"I have a bad feeling about this."
-Every Star Wars Character
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was a success, right? It created the hype, critics loved it, it made the money and it has a healthy 84% score in Rotten Tomatoes. But was it really a success?
I love Star Wars, grew up with it, loved The Force Awakens and get excited every time I see a new movie coming up. But to be fair, many people complaint about TFA because "it didn't have 'character development'". And yet, those same people had no issue with Rogue One having absolutely no character development and a pretty uninteresting protagonist. Jyn Erso seemed to be a great original character, but it turn out to be a missed opportunity. What made Rogue One a success or enjoyable movie is it's setting.
We have the Empire and it's prime, we have a lot of character that we last saw 30 years ago and, of course, Vader. The third act alone makes it for the other hour and a half that came before. With that said, I have a bad feeling about the upcoming Star Wars spin offs.
LucasFilm and it's properties belongs to Disney now. So does Marvel. Marvel has been a success. Star Wars is being a success. Disney like to repeat itself. We've seen it before. Marvel might be a success. But we can all agree that all the MCU movies have the same plot with different characters and, because of that, the first one in each series is usually the best. Because when you see the same thing with the same characters for the second time it stops being good.
I know all Marvel fans will argue about Captain America, and I will argue back that first and second movies have totally different setting (which is helpful) and third one it's not a Cap's movie at all. But that's not the point. The point is: when Disney success in something they repeat themselves.
This means that the already confirmed spin off about Han Solo will feature a bunch of unimportant characters, that Han will be exactly as we remember him from A New Hope (meaning he will no evolve as a character), and more importantly, the movie will end up exactly where Luke and Old Ben Kenobi meet the smuggler. For me, this is bad news.
I want the cinematic universe of Star Wars to grow and show us things that we haven't see yet in the big screen. But seeing what Solo was up to the week before meeting Luke it's not interesting at all. This will lead, yet again, to a great finale where he outrun whatever bounty hunter is looking for him (ahem Boba Fett), just to end up in the infamous Cantina. But, what about the rest of the movie? Well, if Disney does what Disney does best, it will be a slow set up, where they'll throw a bunch of recognizable names of people and planets, see a good amount of memorable characters from previous film and have no arc for the main character whatsoever.
I want to see Solo in action. I want to see him become the infamous smuggler. I want to see him years before A New Hope, meeting new people and gaining his reputation. Pretty much the adventure that gain him his "fame". I don't want to hear about it, I want to see it. Yes, it will be cool to see a young Mark Hamil at the end next to an aged Ewan McGregor, but seriously Disney, put some brains into it.
The same destiny will face the yet-to-be-announced spin off that fans are hoping it to be about Boba Fett or Kenobi. The problem, again, is that if it is Fett, the ending will be right when Vader calls him to offer him the Solo job. And if it's Kenobi it will end when Ben save Luke from the sand people. It'll be a never ending gag of Star Wars movies connecting directly into another movie. Yes, it was great and worked just fine in Rogue One, but it better not happen again for future films.
Then again, I have a bad feeling about this, and something tells me that Disney will go through the safe route and give the fan something to go bananas at the end just so they ignore how average was the rest of the movie.
