I spent many sleepovers passing out during the pod race and waking up mid lightsaber duel. Episodes 1 and 2 were always the birthday movies of choice.
Running Jewel of Yavin was so much fun, what a good adventure
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I just bought it!
I can’t wait to read.
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The Last Jedi is a movie with really great ideas and storybeats, but the execution is…bad. The structure is not really good, and the whole porgs and the jokes and wits doesn’t really fit the story they are trying to tell.
But what it’s trying to say it’s something marvelous, and it is the best looking Star Wars of the whole franshice, the visuals elevate the SW universe to another level, and from what I’ve seen, TROS goes back to the blockbuster look that force awakens had.
Also I think maybe they sould stop trying the whole “THEY HAVE A GIANT LASER THAT CAN DESTROY PLANETS/SYSTEMS AND WE NEED TO SAVE THE GALAXY” and just give it to some up and coming directors with diverse styles so that they can tell smallers stories with all the planets they didn’t blew up yet.
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They really should stop doing that along with the fact that all the planet killing weapons have a fatal flaw that can destroy the whole station or ship. I rolled my eyes pretty hard when they revealed that by destroying the planet killing gun they could cause a chained reaction that would blow up the whole ship.
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The LotR series was instrumental in the cultural shift towards the sorts of hybrid nerd/mainstream franchise movies we have today. Revenge of the Sith has more in common with that series in terms of tone and presentation than the previous two prequels.
Most nerd culture movies in the late 90s and early 2000’s (Batman and Robin, X-Men, Spider-Man) didn’t take themselves fully seriously because most audiences probably expected something goofy and vapid. Attack of the Clones was only one year out from Fellowship, so that series hadn’t quite Changed Everything yet.
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I never thought they could get to the point of trivializing blowing up planets but here we are. From the moment they did like 5 in at once in TFA I thought “They can’t treat doing that that lightly.” Like that point probably got them to where everyone knows someone who got their planet blown up. And lo and behold they go for another one for no effective reason. They blew up scoundrel planet no one’s gonna remember because apparently no one even on it was killed.
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For sure that was the most low stakes and lamest planetary destruction ever lmao, I actually forgot it even happened until reading these most recent posts.
Genuinely impressive to top when they blew up those five planets in Force Awakens. That was even more hilarious because that was supposed to be like the capital/governing bodies of the New Republic or whatever and, uh, I guess the galaxy was just cool with that since the Resistance was still just a small resistance with a few X-Wings at the movie’s climax?
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It’s been amazing to watch ‘the discourse’ surrounding this film with more and more people going in with hopeful expectations and then reaching the other side. I have one friend who adamantly hates the TLJ and is convinced that ToS is the best of the Disney Star Wars… I had another one who wasn’t happy with TLJ but thought this this movie was the worst thing he’s ever seen at the cinema and would have preferred a third movie more in the vein of TLJ.
I’m still amazed at how jumbled it all felt. Even the prequels still at least felt like Star Wars. I keep on going back to the bit in the desert just felt like something I would read on a subreddit. It was such a escalation of different emotions which probably read okay on the page but it had absolutely zero filmic flow. Rey leaps a tiefighter and cuts it open with a lightsaber. Rey and Kylo Ren stand looking at each other. They do the thing from force unleashed and suspend a space craft in the sky. But then lightning comes out of her hand indicating her true heritage. Kylo Ren smiles in secret. She thinks she has killed Chewie but no… Cut to spaceship. Door opens Chewis roars at Hux. Chewie lives! But everyone for the next two minutes thinks he’s dead. It may read good on the page - but it lacked any filmic resonance. I don’t think Star Wars can support things this convoluted.
The good:
- Adam Driver, Adam Driver and Adam Driver. The look in his face when he gets stabbed by Rey, he just looked so pathetic.
- Daisy Ridley was more expressive in the first film and seemed more hungry for the role, this one she feels more on autopilot but she’s still at least solid. The rest of the core cast are also strong despite the circumstances they find themselves in.
- C3PO has some funny lines.
- Good Chewie action. He runs, he jumps, he somersaults.
- That torch joke was good.
- They got Wedge Antilles back for a shot. I think he’s one of the many actors who grew to hate Star Wars, I hope he got paid handsomly for this shot.
- Had Carrie Fisher not passed, I think there was one more important scene between Leia and Kylo Ren and I think after much of the series being concerned with shitty fathers, I think this movie would dwell on decent mothers. I said this much in the TLJ thread. I guess they got to use Han again, which worked well but instead of Kylo being distracted by Leia, I think it would have been Leia who ultimately turned him back to the light.
The Bad:
- From the opening crawl - the Emperor storyline sucked. From the opening it lacked any grandeur in it’s visuals and just felt hastily put together. The fight in the forest with Kylo Ren cutting down those guardians, who I think were prefaced in Rey’s force dream in TFA. The Snoke tank… Palpy’s line about Rey’s true heritage. From the opening five minutes, I knew this film was in trouble.
- Rose Tico
- The multiple fakeouts.
- Lando - Just felt tacked on. Supposedly when Ben is charging into the sith temple at the end he’s using Lando’s blaster indicating in some earlier version of the story he would have give Ben a ride to the final battle. Supposedly he has a daughter.
- Hux was the mole all along! This is some pirates of the caribbean styled rug pulling. I know Hux was just supposed to be an angry little fascist boy, but surely he deserved to go out screaming looking upward as he got stomped on by an AT AT, like the bug he so was.
- Finn and Poe both have female love interests. Hooray for that. Finn had something to say to Rey. Revealed by JJ Abrams in a talk after the film’s release.
- Old school Star Destroyers can now blow up planets now. And there’s a star destroyer for every planet now to subject order on the galaxy. I guess it’s not a JJ Abrams film unless a planet blows up.
- For the amount of shitty fan service on display, why they didn’t at least give all the Reylos their happy end with Ben marrying Rey is weird.
- Chewie gets his medal. Finally. Justice is served. Who cares. All his friends are now dead.
What they should have done.
This film threw the Star Wars sink at the screen, but I was expecting more. I was expecting the portal scene from Endgame - all force ghosts termporarily come back to life for the ultimate lightsaber battle, whilst the emperor cackles in the background. I was expecting zombie star destroyers made out of wrecks. I was expecting the Emperor to ascend into the sky, pulling in all the wrecks to make a zombie death star. I was expecting Luke and Obi Wan to come back. I was expecting the emperor to resurrect Vader and for him to go after Ben and cut him down, then at the last moment Anakin comes in to save his grandson - to the cheers of everyone.I was expecting old man Sebulba racing his podracer on the side of that star destroyer yelling Poodoo as he ran over the red stormtroopers. You want all the force ghosts deflecting Palpy’s lightning, and then you want Rose to fire one of those death star lasers directly at the Emperor. You want the laser to blast Emperor into space, with him screaming no before it ends with a team rocket esque twinkle in the stars. Y’know, if you don’t have the chops to make something that says something relevant, if you are just going to go full stupid in the concluding chapter of the Skywalker saga. Do it properly for goodness sake.
I don’t know who exactly is at fault for how the film turned out. Ultimately, I don’t think JJ set or any of the film makers set out to make a bad movie. I’m left thinking that the only way a mess this convoluted makes it to the big screen is meddling from the top, and suits taking more control over the story based not on what they know about Star Wars but what dipshits said about TLJ on social media. I’m blaming Iger for this one.
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Your version sounds great ngl. I wish this movie/these movies remembered Anakin Skywalker, rather than just carrying his lightsaber around. They love Vader but not Anakin. Imagine if at some point Kylo goes back to the Vader helmet, tries to commune, and his granddad shows up and gives him the lowdown. Damn, that’d be dope.
I think blame for this movie can come from JJ and Terio, because they basically forced the Lucasfilm story group out of the room and wrote their own movie. The visual dictionary for this movie is like 175 pages, rather than like 80 or something, because they go back to the past 2 movies and take a bunch of it and recontextualize it. There’s this hilarious bit where they say Rey took Anakin’s lightsaber off Snoke’s ship because of her “innate scavenger instincts” or something. They use that wording at least twice, it’s incredible.
They basically seemed like they just came up with their own story that is only even slightly related to TFA, nevermind the obvious “oh man they just walked back TLJ.” It barely remembers TFA.
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A little Anakin/Ben pep talk would have been good to get the closure on Kylo Ren’s vision over Vader’s helmet or whatever was supposed to happen there.
I do feel bad that whilst Rey had that brief commune with the Jedi, not even Anakin talked to Ben down at the bottom of that hole to rise up. But I guess you can’t have two jedi pep talks so close together.
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It’s one of those mega-obvious fan service possibilities that would also thematically work.
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Imagine the sequel trilogy where Rey turns to the dark/grey along with Kylo after the throne room scene in The Last Jedi and Finn has to step in and become a Jedi to save the galaxy from their authoritative rule. The Last Jedi could stand as a condemnation of what the Jedi were and how they ruined the galactic order during the Clone Wars, and the final movie of the trilogy could recontextualize things like Light and Dark and answer those questions about what “balance in the force” really means. Finn would be suited because he’s force-sensitive (which they did nothing with!!) and he has seen and done evil things under The First Order, and he turned to the rebellion because he believes in morality and capital g Good. Plus we would get more John Boyega and more of Bad Rey’s dope double lightsaber. It’s a win-win.
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They were actually going to do this in Force Awakens when that character observes it and I’m still surprised they didn’t, there’s concept art for it and everything where Hayden Christensen speaks with him and becomes more burned/cybernetic looking while giving the lowdown about what a load of shit the Sith and Jedi are/etc. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXPQtXzWEAA5-tx.jpg
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Fuckin shit. Why didn’t they use this in this movie at least! It woulda worked so good!
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While I really disliked this movie and it has a ton of other problems that everyone already listed in this thread, the unrealistic release date imposed by the Disney overlords certainly didn’t help.
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One of the biggest complaints thrown at “Rise of Skywalker” is that the movie is pure fan service, which is not a claim Brandon will try to fight. “Look, sure, it’s fan service,” the editor said, “[but] if you didn’t service the fans, it would be, ‘Oh, he didn’t go along with the history of ‘Star Wars’ and what it all means.’”
I’ve seen way too many creative leads in my line of work play the “we have to do this to satisfy the fans” argument to justify these sorts of uninspired design choices.
I don’t doubt that they were under strict deadlines to get the project done, but I get the strong sense that there was a pervasive amount of creative defeatism in this film’s production.
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If you like that idea then you should check out the agent storyline in SWTOR. The big bad is this ancient shadowy organization called The Star Cabal. They formed in the aftermath of the Great Hyperspace War and believed that as long as the Jedi and Sith had power the galaxy would be in danger and eventually came to believe that there wouldn’t be peace until the Jedi and Sith are destroyed entirely. Naturally they became increasingly corrupt over time, but still a great final act villain. I would love for a movie, tv show, or other game to tackle a group like this and not immediately paint them as unhinged bad guys.
KOTOR 2 does do something similar, but it’s obfuscated because the game’s final stretch was unfinished. The point of the main villain’s scheme was to have the Exile internalize their philosophy and then change it with their own input, making it stronger than either her understanding of the light or dark sides of the force and rebirth one of the orders.
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