Adaptation

I have never had another movie end that just left me sitting there wondering about everything I just saw

Everything you just said is objectively incorrect, at least of his movies

Emily Blunt doesn’t save anyone in Sicario…she fails to stop Alejandro from flat out executing a mother and her two small children in Mexico. She completely alienated her morals by signing the affidavit about it afterwards instead of eating the bullet

Chris Pine’s HOHW robbery plan gets two innocent bank customers and a Texas Ranger murdered because he involved his violent/sociopath brother in his scheme. He knows his is now the sole focus of a retired, widowed Ranger who would have probably shot him on site if his family didn’t pull up. Ensuring his children are wealthy doesn’t mean he isn’t also as big a shitbag as his brother was

Jeremy Renner and Liz Olsen couldn’t save any Tribal or state police from the security contractors, proving the theme that when outsiders mettle in Reservation Affairs it’s the Native Americans that pay the price. Wind River is still poverty stricken and Renner’s daughter’s murder is still unsolved, much like the many real world unsolved murders of Indigenous women in America

Jeremy Renner going on a killing spree and leaving Pete to die on the mountain doesn’t make him a white savior, it makes him a vigilante

The reason Rian Johnson was so skewered by Star Wars fans was because he was handed both characters and lore he didn’t create and given carte blanch to do whatever with them. It’s pretty clear his inspiration came from projects like Aliens, a film that only loosely connects to the original and bares the signature touches of its current director

This was where he ran into trouble…..

Regardless of how anyone thought JJ Abrams did as a writer and director of TFA, he clearly had these characters (both new and legacy) set on a (flimsy) story arc that Johnson decided he would upend in order to sigh subvert audience expectations

The problem with that is now we all know in hindsight that neither Disney nor Kathleen Kennedy had any idea of what story arc they were trying to tell beforehand, and were subsequently left with a middle film that relied on the succeeding director (who was not Rian Johnson) and screenwriter to coherently tie all of our subverted expectations together and still stick the landing, both of a trilogy of films and a trilogy of trilogies.

Sadly…they could not, and what we got as a mea culpa was a loud, silly fan service final film that no one particularly liked

Rian Johnson treated the Last Jedi like it was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Back to the Future Part 2-essentially a stand alone plot in a series of films; what he should have tried to emulate was LOTR: The Two Towers-the middle section of a three film saga