J.J. Abrams Explains Why STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER Doesn't Answer All of Our Questions
Even though I had a fun time watching Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and thought it was a decent film, there is still a lot of stuff in it for fans to pick at. There are so many unanswered questions in regard to how certain aspects of the story played out.
Abrams never bothered to answer certain questions like how Emperor Palpatine survived the events of Return of the Jedi, how he managed to build a fleet of hundreds of Star Destroyers underground, where did all the people come from that filled those Star Destroyers? There are a lot more questions as well. Well, in a recent interview, J.J. Abrams explains why he chose not to answer some of these questions:
"We knew going in that we had to make this feel conclusive. It had to come to an end, and yet, there are certain things that I feel… here’s the way I feel about Star Wars. It’s the reason that I loved the original trilogy so much — and the reason I loved the original trilogy more than the prequel trilogy, for me — which was that the original trilogy posed great questions, and allowed you to infer the answer. It allowed you to do the math on your own."
Yeah, he makes a point, but then those questions were eventually answered for us. It was George Lucas’s long term plan. J.J. Abrams doesn’t have a long term plan to go back and revisit these things to answer our questions. I don’t know if Lucasfilm does either. If it does happen, it’ll probably come in the form of a comic book.
Abrams went on to say that while he loves the prequel trilogy, he didn't feel the need for it to answer as many questions as it did. Abrams is apparently the kind of guy that doesn’t like answers. He says:
"Now, I’m not someone who needs to know about midi-chlorians. That doesn’t feel like it’s a thing for me. That’s not to say, however, in this movie we didn’t adhere to the eight films that preceded us and tell an ending that embraces all of it. I didn’t go against that stuff because I didn’t like it as much. But my point is that there’s something about answers, you need answers, but I don’t think demystifying everything is necessarily the key to a successful story."
So he tells a story that doesn’t make sense in some aspects. Is that good storytelling? Do you think what he did was the right approach to ending the Skywalker saga in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker? Do you like lingering questions? Or do you think it’s just filmmaker laziness?
Source: Popcorn With Peter Travers