The Biggest Problem With Star Wars: The Last Jedi Is J.J. Abrams

3. Mystery Boxes And Plot Twists

"What are stories, but mystery boxes? ...[Kept closed] it represents infinite possibility. It represents hope. It represents potential."

J.J. Abrams' TED Talk on his approach to storytelling is now infamous, and it's the biggest and best indicator of his methodology - one that's on full display in The Force Awakens.

While the movie's narrative structure closely follows A New Hope, its bigger ideas are the new ones: the mysterious Supreme Leader Snoke, the parentless Rey, the Knights of Ren. Abrams may or may not have had answers to who these people are but, since he knew in advance that he'd be leaving the trilogy behind, it didn't matter. Like with Lost, he never needed to open the mystery box; he could, as he prefers, keep it firmly shut.

Johnson, then, took possession of these boxes he'd never created, and had a peak inside. With Snoke, he'd have found a powerful figure but one who, despite the theories, there was nothing known about. He was nothing, really, but a hologram who could use the Force. Johnson made him even more powerful, and then cut him down, sensing that he could serve the story better dead than alive.

It's not just a huge shock, but one that pushes Kylo Ren into becoming the new leader of the First Order and the unrivalled Big Bad. We'd already had one Palpatine, so it makes sense that we didn't need another and, after all, Palpatine got no backstory in the Original Trilogy either. What matters most in Snoke's story is that he lured Kylo Ren over to the Dark Side, that he led the First Order, and then that he was killed by his own apprentice. All of which we get on screen. The rest is superfluous and, if there were anything TRULY important, it should've been in The Force Awakens, while the decision to kill him off means he avoids simply being a Palpatine redux.

Likewise, Rey was revealed in The Last Jedi to be a 'nobody', which came after two years of speculation that she was a Skywalker or a Kenobi or a Palpatine or a Jinn or an Erso or product of any other family line in Star Wars. She's left alone on Jakku, and that's all we know about her past. It makes complete sense, then, that she'd be a nobody: for starters, anything else would be too convenient - and Lord knows there were already enough Skywalkers in this saga - and yet also feel shoehorned in. Being from nothing is not only what hurts the Rey the most, but given the pieces Johnson was left to play with, is the best fit, and one that allows the saga to move forward with a new hero that breaks free from that one special family, and instead shows you can rise from nothing to save the day.

The Knights of Ren are largely left out of things in The Last Jedi due to time constraints, but even that is just one line of dialogue from Snoke in The Force Awakens, and one that Johnson gives us an answer to by confirming they were among the pupils at Luke's Jedi Academy.

All of these things are used to drag down Johnson and The Last Jedi, but the problems originate from Abrams' focus on creating mystery boxes rather than actual characters.