• The Sequel Trilogy was so poorly executed. I loved the homage to the original Star Wars that the Force Awakens was. I thoroughly enjoyed the rebellion against toxic Star Wars fans that The Last Jedi was. I absolutely hated the utter bullshit the Rise Of Skywalker became. Which in turn soured my feelings about the first two movies. Why they never had an overarching story in the first place is just ridiculous.

      • They flushed the whole EU. They didn’t even pick it’s bones for the best bits (until recently), they just messed with the dynamics that worked.

        In my opinion, Rey is supposed to be Jaina and Kylo is supposed to be Jacen. Force Awakens has weird moments between the characters that can only make sense if Rey is Han and Leia’s daughter. JJ tried to add ‘mystery’ by hiding this fact, and then Johnson throws it all away to do his own thing.

    • To be fair, they did have some overarching direction, and even many of the same screenwriters.

      I personally think that a lot of the problems come down to Disney rushing the production. It went from four to five years of production time down to two to three and it shows. When you have to go from inception to filming in a few months and to release in 24 months something has to give. Given that there seem to be shot order errors in at least the Last Jedi I do suspect that an extra round of reshoots and editing would have gobe a long way, but there was t time.

      Even the you might be able to do a lot in final editing in some films, but when it’s so effects and locations heavy you end up rather limited in what can be changed after finishing shooting. Force Awakens got away with a lot becuse it used a recap of the original trilogy to save time setting things up, but Abrams style of adding in plot hooks without any idea what later films are going to do with them limited the later films a lot more than it might appear on first glance.

      I also suspect that the fan reaction to the Prequels played a big part in the way they took it. For fifteen years a lot of the talk about them was people asking why we were spending so much time on trade disputes and senate votes, and the team overcorected to the point that all the basic world building and history got pushed into a book. While Bloodlines may be a good book, a lot of it should have been in the movies themselves and not a tie in novel.