When the teaser trailer for The Rise of Skywalker first dropped, the voices of those who dislike The Last Jedi only grew stronger. Apparently, Kylo Ren fixing his broken helmet and Anakin/Luke’s blue lightsaber being reforged is a sure sign of a retcon. But what a lot of fans seem to forget is that it was Abrams, not Johnson, who killed Han Solo and put Luke on an island in The Force Awakens. And it looks like he may have wanted to be even more radical than that. In a chat with Vanity Fair, Abrams explains how his approach to making Episode IX is much different from Episode VII:
Interestingly enough, Abrams seems to have taken a page out of Rian Johnson’s book, which adds a whole new layer of intrigue to The Rise of Skywalker. I love that J.J. Abrams no longer feels obligated to bend the knee to a previously established formula. For Star Wars to continue to thrive, it needs to evolve. Whether you like The Last Jedi or not, there’s no denying that Rian Johnson changed the landscape of Star Wars in such a drastic manner that it blasted the door wide open for Abrams to take the finale in compelling and completely fresh directions while still maintaining the essence and exploring the philosophy of Star Wars. And that seems to be what J.J. Abrams is going for too. “The idea of the movie is kind of how I felt going into the movie as a filmmaker, which is to say that I’ve inherited all this stuff, great stuff, and good wisdom, and the good and the bad, and it’s all coming to this end, and the question is, do we have what it takes to succeed?” (Source: Vanity Fair)
