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Why The 'Star Wars' Movies Keep Getting Longer, And Duller

This article is more than 6 years old.

It’s a commonly accepted fact in Hollywood that writers rule TV, and that directors rule movies. The nature of an episodic TV series, with its pre-established characters and relationships, its fixed tone, its seasonal and series-long story arcs, and the machinery and relationships it establishes between production staff, network, and advertisers, leaves only limited room for a director who’s handling a single episode to flex their muscles and bring their own stamp to the show. Good directors are always welcome, of course, so long as they paint between the lines.

For a movie director though, like, say, Rian Johnson making a picture like Brick or Looper, the enterprise starts with a blank slate, and someone needs to wield responsibility for every single detail of how the story is told, and indeed, what the story is. This is not to belittle the crucially important role of the writer, without whom there would be no story, but in a movie production the script is ultimately subservient to the director’s vision.

The “director rules” rule holds true for most independently financed movies, for mid-sized studio features like the current hit Wonder, and for franchise launchers like, say, The Lego Movie, or the original Star Wars: A New Hope. When there’s no established pattern to adhere to, no pre-sold audience with critically important expectations to be met, it’s essential to have a captain in place with a plan, and sufficient backbone, to see it through, on budget, and on time for the theatrical delivery date. That’s the director’s job.

Sure, studio executives and stars and others involved will get their say, their “creative input,” as it’s called, but if they’re smart, and if the director is a good one, they’ll know where to draw the line and leave the decision-making to the helmer.

The rules change though, when we get to mega-budgeted (over $200 million), studio tent-pole blockbuster sequels like Star Wars: The Last Jedi. When you’re looking at the 8th installment in a franchise that has been running for 40 years and generated tens of billions of dollars in ticket sales, DVD and streaming video purchases, fast food tie-ins, theme park attractions, and merchandise, merchandise, merchandise, the normal rules of gravity simply don’t apply. With so much on the line, there’s no way a big, shareholder-owned corporation is going to hand over the reins to a mere mortal.

Now you may think to yourself, if writers rule TV, and if directors rule movies, and if a mega-franchise like Star Wars is really a movie-series, sort of like TV on steroids, wouldn’t it make sense to hire someone who is a writer and a director to oversee it?

And Disney has indeed done that in hiring Rian Johnson, who both wrote and directed all three of his previous feature films (he also directed three episodes of Breaking Bad), giving him the titles of writer and director on The Last Jedi. They also hired writer-director JJ Abrams to both script and helm the previous installment, The Force Awakens, and to oversee the existing trilogy.

But let's not kid ourselves. As talented as Johnson and Abrams are, they weren't hired to bring their originality, their unique voices, or even many of their ideas to Star Wars. The roles they play as writer-directors on their films are more akin to that of an interior decorator. Take an existing, architecturally defined space, pick out the fabrics, maybe add a bit of your taste to the furniture, bring some color to it, but always remember that you're just a paid employee in someone else's palace.

"Surprise me," the studio executives might have said to Rian Johnson. They might have even meant it, sort of. But that doesn't mean to deliver a wildly original story that will re-invent the franchise, up-end expectations, or bring whole new levels of meaning to the characters' quests. What they really mean is give me five memorable trailer moments, five set pieces or plot twists that audiences will recall as they walk out of the theater. Five reasons for them to say, "I enjoyed that."

And Johnson and his fellow filmmakers did wedge in five sort-of-cool moments, like Luke Skywalker's unexpected reaction when Rey hands him his light saber; when the apprentice Kylo Ren confronts his master, Snoke; when Laura Dern's Vice Admiral Holdo decides what to do with the ship that's under her command; in those and a few other moments the film delivers a bit of requisite surprise.

But all of that is unfortunately in the service of a complete mess of a plot, an episodic jumble that gives the viewer little reason to care more about Daisy Ridley's Rey and the plight of her fellow rebels than for Adam Driver's Dark Side dude Kylo Ren. The story is riddled with lapses in logic, cringe-worthy dialogue, and long, repetitive stretches that feel like nothing more than filler to pad the movie and make it far too long.

Rian Johnson's  job wasn't to create a classic movie, it was to create a serviceable one. What was required of him and the producers was to make a movie, yes, but primarily to take direction from the studio heads, from executives in Disney's marketing department, distribution, international, merchandising, and theme park divisions, to cobble together a least-common-denominator-friendly piece of content that's just good enough to keep driving the machine to the next stop.

Serving all those masters, accommodating all those cooks in the kitchen who are paid to stir in their own competing flavors, inevitably results in bland soup. Constrained by so many demands, it's virtually impossible for a talent like Johnson to display his mettle, to tell a story with deep emotional resonance, to give us a complex character with an empathetic desire to overcome some meaningfully human obstacle that's preventing her from becoming her true, wholly fulfilled self. The movie dabbles at those things, it makes noises resembling inner struggle and deep conflict, but it pulls every punch that it sets up, blunts every edge, and leaves the viewer confused and ultimately bored.

Prevented from going deep, Johnson opted to go wide, making the movie sufficiently long that he could set up enough of those required "surprises" to check off the studio's boxes. At 152 minutes, The Last Jedi is 26 percent longer than the original Star Wars: A New Hope. And the movies have gotten longer over time. The first trilogy averaged 125 minutes in length, the second 139 minutes. And so far the two episodes of the third trilogy have clocked in at a gargantuan average of 144 minutes.

But bigger isn't better, and for me it's a whole lot worse. After nearly 3 hours of sitting in my theater seat watching commercials, trailers, and then the bloated Last Jedi, the main thought in my mind as I exited the theater was how much my back ached.

Read More: Why Disney Rejected China's Day-And-Date Release Offer For 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'

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