps and all that good stuff. and an author who ignores a conversation- as they are entitled to do- also can't be surprised that the next time, i just hit kudos, you know? (also it's like super easy to respond if you're into that sort of thing; you have a ready made script: "thank you!" it even sort of makes sense as a response to "update pls" jerks!)
Okay, see, here’s the thing about the end of “Partings” for me. Christopher knows Lorelai was engaged as of earlier that very evening; they saw each other at her parents’ house. And then just a few hours later she shows up at his apartment completely distraught over the fact that her engagement ended--that her months of fear and doubt and pain led her to an ultimatum and she got rejected.
I never liked Christopher, exactly; but you got the sense in earlier seasons that ASP intended for him to be a slightly sympathetic mess. He screwed up as a kid, he has disappointed overbearing rich parents--he’s Lorelai Gilmore Lite, just male, and worse.
There are always mitigating circumstances to the awful things he is--he abandoned Rory, but he tried to do what he thought was right (marry Lorelai) first, and he was just a child too. He broke things off with Lorelai in S2, but because he didn’t want to repeat those mistakes with his second child. Emily manipulated feelings he never otherwise would have had the fire in the belly to act on in S5. Etc. It’s never enough to redeem him, but for me it was also never enough to actively hate him.
But like. It takes such an unbelievable creep to sleep with Lorelai when she’s in the emotional state she’s in during “Partings”... and he shows no awareness of that whatsoever. Immediately after it happens, he’s asking her to stay for breakfast, he asks her out the next evening like it’s nothing; he talks about how unbelievable and “right” that night was, I just.
Christopher is my least favorite character on the show, probably, even above Dean. But he was never irredeemable for me until this moment. And don’t get me wrong, I do think Lorelai needed to finally, truly work out her relationship with Chris; I think that was a logical and necessary story beat. But I hate the way it started, and I hate that ASP actively chose the worst way to force it to happen (and people keep saying she’s going to “fix” the end of Gilmore Girls like she didn’t break the damn thing in the first place! She’d better fix it. Because in the immortal intonations of Mrs. Kim, ASP: you break it, you buy it.)
“One of the things I tried to do stylistically in the [Gilmore Girls] pilot, was to have the sense of when we were in Lorelai and Rory’s world, that the camera was moving and it was very fluid, and there was lot of energy around it, and when we first went to the parents’ house that it was much more presentational…that it was a world that energy wasn’t flowing in.”
–Lesli Linka Glatter, pilot and episode director (x)
honestly the thing that was so disappointing to me about pride and prejudice and zombies is that there was no art to the work at all, like, you can very clearly tell that someone just hacked apart Austen’s beautiful prose and inserted zombies, martial arts, and some oozing brains haphazardly throughout instead of any thoughtful world building or creative imagining of what a regency era zombie story would look like, let alone a Pride and Prejudice + zombies mashup.
and then people have the temerity to mention how excited they are about the movie because FINALLY a NOT BORING silly ol’ romantic Austen adaptation, which, like, fine, not every genre is for every person but a) I, an Austen fan, would have legitimately LOVED to see an actual imaginative combination of Austen + zombies, like, yes, talk to me about rigid social norms in Georgian England when faced with zombies, describe the interaction between zombie infections/attacks/protections and social class, tell me how the threat of zombies changed those skills women practiced to be considered “accomplished”, etc. it’s totally possible to enjoy both things, and I’m not just being a purist. I don’t hate the book because they added zombies, I hate it because they did it in a way that was lazy, and b) there’s this underlying assumption that Austen=fluff and zombies=cool in the way so many people talk about this and how Pride and Prejudice has totally been “improved” on now that there are Strong Women™ or, worse, elements boys will supposedly finally find appealing about it now and. ugh. I’m certainly not going to hold up Austen as any be-all end-all of feminism, even for her era, but it’s so intellectually lazy to say that now that these women can kick ass they’re worth paying attention to, you know? yawn. physical strength does not in and of itself an interesting character make. and “fluffy” Austen is valid on its own merits; we don’t need to denigrate the original work to talk about why transforming the work could be interesting.
anyway this post brought to you by a bottle of Merlot and fervent hopes that the P&P&Z movie, for once, improves on the book it’s based on.
what are your thoughts on the 1995 vs. 2005 adaptations on p&p? I've never actually watched the 1995 version opps haha :)
I think the 2005 P&P is well-acted, sweet, romantic and funny; the score is evocative and stirring; the cinematography is breathtaking. I also think it is not a very good adaptation of Austen’s novel.
Pride and Prejudice can be a deceptively simple story. A lot of people think of it as the mother of the modern romantic comedy movie, which leads them to conceive of it in very simplistic terms: girl hates boy BUT PLOT TWIST SHE FALLS IN LOVE WITH BOY??? plus related shenanigans. And I mean, that is Pride and Prejudice, sort of. But it’s a very superficial reading of it.
The problem with the 2005 adaptation, at least for me, is that it seems to think that hitting the major plot points of the novel= sufficiently adapting the novel. But there’s a lot more to P&P than the plot. There’s literary context and incisive wit and social commentary and sharp, crisp characterization.
Characterization especially is so, so important in Austen, and I think the 2005 version does a poor job of it. e.g. I can think of three instances off the top of my head where the movie’s characters say what other characters said in the novel– Mary says Elizabeth’s line of “What are men compared to rocks and mountains?”; Mary says Caroline’s line about how “[balls] would be better if conversation, not dancing, were the order of the day”; and Caroline gets Bingley’s response of “Much more rational, but rather less like a ball”.
Why does it matter? Well for example, when Caroline talks about balls and dancing being Terrible in the novel, she’s saying it to impress Darcy, not because she necessarily actually feels that way herself. And it’s part of this whole hilarious sequence that deftly characterizes her, Darcy, and their whole dynamic (and shows us how she doesn’t understand him- Darcy’s unimpressed by obsequiousness and respects authentic opinions even if he disagrees with them- which is why they’d never work as a couple). Bingley’s rejoinder likewise shows his easy wit and comparative lack of pretension.
In the movie, though? This same sequence tells us: Mary= dull and Caroline= mean (she’s sneering this at a stranger, not teasing a sibling, as Bingley did). Bingley’s example of wit is taken away and he’s mostly treated as a bumbling, inarticulate idiot in the film. Okay, I’m being a bit harsh, and most of those things are not out and out incorrect characterizations, but the movie goes for such broad strokes and it drives me nuts.
And maybe you’re like, wow, this is really nitpicking, Ren, lighten up, but the thing is there’s no discernible purpose for the line swapping. It’s just reflective of the movie’s seemingly blasé attitude towards characterization (’well, someone said these book lines! that’s the same, right?’). And you just can’t be blasé about characterization and make a strong Austen adaptation (psst, hey Pemberley Digital. Hey.) There are books where the characters are drawn broadly and this wouldn’t matter, e.g., Agatha Christie novels, but it simply isn’t true for Austen.I’m pretty sure Matthew Macfadyen describes Darcy as “shy” in one of the BTS interviews on my DVD of this movie too, and like??? No. Nooo.
The other thing is–I praised the cinematography above, and this is such a beautifully shot film, it’s just. I’m not sure why you’d choose to shoot an Austen movie like she’s a freaking Brontë. Austen is irreverent. She doesn’t do dramatic, sensual scenes featuring near-kisses with handsome rain-soaked men. (Okay, she kinda did in Sense and Sensibility, but the OTT romanticism is the point. So that she can rip it to pieces later.) She makes fun of people who do those! So the movie’s aesthetic, while gorgeous, is just… jarring, at times. It doesn’t fit. Austen would probably laugh, a lot, if she saw the movie’s sweepingly romantic take on her story. Especially that damn proposal scene.
I also just feel like the 2005 adaptation talks down to its audience. There’s not a lot of subtlety. I don’t need the Bennets to have pigs wandering around their house (which, they totally wouldn’t have) to appreciate the class differences between them and the Bingleys/Darcys. I don’t need Mary to literally sob “I hate balls!” to understand that she’s the odd one out from her sisters. I don’t need Lady Catherine to burst into the Bennet home in the middle of the night while they’re all half-dressed (which, she totally wouldn’t have) to understand her rudeness and presumption in visiting them on such an errand. Etc.
Again, most of the choices the movie makes aren’t flat-out wrong, but they lack nuance. It’s like those dessert flavored yogurts. It’s not bad yogurt, it even kind of reminds you vaguely of the dessert it claims to taste like, but at the end of the day it is still just… yogurt. Austen does so many subtle things in her writing that you miss out on if you skip over.
The 1995 adaptation has a better handle on those nuances. And honestly, a lot of the reason why is that it has the time to delve deeper. Now, of course, a nice long adaptation means nothing if the adaptation fundamentally misunderstands its source material (exhibit A, Emma Approved) and a short adaptation can be very good so long as it grasps the heart of the story + characters (exhibit B, Clueless). Fortunately, the 1995 P&P does have a good grasp of Austen.
One of my favorite examples of this is one of the movie’s first lines. P&P’s first line (not spoken by any character in the book) is, as we know, meant to be tongue-in-cheek. The 1995 version of P&P demonstrates this beautifully: Elizabeth sarcastically says the line, and Mrs. Bennet agrees with it. They use Lizzy’s first line to encapsulate the tone and subject of the movie, the same way Austen’s dryly humorous first line does for the novel.
I think overall the 1995 P&P is less…sexy (Colin Firth soaking wet aside), but it feels more authentic primarily because of characterization. Austen includes a lot of just talking in the novel, because she uses dialogue to show us who these characters are: not just what they say, but how they say it, and to who, and why, are important pieces of information. A plot focused film will skip a lof of the substance of those conversations because they don’t add to the story itself. A character focused film- that, again, has the luxury of time- will include them because those seemingly dull conversations are where all the actual good stuff happens.
There are layers upon layers in Austen. Mrs. Bennet is a silly, silly woman; but she’s also clear-sighted about her daughters’ desperate future, perhaps more so than anyone else in the family; but her own nature nearly irrevocably undermines their ability to avoid that future in a way that’s…not humorous at all. The Bennets aren’t one big happy family trading cheerful jibes while they listen at doors. The parents’ marriage is kind of a sham. Most of the sisters don’t understand or respect each other.There’s a sobering misery that lurks under Mr. Bennet’s isolation.
The length + insight of the 1995 adaptation allows it to hit these multiple points. It balances, e.g., Darcy’s cold arrogance with his fundamental integrity, or Mr. Collins’ awkward nature with his sliminess. It uses simple, subtle costuming choices (compare Caroline and Louisa’s gowns to the Bennet sisters’–the material, the trimmings) to highlight the financial disparity between their families while providing the context for why they would still socialize with each other. The full length and depth of the confrontation between Lizzy and Catherine is also critical to understanding the nature of social class at this time and Austen’s views on social mobility.
I don’t think the 1995 adaptation is perfect. It sometimes lacks subtlety too: really, soaking wet Darcy? SOMEONE EXPLAIN TO ME THE CINEMATIC AFFINITY FOR SOAKING WET DARCYS. The script, being so closely tied to the novel, occasionally drags–it’s one thing to read about a bunch of people sitting around and talking; it’s another thing to watch it. I also- unpopularly- think Keira Knightley would have made a better Elizabeth than Jennifer Ehle if she’d just had a stronger script to work with.
But the 1995 version does hit a lot of the nuances that the 2005 version missed. It’s not that the 2005 adaptation is a bad film or straight up wrong on everything (except the pigs. The pigs are wrong). It just feels like a run of the mill romcom inspired by someone who didn’t really delve deeper into Austen, rather than the bona fide thing.
Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.
shout out to Mary Crawford for making the best/worst off-color joke in all of Austen
