I do agree with you that Disney mismanaged the whole trilogy, and the fault lies with them. They very clearly went into it without any sort of plan or even a particular vision, deferring completely to whatever each director wanted to do. With minimal imposition of a plot outline, the whole thing could have gone much better, even while still leaving the individual directors to mostly decide how they got there.
To my mind, letting Abrams double-down on swerving back to his plot in episode 9 was their biggest management sin when it comes to creating a coherent plot arc. If they'd carried on with what 8 was setting up we'd have had ["nostalgia" => "twist" => "resolution"], and instead we were left with ["nostalgia" => "twist" => "ignore that! more nostalgia"]. The former could have worked out and won over those who disliked the Last Jedi twists, the latter just flopped unsatisfyingly. (A second-movie twist was always in the cards, given general fan sentiment about Empire.)
Disclaimer: I personally liked episode 8 the most of that trilogy, and it's the only one I'd bother to go rewatch. It has the best direction by far, along with the most striking visuals of the lot and most of the quotable lines. That said, I think my take on this holds up regardless of which side of the Last Jedi divide you fall on. :D
Yep, management sins abound. It made sense to me that some people would be picking at Ryan Johnson's film as defiling the saga or whatever because it was divisive, but obviously if you're trying to tell a good story - and it isn't like Johnson forced Disney to produce his film - you'll find a way to work with that and honour the world you're creating. Instead, they threw fuel on the fire, practically breaking the fourth wall as they do everything they can to reverse the thing with Episode 9. People shouldn't be talking about how the writers disagreed with each other, but here we are; the lasting legacy of the last three Star Wars movies is not the movies themselves, but the story of how they were politicked and focus-grouped into existence. Nobody involved here had even the slightest concept of artistic creation.
And to be fair, I liked Episode 8. Flawed, stupid casino planet bit, the ending was silly. But Star Wars isn't known for its plot and logical consistency anyway; the series is 99% retcons and fan theories. What's important is the atmosphere and the characters, and what the meagre plot means for those characters. And there was actually some genuine effort being made.
> To my mind, letting Abrams double-down on swerving back to his plot in episode 9 was their biggest management sin when it comes to creating a coherent plot arc.
Abrams was an Executive Producer on Ep 8 still and was supposedly in the room for all of the plot development. He personally could have avoided most of that swerve had he been paying attention. Admittedly, he thought at the time it was Trevorrow's problem because Disney didn't fire Trevorrow from Ep 9 until the "last minute", but there's a lot of interesting questions left about what Abrams even thought the "resolution" could possibly be even with Trevorrow at the helm. He was still an Executive Producer in a role that should have been preparing for the trilogy as a whole to succeed.
It takes a village to make a movie and all that, and I'm not personally blaming Abrams, though it sounds like it, I think Disney management should have been more involved too. The whole Trevorrow thing reeks of Disney management failure and bad contract planning. (Between that and the shenanigans with Lord/Miller over Solo…)
I think Abrams made the best movie for Ep 9 that he could have given the time, budget, and resources he had to meet a "set in stone" holiday release date. I think he did the best he could with what Johnson left him, and honestly I don't think anyone could have resolved Johnson's plot twists well and still have felt like Star Wars. He had good ideas in absentia, but they weren't "Star Wars".
(Admittedly, I thought Ep 8 was the entire wrong genre for Star Wars: it was a Vietnam War movie in a franchise built around World War 2 metaphors/aesthetics. I also had a big issue with the "Three Billboards problem" of Poe in Ep 8. In my eyes he's unreedemably the villain of the film, and the character is entirely broken beyond repair in Ep 8. But also, admittedly, I haven't liked any of Rian Johnson's films that I've watched [inc. Knives Out; and I especially hated Looper].)
> Admittedly, I thought Ep 8 was the entire wrong genre for Star Wars: it was a Vietnam War movie in a franchise built around World War 2 metaphors/aesthetics.
Ah, but Star Wars has always been a Vietnam metaphor filtered through WW2 aesthetics. Specifically, with the Rebels being the Viet Cong -- they're a small group using asymmetric warfare tactics against a vast military machine that's exerting cultural hegemony over even the territory it doesn't control. Lucas has actually been pretty explicit about this being his intention in interviews.
That's a fair point, though in practical terms I think Lucas just took the roundabout way to arrive a metaphor involving the real world Maquis (as opposed to Star Trek's odder counterpart): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquis_(World_War_II)
There's still a lot fewer "shades of grey" in "French rebels versus Nazis" than in all the complicated geopolitics of Viet Cong versus US military. Lucas may have used the idea from the Vietnam War, but he didn't just filter it through a WW2 aesthetic, he entirely embedded it in it.
To my mind Star Wars isn't exactly the franchise for "maybe the Empire are the good guys in the story" shades of grey. (Though admittedly I also find it appalling how many people cosplay the Empire and how much merch there is and seeming adulation the Empire gets. Though it is seemingly great for Disney's bottom line if people don't think of the First Order as a Nazi Regime that exploded entire planets worth of people like the text tells us they are.)
To my mind, letting Abrams double-down on swerving back to his plot in episode 9 was their biggest management sin when it comes to creating a coherent plot arc. If they'd carried on with what 8 was setting up we'd have had ["nostalgia" => "twist" => "resolution"], and instead we were left with ["nostalgia" => "twist" => "ignore that! more nostalgia"]. The former could have worked out and won over those who disliked the Last Jedi twists, the latter just flopped unsatisfyingly. (A second-movie twist was always in the cards, given general fan sentiment about Empire.)
Disclaimer: I personally liked episode 8 the most of that trilogy, and it's the only one I'd bother to go rewatch. It has the best direction by far, along with the most striking visuals of the lot and most of the quotable lines. That said, I think my take on this holds up regardless of which side of the Last Jedi divide you fall on. :D