The two are not mutually exclusive. Yes he is primarily concerned with making a character study and such, but he is doing so within the realms of Science Fiction and equating what that means the world of Star Wars. He's growing the mythology. He's adding elements like who's funding these wars between the First Order in the Resistance and such. Last I saw in the movie we still had lots of fantastical creatures, lots of aliens, and an entire fight that took place with a hologram effectively. He's 100% toying with the realms of Science Fiction in the movie. Star Wars and every science fiction film ever made has always taken elements of our real world and put them in a science fiction based environment. This movie was no different.
Just by making the themes of your story more important then superficial things doesn't mean you're downplaying the science fiction elements of anything. That just means you're trying to make the story about something and not deliver the people empty calories.
Aliens barely had any presence in TLJ. We had some cool creatures (well, the crystal foxes were cool, at any rate), but actual alien characters with human intelligence were almost nonexistent, aside from Yoda's single scene. And the closest thing to any kind of new culture we got to see was the Canto Bight casino, which was just a regular Earth casino.
That randomly inserted bit about two side's funding the war isn't world building, it's forced commentary with absolutely zero thought put into HOW it fits into the world, or why it matters in the context of the world. Like...why should Finn and Rose, or the audience, care that these random rich people are selling weapons to both sides? War profiteering is important to us in the real world because our world is dominated by capitalism and it means American companies, the supposed good guys, aren't as good as we might think. But who are these war profiteers in Star Wars, and why should we care that they aren't good people? What's one more group of mustache twirling villains in a galaxy dominated by the Empire and now the First Order? It's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. Rian wants to communicate some message, and so his thought is "eh, the Story Group will have someone else figure out how it makes sense".
The hologram is the same thing. Luke just pulls it out of his butt out of nowhere because Rian wanted to subvert our expectations. A fantasy-first approach would be "here are the tools I'm going to give my hero, and these are the conflicts I will put them in and how they will resolve those conflicts based on the tools at their disposal". Yet Rian's approach is "this is the feeling I want to create in this specific scene, so I will give the hero this specific tool at this specific time so as to create the exact moment I'm going for".
Both Luke and Kylo Ren talk to Ray at various points in the movie about this idea of breaking the wheel effectively. We get a brief history given to us about the battle between the Jedi and the Sith to this point as well as an understanding that the cost of war between factions is being fueled by the rich. The idea being presented here is the idea that the battle between good and evil is one large cycle. An endless one. Just taking on new faces. Also, the series always talks about bringing balance to the force, but what balance is a little nebulous. The Jedi believe it to be by taking out the shift, but then Snoke has that monologue about when darkness rises the light comes to meet it. In other words eventually an opposing an equal force is going to cancel the other one out. So this comes back to my question of what does balance in the force truly mean? That's the theme I probably would have played with if I were doing the next movie instead of just making another basic Good vs Evil story.
But the war hasn't traditionally been fueled by the rich. It's fueled by the machinations of evil dark side users manipulating things from the shadows, with one particular dark side user rising above them all and entangling everyone in his web of deception. Yet in TLJ we learn absolutely nothing about the lore surrounding the Sith, how it relates to Snoke, or Kylo, or Vader's voice that Kylo heard in his head throughout TFA. Rian doesn't care about it, resulting in RoS playing catch-up.
And again, I'm not sure where this cycle idea comes from, since the galaxy was at peace for thousands of years before the rise of the Empire. It was never about a cycle, it was about restoring an ideal. It's a "before the dark times" story. You know, like Lord of the Rings, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Wheel of Time, The Dark Tower, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Dark Crystal, etc. It's a standard fantasy trope.
And restoring balance is simple: eliminate the dark side. TLJ never implies that balance is anything other than that. The dark side is a bad thing, the Jedi were flawed in many ways but they were never presented as being flawed for their refusal to embrace the dark side.
What do you think balance
should mean? Are you saying a health balance is to murder one person for every one person you save? Like, how can balance be anything other than the elimination of the corruptive side of the Force that drives people to become self-centered murderers?
