There was a 2008 SW Insider article where they were talking about The Holiday Special. At the end they say something about Lucas learning not to relax control over SW because even if you stir in the same ingredients, you can't recapture what makes Star Wars, Star Wars, without one person having creative control. It's a shame that fans know this and have known it, yet Disney hasn't figured it out yet. I think that's why the Sequels, specifically, failed because you had too many people who wanted to make their mark on SW without Lucas being there to tell them "That's an interesting design/idea, but it's not SW."
I think it's less about
control and more about
vision. Star Wars -- or really any film -- requires one person that has a clear, consistent vision for that story. If you're going to do that over the course of 3 films, you need one person who knows the vision the whole way thru. You can have other people direct, other people write, etc., but one person needs to have the vision.
Separate from that, though, that one person needs people around them to say "That's a really dumb idea, and we can't do that" or "That's...ok, but it could be amazing if we rework it a little..." George needed "No" men around instead of just "Yes" men. Unfettered George is 2 amazing ideas, 3 good-but-could've-been-better ideas, and 5 crap ideas that overshadow the other 5. George with a solid creative team around him to help shape his vision is ANH/ESB.
The ST failed because the saga was over. Even as highly regarded as the Thrawn trilogy from the EU was, it was still an afterthought. They should have just created a whole new story, set in a different time period, totally disconnected from the main saga and hired writers who actually understood the IP. If they threw out George's treatments for his version of the ST, they could have just as easily thrown out the prospect of making 7,8, 9 altogether. I know having Harrison, Carrie, and Mark attached seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was ultimately short sighted for the brand long term.
It made sense from a purely financial perspective, and I think it could've worked although it made things a
lot harder from a narrative perspective.
But it also meant undoing the very clearly "And they lived happily ever after" end to the saga that ROTJ created. I've always thought that they should've pushed it far enough into the future that we're several generations removed, so you don't have any more of the "Famous families" names floating around. No Solos, Kenobis, Skywalkers, Palpatines, whatever. Totally new characters in a familiar universe.
I'll also say that I think Disney could've done a decent, if exceedingly dull and risk-averse, version of these films that had a coherent feel to them and that were just a casual romp, but that would've required not sticking Rian Johnson in the middle of things.
JJ Abrams is a rollercoaster engineer who knows how to make great blockbuster rides with no real substance to them. But hey, you wanna strap in and go for some loops and drops and whatnot, he's your guy. Rian Johnson actually makes movies about people and takes his characters seriously. I think the main problem with TLJ is that Johnson took the setup from JJ, said "Ok, so what would all of this really mean?" and then just expanded on it.
For example, the question of why'd Luke disappear to Ach-To AND keep himself hidden. It's literally never explained in TFA. Luke's gone, and the map to finding him is the maguffin of the film. It doesn't even really make sense when you unpack it (he hid, but he kept a map stuck in R2, but he didn't want anyone to find him so why'd he give R2 the map, and also if R2 wasn't with him how'd he fly his X-wing and....) But whatever, this is a JJ movie and we're not supposed to actually stop and think for more than 3 seconds.
So, Rian Johnson looks at this pile of questions and says "Ok, so, why
would Luke disappear? Why would this hero, this guy who was so committed to finding the good in his evil, child-murdering father, why would he bail on everyone and everything he supposedly cared about? And the answer becomes "Because of crippling guilt, and a firm belief that everyone would be better off if he was gone." Otherwise, why leave in the first place?
The trouble is that this answer is a very
real answer. It's what humans who exist in the real world would actually do, and it's the kind of motivation that they'd actually have.
And that has
nothing at all to do with the kind of movies JJ was making, nor (apparently) that everyone wanted to see. They didn't want real, grounded characters with motivations that make sense. What they wanted was a tighter, better thought-through roller coaster ride where Luke meets Rey at the end of TFA, hears how badly everything has gone, and -- regardless of whatever sent him to the island in the first place -- turns around and says "It's worse than I thought... We have much work to do, Rey. I'll train you, but we need to go on an adventure to find the Three Maguffins of the Jedi" and then he conveniently dies along the way jUsT lIkE oBi-WaN dId BeCaUsE tHe FiLmS rHyYyYyYyMe!!11!
(seriously, that "Well, they rhyme" bulls**t is such a cop-out excuse for just recycling the same old story again and again. It's pure myopia and a lack of any kind of creative vision.)
In other words, what they wanted was a very
movie-like response from Luke. People don't do that in real life. In real life, the former warrior who goes off to find solitude does that because
he's ****ing broken inside and a single, plucky would-be student won't coax him back into action. In real life, that guy is suffering from
serious ****ing trauma because his
own family murdered his entire school and turned to evil and he couldn't stop him. (Even if you leave out the Rashomon "It wasn't/was/kinda my fault" thing.)
I love what Rian Johnson did with TLJ. I think it's an amazing film with
the best character work in the entire nonology. But I think it's pretty clear that he is the needle-drop in the middle of the ST and that his approach
does not mesh well with JJ's "WHATEVER! IT'S ALL JUST A RIDE! STRAP IN AND HERE WE GOOOO! WHEEEEEEEEEE!!!" style. With JJ, you'll feel the feels because he knows how to angle the cameras and have the people say the words and make the score rise and fall, and whether there's anything in the narrative behind any of it is entirely beside the point. Ben and Rey will kiss because these are two charismatic leads and because shut up, that's why. And you'll like it because we'll swell the music here and set the lighting just so and these are the things that happen in films that people want to see. Somehow Palpatine came back and it doesn't matter how because you all just wanna see him cackle and eat scenery and shoot lightning anyway.
Having real characters with real emotions doing things that would happen in the real world (or having real world consequences occur because of the "only in a movie" thing they do) doesn't fit with that style at all. You could do a whole trilogy that way, or you could do a whole trilogy JJ's way, but mixing them together really doesn't work.
The further we get from the original film, the more I'm convinced that as magical as it was- excess of anything is never good. It's true in life and it's certainly true in fiction.
"And then what happened?"
"They lived happily ever after."
"And
then what happened?"
"They got old and died."
"That's too sad, Daddy. What happened after other than that?"
"Nothing. Go to bed."
