Star Wars whinge: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson should just shut up
It’s time blockbuster directors stopped blaming fans and accepted the truth about their flawed movies, Duncan Lay writes, adding you don’t win fans back by trying to rewrite history but by doing something better.
Opinion
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Just shut up. Put down your silly megaphone, walk away, sit in your fancy director’s chair and count your money. I don’t usually give out advice — well, to be more accurate I don’t usually give out good advice — but this time I think that is a sensible message for all those “wronged” directors out there.
The ones whose movies, for whatever reason, didn’t strike a chord with viewers. Recently we have had both Rian Johnson (The Last Jedi) and David Ayer (Suicide Squad) turn the whinge control up to 11 in defence of their flawed movies.
Johnson’s The Last Jedi was applauded by the critics but slammed by the fans, with a very shaky 44 per cent fan approval score on Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest of any Star Wars movie.
While plugging his latest movie, he decided to rewrite history a little bit. He probably should have rewritten that whole Finn-Rose subplot first but anyway …
Johnson declared: “I distinctly remember being disappointed by The Empire Strikes Back … but then it slowly became my favourite one.”
The suggestion being that fans will come to realise their mistake, that they didn’t hate The Last Jedi after all and in fact will eventually love it and Johnson’s vision.
Yes, that’s right. It’s the fault of the fans that you took all of the interesting potential plot twists such as Rey’s parentage and Snoke’s background and dumped a pile of Bantha dung on them. TESB was a brilliant film with some of the most memorable lines in movie history. The Last Jedi was a brilliant exercise in marketing.
True, Johnson did get lured into saying it by the interviewer but it’s not like he’s a 12-year-old on his first movie. If he didn’t believe it, he wouldn’t have said it.
Then we had Suicide Squad’s David Ayer getting into a Twitter fight with a critic. That’s never a good idea. Nothing involving the phrase “Twitter fight” has ever ended well.
Suicide Squad is being remade and someone wondered why, when Ayer’s original was something “that literally every sane person on Earth hated with a passion”.
Sure, that was a slight exaggeration but not by much. Still Ayer hit back, calling it “mean spirited” and writing: “It’s incredibly painful to have two years of my love attacked in such a way.”
That sounds really creepy, especially as the only thing to love about it was Margot Robbie.
What was Ayer hoping to achieve? That we would all tell him that we secretly loved his crappy movie after all?
We get it. We know that sometimes studios bugger up a director’s vision because a) most of them are so coked up that they lost touch with reality back in 1987 and b) the money involved in a Star Wars or superhero movie is so huge that they are crapping their pants more than a two-year-old after their first curry.
But you don’t win fans back by trying to rewrite history. You win them back by doing something better. So don’t expect us to come around to your mansion and join you in filling up your infinity pool with our tears at the injustice of it all.