JJ’s Wonky World Builds: Number 5
The dead speak! So the text crawl tells us at the beginning of The Rise of Skywalker. I’d expect that declaration in an Ed Wood movie. The Emperor is back! So a character who we didn’t know existed in this Sequel Trilogy becomes the arch-villain. Usually, you’d establish the villain as being villainous at some point prior to declaring they’re the villain. In A New Hope, we know Darth Vader is a villain because he walks onto the Rebel freighter and chokes out the captain. He tortures Leia. He even chokes one of his own officers. Grand Moff Tarkin blows up Alderaan. The Emperor is referenced as dissolving the senate…
Wonky World Building and JJ
All storytellers have different strengths and weaknesses. In telling a story, they’ll play to their strengths, and hopefully that compensates for their weaknesses. But what happens when a storyteller’s weakness is storytelling? I can’t fault director JJ Abrams’s ability to make visually stunning movies (lens flares and all). But his storytelling is terrible, which is born from his appalling world-building. Word-building is paramount to me. Get it right, and you can sell me anything. I’ll believe immortals are living among us who can only die if they lose their head; I’ll believe an eccentric inventor builds a time machine out of a DeLorean; I’ll believe an archaelogist is retained by…