this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2026
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Debatable. Anyway, the very next guy after the very next guy managed to be infinitely worse than both. What was his name again?
The guys that also ruined game of thrones?
Ironically Game of Thrones was ruined because the show runners got an offer to do a Star Wars movie. They turned down HBOs offer to do more episodes of GoT and instead hurried through and botched the ending because they wanted to get started on that Star Wars project. They botched GoT so bad that Disney got rid of their movie. Serves them right.
Lol, if that's true, it really is one of those situations when you drop everything you carried trying to catch something unimportant
This is all accurate but I think the same effect was hitting everyone in the whole franchise. They were all incredibly famous and getting all mannner of offers to do everything under the sun and it was going to be hard to keep all of them together for that much longer. It wasnβt exactly Harry Potter where all the principals were children who grew up making the movies. By the finale, even the actors who started young were in their prime.
Force Awakens > Last Jedi > Rise of Skywalker
So itβs really a toss up. Somehow Abrahms returned and ROS hit the lowest lows in the series.
Nah. VIII had a few missteps, but it was better then the rehashed plot of the first, and far better then the mess that followed.
What the actual fuck? Episode VIII is quite literally the worst mainline Star Wars movie made. I consider even episode IX to be better, not by a big margin but still better for no other reason than to try and salvage the clusterfuck that was episode VIII. Here's a short list of things episode VIII got wrong.
The whole movie is one massive misstep that derailed the entirely sequel trilogy. I get Episode VII wasn't anything magnificent but the entire point of episode VII was to reaffirm to the fans (who were skeptical about the continuation of Star Wars considering Episode III didn't really leave on a high note and Episode VI kinda tied up the loose ends) that the series is going somewhere and isn't nosediving off a cliff. That's why they effectively redid the Episode IV plotline, because it was a safe starting point that sets up characters for episodes VIII and IX. Abrams even left a rough draft for VIII and IX but then Johnson was given full creative control to throw the entire trilogy draft out the window and do whatever the fuck he wanted. We don't know if episode IX could've ever been good because episode VIII fucked the entire trilogy so hard it became impossible to salvage.
The only context in which Episode VIII could be better than IX is if you view them as individual movies and not a part of a trilogy. And you know, Episode VIII probably could've been an okay standalone film. But it wasn't. It had to respect what episode VII set up and it had to give episode IX something to follow up on. It didn't neither and for that both Episode VII and IX are worse off simply because episode VIII exists. In fact the movie almost killed the entire franchise by taking all the characters and storylines and driving them off straight off the cliff.
You're right with all your bullet points. Episode VIII has a fundamentally broken plot in many ways. The thing that it has going for it though is that it has a few actual themes that I found interesting. I like that Johnson questioned the whole light side dark side polarity and that Rey came from nobody in particular. I liked the rejection of the Skywalker family and assertion that heroes could come from anywhere. If it had followed a better movie, "let the past die" would have been a legitimate highlight for me. It didn't work in the trilogy it's a part of, but if the trilogy had been based around the VIII we got I think it could have worked as a sequel trilogy to Star Wars.
And the thing is that I think those are about the only things I particularly like in the entire sequel trilogy besides Babu Frik (I hate how much I love that little dude), and that makes episode VIII the best of a trilogy of bland to bad movies for me. Episode VII was the best constructed of them, and it had cool stuff, but it didn't do anything that made me think "oh that's interesting" (like VIII did) because so much of it was nostalgia based 'memberberries. You're right about it being made to address fan concerns, but that was only relevant in 2015, and I'm looking back at in 2026. Episode IX was just a train wreck start to finish, and I don't particularly blame it because it had the unenviable task of following up VIII, but it's still just bad with nothing interesting to show for it.
I have to say I'm getting of directors both-sidesing every story. It was one of the reasons I didn't like episode VIII. Star Wars was better when it was good guys vs bad guys.
100% this it was Rian Johnson's inability to work from someone else's starting point.
To add to your list. Finn. Johnson butchered Finn's story so much that the actor vocally said he would never take another Star Wars job.
He was supposed to be a Luke analog. He was supposed to be force sensitive. He was supposed to confront Phasma. The first movie projected so many hints at the path many of these characters were going to take in the trilogy. There was a parallel to Finn and Rey. Finn's force awakening literally breaks his mind control and we see Kylo sense him!
Johnson came in and burned all of those threads.
I accepted a lot about Episode VIII, but the ruin of the Finn stuff is where it actually became unforgivable for me.
I put Finn (and Phasma) together with all the other threads Episode VII set up and Johnson wrote off. There were simply too many to mention each thread individually.
But yeah, it was a travesty what Johnson did to Finns story. Considering how shafted he got it would've been a mercy kill if Finn had sacrificed himself in Episode VIII but even then Johnson needed to subvert expectations and continue ruining characters.
7 put Luke on an island during a war, 8 was just doing the best it could with Abrams' nonsense mystery boxes
Except that it ignored everything set up in the previous movie, thus causing the next movie to be an absolute mess.
The force awakens basically had that same problem though, effectively undoing everything concluded in return of the Jedi. Granted there's a time gap but there's no explanation as to why the former rebels (whatever they were called at that time I forgot) were still such a small force compared to the new big bad (something order?), not to mention why this order exists in the first place, what their motivations were, how they got their numbers and resources, etc. They're just a galaxy-level threat sprung from thin air. It seems pretty clear to me that JJ just wanted to remake a new hope with as little consideration of the conclusion of return of the Jedi as he could get away with, plot holes be damned. RJ tried to address some of these plot holes but even he doesn't really attempt to justify the something-order's existence. If the force awakens was the first star wars movie as a new hope was then it wouldn't be such a big deal, but coming just a few decades after the return of the Jedi, there ought to be some explanation for how they lost so much progress in that time, preferably in the first act. But nah, it's just "somehow the empire returned (with cool new branding)" because JJ can't write a plot to save his life.
This is why I really don't care for the new trilogy through. Episode VII is a fun movie in isolation but as a follow-up to VI it makes zero sense. Says a lot about audiences that they just blindly accept its premise with no questions asked. The rebels are magically the underdogs again guys, nothing that happened in original trilogy matters!
Yeah, there was so much material they could have pulled from the Expanded Universe. The New Republic era, reclaiming territory from the imperial remnants and rebuilding the Jedi Order; the New Jedi Order era, fighting off the Yuuzhan Vong and the Killiks; the Fate of the Jedi era, when the Sith make a comeback; and then there's the Legacy era after that.
That's at least 3 or 4 trilogies right there.
Not to mention going back in time to the Old Republic era with its wars against the Sith empires, and the Dawn of the Jedi in the Origins era prior to that.
If they really wanted to milk the franchise, they had plenty of material to work with instead of just saying "nah" and declaring it all non-canonical, only to replace it with slop...
Nah, don't put the blame on ep. IX mess into VIII. It also ignored everything set up on the previous movie, and even if it didn't, there wouldn't be any need for it to suck that much.
Now, none of that makes VIII good...
8 is the best Star Wars movie
A few missteps is quite the understatement. I'd take boring rehash over universe-breaking any day. But it doesn't matter in the end. It's like comparing different flavors of shit.
IDK. VII was disappointing, but I hated VIII so much I still haven't watched IX. But maybe picking a winner out of these is besides the point. Rogue One showed what a good, modern Star Wars film could look like, and in comparison with that, both VII and VIII are just terrible.
Honestly if you told me that Alex Kurtzman was a psyop by Rick Berman to make us hate him less I would have to believe it.
What is it with Ricks?
goongas
Hey, someone got the reference!
"Every singe image is so dense, it has so much going on!"
i can't not hear it.