Star Wars 9 : The Rise of Skywalker

[Velorath]

But please go on telling us about how horrible The Last Jedi was. Because that's what let to Abrams being hired to serve us all vanilla pap.

I can tell you that Last Jedi was bad and still think Abrams is bad also. TLJ had some ideas but couldn't find a way to build a story around them. ROS had zero ideas but at least showed a base level of competence in creating a narrative regardless of it being completely uninspired.

I can also say that ignoring distance and travel time doesn't make the list of the biggest problems any of these movies have. That's the kind of stuff people generally start to nitpick when they already aren't liking the movie.

Also Michael Myers doesn't really teleport around in Halloween and the area where the (original) movie takes place is pretty well defined as we see people go back and forth between the houses where most of the action happens. If you want to say Jason teleports in the Friday the 13th movies by all means make your case, but leave Carpenter out of it.

[Abagadro]

I'm liking this movie less and less the more I think about and reflect on it.

[HaemishM]

I'm liking this movie less and less the more I think about and reflect on it.

Just writing my post about it made me angry. This movie didn't hold together well in the theater and even the slightest bit of retrospection absolutely annihilates it.

[Riggswolfe]

But please go on telling us about how horrible The Last Jedi was. Because that's what let to Abrams being hired to serve us all vanilla pap.

The Last Jedi was pretty bad. Probably the only Star Wars movie worse than it is the Attack of the Clones. Out of the 4 lead characters of the sequels it utterly screwed up the stories of two of them. It did alright by Rey and Kylo Ren but only barely. Killing Snoke and making Kylo Ren the new Supreme Leader was just facepalm bad. Not because I cared about Snoke but because Kylo Ren as the leader of the First Order isn't interesting. He's just not. And there's no convincing reason for them to follow him either.

This movie had issues but I think at least half of them came down to "Shit, the Last Jedi spun its wheels on all of our non-force characters and killed off the potential threat we had to replace him with the character that was supposed to be our Darth Vader. Now what the hell do we do?" Can you imagine if the big threat of this movie was Kylo Ren? He's possibly the best character in the sequel trilogy, but he's just not threatening enough to be the evil threat the heroes have to combine to take down.

Sadly, I think on the Force side of things the Last Jedi had some interesting points it was trying to make. The problem, and it's a fucking huge one, is what it was trying to do wasn't a fit for the middle part of a trilogy. Ideally the middle part of a trilogy should basically be act 2 of the story and spend its time challenging the heroes and getting all the pieces in place so the third movie can wrap it all up. The Empire Strikes Back and The Two Towers do an excellent job of this. The Last Jedi did an awful job of it and it meant this movie had to waste about a third of its runtime trying to do all that setup.

[Abagadro]

I'm liking this movie less and less the more I think about and reflect on it.

Just writing my post about it made me angry. This movie didn't hold together well in the theater and even the slightest bit of retrospection absolutely annihilates it.

Was actually kinda funny. Went to a pre-opening day screening Thursday night. True die hard crowd. Only two moments got even the slightest reaction and even then they were pretty mild "wooos". Compared to the pre-opening night screening of Endgame where people were losing their shit so much I missed lines of dialogue.  It was just a mess.

My kid liked it though, so shows that spectacle can be effective on a fairly non-critical audience. Maybe that's what we reacted to back in the day and they are all messes.

[Velorath]

There were 2 positives though. Just two.

[Abagadro]

[Threash]

[Velorath]

 

[HaemishM]

 

Spoilers on spoilers. 

[Velorath]

 

Spoilers on spoilers. 

And the chain of spoilers continues:

[Threash]

 

Spoilers on spoilers. 

And the chain of spoilers continues:

[Velorath]

Vaguely remember. Haven't watched TLJ since the theater. Have no intention of doing so again.

[HaemishM]

It really isn't worth rewatching, especially when this movie really doesn't pay off much of anything they did there, for good or bad.

[Khaldun]

Sorry, man, but the fans who flipped out on The Last Jedi own a lot of this. You might not have liked the way TLJ did what it did, but it had the right ideas: to move on, this series has got to get out of its ruts. The only people making Star Wars who know what they're doing are Favreau and Filoni. They need to give them total executive authority the way Feige has it with MCU stuff--and let them just say fuck you to the worst fans if they need to.

[HaemishM]

Thing is, this movie feels like a checklist of "things to retcon/forget/change that the Internet hated," mixed with the usual callbacks to previous movies like when Lando says "I have a bad feeling about this." TLJ took chances but either did them badly or without good reason, and most of it didn't feel like Star Wars. This feels like Star Wars through the lens of an Internet forum full of incels with Star Wars bedsheets.

[Khaldun]

So get it straight: do you see why a film that took chances with the property was worth backing even if you didn't like it, compared to incel-fandom wanting Luke to come out of hiding and kill the bad guys single-handedly and giving Snoke a detailed backstory and etc etc? This was the point all along: even if you didn't like the actual film if TLJ, it was the right WAY to go, basically. But every fucking dipshit complaint about Snoke needing a backstory or Rey not having a long enough training montage or Luke drinking alien seal milk or whatever led to this ho-hum checklist garbage. Sometimes you gotta back the artist even if he/she made a less than perfect work in order to get the train onto a better path.

[Velorath]

Sorry, man, but the fans who flipped out on The Last Jedi own a lot of this. You might not have liked the way TLJ did what it did, but it had the right ideas: to move on, this series has got to get out of its ruts. The only people making Star Wars who know what they're doing are Favreau and Filoni. They need to give them total executive authority the way Feige has it with MCU stuff--and let them just say fuck you to the worst fans if they need to.

I liked some of the ideas TLJ had but the movie didn’t work, and the middle of a trilogy was the wrong place to try to insert them. They were shoving a square peg into a round hole with that movie and you can’t tell me that if they just kept trying to force it in there for another movie that it would eventually fit.

[HaemishM]

Sorry, man, but the fans who flipped out on The Last Jedi own a lot of this. You might not have liked the way TLJ did what it did, but it had the right ideas: to move on, this series has got to get out of its ruts. The only people making Star Wars who know what they're doing are Favreau and Filoni. They need to give them total executive authority the way Feige has it with MCU stuff--and let them just say fuck you to the worst fans if they need to.

I liked some of the ideas TLJ had but the movie didn’t work, and the middle of a trilogy was the wrong place to try to insert them. They were shoving a square peg into a round hole with that movie and you can’t tell me that if they just kept trying to force it in there for another movie that it would eventually fit.

This. I would have applauded TLJ for taking chances but if you take your chances, they have to hit. And when you are in the middle of a BILLION dollar franchise, you have to take those chances with some kind of PLAN in place, as opposed to "well, we left it all up to Ryan to make the choices but we clearly didn't back him in those choices because Rise of Skywalker exists." If they had started Force Awakens with Rian Johnson, with those ideas in place and thought out from the get go, the 3rd installment in the trilogy would have been decent, though opinion likely would have been divided as much as it was on TLJ. The problem was that TFA went one way, and TLJ went a completely different fucking way without any seeming rhyme or reason or any connection to TFA. You can't do that in the middle of a trilogy.

That Disney clearly felt they needed to "make it up to the fans" with Rise tells me that they didn't really believe in Rian's vision either. They just realized too late that Star Wars fans are very particular about the type of turds that show up in their Star Wars boxes. Not sticking with the same writer through the entire trilogy was a HUGE mistake. Rise had all the problems that Solo did only it was much much worse.

[Khaldun]

SOME Star Wars fans.

I'm a fan. I saw the first film 20 times in the summer of 1977. Fuck the people who got their panties in a bunch after TLJ. We didn't take a vote, we're not a country, nobody gets to declare themselves the real fan.

[Riggswolfe]

SOME Star Wars fans.

I'm a fan. I saw the first film 20 times in the summer of 1977. Fuck the people who got their panties in a bunch after TLJ. We didn't take a vote, we're not a country, nobody gets to declare themselves the real fan.

Some of the people upset about TLJ were the usual crowd of assholes. The ones who attacked the actress who played Rose and whined about Rey.

But TLJ had major, major issues.

The slow motion space chase was just idiotic. It made no sense in the context of any other Star Wars movie, tv show, comic or novel. All the First Order had to do was have a couple of ships make small jumps in front of the Resistance and blow them out of the sky.
The hyperspace tracker also makes no sense. It's never mentioned anywhere else and didn't show back up in Rise of Skywalker though RoS arguably had an even worse version of it in the beginning of the movie.

Finn and Rose's entire storyline was an utter waste. I get what Rian was trying to do but the contrivance with the space chase and the fact it was all an utter waste of time in the story undercut it badly. Finn was intended to learn a lesson there except the events pictured on screen really taught him nothing and wasted a lot of screentime.

Poe's story taught him a lesson though I don't think it was the one Rian intended. The intention was that Poe needed to learn to think and to not rush into things. But what he really learned is a leader doesn't have to tell anyone else shit and it'll all work out because the leader is smarter than anyone else. Admiral Holdo didn't tell a single person what her plan was and some of the crew mutinied over it. But hey, it worked. Guess that's a valid leadership style!

I have fewer complaints about Kylo, Rey and Luke. I think that the handling of the story about the night Luke almost killed Kylo was well done. I liked most of the training scenes with Rey. On the other hand, I do think making Kylo the new Supreme Leader after killing off Snoke was boneheaded. Kylo's like...30 or so? He's an impulsive hot head who is obsessed with Rey. This does not have the makings of a good final villain. I had mixed opinions about Rey's parents. I get what Rian was going for. I get showing that you don't have to be a Skywalker or whatever to make a difference. But doing that in the middle of a trilogy that is tying up the story of the Skywalkers isn't the place to do it. You do that in a new series of movies that don't have expectations in them. You also don't do it after the previous movie dropped hints that her parentage was important. It felt like being subversive just to be subversive.

Remove all of Finn and Poe and make TLJ its own "Star Wars story" and it would have worked much better. But as Episode VIII of what was intended to be a long story about this family and their impact on the galaxy it was a huge misfire. And as much as I've liked Rian's work on other movies the writing at times was just utter shit.

[pxib]

Apropos nothing: The original trilogy done as an anime opening.

[Hoax]

TLJ had the Luke/Rey/Kylo arc and a bunch of dogshit. It was a dogshit movie built around a stupid fulcrum of their space gas was going to run out but they are being hyperspace tracked so they can't run anywhere!? OH NOES. That's the device the entire movie relies upon to exist. Which means its structurally fucked.

There's a bunch else wrong, I felt like the comedy was especially kiddy/bad/unfunny in TLJ to the point where it helped remind me that I was sitting in a theater and had paid a lot of money to be there. Stop defending that movie like anyone who calls it out for being a dickshit luser is a MRA/incel type, that's bogus.

Don't get me wrong. TFA was as bad and probably worse.

Apropos nothing: The original trilogy done as an anime opening.

Noragami OP is a banger but a very odd choice. Surprised they didn't go with like TTGL or Code Geass.

[Threash]

We didn't take a vote, we're not a country, nobody gets to declare themselves the real fan.

This is the only vote that matters anyways.

[Hammond]

Finally got to watch this on Saturday.

I was born in 1976 so one of my earliest memories was Empires Strikes back. I was to young for A New Hope but we certainly watched it on VHS. With that in mind I didn't have high hopes for this movie and even so I was let down. Like others have said it was just not a good movie and a unfortunate ending to a long road.

Thankfully the Mandalorian is decent enough that I have that to fall back on and enjoy.

As far as money goes, In a 150 seat theater we had a grand told of 15 people. Not sure this was a reflection on the theater or the movie. When I watched Avengers at the same theater it was almost full on opening weekend. With 175 million estimated for the opening weekend it falls between Disney's estimate at 165 million and the 200 million investors were betting on. So it will be interesting where this will end up.

[Samwise]

https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/23/21034833/star-wars-episode-9-rise-of-skywalker-box-office-first-weekend

TFA: $494M opening weekend
TLJ: $437M opening weekend
ROS: $373M opening weekend

If we extrapolate that trend, after the next few trilogies they'll need paid seat-fillers, like at a Trump rally.  

We'll see if I can avoid seeing this one in theaters.  I didn't plan on seeing either of the last two but ended up getting dragged along and/or having my ticket paid for by people who were more excited about it than I was.  This time I don't think I know anyone IRL who's interested in it, outside of the handful of nutjob fans who already went and saw it and are pretending they liked it.

[RhyssaFireheart]

Just got back from seeing it with the husband and to be honest, I liked it. It felt like a satisfying end to the series to me and that's all that matters. *shrug*

[Threash]

Well clearly you are just pretending.

[Samwise]

I should elaborate -- the people I know who have been talking about it on my Facebooks have 100% been complaining about the "haters" and 0% been talking about how much they liked the movie in and of itself (except for general statements along the lines of "I've been waiting for the next Star Wars movie for so long," etc that could have been written independently of seeing the movie).  These are the same people who said that Ghostbusters 2016 was better than the original.  For a certain type of fan, I don't think it's about enjoying the actual thing, it's about winning some kind of personal culture war that started when they were in high school and the football jocks made fun of them for playing with action figures and has now become inextricably tied up with the need to oppose MRAs and incels on every battleground they can find.  And that's fine; I just don't engage with those people on any topic that's related to one of their fandoms and I completely disregard their opinion because I know they're evaluating things according to a set of criteria that have no relevance to me.

Rhyssa's review above was the most glowing and sincere praise I've seen yet of the actual movie, and it boiled down to "well, at least it's over".  Which is pretty much how I felt after the last episode of Game of Thrones.  

[Khaldun]

Look, there is nothing in TLJ that is idiotic as any number of scenes in Rise of Skywalker. But I'm sure the toxic fans who flipped out about the space casino or the slow-motion chase or the lightspeed destruction move will probably forgive this movie because it reprises every nostalgic impulse that babymen fans require.

Rise of Skywalker is easily the worst film in the series--it's not only creatively incompetent (like the prequels) but also grossly cynical (which the prequels weren't, at least). What a fucking awful cinematic abortion it is. It alternates between being boring, being confused, being desperate, and being incoherent, all the while making it a POINT to crap on the skills and possibilities of its likeable cast, its potentially interesting characters, and its situation. The few interesting moments and set-pieces are squandered, the humor is forced. There's about six movies trying to get out of the giant turd-monster they've been squeezed into, and only two of them are even interesting or possibly good.

I'm not even going to go into the hysterical attempts to throw off everything in TLJ as ballast, and the equally hysterical attempts to reassure the incel fans that don't worry Star Wars is not woke. Giving Finn a black girlfriend, having the two of them lightly suggest a mutual connection to a slave trade, and then having Lando Calrissan lightly suggest that there's a black planet out there that they might be from is the worst of it, but not the only.

[Khaldun]

The last season of GOT was, by comparison, vastly better. This was incompetency, fuck-you, and "please preserve the value of the franchise" wrapped into one hysterical 2+ hour turd. As with all hastily digested turds, there are chunks of undigested food in it that could have been delicious, once.

[Samwise]

having Lando Calrissan lightly suggest that there's a black planet out there that they might be from

 

[HaemishM]

I'm not even going to go into the hysterical attempts to throw off everything in TLJ as ballast, and the equally hysterical attempts to reassure the incel fans that don't worry Star Wars is not woke. Giving Finn a black girlfriend, having the two of them lightly suggest a mutual connection to a slave trade, and then having Lando Calrissan lightly suggest that there's a black planet out there that they might be from is the worst of it, but not the only.

Yeah, I was cringing throughout the whole discussion between Finn and the other former Stormtrooper who is black and whose name I don't even remember (did she even say her name?). I kept thinking, "So wait, are they going to say that Finn doesn't totally want Rey and have him go with the black chick? Isn't that like asking for serious trouble?" But then they just completely never follow through on any of the hinted romantic angles ever at all. I can't tell if they were trying to be too subtle or they just fucking forgot in their haste to add another 1500 Star Destoyers to the scenes.

Also, I think you are underestimating just how idiotic Luke Skywalker drinking the green teat milk was.

[schild]

having Lando Calrissan lightly suggest that there's a black planet out there that they might be from

 

If this is a real thing that happened

Fucking lol

Jesus Christ star wars

[Khaldun]

It was as not-idiotic as him drinking blue milk on Tatooine. It was fine. It was funny. It was alien. All of strike me as good for Star Wars.

This fucking SHIT? This fucking horrible piece of garbage movie? It is all kinds of dumb nope. This WaPo essay gets at how it's like a bad--I mean REALLY bad videogame, with the worst fetch quests ever. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2019/12/20/rise-skywalker-embraces-all-worst-parts-video-game-storytelling/