Just ahead of the opening of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” this weekend, “The Last Jedi” director Rian Johnson appeared on the “Swings & Mrs” podcast with Jennifer and Cody Decker and told them that catering to fandoms would be a mistake.“I think approaching any creative process with that...
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Trust this dude he knows how to make a good movie.
He's not totally wrong, catering to the fans is a mistake. What you need to cater to is the mythos of the film (Which is partly how the fans view them film). It seems like these two things would be the same, but they aren't. Each individual fan might view individual concepts differently and have different hopes for how things turn out--trying to please them all will be a mess. But most fans can agree on the generality of concepts in the mythos, and all you have to do is respect that. And Rian Johnson literally did the opposite of that. He went out of his way to rip apart those general concepts for 'shock factor' alone (So not even destroying them in an interesting way, just shitting on them because he knew it would shock people. Luke tossing the lightsaber is a metaphor for the whole movie. The absolute cheapest, most superficial way to do the unexpected--nothing mattered except for it being the opposite of how things should be.).
but that’s not really going to satisfy me…I want to be shocked, I want to be surprised, I want to be thrown off-guard, I want to have things recontextualized, I want to be challenged as a fan when I sit down in the theater. I think what you want from a movie guides, inevitably, how you go about making them,” he added.
Again, the above isn't wrong. He just didn't care enough about the IP to pull it off, A twist or a "recontextualization" only works if you delicately and carefully guide the fans through it so it makes sense with what happened before. Its not simply doing the opposite because "hurr hurr what a twist!", its about slowly bending the material to lead fans to a new expectation. If you don't carefully lead the audience to your shocking outcome in a way where each step feels very organic and before you know it, your view is changed--then you failed. A good twist should be like a good joke, the answer should be obvious when you think about it with your new context (IE all the things you've learned over the course of the film), but at the same time very difficult to figure out given the old way of thinking. Johnson didn't do that; he didn't really explain why things were so weird and different, he just said "that's how it is".
If you want a great example of a property that's been able to do this...Look at Cobra Kai. It totally recontextualized the Karate Kid and did a 180 on most of the things we knew. Fans didn't reject it because it was very apparent that they didn't simply say "durr this is how things are now, this character is now a douche". No. The writers took their time to add a new dimension to the story without disturbing what was there, and it was fucking great. The story GREW into its new form, without needing to alter the roots. That's the difference.
The idea that the only thing important is the shock factor is dumb, its like saying icing is the most important part of the cake so you make a cake of all icing. Shock for surprises sake sucks. He could have had Rey shit in a box and rolled credits and it would have been fucking shocking, but that doesn't make a good film. Cohesive story makes a good film (Which is also why its infuriating that he constantly compares his bullshit to Empire. Again he's not wrong in the technical sense, if his film had been the second in a trilogy and we knew NOTHING about SW, it would have been
a lot better...But what he's missing is his film was NOT the second movie in a series. It was the 10th or 11th...Meaning you're building on much firmer roots, and a broader base and if you don't account for that, your movie is going to feel exactly like TLJ did--as if it was made by someone who just didn't give a shit about the story before that point, except to know enough to add some "shocking twists".)