Rian Johnson’s major ‘Star Wars’ regret
Comfortably the most polarising and divisive instalment in a franchise that’s spawned 11 feature films over the course of almost half a century, The Last Jedi placed Rian Johnson in the line of fire from many Star Wars fans. To this day, even mentioning the movie to a supporter of the saga is guaranteed to generate a reaction, whether it be positive or negative.
For some, Episode VIII is regarded as one of the finest entries to Star Wars canon, one that wilfully sacrificed the nostalgia-heavy elements of The Force Awakens in favour of a bold deconstruction of the mythos. For others, it torpedoed everything they wanted Star Wars to be, ruined the character of Luke Skywalker, and undid much of the character work established in the previous chapter to act as more of a standalone film than a direct successor to Episode VII.
Johnson is fully aware he made a cosmic blockbuster that just as many people loved as loathed, but that isn’t his biggest regret. Instead, the inability to screen the film for test audiences stands out as a sore point, which is ironic considering it would have offered an early indication of the deafening noise, both good and bad that was about to come.
Spoiler culture in the internet age has made it increasingly difficult for any high-profile feature to arrive in cinema with all of its biggest secrets kept intact, with NDAs often not even worth the price of the paper they’re printed on. As a result, Disney and Lucasfilm were adamant that The Last Jedi be withheld from anyone who could potentially leak its most important aspects online until the day of its theatrical debut, something Johnson begrudgingly accepted.
Speaking on the special features of the Knives Out home video release, the filmmaker lamented the call made from above his paygrade: “You can’t test Star Wars movies for a lot of different reasons. I’ve always hated test screening, and when we were making Star Wars, at a certain point in the process you’re like ‘God, I would give my left arm to put this in front of 300 people in Burbank and just see how it plays.’”
Beyond that, the Brick director harbours no other regrets or misgivings over his time spent in the Star Wars sandbox, regardless of how heavily it split opinion. In fact, when he was asked that exact question by Gizmodo, he answered in the negative: “No, that’s one thing I can say, that I put everything into a Star Wars movie that I could possibly want in a Star Wars movie.”
That being said, he did acknowledge that it wasn’t greeted rapturously by everyone: “I had my chance at the plate. I swung,” he continued. “That’s one thing I don’t feel any regrets about or anything like that.” At the end of the day, he did exactly what he wanted to do, regardless of which side of The Last Jedi fence anybody ended up falling on.
