As we touched upon in our review and our piece about the ending of 'The Rise of Skywalker', there's an element to the talk around the movie of simply not being able to please everyone.
In short, any decision JJ Abrams et al made was going to annoy some people, hearten others, and confuse the rest. The choice, then, is to simply make the movie that they want to see and resolve it as best as they can with what they've got. At a recent Q&A along with screenwriter Chris Terrio, Abrams laid out some of the criticisms of 'The Rise of Skywalker' and whether there's a problem with the 'Star Wars' fandom itself.
"No I’d say that they’re right. The people who love it more than anything are also right," Abrams began. As he tells it, trying to please everyone was never going to work and, more to the point, "how do you even go about that?" As he tells it, any choice they made was going to divide audiences.
"We live in a moment where everything immediately seems to default to outrage. There’s a kind of M.O. of either it’s exactly how I see it, or you’re my enemy," the director argued. When asked about Rian Johnson's 'The Last Jedi' and whether or not choices in 'The Rise of Skywalker' were a direct result of walking back some of his changes, Abrams made it clear that wasn't the case.
As you'll see in the video below, he also talks about how Luke Skywalker was handled from 'The Last Jedi' to 'The Rise of Skywalker', and how there was a clear arc in the last movie to where he is now. It's interesting stuff, and if nothing else, certainly lays out the thinking behind some of the choices made in the movie.
