Originally Posted by
Revolutionary_Jack
In Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader fails every single thing he sets out to do...
-- The entire attack on Hoth is a worthless victory since the rebels evacuate with the bulk of the forces (whereas TLJ has the First Order morons decimate the entire fleet step by step and bit by bit) and all Vader has is claiming an empty base to his credit.
-- Vader's actual plan in the movie is turning Luke to the dark side and plotting a coup d'etat on Palpatine. He fails utterly at that.
-- Vader's only minor victory is him capturing Han Solo, but even that is undone because thanks to his total incompetence as a military governor, Cloud City a neutral area goes entirely to the side of the rebels and Lando Calrissian replaces the loss of Han Solo as another great pilot who is now all-in with the Resistance.
ESB feels a lot darker and hopeless than it actually is. That's because it's entirely framed from the perspective of the main characters of Han, Leia, and Luke. But on the whole the resistance in ESB starts and ends more or less where they were post-Yavin. (I am sure there are some EU-readers and Marvel comics readers will tell me otherwise but I am going entirely by what's on screen in ANH and ESB.) The thing is ANH is a big epic war movie. But ESB is not, it has far lower stakes. It's not a sequel which believes "bigger is better", quite the opposite. ESB is a small-scale intense thriller. The stakes in ANH is much higher. The Death Star was a planet-killing machine, but in ESB, the stakes are about whether Han and Leia will tell each their feelings and make out, or whether Luke Skywalker will be corrupted by the dark side of the force, and exactly what is the deal with that Darth Vader guy. TLJ on the other hand is "bigger is better" in its approach and it has the same big war movie scale as TFA and TROS. The movie should have narrowed focus to Poe, Finn, Rey, Leia, Luke, Kylo. TLJ is the longest Star Wars movie ever made. So this is definitely not a movie of modest scale and intention.
George Lucas knew exactly what ESB should be and what it should do. During pre-production he had horror movies screened for the cast, and said that he wanted the movie to be closer in tone to The Exorcist than the previous movie. So ESB has a lot of horror elements, the entire swamp of Dagobah, for instance and that vision where Luke cuts off Vader only to find his face behind that mask and the final duel with Vader at Bespin. Whereas nobody had that imagination and wit during the production of TLJ, in a sense of going somewhere entirely different in style and scale from the previous movie.
Both Lando and Yoda are tied to the backstory of Han Solo, and the Jedi Order respectively. Whereas Rose Tico and Holdo aren't tied to the backstory of Finn and Poe. That's what I mean when I said the two characters served the established leads rather than being entirely unconnected to them. In TROS, JJ Abrams' new characters Zori Bliis and Jannah are actually connected to the backstories of Finn and Poe, the first being a former spice-runner like Poe and the other also being an ex-Stormtrooper. Not saying that doing that was right but basically, Rose and Holdo needed to have been connected to Finn and Poe. Holdo should have been a sergeant who knows Poe from his spice-smuggling days and was a martinet who gave him heat to do that. In fact, Holdo using Poe's past which he has hidden and feels ashamed of, would have given more reason for Holdo's suspicions. In TLJ, Finn is basically there to serve Rose's story, and not the other way around. It was Rose's sister who dies in the opening scene, it's Rose who has an interest in Canto Bight and saving the kids there, not Finn. It's also Rose who initiates a romance when Finn had no interest in her. This is the black male lead of The Force Awakens and he's basically demoted to being a tagalong for an OC in a sequel that should be a deep dive to his character. No wonder John Boyega was "iffy" about TLJ.
Because it has none of the qualities that ESB had originally. To make Empire Strikes Back today is to have a philosophy and attitude entirely opposed to big budget hollywood studios, where the sequel always has to "bigger, better, darker, grittier" and so on. The closest movie to the spirit of ESB is James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy 2 because again a very small scale movie compared to the first movie, a deeper dive into the characters, and a plot with more personal stakes (albeit because of Ego it does also have grand stakes at the end).
Flashy uses of red aren't good visuals. There are other colors.
Canto Bight looks like a setting out of the prequels. It's not something entirely new and different. The look of the ST needed to be as new and distinct as the PT was, as the OT was. The PT established that the world before the Old Republic, the era before the Empire, was grand, shiny, opulent and a lot more diverse in aesthetics and visuals than the OT. It communicated to you visually that the "used future" of the OT was entirely created by the Empire and Palpatine's totalitarian regime. In the ST, we needed to see the government of the Resistance, we needed to see the galaxy built on the work of Luke, Han, and Leia.
And what we got was...OT cosplay and retro-fetishism built by a bunch of people without any of the visual imagination of Lucas himself.