The Last Jedi and the 7 Basic Questions of Narrative Drama

Hey guys! I highly recommend checking out Lessons From The Screenplay's video for more on the writing of The Last Jedi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYN2Lp9oHMk

That "10 characters" bit is hilarious I was just saying "But there's only -" and then I saw Snoke slowly peeking in from the corner 🤣

Just Write: "The reveal that Rey's parents are nobodies is pretty brilliant." TRoS: "I'm gonna ruin this man's whole career."

“There’s only one business in the galaxy that gets you this rich” Rexter Dexter’s diner

7 Basic Questions of Narrative Drama in 3 Parts Part 1 - Wants vs Needs (1:36) 1. What does this character want? 2. What does this character need? 3. How do those wants and needs conflict within the character? Part 2 - Conflict (6:30) 4. How do the characters' wants and needs conflict with the outside world? 5. How do they conflict with other characters? Part 3 - Change (9:23) 6. How does the character change through the those conflicts? / How does that resolution affect them? 7. What impact does that change have on everyone else?

i fear that the fan overreaction and it was overreacting to the films quality will make disney clamp their corporate crip harder on the creative aspect of the next films resulting in more bland and safe sequels

oh no i'm not brave for the comment section

I like how so many older Star Wars videos are showing up in my feed again.

My biggest issue with this movie was that I felt like none of the three plotlines were given enough space to breathe and feel organic. I understood how the conflict was supposed to play out and I didn't have any issues with the plot or the characters per se but felt like by attempting to tell three stories, they all felt rushed and shortchanged. I feel like the movie would have been more moving if it focused more on Rey and gave her story the significant bulk of the screen time. I actually like the themes in her story a lot and I wish they were given more time to be explored.

I can understand your argument that it is a story competently told from a thematic standpoint, but I would argue with your last point that it wasn't just fan service or self indulgent. One of the huge things that ruined the movie for me was just how often the story would pull you into to its seriousness only to give you a harsh slap back to reality with a wink-down-the-camera 4th wall breaking bit of needless slapstick that ruined the tension. Our introduction to Luke is ruined for a cheap laugh, the porgs ruin several moments for cheap laughs, Chewie is used for cheap laughs, the caretakers are used for cheap laughs, Leia pulls herself back into an exploded ship mostly for fan service... what bothered me most about TLJ was how little the story seemed to care about itself and respect itself, and how often it broke the mood for the sake of the audience alone rather than the characters. That's something that TFA suffered from as well, but TLJ took it up to 11.

I think Rey’s parent’s being nobody is perfect as well, and I dread the day when JJ Abrams ret-cons that decision.

8:56 "You have no place in this story. You're nothing. But not to me." Is that meta-commentary?

By the way - as soon as Poe does learn about the plan he tells DJ about it - jeopardizing the whole thing and getting people killed - and people wonder why it had to be kept a secret - she didn’t want the word to get out

The "these ten characters" joke with Snoke really got me more than I expected.

1:56 I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but it was amazing.

I disagree about the film's overall quality and cohesion but I very much appreciate your efforts to explain positive qualities. That's much harder than pointing out flaws, and not enough people do it. Also, mega-respect for being fucking nuanced about it, and being able to admit that the film has positive and negative qualities, unlike most fans who have a compulsion to be all-or-nothing on every film.

So,...being a hotshot impulsive character is bad for Poe but good for Rose. Poe was given a tongue lashing for endangering lives, meanwhile Rose set a stampede of animals throughout a town. Trying to save your friend over the "greater good" is bad for Finn but good for Rose. Self sacrifice is good for Vice Admiral Holdo but Finn needs someone to intervene & teach him a lesson. This movie has a message to put certain characters in their place. I'm just saying.

0:51 - "We can agree that it says what it wants to say in an effective manner." I disagree with you on that point -- my chief complaint about The Last Jedi is not with the direction or central ideas of the story, but the complete incompetence with which it was executed. The complaints you cite throughout your video are common, but I hold most of them up as misdiagnoses of the problems with The Last Jedi. They are strawmen of the arguments that I, and others, make against the movie. 10:45 - "They are arguments for it being competent; for it having a rock-solid dramatic foundation" The need vs. want framework is useful, and I think you make the strongest case I have yet seen in favor of The Last Jedi having some value as a story. However, the execution is so poor that closer examination reveals major flaws in two of the three characters' transformations, and weakness in the third. The movie fights with itself and contradicts its own themes, which leaves us with a muddled emotional understanding of the characters' struggles and triumphs. More than that, The Last Jedi makes a host of seriously detrimental decisions which do not support the need vs. want conflicts you presented, and which weaken the movie and the franchise as a result. Eventually, I hope to make video essays of my own on the subject. Meanwhile, here are some examples of how The Last Jedi undermines the character triumphs you presented. 1. Admiral Holdo repeatedly refuses to even reveal that there is a plan. It's one thing to refuse to bring Poe in on the details of the plan -- as you say, she doesn't trust him -- but any competent leader in a desperate situation would assure their people that they had a plan. Life-and-death situations are absolutely not the time to be testing the faith of your people. Holdo is therefore a terrible leader. Even when Poe mutinies, Holdo says nothing. The movie makes it abundantly clear that if at any point Holdo had so much as said she had a plan -- or clarified what the plan was once he had mutinied -- Poe would have instantly been 100% on her side. That's idiot plotting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_plot) -- it requires Holdo to behave like an idiot for the plot to work. Holdo therefore fails as a role model for Poe. Poe becomes weirdly worshipful of Holdo the moment he understands what she's actually trying. We laugh off his defiance of direct orders and subsequent mutiny, and all is forgiven. Boys, right? Then Holdo launches her suicide attack (weirdly, exactly the same sort of thing beginning-of-the-movie Poe might do). The battle on Crait reveals that Poe defying orders is the only thing that gave them a fighting chance (remember the Destroyer he successfully blew up? That would have been able to destroy the base from orbit, per it having destroyed the previous base from orbit), and thus vindicates his earlier behavior. Poe calls off the attack on the walkers -- the only chance for survival that he knows they have left -- and thus condemns the entire Resistance to death. Only Luke and Rey save them, and he had no knowledge that they even knew where the Resistance was trapped. In other words, nothing was ever wrong with Poe. Leia and Holdo were terrible strategists and leaders, and Poe has been gaslighted into thinking his was wrong. This entire plot fails because it tries to convince us that Poe was wrong and Holdo and Leia were right, even as the movie proves the exact opposite at every turn. 2. As you say, Rose represents what Finn actually needs. But Finn is robbed of his choice to save the Resistance by Rose, who loses her mind and stops his self-sacrifice, thus condemning the entire Resistance to death. Once again, they are the last known hope for the Resitance, and Rose, of all people, should understand the value of self-sacrifice for a cause -- her sister died to save her and the Resistance, and she was responsibly stunning deserters earlier in the movie. We are given no indication that she felt her sister's sacrifice was in vain. This plot is ruined at the end because Rose behaves inconsistently and incomprehensibly, and Finn is not allowed to make meaningful decisions. His supposed mentor presents a new message: Don't fight to protect; just let your friends die. The music and cinematography clearly indicate that we're meant to think Rose is heroic and correct. This muddles Finn's journey -- He's supposed to learn to fight for the cause of the Resistance . . . but he's also not supposed to fight, because that's somehow wrong. There are also issues with Finn's arc in that it's just an extension of his previous arc -- He learns to fight for his friends in 7, and now he's learning to fight for a cause. It feels in some places like his character is sliding back on the previous arc, and it's unclear why he so quickly abandons his desire to prevent Rey from getting trapped. 3. Rey wants external validation from Kylo and Luke. Yet, she has already had external validation from Han, Chewie, Finn, BB-8, Maz, and Leia. Rey is apparently insecure about her parentage, demonstrated by two scenes with Kylo in which he speaks poorly of her parents, and then one scene in which she tries to learn about them from the Dark Side. The Kylo scenes are prime examples of telling, rather than showing, which is weak. Her taking action toward the Dark Side to learn about them functions fairly well (except in that it is totally inconsequential, both in that Rey isn't falling to the Dark Side and she learned nothing from the attempt), and explaining her attachment to Han as her searching for a father figure works decently. Her relationship with Luke is pretty consistently terrible, and she has two other reasons for seeking out Luke (bring him back and receive Jedi instruction) which muddle that explanation. Rey never returned to Jakku after escaping Starkiller Base, despite denying Maz's claim that her parents wouldn't come back. On the one hand, that seems to say she's accepted that her parents won't return. On the other hand, she never explicitly makes that determination on-screen, so who can say. Parentage aside, Rey has all the skills she ever needs -- she can Force-whatever she needs, she can pilot, repair, scavenge, climb, fight with her staff, fight with a lightsaber; she can even swim, despite growing up on a desert planet. Rey never fails in a meaningful way, and almost never needs help. The one exception is the scene with Snoke, which she nonetheless escapes from without a scratch. In other words, Rey is not portrayed as underprivileged, weak, or unliked in either of the movies. In fact, Luke complains that she's too powerful, and she has no problems with Chewie. She does start as underprivileged in The Force Awakens, but this is her arc in The Last Jedi. She proves over and over again that doesn't need anyone's help and would be fine on her own. This arc kind of works, but it could have been presented much more powerfully if we had meaningful examples of Rey failing or needing help, or being ridiculed or going unrecognized despite her contributions. Instead, it feels tacked on and weakly supported. Her internal struggle for emotional independence could have benefited from external struggles which showed us why she might feel insecure.

I think you analysis is accurate, but doesn’t the fact that so many people didn’t connect to these arcs sort of imply that they fumbled the ball on communicating key moments in these arcs? Like, i see the setup for poe, but at which moment does he learn? I feel similarly for finn. Their decisions don’t seem to hold much weight for the audience, somehow.

Right on! I love Last Jedi and 2 points: 1) that doesn’t mean I think if you don’t like it you are wrong 2) that you don’t like it doesn’t mean I’m wrong Opinions differ. My reasons for liking it are personal, as they should be, this movie touched me and moved me and that’s all I want in a film.