SPOILERS AHOY!

Insofar as it is possible for a movie to be objectively bad (in terms of internal logic, continuity, and so forth), this movie is objectively bad.

Insofar as it is possible for a movie to be subjectively awful, for me this movie is awful. Almost unremittingly terrible. Total garbage.

As I wrote in my reaction to The Last Jedi, the sequel trilogy — as a result of the foundation thoughtlessly laid by J.J. Abrams in The Force Awakens — is fundamentally built on a nihilistic foundation that diminishes the original films instead of building on them: “If you accept the sequel trilogy as canon while watching the original trilogy, it makes the original trilogy films weaker and less powerful. And that’s really not okay, in my opinion.”

Impressively, with The Rise of Skywalker, Abrams has done it again. Not only does the film make the original trilogy exponentially worse if you accept it as canon, it manages to ALSO make The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi retroactively worse films if you accept it as canon.

We could talk almost endlessly about the myriad ways in which this is true — the incompetent damage done to the mythic arcs of Anakin and Luke by bringing Palpatine back; the retroactively neutered character arcs; the thematic incoherence; and on and on and on — but it’s largely pointless because the film is so godawfully bad that it just doesn’t matter.

Trying to analyze all the ways in which this movie is terrible is actually a fractal exercise in madness. You can talk for hours and not exhaust all the ways in which the film is bad, because the closer you look at the film the more flaws you discover. So rather than trying to do that, I will instead look at two significant ways in which the film is terrible and hope they will serve as exemplars of all the other ways in which the film is terrible.

PALPATINE’S FLEET

One of the film’s major problems is that it’s filled with nonsense. Palpatine’s fleet is a good example of this because every time the film mentions them, it seems really committed to making them even more ridiculous.

First, the ships were apparently buried and erupt out of the earth. This makes no sense. They aren’t designed to land. It doesn’t make sense that you bury them.

Second, they show a comically large number of them on screen. It seems as if the image is meant to be threatening, but it misses the mark and ends up in the comedic absurdity of a five-year-old who has just learned how to copy and paste in Photoshop.

Third, we discover that “his followers have been building [the fleet] for years.”  But… how? Where did the supplies come from?

Fourth, we’re told that in 16 hours “attacks on all free worlds begin.” This is an almost comically short amount of time for them to even pretend to deal with the problem, but don’t worry: The film will shortly make it clear that this is impossible.

Fifth, we’re told that the fleet will increase the First Order’s resources “10,000 fold.” Assume that the First Order has as few as 100 ships currently. We’re being told that Palpatine has one million Star Destroyers. The visual was comedically inept before; the dialogue makes it even more absurd.

And where are the crews for these ships going to come from? This scene also features First Order leaders declaring, “We’ll need to increase recruitments. Harvest more of the galaxy’s young.” Okay, great. Let’s say a star destroyer only needs a crew of a hundred people. So you immediately kidnap a hundred million kids and instantaneously have the infrastructure to indoctrinate and train them. Great. Your fleet will be ready to go in, I dunno, let’s say 10 years?

This is, of course, the fleet that’s supposed to be launching attacks in less than a day.

Sixth, it’s revealed that every single star destroyer has a Death Star laser strapped to its belly.

… no comment.

Seventh, we’re told that the ships can only leave Exegol one at a time by following the signal from a navigation beacon. This is, prima facie, stupid. The film will also contradict this claim multiple times. But whatever, let’s accept the conceit that you can trap the fleet on Exegol by destroying the navigation beacon.

But if this is such essential infrastructure, why would you only build one tower? And why is it completely undefended and unshielded? And given that it’s completely undefended and unshielded, why do the good guys need to land a ground assault team?

Seventh, ha ha ha. Just kidding. The star destroyers can totally have navigation beacons built into them that will allow them to leave Exegol without a ground-based navigation beacon. They just turn that ground-based beacon off and use the ship-based one instead!

But only one ship has it! Because why would you include “able to leave drydock” technology into more than one ship?

Okay. Fine. It’s a very super-special navigational tower and it’s super-expensive and they can’t include it on every ship. Or even more than one ship. Sure. I mean, we’ll ignore the fact that the Rebels didn’t require one of these super-special navigational towers and Rey broadcast the navigation signal across hyperspace from an X-wing, but, sure, those are the “rules” and that’s just—

Eighth, GOTCHA! They blow up the super-special navigation tower, but the star destroyer can still send out the navigation signal! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Any star destroyer could do it, in fact!

Ninth, so they blow up the whole star destroyer! And that’s it! No way out now! Hee hee tee hee.

What’s that, you say? The ground-based navigation tower was never destroyed and could just be flipped back on? And then none of it matters anyway because they just blow all the star destroyers up?

Ho ho hee ha ha ha ho ha.

To be clear: The whole movie is like this.

Take virtually any element of the film and you will find nothing but nonsense. (Think about the Sith dagger for a moment if you’d like to see what I mean. Really think about it: Where did it come from? Why does it exist? What function was it supposed to serve? And how lucky was Rey when she walked up to that one specific, unmarked spot on the coast?) And many of these separate areas of fractal nonsense end up overlapping with each other, which serves to exponentially increase the stupidity.

ROSE

Beyond the nonsense, the other pervasive element in The Rise of Skywalker is the unrelenting retconning of The Last Jedi. It is not merely that the instances of this are so numerous as to be beyond easy cataloguing, it’s that they’re all so… pointless. For example, rolling back Poe’s entire character arc so that he’s once again not ready to assume the mantle of leadership doesn’t lead the character anywhere interesting, it just puts him in a stunted cul-de-sac. Kylo Ren reforging his helmet similarly doesn’t go anywhere; he wears it a couple of times, takes it off largely inconsequentially in the middle of a random scene, and then we just never see it again.

But perhaps the best example of this is how Chris Terrio & J.J. Abrams did Rose dirty.

Rose, of course, was the new major character in The Last Jedi who became an important mentor and friend to Finn before eventually falling in love with him.

And in The Rise of Skywalker, she is basically nonexistent: She pops up here and there to deliver lines as Generic Rebel Person, and is never given a single meaningful contribution or interaction with the other cast members.

Okay. That’s unfortunate. But maybe it’s just unavoidable? There’s already a lot of stuff going on in this movie and it’s possible there just literally wasn’t time to include more material for Rose.

Except, no. Because the movie goes out of its way to create a different female sidekick for Finn who can hang out with him for the final mission. It’s painfully clear that it would have taken literally zero effort for Rose Tico to fill that role. The only reason not to do this is because you’re deliberately attempting to erase The Last Jedi.

But just ignoring Rose isn’t enough. They even include a little scene where Finn says, “I’m going to sacrifice myself,” just so Rose can say, “Okay,” and contradict herself from the last film. (And then somebody else gets to rescue him anyway.)

Is it just sheer pettiness? An abject cowardice that waves the white flag to the most disgusting, misogynist, racist trolls in Star Wars fandom? It ultimately doesn’t matter. It’s a travesty.

To be clear here: It doesn’t matter whether you liked The Last Jedi or if you hated it. Expending all of this narrative energy in order to retcon the previous installments in a series for no other reason than to “fix” some abstract point of continuity that you consider to be “broken” is not how you make a good film. It’s not that continuity isn’t important; it’s that when you focus on continuity-for-the-sake-of-continuity, you are failing to do literally everything that goes into telling a great story.

There are whole scenes in this movie that exist for no other purpose than to say, “Remember this thing that happened in The Last Jedi? WELL, IT NEVER HAPPENED.” These suck the oxygen out of the room. They do not further plot or character or theme. They take up space and time that could be better focused on virtually anything else, disrupting effective pacing and structure.

CONCLUSION

There’s other stuff we could talk about here. Like how the film not once, but twice pretends to kill off a legacy character only to bring them back and then have them do literally nothing else of consequence for the rest of the movie. Or how the movie lacks any subtext, even going so far as to introduce a new droid whose entire job is to announce what emotion you’re supposed to be feeling at any given moment. Or that the movie is trying to cram about three or four times more content into it than the filmmakers are capable of integrating. Or some of the truly baffling editing choices that cut away from the action for no discernible purpose. But it’s all just variations on a theme.

And that theme is:

This movie is total garbage.

There are a handful of moments that are legitimately beautiful or clever or poignant. But I mean that literally: I can count them on one hand. And they are fleeting and largely inconsequential to the whole.

I am certain that I will not dissuade anyone who was planning to see this film from doing so. But I honestly wish that I had not seen it myself.

For our second scenario structure challenge we’ll be returning to the Star Wars universe, but to a decidedly more obscure example: Star Wars: Underworld – The Yavin Vassilika was a 5-issue mini-series produced by Dark Horse Comics in 2000-01.

Star Wars: Underworld is not a great comic book, being primarily hamstrung by an artist with a delightfully detailed and stylized vision of the Star Wars universe, but whose panel layouts too often topple over the ledge of “creative” and go hurtling into the vast void of “incoherent”. But what the series does have is a really interesting premise that sets up an action-packed narrative.

The basic hook is that three Hutts learn that a long-lost and extremely valuable artifact known as the Yavin Vassilika is rumored to have been found (or, more accurately, located).

The Hutts decide to make a “friendly” wager to see which of them can obtain the Yavin Vassilika first, with each hiring a team of operatives to track it down. A number of familiar faces from the Star Wars movies and Extended Universe are split up across the teams (Han Solo, Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian, Greedo, Bossk, IG-88, etc.), and each team needs to track down Webble, the raving madman who claims to have seen the Yavin Vassilika; backtrack his recent movements to figure out exactly where the Yavin Vassilika is; and then secure the Yavin Vassilika.

Most of the action, of course, is driven from the teams interacting with each other: Spying on other teams, sabotaging their efforts, baiting them into following false leads, openly trying to kill them, and so forth.

The story also utilizes an interesting cluster of sub-agendas. Some of these take the form of specific vendettas between the characters, but also in the more generic form of registered bounties that have been taken out on various characters. It’s under these auspices that Boba Fett enters the fray as an independent party seemingly uninterested in the Yavin Vassilika itself, but intensely interested in the people seeking it. The participants in the “race” are also able to take out (and buy-off) bounties on each other as the opportunities present themselves, creating an ever-shifting tangle of incentives.

The final wrinkle in all this is that, in addition to the Hutts, there’s another major player interested in the Yavin Vassilika: A mysterious figure known only as the “Collector”, but who also has an agent in the field. This agent primarily operates by trying to suborn the agents of the Hutts so that they’ll deliver the artifact to them instead of to their employer.

RACE TO THE PRIZE

The basic structure of Star Wars: Underworld is fairly easy to emulate:

1. Create X number of competing teams/agents. Star Wars: Underworld has, in addition to the PCs, two additional teams directly pursuing the McGuffin and two independent agents pursuing their own agendas (one trying to convince the teams to sell her the McGuffin; the other hired to secretly protect one of the hunters).

This is really the meat of the scenario. Create interesting foes and big personalities for the PCs to compete with and you should have a winner. You can also follow the lead of Star Wars: Underworld here and have the agents in the field working for a variety of employers who have competing agendas for the ultimate use of the prize.

2. Finding the McGuffin is a linear Three Clue Rule scenario, which is super easy to design.

You’ll probably want to make this chain at least four or five links long, giving the PCs plenty of time to jostle for position, conspire with, and be ambushed by the other factions. Making some or all of these links somewhat involved mini-scenarios will make it easier to intensify the stakes by bringing multiple teams into play. (You could also use a node-based structure instead of a linear one to add complexity to the investigation.)

Where this can get a little more interesting is that if you’re not the first group to find a particular clue, you can also just track the team(s) ahead of you and follow them to the next clue. In addition to the PCs investigating other teams, this also provides a motivation for other teams to be investigating them (thus prompting interaction between the teams).

In its most basic form, this is really all you need to run this type of scenario. Run the investigation scenario straight, but then throw in an appearance from a competing team whenever it seems appropriate to make things interesting. Don’t forget that the other factions are also in competition with each other and will have interactions that don’t directly affect the PCs, but may spill out onto them.

ADVANCED OPTIONS

But let’s look at a few advanced options we might use to enhance the experience.

BOUNTIES: As mentioned above, the original Star Wars: Underworld narrative includes a substrate of competition based around various members of the competing teams having bounties on their heads. This provides secondary motivations that can complicate the simple rivalry between the teams and also allows for factions motivated by something completely different from the other factions.

(You might think about other secondary objectives that can bring additional factions into play. Not just because that’s useful for creating additional factions, but because having factions pointed at different things – instead of all being pointed at the same thing – can make it easier for those factions to collide with each other.)

To set up a similar bounty system:

• Set initial bounties on some (but not all) of the participants in the race. (I’d suggest generally including at least one PC on this list.)
• Ideally, have a mechanism which allows PCs and other characters to quickly keep up to date on which characters have active bounties on their heads.
• Figure out how characters (particularly PCs) can place a bounty on another character’s head.
• It can also be useful for there to be a mechanism by which a PC (or other character) can remove the bounty placed on their head. In the Star Wars universe, bonded bounties can literally just be bought out. Another option might be that the death of the person who put the bounty on your head will result in the bounty being removed.

You’ll probably want to make sure that the PCs become aware of the bounty system fairly early in the scenario (or even before the scenario begins).

TIMELINE: Purely improvising the activities of a half dozen other factions in simultaneous operation with the PCs can be a tad difficult and may have unsatisfying results. One way you can prep the progress of the race is by laying out a simple timeline of how quickly the other factions reach various milestones in the scenario.

Like any timeline, of course, you’ll want to:

• Make sure you don’t spend a lot of effort prepping past the point at which the PCs will almost certainly have meaningfully altered the outcome of events. (I’d guess probably no further than the first two or possibly three milestones.)
• Alter and update the timeline as necessary in order to reflect the actions taken by the PCs (and the impact they have on other participants).

For factions that are pursuing goals tangential to the McGuffin search, their timelines might instead feature sequences of escalating interactions with the PCs (and also the other teams).

The benefit of objectively tracking the progress of the other factions is that it creates a hard deadline for the PCs; the resulting pressure will ratchet up the intensity of the scenario for the players. The advantage of prepping a timeline to accomplish this is that it’s relatively simple and straightforward, and also allows you to put some thought into the types of clues their off-screen activities might generate. The disadvantage is that it’s comparatively likely to result in a lot of wasted prep.

PROGRESSIONS: Alternatively, for some factions you may find that prepping a progression has more utility. Progressions are similar to timelines, but rather than pegging events to a specific time, each progression represents a sequence of actions that a particular faction might attempt.

For example, in Star Wars: Underworld the character of Jozzel could be given this progression:

• Offer Faction #1 300,000 to deliver the Vassilika to her in exchange for a fake that can be given to their Hutt patron.
• Attempt to seduce a PC in order to keep tabs on their progress.
• Plant a homing beacon on the ship belonging to Faction #2.
• If she gets the McGuffin, steal the PCs’ ship (or a ship belonging to another faction) and lead them to her secretive patron for the final exchange.

Progressions aren’t locked in stone, of course. In the case of Jozzel, during the “actual play” of our hypothetical gaming session, she ends up getting basically kidnapped by the PCs and dragged along by them for a good long while. Maybe the next time you run the scenario, she ends up getting killed by one of the factions and they leave her body in a location where it will frame the PCs for her murder.

In other words, just like timelines, progressions can easily get disrupted by PCs. But they can also be a little more flexible in practice, since their additional elements can often be brought back into play (often from an unexpected angle) even after the disruption (whereas the events on a timeline tend to be dependent on the previous events of the timeline).

On a similar note, you can also use weak progressions. These are really just a menu of “things this faction will do” without necessarily putting them in a specific sequence. Weak progressions are more difficult to use in practice because it means that you have more “balls in the air” so to speak, but they give a bigger menu for options of “what happens next” during actual play.

CHASE MECHANICS: Another alternative would be to create some form of mechanical structure for resolving the progress of each team towards the goal. Exactly what this would look like would depend on the system you were using to run the scenario, obviously, but the advantage would lie in giving the players a more direct feeling of control over the outcome of the race by giving them something more tangible to interact with and manipulate. The GM, for their part, would similarly be able to actively play each faction’s interactions with the chase mechanics.

RUNNING THE RACE

Upon reflection, running the McGuffin Race is not that dissimilar from using an adversary roster when running a dungeon; the difference is that rather than managing the activities of the adversaries geographically, you’re managing them temporally (and probably, for most GMs, with a healthy dose of dramatic timing).

If you go with the relatively straightforward options, you’ll have:

• The investigation for finding the McGuffin.
• A set of progressions for each faction, detailing their activities.
• Possibly a timeline for when other factions “hit” each milestone on the investigation.

Note that each of these can really be thought of as a separate linear sequence running in parallel with each other. (Even the investigation is just the linear framework which will form the backbone of the actions which the PCs choose to take.) So when you’re running the race, you just need to look at the top item of each of those lists and decide what happens next.

It seems big and complicated and chaotic, but structurally it’s actually easy peasy.

If you’re still struggling with how to make it all work in practice, try imposing a slightly more formal procedure on yourself:

• Each time the PCs finish a scene, take a moment to provisionally frame the next scene. (As described in The Art of Pacing, that means identifying the PCs’ intention, choosing obstacles, and skipping to the next meaningful choice.)
• Before committing to that scene, however, look at your progressions and pick 1-2 things that the other factions do before that scene takes place. (You can even roll 1d3-1 and randomly determine which factions take their next progression actions if you really want to provoke yourself in unexpected directions.)

Some of these actions won’t actually affect the PCs or what the PCs are doing right now. That’s fine. Make a note (mental or otherwise) that they’ve happened and move on to the next scene. The PCs will likely discover the consequences of what’s happened in a later scene.

Other actions will affect the PCs. Those are essentially obstacles standing between them and the scene they wanted to have (or the obstacle you had already anticipated for them): Frame up the new scene and run it. When that scene is finished, let the PCs proceed to their next scene (which may or may not be where they were headed before they got interrupted by the other factions). When that scene is done, repeat the process of seeing what the other factions are doing.

Also: Your progressions aren’t written in stone. As things develop in play, feel free to add (or insert) additional actions into the progressions of the other factions. You might also discover that certain situations will prompt factions to take actions that you didn’t prep onto their progressions. That’s obviously totally fine. Do what feels right and play each faction actively throughout.

BEYOND THE UNDERWORLD

For an additional exercise, consider analyzing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as another example of this scenario type. The basic elements are a little more occluded here (particularly because so many of the factions are pretending to be allies when they’re really antagonists), but it can be a valuable example because the action is more strictly based around Indiana’s POV (which more closely emulates what the typical experience of PCs will be at the table).

Consider, also, Guardians of the Galaxy, which uses a micro-version of the structure to bring the PC party together.

It only lasts for a single scene, really, but you’ve got similar dynamics (including literal bounties as an alternative motivation for factions being involved). A scene like this obviously doesn’t need the full work-up described above, but within its tight confines it can be a useful object lesson in what makes these situations tick: Think about how much less interesting the scene would be if Rocket and Groot were also solely interested in the sphere, thus unifying everyone’s goals instead of having them work at cross-purposes.

Rare and magical artifacts are, obviously, not the only sort of McGuffin that can be targeted in the race which forms the backbone for this sort of scenario. Anything which must be searched for or obtained through a sequence of challenges can have a similar function.

A structure which at first glance seems the same, however, would be multiple teams competing at a single challenge simultaneously. An elaborated example of this would be multiple teams exploring the same dungeon at the same time. Although superficially similar, note how the lack of a series of shared chokepoints makes it much more difficult to bring the various factions into interesting interactions with each other. Despite their similarities, I think you’ll actually need a different structure to make this sort of scenario work smoothly and successfully at the table. (And that might be something we look at in the future.)

Go to Challenge #3

Our first scenario structure challenge is the Death Star sequence from the original Star Wars. More generally, this is an exemplar of a “space station infiltration” mission, but we’ll be using the Death Star as a useful parallel (while acknowledging the limitations of this).

What makes the Death Star scenario tick?

(I’m just going to assume here that everyone is familiar with Star Wars. If you’re not familiar with it, do yourself a favor and immediately track down a copy of the original, unaltered version and watch it ASAP.)

1. The PCs have to gain access to the Death Star. (In the case of the movie, they got captured by its tractor beam and hid in the smugglers’ compartments.)
2. There was a primary obstacle they had to overcome in order to get out. (The tractor beam needed to be disabled.)
3. There was an objective they wanted to accomplish. (Rescue the princess.)
4. There was a grab bag of situational obstacles that needed to be overcome, bypassed, or otherwise resolved in order for the PCs to overcome the obstacle and/or achieve the objective.

When it comes to the situational obstacles, note that there’s only a handful of them: Stormtroopers, Imperial officers, the security protecting the Death Star’s computer network, magnetically sealed doors, and Darth Vader. Rather than introducing entirely new elements, the lesser obstacles get mixed and remixed constantly: Stormtroopers scanning the ship. Stormtroopers guarding the ship. Stormtroopers attacking them in the brig. Stormtroopers chasing them through the corridors. Stormtroopers guarding the ship again.

RAID SCENARIOS

Let’s digress for a moment and talk about raid-type scenarios in general.

John Tynes’ Three Days to Kill module is my personal touchstone for this. It certainly wasn’t the first raid-type module ever published, but it was the one which, for me, made the concept really gel definitively (primarily because Tynes boils it down to an essential core and clearly spells out exactly why he designed the scenario the way that he did; in other words, he breaks down the scenario structure for the GM).

Basically, there are three parts to a basic raid scenario (which Tynes describes as a “Tom Clancy-style special ops mission”):

First, it largely functions using the same room-and-key design of a location-crawl.

Second, the target location is designed in such a way that the PCs can grok the entire floorplan and some (or all) of its defensive measures. (You’ll note that this is distinct from a typical dungeoncrawl, where it is virtually impossible and usually antithetical to the desired gameplay for the PCs to be able to predetermine the entire floorplan.)

Third, the target location should generally feature lots of potential entry points (allowing the PCs to select their approach and make meaningful tactical decisions about how to carry out the raid).

Fourth, the defensive forces should be designed to respond as an active opposition force.

Over the years I’ve refined this structure to include adversary rosters in order to make it easier to key patrol patterns and also to make the defensive forces more dynamic in actual play.

The intended form of play is that the PCs will (1) learn about the target location, (2) have time to plan their raid, and then (3) execute their raid against active opposition.

THE DEATH STAR RAID

Once you understand the basic raid structure, the potential trap for a Death Star-style raid is trying to map out the entire space station. That’s valuable for smaller raid scenarios (particularly if you prep it in a way that the blueprint can literally be presented to the PCs so that they can use it during planning), but a space station is just too big for that to be convenient. (Even a space station much, much, much smaller than the Death Star.)

So in planning out a raid on the Death Star, you’ll need to figure out how to design the raid on a slightly more abstract level. Let’s look back at our list of four elements which makes the Death Star sequence tick:

1. Generally speaking, do NOT determine how the PCs will gain access to the station. Instead, take a step back, think about all the ways people can enter the station, and then figure out how those entrances have been secured. Sketch those out briefly. As with any other raid scenario, it’s now up to the players to (a) learn about them and (b) figure out how to bypass them.

2 & 3. Figure out 1-3 objectives that the PCs want on the space station and/or primary obstacles they need to overcome to escape the station once they’re onboard it. (The players may have already determined at least some of this for you when they made the decision to raid the space station in the first place: Why are they there?)

4. Prep your grab bag of 4-6 situational obstacles that can complicate the PCs’ efforts to reach and achieve the objectives/primary obstacle. Include 1-2 big, notable bad guys (Darth Vader, Tarkin). Include some interchangeable mooks (stormtroopers, officers). Include some passive security features (computer network, magnetically sealed doors).

Finally, briefly sketch the general layout of the station. As noted, this shouldn’t be a hyper-detailed map: You want to know the major features of the space station (docks, brig, bridge, engineering cores, Stormtrooper barracks, etc.) and you probably want to have a general sense of where they are in relation to each other (brig is on the upper levels, docks on the lower levels, etc.).

A flowchart structure can work well for this, giving enough structure for the PCs to make meaningful choices without getting bogged down in an unnecessary superfluity of detail.

SITUATIONAL OBSTACLES

As you’re developing this flowchart, try to include at least 1-2 locations between the entrances and the various objectives/primary obstacles. These are the locations where the PCs can encounter some of the situational obstacles. For example, in order to get from the docks (where the PCs enter the Death Star) to the brig (where the princess is being held) you need to pass through the central elevator shafts (giving Imperial officers or other personnel a chance to spot you).

You can sketch out what situational obstacles are found in each location, if you like:

DOCKS

• 2 stormtroopers in the docking bay itself
• 2 imperial officers overseeing the docking bay from the control room
• Magnetically sealed door on the control room

THE DEATH STAR RAID IN PLAY

And that’s basically it. At this point, you’ve got enough material that your players should be able to engage with it and you can respond dynamically whenever they do.

Don’t feel trapped by your prep. Remember, that what you’ve been designing are tools: If they’re in the brig and they blow their Bluff check, send in some stormtrooper squads. If they feel trapped, don’t think they can fight their way out, and they say, “There must be another way out of here! Can we get out through the vents?” think for a moment and then say, “Sure. That works. You can blast a hole in the wall over there and drop down onto the garbage disposal level.” You didn’t prep a garbage disposal level, but it makes sense that a space station would have one, right?

The garbage disposal room they drop into feels like a significant location, though, so let’s add a situational obstacle. Stormtrooper guards? Hmm… No. They just got away from stormtroopers up above, and who would bother guarding garbage? Let’s throw a magnetically sealed door here and… compacting walls? Yeah, that sounds good.

BEYOND THE DEATH STAR

Obviously this basic structure can be used for more than just space stations: Any raid targeting a sufficiently large facility can be set up this way.

As an exercise, you can break down the raid on CIA headquarters in Mission: Impossible and design it as a scenario. The objective is obvious (the NOC list kept in the vault). What are the potential entrances to the facility? What is the primary obstacle(s) that prevent them from leaving once they’re in? What are the situational obstacles that the GM can use to complicate their mission (if they choose to accept it)?

Go to Challenge #2

The Last Jedi has proven to be a controversial and divisive movie. What is perhaps most surprising is the degree to which both sides of the conversation seem to be simply incapable of believing that the other side exists and are obsessed with disenfranchising their opinion: Those who liked the movie are convinced everyone who says they didn’t are either mindless fanboys, Russian bots, or racist misogynists. Those who disliked the movie are convinced everyone who says they did are either mindless fanboys or paid Disney operatives.

I’ve found myself somewhat in the middle as far as these discussions are concerned. (Which, of course, means that I’ve spent all my time being broiled alive by both sides.) So let’s talk about The Last Jedi.

SPOILERS AHOY!

There are eight significant clusters of criticism for the film:

1. As The Last Jedi begins really building on top of the decision in The Force Awakens to completely reboot the Empire vs. Rebellion conflict, it’s become clear to many people that they really hate this decision. (This includes people who didn’t like The Force Awakens for the same reason.)
2. This nihilistic reboot methodology also extends destructively to the OT characters, each of whom are revealed to have been the most complete, utter, and abject failures imaginable in every single facet of their lives – personal, professional, political – and are then set up to be systematically killed off one movie at a time. (A scheme only somewhat derailed by Carrie Fisher’s death in real life.) This is, to put it mildly, leaving a really bad taste in people’s mouths.
3. The primary plot (of the cruiser chase) is riddled with plot holes and doesn’t make any sense. The film suffers because its backbone is broken.
4. There is an assortment of special edition/prequel-style humor which is not landing for many people (titty-milking, confetti Praetorian guard, “General Hugs”, etc.).
5. Material that fans feel is inconsistent with and untrue to the canon which has preceded this film. One prominent sub-cluster here is Rey’s ability to perform astonishingly powerful Force tricks while receiving no training whatsoever.
6. Several plot threads end with the heroes failing to achieve their goals. (Many critics describe these plot threads as being “pointless”, but this is one point where I’ll editorialize by pointing out that “failure” and “pointless” are not synonymous in cinema. More on that in a little bit.)
7. “But my pet theory! But my speculation! But my shipping!” The Last Jedi is not consistent with (and some feel even deliberately contemptuous of) many of the popular fan theories that followed in the wake of The Force Awakens.
8. WTF is up with all these women and minorities fucking up my movie? (Actually, I’ll editorialize here again: Fuck these people.)

From this list, in addition to #8 (seriously, fuck those people), I’m also going to summarily dismiss #7. First, from a purely factual point of view, Rian Johnson finished writing his script and began pre-production for The Last Jedi before The Force Awakens was ever released. The personal “slight” that some people are perceiving because their personal pet theories didn’t pan out has no basis in reality: Johnson was faced with the same conundrum you were and came to different conclusions.

Second, this general trend in fandom is not a healthy one in any case. For example, shipping as a fun little thing to do as fans / while writing fan fiction is cool. The toxic version where fans rage against the dying of the light when their ships don’t pan out is a cancer on modern media.

IT’S REVOLUTIONARY!

Let’s also dispatch with something else straight out of the gate. I am really sick of being told that a film in which:

• The rebel’s base has been discovered and they need to evacuate
• A young Jedi goes to seek an old master who has retreated to a remote planet because a former student turned to the Dark Side (and then discovers that the old master lied to them about their former student!)
• The heroes seek help from a charming rogue only to have him betray them
• There’s a confrontation between the Disciple of Light and the Disciple of Dark in front of the Emperor’s… err… Supreme Leader’s throne

is some sort of revolutionary Star Wars story the likes of which has never been told before.

It isn’t.

Get over it.

DESTRUCTIVE NIHILISM

By far the largest problem that I, personally, have with this film are the first two points above: The sequel trilogy is fundamentally built on a brutally nihilistic foundation. And that’s not even Rian Johnson’s fault: He took what The Force Awakens gave him and he followed it through to the logical conclusion. He’s ruthlessly effective at it, in fact, and, honestly, it shouldn’t be any other way. Ultimately the sequel trilogy is what the sequel trilogy is going to be; fighting against that now would only result in an increasingly incoherent narrative.

That doesn’t make me any happier about it, though. I think it’s an abominable handling of the Star Wars legacy. Instead of building on what came before, the sequel trilogy diminishes it.

By contrast, the prequel trilogy, for all of its flaws and foibles, never diminished the original trilogy. If anything, the prequel trilogy greatly enhanced the original trilogy. (Primarily due to narrative leitmotifs like the character arcs of Anakin and Luke, although that’s perhaps a topic for another day.) The same cannot be said for the sequel trilogy: The revelation that everything achieved in the original trilogy has been turned to ash and the heroes of the original trilogy are complete and utter failures is incredibly damaging to the ending of Return of the Jedi and, in fact, the entire narrative arc of the first six films. Six films all led up to a moment where Luke Skywalker transcended the teachings of the Jedi and the teachings of the Sith and brought balance to the Force. The sequel trilogy fundamentally unravels that in order to “reboot” the original trilogy characters back to an earlier state of their existence.

If you accept the sequel trilogy as canon while watching the original trilogy, it makes the original trilogy films weaker and less powerful. And that’s really not okay, in my opinion.

Allow me a moment now to rebut a few common counter-arguments at this point.

“Everybody dies! This was inevitable!”

Yeah, sure. But not everybody dies after seeing their entire life end in abject failure.

“You just wanted the original trilogy heroes to be perfect paragons without flaw!”

Not at all. This is a false dilemma. Luke, Leia, and Han can be flawed characters who make mistakes without being complete and utter failures. And it would be far more interesting to see Luke, Han, and Leia all continue to grow as characters from the point where we left them at the end of Return of the Jedi than it is to see them all get nihilistically rebooted to either earlier stages of their lives or into a cheap Ben Kenobi rip-off.

“You can’t have peace! The movie is called Star Wars!”

This is another false dilemma. If you don’t reboot the Empire vs. Rebellion conflict, the alternative isn’t automatically a peaceful galaxy filled with happy unicorns frolicking through fields of flowers. The alternative is an infinite variety of OTHER options which aren’t destructively nihilistic to the Star Wars legacy: Palpatine Loyalists rebelling against the New Republic. A cold war in a galaxy divided between the Imperial remnant and the New Republic. Droid War. Extra-galactic invasion. Cryogenically frozen Sith army from 10,000 years ago waking up.

The sequel trilogy simply lacks ambition.

Now, as I’ve mentioned, these problems were already present in The Force Awakens. That movie laid down the destructive foundation of the sequel trilogy. But The Last Jedi really starts building on that foundation, owns what that foundation means, and begins telling a story that drives home the consequences of that foundation. I think that’s the primary reason why it’s bearing the brunt of people’s ire for this nihilism.

Similarly, I thought I’d come to terms with the sequel trilogy “reboot” after The Force Awakens. But leaving the theater after seeing The Last Jedi I had to grapple with the fact that I had not, in fact, done so. The conclusion I eventually reached was that for me, personally:

The sequel trilogy is fan fiction.

Albeit fan fiction with a fantastic budget.

Consider what Mark Hamill said in a recent interview:

I almost had to think of Luke Skywalker as another character. Maybe he’s Jake Skywalker. He’s not my Luke Skywalker. (…) We had a fundamental difference. But I had to do what Rian wanted me to do because it serves the story. Listen, I still haven’t accepted it completely.

Like Hamill, I couldn’t accept this movie as being a “real” part of the Star Wars saga. And so… I’ve chosen not to. And, at least for me, once I made that choice, when I went back to see The Last Jedi again, I was able to really enjoy the film for what it is by itself. Because once you get past the destructive nihilism on which it is built (or simply bypass that entirely by severing it from all that has come before), what you have is a really great movie.

Jake Skywalker, for example, may not be Luke Skywalker. But Jake’s story is really amazing and filled with some incredibly powerful moments once you accept that he isn’t Luke Skywalker and his story is not going to be coherent with Luke Skywalker’s. (For example, “And the last thing I saw were the eyes of a frightened boy whose master had failed him.” is an incredibly powerful idea, perfectly scripted with phenomenal line delivery, and complemented by perfect and beautiful visual framing… It’s just brilliant. It also has no business having Luke Skywalker in it.)

THE PROBLEMS I HAVE

The destructive nihilism, however, is not the only problem the movie has. We’re particularly going to look at points #3, #4, and #5 above, because that’s the cluster that sums up where I think the movie falls short.

The first 7 minutes of The Last Jedi include:

• The “General Hugs” comedy bit.
• Poe taking out all of the surface cannons of a dreadnought solo, while flying an X-Wing which moves unlike any other Star Wars spaceship ever filmed. (It looks as if he’s driving a drag racer from Fast and the Furious.)
• The poorly delivered “Wipe that nervous expression off your face” line.
• The utterly bizarre “fix a computer by smashing it with your head” comedy bit.
• The bit where all the bombers were flying in such a close formation that when one was taken out they were all taken out.
• Also, fine, bombers “drop” bombs in zero-g because the spaceships fly like World War II fighter planes. But the bomb bay doors are open to the vacuum of space, and something like 5 minutes later Leia is going to be sucked out into space because of the vacuum. Set a rule and follow it. I stand corrected (see the comments). This still bugged me in the moment, but I was wrong to be bugged by it.

Watching the tonally-deaf special edition-style humor for the first time in the theater, the thought honestly crossed my mind, “I might have to walk out of this movie.”

Fortunately things improved from there, but there are still a number of problems with the film, most notably the central chase sequence around which the entire film is built.

• We’re slightly faster, but for some reason that doesn’t translate into “getting ever farther away”; it translates to “we can maintain this very specific distance”
• The First Order has multiple ships, but they can’t just have some of them do an FTL jump to pen the rebels in.

And so forth. Basically, I think if you’re going to make a dilemma like this the central pillar on which your entire film is built, you need to make the effort to make sure it actually makes sense. When you fail to do that, everything you build on top of it becomes rickety.

Having firmly concluded that the ship chase sequence was built on nonsense, however, I was surprised when watching the film a second time that in the absence of my brain gnawing away at the logistics of the chase sequence, I was able to sort of accept the “reality” of that chase sequence and instead appreciate the intricately woven character arcs built atop it.

CANTO BIGHT

Which brings us to Canto Bight (aka, the Casino Planet).

Oddly, I’ve found a great deal of criticism surrounding the film’s focus on this sequence. It’s apparently “pointless” (because it results in failure) and should have been cut from the film.

Which I find utterly bizarre because Canto Bight is absolutely essential to the movie.

Like all of the best Star Wars stories, The Last Jedi thrives on its characters. (Which is why the fundamental swing-and-a-miss on the core characters from the original trilogy is causing such immense blowback. But I digress.) And for Canto Bight there are two key character arcs to consider here.

First, Poe’s. This consists of four specific beats:

• Make a mistake by pursuing a course of reckless heroism instead of strategic leadership in the bombing run. (He then gets called out by Leia specifically for doing this, clearly establishing this as a central idea in the film. She even says, “I need you to learn that.”)
• Make the same mistake on an even larger scale by disobeying Holdo’s orders and putting the entire Resistance at risk.
• Learn from that mistake, and demonstrate that learning process during the skimmer battle on Crait. (“It’s a suicide run. All craft move away! … Retreat, Finn! That’s an order!”)
• Apply the lesson which has been learned by realizing that Luke is buying them time, and then leading the survivors out of the cave instead of leading an assault on the First Order. (A decision which is then very specifically endorsed by Leia – “What are you looking at me for?” – who established this arc in the first place, thus signaling that Poe has been successful in learning this lesson and has been rewarded with the leadership which was also foreshadowed as the prize for doing so.)

The Canto Bight sequence only has an ancillary impact on Poe’s arc, but I bring it up because it’ll tie back into Finn’s arc in a second. Finn’s arc begins back at the beginning of The Force Awakens and is built around Hierocles’ conception of oikeiôsis, in which humans extend their sense of self in ever-widening concentric circles:

• He wants to survive.
• He extends that desire to Rey.
• He extends that desire to the Resistance (i.e., the actual men and women who are in peril on the Resistance’s ships).
• He transcends that desire and becomes a Rebel; one who will fight for what is right to the benefit of the entire galaxy. (This culminates in, “Rebel scum,” which is a fantastic inversion of that line.)

In order for Finn to achieve that final bit of growth, he cannot be stuck on the Resistance transports. He has to go out into the galaxy and truly see the consequences of not standing up to the First Order. He has to see the oppression. That doesn’t necessarily need to be Canto Bight (there are other forms of oppression that could have been depicted), but the setting works well due to the strong contrast between luxury and oppression.

(This is also a good junction to note that the Canto Bight sequence is not particularly long. It takes up only 11 minutes of the film and is very briskly paced.)

The other aspect of Canto Bight is Rose. She doesn’t have a strong personal arc (because she’s a supporting character), but she plays a really important role as Finn’s guide and teacher. Not by actually, literally teaching him shit, but by being the living embodiment of ideas and experiences that he needs to process. Canto Bight is, once again, essential for this because it provides the tapestry on which Rose’s character is revealed, and it is by seeing Canto Bight through Rose’s eyes that Finn learns the lessons he needs to learn.

What’s interesting here is that Finn’s growth up to this point has only taken him as far as where Poe was at the beginning of the film: That’s why Finn disobeys an explicit order and attempts a suicide run on the cannon.

This is really amazing and subtle filmmaking for a couple of reasons:

• Finn has arrived at this point not by paralleling Poe’s character arc, but by perpendicularly coming to the same resolution. This adds depth and dimension to this aspect of the film. (In much the same way that, for example, Kylo Ren and Luke come to the conclusion of “let it all burn” from very different directions and for very different reasons after both ricocheting off opposite sides of the same moment).
• At the very moment that we’re seeing Poe demonstrate that he’s learned the lesson, we’re seeing Finn repeat Poe’s mistake from the beginning of the film. Thus there is a direct contrast that really lights up Poe’s growth as a character.
• Rose saves Finn and tries to communicate something really important (both to himself and this entire film): “That’s how we’re going to win. Not by destroying what we hate. By saving what we love.”
• Finn still hasn’t actually learned the lesson, though. So the moment at which Poe is fully incorporating the lesson and demonstrating his mastery of it (“He’s stalling. (…) We’re the spark that will light the rebellion.”), he’s simultaneously providing the final push Finn needs to get over the hump, learn the lesson, and get to the same point Poe is now at.

And what is that point?

What Poe just said: That it’s not enough to Resist. They must be the Spark which lights the Rebellion.

It’s arguably the single, most important theme of the movie, and these three characters have engaged in a beautiful dance through the entire film so that, rather than just talking about that “spark that lights a rebellion” we’ve seen that spark in action. And how that spark has transformed Poe and Fin (and, through a completely separate arc, Rey) into the Rebellion.

And the whole thing turns around the axis of Canto Bight.

CONCLUSIONS

Canto Bight isn’t the weak link in the movie. It’s an almost perfect example of just how good this movie really is.

Once you divorce The Last Jedi from the crippling flaw of utterly failing to build upon the Star Wars legacy (and, in fact, doing the exact opposite by inflicting terrible damage upon that legacy) — and, don’t get me wrong, that’s a really huge problem — and consider it strictly as a film on its own merits, what you discover is:

• Incredibly intricate and interwoven character development
• Fantastic performances from virtually everyone in the case
• Stunningly beautiful and effective cinematography
• At least a dozen moments that are absolutely iconic and incredibly memorable

But it’s this last bullet point that inexorably draws us back to that central problem, because for so many of those moments it would be more accurate to say that they would be iconic if they weren’t built on false foundations.

I’ve already mentioned how incredibly cool the “eyes of a frightened boy” moment is… if it didn’t feature Jake Skywalker masquerading as Luke Skywalker. To that we can also add things like:

• The spellbindingly captivating hyperspace ramming sequence… except that the hyperspace ramming itself (like the sudden ubiquity of never-before-seen cloaking technology) has problems syncing with everything we’ve seen in this universe previously and opens a Pandora’s box of future storytelling problems.
• The “spark which lights the rebellion” material is pitch perfect, deep, and incredibly effective… if it were part of a story set prior to A New Hope. (It makes the comparable material in Rogue One look almost hapless by comparison, and I liked Rogue One.) But here these themes simply attach a bullhorn to the destructive nihilism of the films with a screeching, “I’m fucking up the original trilogy almost as badly as the special editions!”. And, ironically, the more effective Johnson is in realizing this material, the more he cranks up the volume on the bullhorn.

And so forth. There are also, to be fair, a number of very good moments which land without any drawback whatsoever. (For example, Kylo Ren’s incredibly clever way of getting around Snoke telepathically monitoring him for betrayal.)

But there’s also a smattering of other foibles in the film, including a number of baffling continuity errors. (For example, the fact that Poe knows Maz is perhaps explicable despite never meeting her in the previous film. Poe having somehow never been introduced to Rey during their time at the rebel base at the end of The Force Awakens is not.)

So, here’s my final verdict: As a Star Wars film, The Last Jedi earns a D. Separated from the saga and treated as a form of indulgent fan fiction, I give the film on its own merits a B+.

If you can, like me, separate this film from its destructively nihilistic base through the simple mental expedient of saying #notmystarwars with positive instead of negative intentions, then I highly recommend The Last Jedi. It’s a wonderful and beautiful and powerful film.

But I won’t blame you if you can’t.