Episode VIII retconned away most of the new stuff established in episode VII. It also retconned a bunch of stuff from the other trilogies.
There was a lot of set-up in TFA: Who are Rey’s parents? What is Snoke’s end game? What‘s up with Phasma? How will the First Order stomach the destruction of Starkiller Base? How powerful is the First Order anyway? Can the Republic recover from the destruction of
CoruscantHosnian Prime?Can you lower the stakes even further? And who cares?
You have helpfully already grouped these questions into the relevant answers.
- Who are Rey’s parents?
- What is Snoke’s end game?
These things deserved to be tossed into the mud, and was the best decision Rian made.
- What‘s up with Phasma?
Yeah that sucked. Though don’t let memory exaggerate for you how much screentime Boba Fett really got, relative to how much we’ve built him up.
- How will the First Order stomach the destruction of Starkiller Base?
- How powerful is the First Order anyway?
- Can the Republic recover from the destruction of
CoruscantHosnian Prime?These were treated as trivial, ephemeral concerns within TFA from the getgo. Their appearance and destruction were already inconsequential, and followed dream logic. TLJ did not really contribute to that.
The last three are important to get me to care about the success of the resistance! I still don’t know what’s at stake! It’s like James Bond being saving the country of Liechtenstein from a communist invasion and dictatorship.
“How powerful is the First Order anyway” is fucking vital for the movie to work. Just because a nerd would care about something, and you feel contempt for nerds, doesn’t mean it’s inconsequential. If we don’t know how powerful the First Order is or how the fuck they got so powerful after what we’ve seen in ROTJ and TFA, then we don’t know the stakes and context for the conflict. We can’t care about opposing them, because without that information, their victory and loss follows no rules.
I dont think BamBam disagrees with you on that one - just that TFA *also* did not care about this completely vital thing. There was absolutely no politics in TFA, the destruction of Coruscant elicited almost no reaction from anyone in the movie, the comparative strengths and organizations of the Republic and the First Order were never delineated, and so on. If you saw TFA, you never should have expected any discussion of the politics of the universe in TLJ, it was clear the series did not care.
Okay, but TLJ seems to be focused on throwing out a bunch of other stuff from TFA, saying “no forget that” and “that’s dumb that doesn’t count”. It threw out Snoke’s plan and Rey’s parentage, which TFA set us up to believe were important. So, if the movie is changing course so hard and throwing out so much of what TFA did, why double down on THIS problem, and why should we expect continuity in this issue from a movie that doesn’t have that same continuity for anything else?
I have any number of bones to pick with The Last Jedi, but its handling of the Rey’s-parentage issue is not one of them.
By which I mean – it didn’t come across as “whoops, we decided that we want to take things in a different direction, never mind about all that stuff from the first movie.” It came across as deliberately raising expectations of a particular kind in order to make a point by undercutting them.
Star Wars has always been a story about dynastic ties and destiny-arising-from-birth. The narrative hinge of the entire original trilogy is “Vader is Luke’s father.” The prequel trilogy was about a messiah who could be foreseen from birth by midichlorian count, and about his forming predestined connections with all sorts of [metanarratively] famous people, and about the spiritual Yoda –> Dooku –> Qui-Gon –> Obi-Wan –> Anakin lineage. So when The Last Jedi comes out and teases “maybe Rey is the child of important people,” it’s proffering another iteration of exactly the story that we’re awaiting. And when it then (in a moment of great drama) says “nope, Rey’s parents are no one special, whatcha gonna do now?” – it’s attacking that trope, it’s saying “heroism is not a dynastic thing,” it’s saying “you don’t have to be connected to Special People in order to be special yourself.”
And maybe that makes you cheer, or maybe it annoys you a bit, in a “mumble grumble Star Wars believes in dynasties and you should respect that” kind of way. Either of those responses is reasonable. But it’s not like this setup was an accident.
A similar point, less strongly, could be made about Snoke. “Turns out he’s not interesting, he doesn’t have some kind of cool backstory or mastermind plan, he’s a generic creepy dictator who serves as a stepping-stone in Ben Solo’s saga. Sometimes the importance doesn’t lie where you think it does, sometimes the tropes don’t pan out in exactly the way that seems most obvious.”