This isn’t anything brand new I’m saying, but I just continue to be genuinely fascinated and so, so in awe and impressed by how Lucasfilm has crafted the last leg of the Skywalker Saga around two core, archetypal plots that everyone’s seen play out hundreds of times already--“Beast and Beauty” and “Prodigal Son”--yet somehow prevented the trilogy from being overbearingly predictable. Which is a serious necessity if you want to extend one overall, original, non-prequel story across 3 movies as 3 acts. Particularly for casual fans and the general audience.
Because the fandom is...gonna fandom. And most of us have discerned, or at least suspect, the basic trajectory and ending of the story--whether we like it or not--and while the intra-fandom wank, denial, and cognitive dissonance, as well as the fandom-adjacent, ignorant hot takes--pretty much the entire Discourse(TM) around the ST, really--can be incredibly annoying, it’s also incredibly meaningless. Because us fandom people and our baggage and expectations and preferences were not a top priority for the creators to take into consideration while putting these movies together. If any demographic was, besides kids, that would be casuals and the GA. The ones who don’t linger on or look too deeply into this stuff, and generally just go with the flow of a well-told story (and also make up most of the box office earnings).
And Lucasfilm has indeed provided them, and even the fandom, with an intricately plotted, roller-coaster of a story. The templates it's built on are classic, simple, and well-worn, but they’ve mostly buried the simplicity under, while simultaneously telegraphing the story via, excellent and highly effective utilization of techniques like “show, don't tell” (and being very selective about what they show, or don’t, and when), heavy tropery and visual symbolism, hiding things in plain sight--TFA was especially masterful with this--and lots of dialogue with dual meanings, usually referring to one thing in a scene, but subtextually acting as a reference to something/someone else, or as foreshadowing for later.
But the most effective smokescreen, the biggest slight-of-hand Lucasfilm pulled on everybody--including early Reylo shippers, who were either confused or skeptical at first about what they’d seen TFA establish--was beginning the trilogy with the Legacy Child, the Cursed Prince, the Prodigal Son, already as a full-blown villain (or as full-blown as he can muster, anyway, lol). Without even a “so here’s what happened to him” prologue to ease us into things. And I have kind of a guess/theory about how this came to be, based on what we know so far about the inception of the trilogy. It was always one of George Lucas’s main plot points that Han and Leai’s son would fall to the dark side. But apparently, his version of the arc started before the fall, and would’ve included the son being corrupted and turning to the dark, and then gone on from there, presumably towards his eventual redemption--kind of a condensed version of Anakin’s arc across Episodes I - VI, probably, but living at the end. It’s also been disclosed that one of the adjustments Lucasfilm made to George’s original ideas was to time-shift his version of events. They moved Luke’s entrance into the story down, because it was realized that his presence too early in would pull focus away from the new generation characters who needed to be introduced and established. And they moved the young Solo’s dark side phase up, because...well, rather conspicuously, no one’s given an explanation for that, yet. So I’m pretty sure, or at least, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out, that a major reason, if not the reason, for that shift was to do away with the original beginning of Ben’s arc (on-screen, anyway), start with him already fallen, and keep his backstory and the circumstances surrounding his fall as mysterious as possible for as long as possible.
Because, I guarantee you, if the story started off with viewers seeing Ben Solo as the OT heroes’ Good Boy Son, and then saw him be corrupted and turned by a villainous dark-sider...if the story started off with Rey and Ben meeting as light-siders and starting to fall for each other and being hinted all over the place towards a shared destiny, and then Ben was corrupted and taken from her by a villainous dark-sider...it would have been so, damn, obvious, way too obvious, ridiculously obvious, what the trilogy was doing and where it was headed. People complain now about what we eventually got seeming “so predictable it’s boring”, but ummm... 🤷🏾 Even if that alt-trilogy was super well-written and extremely well-executed, the endgame would’ve been a much bigger DUH than it is now. Just by virtue of how those kinds of stories typically go, especially in what’s supposed to be feel-good family entertainment.
But plop us down into the story with the Legacy Child of Heroes as a “villain”, and suddenly everyone’s all discombobulated across the board about what the hell the ST is doing. I mean, genius. The last chapters of a decades-spanning operatic saga should be as dynamic, as epic, as poignant, as cathartic, as memorable, and as suspenseful as possible (especially after the point of the previously released trilogy was a foregone conclusion). And the formulation of Ben’s and Reylo’s arcs definitely ups the ante on all those. Lucasfilm took what could otherwise have been a more obviously straightforward and even rote narrative and spun it into something that’s got audiences on their toes till the very end. And all without being Subversive and Shocking For The Hell of It.
But instead, they were subversive in a substantial way, in the way Star Wars always has been--by doing what the mainstream/the “norm” is usually too chicken, too hesitant, or too unimaginative to do. In the early 80s, mainstream blockbusters weren’t painting as victims and unequivocally redeeming major villains--but George Lucas did that. In the 90s, mainstream blockbusters weren’t depicting iconic villains as blatantly woobyfied, innocent children in their pre-villainy years--but George Lucas did that, even in the face of skepticism from within his own studio (the earliest other instance I can think of in recent memory is Magneto in the first X-Men movie, but that was released over a year after TPM). Now, mainstream blockbusters don’t center female-gazey, heroine & villain, enemies-to-lovers redemptive romance--that is not something the majority of general viewers are accustomed to--but Kathleen Kennedy & Co. did that. And in doing so, made the relationship between the Commoner Girl heroine and the Galactic Prince male lead, in what’s essentially a fairy tale, seem way edgier, more “controversial”, and more titillating than it has any right to, lol. But Lucasfilm did it all For The Drama, and it worked like a charm.
They took the archetypal and made it debatable. They took the fairly obvious and made it suspenseful. They took the centuries-old, tried-and-true and made it the subject of “would they actually go there, and how far?” skepticism and speculation. They literally injected a metaphorical proverb into the second act about not believing the sun is still there just because it’s night and you can’t see it...and yet, some people aren’t believing it just because we’re in the ‘night’ phase of the story and they can’t see it, lol. And it would be one thing if this was for a one-and-done movie. But they managed to draw this out across 4 years and 3 movies. I’m amazed. The Skywalker plot of the ST is, simplistically speaking, pretty much a space opera combo of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, yet Lucasfilm’s got the fandom anxious and the GA curious about how it’ll all end, like
Quite a feat, if you ask me, but they really Did That.
