Tomas Pueyo
Aug 31, 2018 · 1 min read

[Response] Let me give you a more hopeful perspective!

The fact that ~90% of my predictions about SW8 were right is very telling of Rian Johnson’s take on SW.

If you followed this post well, and you read my post on what will happen in SW9, you’ll notice that SW9 needs to escape the infinite loop of SW. It means it needs to be different from SW in general, and SW3/6 in particular.

But you can’t just start diverging from the rest of SW in the last movie. The divergence needs to start in the movie before, at least.

So the challenge for Rian Johnson was: how do I uphold SW’s rings while at the same time showing a break from them? And I think he did that well:

  • 90% of my predictions were right, so clearly he did uphold SW’s Ring Structure.
  • The places where he diverges are very specific, and well thought through: the fact that they kill the Emperor one movie earlier opens it up to just the conflict between the new, equal takes on the Force (Rey and Kylo); he kicks off the concept that it’s not going to be the Resistance who will win against the Dark Side, but rather an uprise from the people; the use of lightspeed as a weapon changes the balance of power and adds uncertainty to space combat…

I think he had a very very difficult job, and he did it pretty well. What specifically bothered you, and what would you have done differently?

    Tomas Pueyo

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    Why?