It’s easy to blame Rian Johnson for the Last Jedi and completely derailing any chance the Sequel trilogy had of being any good, but really the main fault lies with Kathleen Kennedy.
As producer it was her job to ensure a level of consistency and quality for Star Wars films going forward. Instead she just arbitrarily picked a different director for every single film because… she liked their work? She agreed with them on their politics and ideology? God only knows. She went in with zero planning. As it turns out, picking two different directors with two different visions and letting Johnson just completely ignore whatever Abrams was setting up happened to be totally disastrous in telling a story. Who knew. It’d be like Tolkien writing out the Fellowship of the Ring, then getting a different author to write the Two Towers and they do something that goes against everything the previous installment stood for, like Frodo putting on the One Ring, gains awesome, God-like powers, and destroys Sauron in a single attack (maybe not the most apt comparison as I don’t really like Abrams and the Force Awakens that much either, and Tolkien wrote out the whole story before splitting it into three parts. But you get the idea).
I kinda feel bad for George. True, he sold off the franchise to begin with, which he never should have done. But there’s a reason why he was so protective of Star Wars for so long, and he trusted Kennedy to handle it with care. How did he work with her for so long and not suspect how grossly incompetent she really was?
.
https://youtu.be/R4dBdiPqMMo
