Force Awakens editor Mary Jo Markey still sounds pretty peeved about The Last Jedi
Disney’s ever-baffling decision to write one of the most hotly anticipated movie trilogies of the last decade like a series of laser sword-heavy Mad Libs continues to pull in strong dividends from the “People unhappy on the internet” sector this week, as IndieWire reports that one of the editors on Star Wars: The Force Awakens is still pretty peeved about Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi. Specifically, editor (and long-time J.J. Abrams collaborator) Mary Jo Markey hopped on the Mission: Impossible-focused Light The Fuse podcast with co-editor Maryann Brandon recently to talk about their long and prolific careers—including Mission: Impossible 3, but also Markey’s feeling that Johnson specifically set out to take a hatchet to all the storytelling laid out in Episode VII.
The segment (which starts at about 4:16 in the above video) begins with the much more diplomatic Brandon stating that she “liked parts of The Last Jedi.” Although Brandon is much more generous in her assessment of Johnson’s deconstructionist film, both editors are pretty clearly frustrated with what they see as an unwillingness to work in the space laid out by Abrams’ first Star Wars movie. “It’s very strange to have the second film so consciously undo the storytelling of the first one,” Markey said, before going on to note that she doesn’t think Abrams did the same with The Rise Of Skywalker (although neither her, nor Brandon, worked on that particular installment). “It’s like if someone wrote the middle of your novel. Now how do you get the end of the novel?” Brandon asks—despite the fact that Abrams was only asked back to direct Episode IX after Disney got cold feet about Colin Trevorrow’s take on what was supposed, by design, to be a film trilogy with no particular author at all.
Anyway, please consider this your regular reminder that, for as much as our society seems to be hell-bent on deforming itself into some new and strange shape, people being pissed off about The Last Jedi is still a constant you can keep close to your heart.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Markey responded to Brandon’s comments about liking parts of The Last Jedi by saying, “Well, I guess we’re not telling the truth today!” We have been informed that the voice saying that line was actually that of podcast co-host Drew Taylor, not Markey. We regret the error.