bren 🌙

- what is the central conflict of the story? does it get resolved in the end?

- what does the main character desire? what is their objective? (not the same thing) what are they going to do to reach that objective? what is stopping them from reaching that objective?

- can you describe the movie's climax in a simple sentence? example: "protagonist reaches the top of the mountain after learning how to climb." if you can't, then it means there's something unresolved in the main conflict.

so let's see what happens with tlj. the protagonist, Rey, wants to be trained as a Jedi. Alright. What does she do? She travels to Ahch-to. But then, Luke doesn't want to train her. First inflexion point. But she doesn't give up. She wants to be trained no matter what. She follows him for days until he finally accepts. Middle point. Training is not what she expected. But then... The movie does a hard turn and her entire motivation changes. Suddenly saving Kylo is more important than her training. Suddenly she decides Luke is not who she thought he was. She leaves the island to save Kylo. At first one can think "well of course she does, this is a narrative parallel to Empire Strikes Back, when Luke leaves his master to save his friends!" But no! Because 1) Luke never doubted Yoda as a master. He left against Yoda's wishes, but because his motivation was always to save his friends. He trained as a Jedi to be able to do exactly that, but better. 2) Rey wanted to be a Jedi as part of her self-discovery and search for her identity. Did she decide that the Jedi path wasn't for her? Nope, that's never questioned. Does she discover another part of her identity that's more important than being a Jedi? No. She just sees a flashback and changes everything about her character. With no justification or transition whatsoever. She stops being Rey and becomes someone else.

The resolution of the movie, does it say something about Rey? What did she learn? What did she discover about herself? Nothing, really. She's still powerful and smart, Luke turned out to be the Hero she wanted him to be, her friends are safe but not because of her. She doesn't fail, but she doesn't succeed either. Why? Because there's no central conflict. The movie asks one initial question and answers another.

And I'm not even touching on the side plots. I'm not even addressing the position of this movie inside an already ongoing narrative. This is just how convoluted the plot of this movie is in isolation.