It’s not really shades of grey. It’s acknowledging the story told so far. Many a SW fan has talked at length about how the Jedi are, in the end, rather ineffective and kind of dumb. They have all this power but the majority of Jedi training is in not using, being stoic, having no attachments, and being neutral. They aren’t actually good guys at all. When they find “the chosen one” who will “return balance” to the Force they don’t even bother to notice that they’re in charge and they don’t WANT balance. Meanwhile they work closely with a barely closeted Sith Lord to help him kill the Republic and build the Empire, and they never even notice the fact that he’s running both sides of the war.
In a lot of ways LJ gets SW BACK to what it was. It breaks it away from the Skywalker soap opera it had become, it actually gets it BACK to good vs evil while discarding the Jedi (not actually good guys) vs Sith (pretty much just anti-Jedis without much direction other than not being Jedi). It breaks SW out of a naval gazing spiral it got into near the end of Empire. We now have a bad guy whose bad because that’s what he wants to be, and he’s being opposed by good guys not primarily motivated by weird stoicism. It’s actually much more black and white now than it has been since Darth wound up Luke’s father.
Sorry but I disagree completely. I could care less about making like cynical or killing off the old characters, SW was good v evil and if you think this movie “returned” sw to that, I don’t know what movie you were watching.
This movie left nothing that binary anywhere.
No one is evil and even Rey, who is “good” comes across as simply less cynical and naive than purely good.
There movie leave the audience with literally no reason to come back.. because it’s just going to be more shades of gray and nihilism.
About the only concept that isn’t completely destroyed is some vague notion of “hope”.. but even this is somewhat ephemeral.
There are plenty of execution issues that can be ripped apart, but the real problem is SW is no longer Good V Evil as of this movie...
The original Star Wars was a space story using the Dungeons and Dragons alignments of Lawful Good (Jedi), facing Lawful Evil(Sith), with a Chaotic Neutral(Han Solo) thrown in for good measure.
After that, it lost the original charm, and became “The Great Quest for TOY SALES!”
There are some REALLY, REALLY good books out there from the SW Universe, but Disney doesn’t own them, and would have to pay actual royalties to the creators of them. Which WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
We have a bad guy who is “bad”, because he has daddy issues. If he was a female he would have been a stripper at “Cantina Royale”.
As far as I remember only one Jedi thought Anakin was the chosen one, until Obi-wan called him that in Episode III. Nothing about Palpatine screamed Sith Lord until Episode III, to the characters in the movie. The Jedi actual acted on the side of good for the Republic, because of the actions of Count Dooku and the manipulation of the Trade Federation. It was pretty straightforward and simple.
Now we have a Star Wars that has way too many unanswered questions and huge “leaps of faith” cause “reasons”. Rian Johnson has managed to outdo the ridiculousness of the mitichlorian disaster, by having anyone have force powers, and be able to master them without training (something Abrams pushed the envelope with in TFA).
Umm.... I think Lucas himself said that the Star Wars saga was a biography of Anakin Skywalker.