The Star Wars sequels don't deserve your hatred either

Though the franchise is putting something outside the Skywalker Saga in theaters, the sequel trilogy's thorny legacy persists.

By Jesse Hassenger  |  May 21, 2026 | 9:00am
Photo: Disney
Film Features Star Wars
The Star Wars sequels don't deserve your hatred either

“This will begin to make things right.” In 2026, the first line of dialogue in Star Wars: The Force Awakens might be read as insulting hubris, a wink at the fandom performed with misplaced emphasis and confidence. A cutesy promise to fans is how you’re welcoming audiences back to the world of Star Wars after a decade away from proper feature films? (That previous film would be Revenge Of The Sith; in the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, “that business on Cato Neimoidia doesn’t count.”) But 2015 was a different time, back when that line could almost pass for subtle, when everyone seemed excited about a fresh start for Star Wars, and when writing about how the previous trilogy of prequels was good, actually, was considered an affront to good taste—to say nothing of those poor sainted YouTubers tirelessly campaigning against them!

I won’t suggest that the prequels are now uncontroversial in nerd circles, though their fanbase remains strong and the Disney iteration of Lucasfilm now seems less afraid of that era. That’s probably because the companies’ fear has a bigger and arguably even more absurd target: the Star Wars sequel trilogy that Force Awakens kicked off, easily the highest-grossing trilogy (to the tune of $4 billion worldwide) that has ever managed to somehow terrify a multibillion-dollar business from wanting to even mention them directly. In recent years, there have been theatrical Star Wars re-releases almost annually: Rogue One came back to IMAX theaters to promote the streaming series Andor in 2022; Return Of the Jedi had an anniversary return in 2023; The Phantom Menace and Revenge Of The Sith received similar treatments in 2024 and 2025, respectively. Even during the height of COVID-19, The Empire Strikes Back received a 40th anniversary run at drive-ins. The Force Awakens, meanwhile, remains the biggest-grossing movie in domestic box office history—and yes, that’s without adjusting for inflation, but it’s also held the position for a decade—and received no such celebratory re-release for its 10th birthday. 

Now, shortly after that anniversary, Star Wars is back again. The Mandalorian And Grogu, the franchise’s first theatrical release in almost seven years, seeks a fresh start, just as The Force Awakens once did. It’s not traversing quite as big a gap as the one between that movie and the prequels, but then, the years between 2005 and 2015 included a substantial stretch where Lucasfilm’s public position on new live-action Star Wars movies was that there wouldn’t be any and please stop asking. That was never the case between 2019 and 2026; Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 to make Star Wars stuff, not to burnish its specialness by taking long breaks. Yet despite its financial success, the Star Wars sequels were clearly something that Disney felt the need to recover from, focusing their energies on streaming TV series that both avoided sequel-era characters and somehow seemed to contribute to the sense that the new Lucasfilm had accidentally slaughtered its own cash cow. It doesn’t help that the internet remains alight with discontent over the sequels. Sure, the argument seems to go, the prequels were life-ruiningly terrible, but at least ruining our lives was apparently part of George Lucas’ singular vision. The sequels came to us straight from the bowels of Disney’s cursed IP hell.

Or did they? It’s tempting to simply shrug off the hatred as just another cyclical marker that will settle with time as those who grew up on the sequels start to raise their voices. And to some extent, this is probably accurate, especially considering that the YouTube outrage machine will take as rant fodder countless things that many well-adjusted, non-monetized people either simply enjoy or don’t. (Again, nearly a billion dollars in North America alone—still more than Avengers: Endgame—suggests plenty of rank-and-file enjoyment.) But for the precise timing of its place in the culture, the sequel trilogy is thornier and more complicated than mere hate-now-like-later cycles. 

The sequels also represent—on average, at least—vastly better filmmaking than they’ve been given credit for. With the fullness of time, it’s become increasingly fashionable to bash J.J. Abrams, the impresario who has made some original marks on television while serving primarily as a tricked-out big-screen cover band for imperiled franchises like Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, and Star Wars. (Perhaps not coincidentally, two of those three began life on TV.) Anti-Abrams sentiment ignores the reasons he kept getting those jobs: He’s a genius, if perhaps a shallow one, in the not-insignificant matters of casting, momentum, and finding the immediacy of what makes those familiar properties so exciting. It’s been reported that George Lucas tried to convince his pal Steven Spielberg to take over directing a Star Wars movie at some point; The Force Awakens supplies an irresistible if superficial simulation of what that might look like, with its lithe camera movements, crowd-pleasing instincts, keen eye for casting, and, yes, its lens flares. It’s a movie of relentless, gassed-up pleasure-seeking—sensational in the truest sense.

Given that relentlessness and the narrative incoherence it can flirt with, Abrams is more akin to a nerdy Michael Bay than an oops-all-blockbusters version of Spielberg. But watching The Force Awakens, notoriously the product of many agonized rewrites and rethinks, it’s remarkable how quickly the key elements fall into place. Rey (Daisy Ridley), the lonely desert scavenger; Poe (Oscar Isaac), the cocky Resistance flyboy; and Finn (John Boyega), the stormtrooper who wants a fresh start, are as instantly likable as any characters in 21st-century blockbusting, cleverly echoing and remixing the original Luke-Leia-Han types without slavishly copying them. Abrams isn’t just good at selecting actors, either; he directs them into boldly physical performances that carry as much momentum as his amped-up camerawork. Ridley in particular is a great runner, making Rey’s preternatural Force skills seem like a natural extension of her bearing, while the body language between Isaac and Boyega establishes their kinship with truly ridiculous efficiency. I love the digital symphony of Lucas’ characters and images in the prequels, but Abrams does an admirable job of making Star Wars about humans again. 

Even more impressive: The movie is at its best before any of its legacy characters show up. That’s not to say that the reintroductions of Han Solo and Leia Organa fall flat; if anything, they’re surprisingly effective and thoughtful uses of legacy characters compared to many other long-gap sequels. But it’s around that midway point that Force Awakens starts more explicitly suggesting that Abrams thinks of Star Wars mainly as A New Hope, which is fine from a cinema-historical perspective but regressive from a narrative one. Even then, the mega-eyeroll of Poe going out of his way to insist that actually, the neo-Empire’s new Death Star-like weapon is way more dangerous (read: even cooler) than the old version is mitigated by the increased presence of a genuinely complex new villain in the form of Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), whose very desire to imitate his grandfather makes for a satisfying subject of a legacy sequel. There’s also something pretty neat about a love letter to fans composed through the keeping of a decades-old promise to kill off a beloved character. Han Solo gets to die, just as Harrison Ford always wanted. 

Fan acceptance of that actor-approved mortality didn’t last. By the time Abrams made his way back to the universe for the trilogy-capping The Rise Of Skywalker, none of the original trio was left standing, with one death per entry, the final one forced by the real-life passing of Carrie Fisher. The cold specter of death isn’t the only pall cast over Rise Of Skywalker, however. This is the hardest Star Wars movie to defend, in large part because the movie itself does such a lousy job of playing its own frantic game of defense. The savvy maneuvers of The Force Awakens turn sweaty here, in ways big and small: The go-go-go plotting is mostly MacGuffins and chases. Poe is shamelessly retconned into more of a Han Solo figure through a pointless spice-running backstory. Somehow, Palpatine returns, and in his most dastardly plan yet, reshapes Rey’s previously anonymous parentage. Perhaps worst of all, every legacy good-guy character—except, weirdly, Harrison Ford, who plays Han for one more scene in a genuinely touching vision in his son’s head—feels like they’re a video game avatar reciting lines from cut scenes. This is understandable (if a little ghoulish) in the case of Carrie Fisher, whose “performance” was composed of written-around outtakes. But were Mark Hamill and Billy Dee Williams instructed to act in that stilted style as a warped form of matching tribute to Fisher, or—more likely—was Abrams just ill-equipped to direct his heroes? It’s a galling showcase for a franchise-wide fear of saying the wrong thing, something that would come to characterize Disney’s post-trilogy mandate. 

Yet, as with multiple masked Star Wars villains, it is possible to sense the good in Rise Of Skywalker. Some of this is part of the film’s overall hodgepodge. For example, the C-3PO material inspires several great gags. (After a memory wipe, he refers to new alien character Babu Frik as “one of my oldest friends!”) The Palpatine story, desperate as it is, does at least make sense as an extension of the darker side Rey explores in the previous film. And just as The Last Jedi found some interesting new wrinkles in Force sensitivity involving projection of the body, Rise Of Skywalker introduces Force healing in a lovely scene where Rey heals a fearsome-looking snake creature. (This concept was touched upon in Extended Universe and Clone Wars material, as has seemingly every Star Wars concept introduced in the past decade, but would have been new to the majority of the audience.) 

Most strikingly, though, Rise Of Skywalker is a good-looking movie, unafraid of sci-fi-fantasy maximalism in a way that does actually lend some sequences an impressive space-operatic heft, especially when they involve Rey and Kylo Ren. Late in the film, the vaguely embarrassing search for a “Sith wayfinder” that will lead the good guys to the nightmare planet of Exegol brings Rey and Kylo, among others, to some wreckage from the second Death Star, now sitting in an ocean in the Endor system. It’s striking imagery, especially as former scavenger Rey leaps across vast and precarious interiors in shots that echo her earliest moments in Force Awakens. Whether or not Abrams intended to underline how the world has repeatedly forced this character into the unresolved conflicts of another generation, it has both metatextual meaning within the biggest of all legacy sequels and real-world resonance for the young people inheriting an increasingly regressive world. After the events of the past few years, it’s a lot harder to scoff at the sequels for running back a new Empire/Rebel conflict. 

Soon after reaching the Death Star, Rey and Kylo Ren battle on the outside of it, waves crashing around them, the scene both elaborate and desolate. For anyone who found the lightsaber battles from the prequels overly choreographed and formalized (as much sense as that made for a more training-heavy era in Jedi history), the Rey/Kylo duels are far rougher and more feral even in their acrobatic moments—an exercise in attempting to wield raw power without either side feeling certain about how ruthlessly they want to treat each other. Again, there’s melancholy poetry in watching Ridley and Driver tussle over the lost but not forgotten remnants of the past. The Jurassic World series, reviving Jurassic Park the same year that Force Awakens brought back Star Wars, similarly layers newer adventures over the detritus of the old; at least the Star Wars version has more conscious meaning for the characters at hand. 

Any number of ragebait creators could tell you who caused that wreckage in the first place: It was all Rian Johnson’s fault! The modern wisdom that Force Awakens was empty nostalgia bait (and the immediate sense that Rise Of Skywalker was failed damage control) seems fueled by the divided fan reaction to The Last Jedi. The positive side can be summed up by the film’s CinemaScore, critical reception, and box office take. The negative contingent seems split between those rummaging through a grab bag of talking points (Luke wouldn’t do that! That’s not how gravity works! Leia Poppins!) with easy refutations (Sure he would, it just makes you sad! It is, but also who cares? Using the Force to briefly float through space is cool!), and the armchair screenwriting gurus who point to the importance of planning out your sequel trilogy with a clear and vetted blueprint before beginning production.

But The Last Jedi is actually a testament to the liberating power of absolutely not planning your trilogy ahead of time. Johnson picked up material that Abrams revived, cast, and shot, then deepened it in ways that are unique to his own genre-tweaking sensibility. Having Luke Skywalker not appear in The Force Awakens was an obvious punt from the previous team; Johnson caught it and ran with it, creating with a reluctant Hamill one of the best performances in the series. The testy relationship between a guilt-ridden, cranky hermit and an eager student who is both impatient (like Luke before her) and convinced of her righteousness (like the Jedi of old) expands Rey’s understanding of the Force without rehashing the Yoda material from The Empire Strikes Back. It’s capped by a delightful appearance from the green guy himself, who promptly sets fire to the idea of Jedi as a holy, ritualized way of life—but not as a way of learning, or working as a force for good. In between her lessons with Luke, Rey also shares uncomfortable closeness with Kylo Ren, as the two find themselves bonded by a series of cross-galaxy conversations with a genuine sexual-emotional tension rarely seen in Star Wars.

The sequences on this remote planet are more about character and theme than plot, attuning the movie to the nuances of the Force than anything else in the trilogy. In keeping with this attention to the natural world, Johnson and his longtime cinematographer Steve Yedlin take the late-2010s Disney franchising turn toward drab compositions and flip it into something distinctive: The rocky cliffs of Ahch-To (and the slate-like color of Rey’s Last Jedi outfit) are saturated in grayness, but the details are sharp and vivid, at times hyperreal, making Ahch-To look both grounded in reality and otherworldly. Those gray tones accompany Rey and Kylo to a later scene in Supreme Leader Snoke’s throne room, where they contrast with the heavy use of red in a massive fight scene. Ridley and Driver are both terrific as brief action partners and disappointed enemies. The elation Rey feels at briefly teaming up with Kylo Ren turns to heartbreak when he, unconsciously Anakin-like, can only see their relationship as the means of establishing a new galactic hierarchy. Though he unleashes plenty of cool creatures and settings, Johnson also maintains Abrams’ human focus; his most memorable images have to do with colors, compositions, and faces. 

The rest of The Last Jedi addresses further disappointment and failure, as the strategic planning of the Resistance and scrappy impromptu scheming of Finn, Poe, and Rose are both thwarted in the moment while nonetheless inspiring acts of defiance. Some are immediate, as with Admiral Holdo’s kamikaze lightspeed run. Others are longer-lasting, as the young Force-sensitive stable boy on Canto Bight, subject of the film’s final shot, takes obvious inspiration from the Resistance. It’s a message of resilience and hope that some fans mistook for depressing cynicism, seemingly because Luke Skywalker doesn’t slash anyone with a lightsaber. Besides, a movie where BB-8 drives an AT-ST self-evidently does not want to burn down Star Wars.

In a way, though, The Last Jedi does help burn it all down—not by tanking the series or refuting its values, but by proving that a trilogy need not bind the ambitions and skill of its individual entries. As much as it broadly follows Empire Strikes Back with bad guys getting the upper hand and a young hero receiving instruction from an eccentric old hermit, it doesn’t require the obligatory darker tone or cliffhanger ending for its effectiveness. Johnson’s movie does meaningfully expand upon its predecessors, yet it is far less self-conscious about its place as the second part in a third cycle of trilogies, in a way that must have been understandably flummoxing to whoever was charged with taking over to bring it all home. It’s similar to what’s so thrilling about fellow 2010s-era blockbuster spectacle Mad Max: Fury Road, a fourth film that recasts its title character, introduces a new character as co-lead, and renders past iterations as fuzzy memories that inform the new film without defining it. 

The Last Jedi isn’t quite as radically its own thing, but it feels like the work of a specific filmmaker who has specific ideas about Lucas’ world. That’s somewhat true of the Abrams siblings on either side of it, too—eventually hamstrung by the fact that part of Abrams’ whole deal is having no earthly idea how to bring his Spielbergian openings to an end. As much of an amusing lark as The Mandalorian And Grogu is, it is also an attempt to fulfill the goals of Rise Of Skywalker, more quietly: Nudge Star Wars films in a direction that will offend as few people as possible while activating their familiarity receptors. Next up, something from Shawn Levy. 

Of course, we’re still talking about a multibillion-dollar sci-fi-fantasy movie series. Even in the best and bravest of circumstances, it’s not going to become the new home for auteur-driven radicalism. And even in the best-case scenario of a movie like The Last Jedi, it’s not exactly a series in need of a vociferous defense. (That’s what the money is for.) There’s a fine line, however, between sober long-term planning and making big-screen TV. Plans turn movies like The Last Jedi into installments. Given that a Disney-owned Lucasfilm can’t be reasonably expected to consistently rely on scarcity to return some mystique to Star Wars, installments are the last thing they need. The Star Wars sequel trilogy intuitively understood this, actively resisting easy fan service in its best moments, and leaning into shameless recreations during its weakest. The most enduring tribute to its power would be a Star Wars that learns to be less terrified of its angriest fans—and itself.

 
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