Star Wars 9 : The Rise of Skywalker

[Riggswolfe]

I am only more convinced you don't understand what is happening in these movies. You have fundamental misunderstandings about the things that happen in them. Not even like, sub-textual misunderstandings. Flat out textual misunderstandings.

Yeah...I'm the one with the fundamental misunderstanding because I don't think Finn's suicide attack was going to cause him to fall to the Dark side. Yeah...that's what's going on. I think you're retconning this scene in your mind since Rise of Skywalker very strongly hints he is Force sensitive which isn't hinted at really in the previous two movies.  It's sad and funny. You do you. You like the movie for whatever reason and have retconned the entire series to fit that. Uhh...congrats I guess?

[Jeff Kelly]

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

[Shannow]

SW movie threads may be the stupidest thing.

The movie was fine. Better than the last, there are worse ways to spend 2 hours on Boxing day.

[Hoax]

holy fuck Goum clinging to the idea that Finn falling to the dark side after his sacrificial suicide attack is a valid reason to prevent it is peak Star Wars thread. fucking numbnuts

ROSE DIDNT WANT HIM TO END UP IN DARK SIDE HELL LOLOLOLOL1

also this:

Arguing about any individual plot point in TLJ is like having a debate over whether the slightly firmer part of a turd used to be chicken or pork. It's a garbage movie that fails to pass even casual scrutiny of the plot, structure or story beats. Like, there is no part of the movie that you can apply any amount of critique to, that doesn't immediately collapse into a singualrity of shit. It's the shitception. The deeper you look, the more shit there is. Mandelbrot shit.

The movie constantly sets up situations then proceeds to utterly fuck the landing each and every time. It asks you to hold contradictory feelings about main characters. It's the 8th film in a 9 film arc and it deliberately throws away all continuity with the previous episodes.

Anyone defending this turd salad needs to have their brain put through a blender.

I want to say though, it was probably better than TFA. The thing was TFA was such a weak setup that I went into TLJ concerned so it took less for me to be not engrossed in the movie and instead be sitting there thinking about why exactly I was sitting there.

[calapine]

Guys.....it's Christmas.  

Look, a kitty:


I will concede, some of the interpretations expressed in this thread, questionable they are.

[jgsugden]

Guys.....it's Christmas.  

Look, a kitty:


I will concede, some of the interpretations expressed in this thread, questionable they are.

A cat jedi like that should have a blue lightsaber.  Not a yellow one.  And it should make light, not be squishy.

[Paelos]

Saw it yesterday, liked it a lot. I think the hate is unwarranted. It was a fun movie that capped off the action space opera.

[Khaldun]

Arguing about any individual plot point in TLJ is like having a debate over whether the slightly firmer part of a turd used to be chicken or pork. It's a garbage movie that fails to pass even casual scrutiny of the plot, structure or story beats. Like, there is no part of the movie that you can apply any amount of critique to, that doesn't immediately collapse into a singualrity of shit. It's the shitception. The deeper you look, the more shit there is. Mandelbrot shit.

The movie constantly sets up situations then proceeds to utterly fuck the landing each and every time. It asks you to hold contradictory feelings about main characters. It's the 8th film in a 9 film arc and it deliberately throws away all continuity with the previous episodes.

Anyone defending this turd salad needs to have their brain put through a blender.

Which turd salad? Anybody who can argue that TLJ is a turd salad but that FFA and ROS aren't are suffering from severe cognitive dissonance. Someone who argues that they all are? Ok, fine, you're consistent at least. But anyone who can't tolerate what they see as narrative incoherence in TLJ but who is cool with the supposed fun and jollies of ROS has such utterly contradictory standards for coherence that I don't know how they watch movies of any kind without having a stroke.

I'll stick to my guns on this: TLJ had the right *ideas* about SW. None of the sequels are very good movies as such in terms of craft, tightness of narrative, etc., but TLJ is the only one with a vision of what it wants to be that is remotely interesting. The Abrams sequels are cinematic garbage AND utterly cynical; their only virtues are some good characters with some good actors backing them.

[lamaros]

Khaldun: TLJ's one true internet defender.

[Khaldun]

There were actually quite a few people who liked it, but whatever.

[IainC]

Which turd salad? Anybody who can argue that TLJ is a turd salad but that FFA and ROS aren't are suffering from severe cognitive dissonance. Someone who argues that they all are? Ok, fine, you're consistent at least. But anyone who can't tolerate what they see as narrative incoherence in TLJ but who is cool with the supposed fun and jollies of ROS has such utterly contradictory standards for coherence that I don't know how they watch movies of any kind without having a stroke.

Can you link where I've done that? I'll wait.

[HaemishM]

TLJ had IDEAS about Star Wars, but I certainly wouldn't argue they were the RIGHT ideas. I thought most of them were shit. TFA also had ideas, and I think they could have been good for the franchise if they had been developed by someone who either gave a shit about them (Rian Johnson clearly didn't, since he ditched like all of them) or someone with the competence to make them decent (RoS shows that JJA was in no way competent to bring those ideas to fruition).

This trilogy is as bad as the prequels.

[Riggswolfe]

TLJ had IDEAS about Star Wars, but I certainly wouldn't argue they were the RIGHT ideas. I thought most of them were shit. TFA also had ideas, and I think they could have been good for the franchise if they had been developed by someone who either gave a shit about them (Rian Johnson clearly didn't, since he ditched like all of them) or someone with the competence to make them decent (RoS shows that JJA was in no way competent to bring those ideas to fruition).

This trilogy is as bad as the prequels.

To be fair to JJ, he was handed a turd of a movie to follow up on in TLJ, Carrie Fisher died and the fanbase was split so he was going to have problems no matter what he did. To be blunt, if Disney had called me to direct RoS I'd have told them "Hell no!" and hung up the phone. This was a no-win situation. I think if Rian Johnson had been a more competent writer and/or Kathleen Kennedy had actually enforced some kind of vision for this trilogy things would be different.

Which turd salad? Anybody who can argue that TLJ is a turd salad but that FFA and ROS aren't are suffering from severe cognitive dissonance. Someone who argues that they all are? Ok, fine, you're consistent at least. But anyone who can't tolerate what they see as narrative incoherence in TLJ but who is cool with the supposed fun and jollies of ROS has such utterly contradictory standards for coherence that I don't know how they watch movies of any kind without having a stroke.

I'll stick to my guns on this: TLJ had the right *ideas* about SW. None of the sequels are very good movies as such in terms of craft, tightness of narrative, etc., but TLJ is the only one with a vision of what it wants to be that is remotely interesting. The Abrams sequels are cinematic garbage AND utterly cynical; their only virtues are some good characters with some good actors backing them.

I won't be taking any advice from you about what's good or not in Star Wars. You're willing to die on the hill that is "TLJ is a good movie!" Go join the people who think the prequels are awesome in the rubber padded rooms please.

[Abagadro]

I'm going to finally land on the idea that the entire third trilogy is kinda just crappy on the whole and that what should have happened is George Lucas being an executive producer providing overall story guidance but letting otherwise good filmmakers write and direct them would have been the better path from what we got (this also includes the prequel trilogy, who'd a thunk).   He cobbled together a pretty cool sandbox but both shit in it himself and then turned it over to people who had no clue what to do with it in films.  The fact that multiple tv series and games have been great in the IP points the finger pretty firmly to people like Kathleen Kennedy, JJ, and Michelle Rejwan or maybe the film medium just doesn't lend itself to it after the first go-round.

[Velorath]

As bad as the sequel trilogy was, George's stated idea for the sequels was worse so they probably made the right call not having him involved.

[Paelos]

I liked that the action didn't drag, and I liked the light/dark aspects of the movie with Ren/Rey. I also liked the cameos and several comic moments.

The dialogue only made me roll my eyes a couple of times, and overall was fitting with the action so I rarely noticed it.

The plot movement held together for me better than TLJ.

[Khaldun]

Go here and collect 30 boar livers! Then go there and do a FedEx quest! Then have watch a QTE with Rey! Then go where the next quest giver sends you!

I mean, maybe that seems like an actual story to some of you because you've played a bunch of MMOs and you're used to it. But none of it makes any more sense than a slo-mo chase through the galaxy. And at least the dumb casino planet sidequest in the last one had a point to make about the overall conflict and pushed some character development. The C3PO sidequest in this one had no point besides "give Poe a girlfriend and tell us that he's the new Han Solo so people stop expecting him to hook up with Finn"--they cancel out the only consequence of the whole thing fifteen minutes later, and the supposedly 'dark' droid-memory guy is a cute little muppet who seems wholly benevolent. Oh, wait, there's a captain's medal that lets you land on any First Order ship without them even looking at your ship or having any real security when you land, right, without which the girlfriend can't get off the planet only actually somehow she can later on just in time to join the battle and avoid getting rando-blownup on her planet.

Anybody who had a problem with the go-to-lightspeed suicide maneuver or the bombing ships in the last one should be flipping out over the utter ridiculousness of the Final Order fleet and all the contrivances thereof.

[eldaec]

That's no different to a typical MCU plot and not really the problem here.

I do agree that this stuff is more visible because the quality of writing is not great.

[Khaldun]

Compare the pacing and craft involved in Endgame's McGuffin hunt to this movie. Endgame was the culmination of a long-term plan. The exchanges between the characters are incredibly well-written and reflect the care that's gone into developing each one of them. The turns and twists of the plot ratchet upwards towards several big set pieces that have major emotional payoffs. There wasn't anything in this flick even a thousandth as rewarding as the "portals" scene in Endgame and for god's sake, there should have been considering the road travelled to get to this point.

Citing the MCU is just a great way to further accentuate what a crappy movie this is and how crappy the sequels as a set of films are. The only moment that they seemed to have an actual direction in mind on the key narrative arcs and world-building vision was in some elements of The Last Jedi, despite the bad narrative structure of that film. This movie has absolutely no idea of the way forward--the only thing you could do with Star Wars if you followed this movie's lead is have it center on fighting more ships that can destroy planets be blown up by more small ships against which they have no good defenses, have Palpatine have made yet another plan that will bring him back to life again, have Rey have children because the Force is apparently like a royal bloodline rather than a spiritual energy that binds all life together, have one of the kids be a bad seed, then reveal that Luke Skywalker had a hidden love child who was raised by Lando Calrissian on the planet of the Black People who can be trained by Finn and Finn's girlfriend in order to fight Rey's evil Sith child, and then do a few quick nostalgic flashbacks to Jar Jar Binks, Boba Fett and General Grevious.

[eldaec]

I'm not sure endgame's dialog is 'incredibly well written'. But I do agree that, like all JJA films, it is in the detailed writing work that TFA and RoS really fall down, and that means the fairly silly plot shows through too clearly.

The bloodline thing was horrible. But unimportant, because the one thing I actually think the series did far better than the OT is showing Rey struggling with light/dark.

[TheWalrus]

Bioware always did really well with light/dark options.

Help the poor citizen
-or-
Murder the bastard in front of his children

Subtle nuance there.

[Riggswolfe]

The bloodline thing was horrible. But unimportant, because the one thing I actually think the series did far better than the OT is showing Rey struggling with light/dark.

Not just the OT, but the PT as well. Luke is pretty clearly a good person and only has like one very brief moment of temptation. Anakin on the other hand is a walking time bomb for 2/3rds of the prequels so other than a very brief moment when he can't decide if he should murder Dooku, we rarely see him truly struggle not to fall to Darkness.

They did a pretty decent job in TFA and ROS with showing that struggle in Rey. It's subtle in TFA but when you rewatch her fight with Kylo Ren she's definitely drawing on the dark side when she overpowers him. TLJ actually fell down on this pretty badly other than its hamfisted nod to the Dagobah dark side cave. RoS kind of overcorrected and had her acting angry for a big chunk of the movie only to pull back at the last moment because of Ben Solo. I actually really liked that honestly, it was like his redemption also pulled her back from the brink.

On another note, one thing I really liked in this movie was the concept of the Force Diad. I hope they keep the passing objects through the force thing confined to only Force Diads and that they don't get overused in Star Wars media. I wish they'd introduced the concept in the first movie honestly to give it time to really breath but I did think it made some of their earlier interactions make more sense retroactively, like how even in TFA Kylo is obsessed with her.

[eldaec]

Part of it is that the acting is better in every star wars after the OT, because they could hire better actors.

The rey/Kylo passing objects thing was pretty cool in this. The moment Rey passes the thing toward the end was a cool moment even if telegraphed from when Kylo throws the thing and retelegraphed when Luke tells rey to take the thing. More than anything it was cool because Adam Driver had done a really good job of acting like a new character. His choreography had changed completely.

I didn't particularly rate Daisy Ridley in the first one, she was OK, but she did a great job in this.

Of course, non-movie star wars media will now be unable to go 5 pages without feeling the need to force teleport objects around the place.

[Threash]

Part of it is that the acting is better in every star wars after the OT, because they could hire better actors.

Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor etc are all great actors but those movies were not better acted than the OT, and that is entirely on Lucas who apparently did zero actual directing of the actors.

[Khaldun]

Of course people who flipped their lids about Leia flying through space because because we'd never seen that and oh god now what is going to happen in later movies with that new power are ok with "the Force lets you teleport actual physical manufactured objects through space if you're part of a 'Force dyad'".

We've never seen ANY light-side Force user be particularly compassionate or altruistic towards strangers except in the Clone Wars cartoons and associated media, really. Finn shows more compassion and altruism (at risk) in all three sequels than any Jedi. Shit, the Mandalorian has shown more direct compassion under circumstances where again, it puts him at enormous risk. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan get reluctantly entangled in the affairs of the Gungans and barely tolerate Jar Jar (which I suppose is a sort of compassion, vaguely).

We've actually never seen a Sith act selfishly or self-indulgently, for that matter, except maybe Anakin with Padme *before* he goes Dark Side. And arguably that was real love. We've seen Sith angry and murderous and focused on the acquisition and maintenance of power. But neither faction actually seems to have an everyday morality that maps to what we often think of as "good" and "evil". They are both highly disciplined, focused on relatively narrow missions. It's really more like lawful neutral v. neutral evil.

Not that this movie had anything even remotely interesting to say about the Sith or the Jedi as factions per se. It did good work with Rey the character and Kylo the character, that's it.

[Samwise]

Of course people who flipped their lids about Leia flying through space because because we'd never seen that and oh god now what is going to happen in later movies with that new power are ok with "the Force lets you teleport actual physical manufactured objects through space if you're part of a 'Force dyad'".

Who are these people that you're arguing with?

[Riggswolfe]

Of course people who flipped their lids about Leia flying through space because because we'd never seen that and oh god now what is going to happen in later movies with that new power are ok with "the Force lets you teleport actual physical manufactured objects through space if you're part of a 'Force dyad'".

Who are these people that you're arguing with?

The only complaints I saw about it was that it looked silly in its execution. She looked like Mary Poppins, not a Force User.

[HaemishM]

I flipped about it because 1) it looked INSANELY STUPID (breaking the rule of Cool) and 2) it deprived us of a decent death for Leia who ended up dying anyway. Not that I minded the way they handled her death in ROS, but it would have worked much better for the movie had she been killed instead of spoonful of sugaring her way back from the outer limits.

[Paelos]

Seriously, who broke Khaldun?

[Samwise]

The Leia flying thing mostly seemed dumb to me because it wasn't set up in any way (a couple of vague lines way back in RotJ don't count).  The way to introduce something like that is to set it up in a low-stakes scene before using it to resolve a high-stakes scene.  

Example from another story: Bilbo gives Frodo a mithril shirt at the very start of the story, establishing that Frodo is secretly armored.  It's a low stakes scene that is mostly about an emotional moment between Bilbo and Frodo, but it's also a setup.  Later in the story, Frodo gets stabbed in the gut, and it's a very intense high-stakes scene, and because everything is happening so fast we think he's a goner -- but that's right, he had that armor shirt!  That's the payoff.  If the mithril hadn't been explicitly set up beforehand, it would have come off as deus ex machina bullshit.

I haven't seen ROS and don't plan to in the near future, and unlike the voices in Khaldun's head I certainly have no interest in white-knighting it, but if they did some sort of teleportation thing there I guess it was at least set up in TLJ by having water get from Rey onto Kylo when they were Force-Skyping, which has no consequence in itself but establishes that their connection allows stuff to get from one to the other.  All the Rey/Kylo stuff was the best part of that movie IMO.

[HaemishM]

All the Rey/Kylo stuff was the best part of that movie IMO the entire new trilogy.

Fixed that for you. Their conversations through the Force was the best part of both TLJ and ROS in every way - visually, narratively and the acting involved.

[eldaec]

All the Rey/Kylo stuff was the best part of that movie IMO the entire new trilogy.

Fixed that for you. Their conversations through the Force was the best part of both TLJ and ROS in every way - visually, narratively and the acting involved.

And for all the 'TLJ was completely ignored' you keep hearing, Rey and Kylo's relationship was entirely a TLJ creation. TFA did none of it and wasn't really capable of it.

RoS wouldn't have gone there either without TLJ.

[eldaec]

Of course people who flipped their lids about Leia flying through space because because we'd never seen that and oh god now what is going to happen in later movies with that new power are ok with "the Force lets you teleport actual physical manufactured objects through space if you're part of a 'Force dyad'".

Who are these people that you're arguing with?

The only complaints I saw about it was that it looked silly in its execution. She looked like Mary Poppins, not a Force User.

Not as silly as 'Oh she trained to be a Jedi in her spare time. Look, a flashback'.

[Riggswolfe]

On a more humorous level I just realized Rey is going to be lucky if she is not haunted by a pissed off Force ghost.

[Samwise]

Not as silly as 'Oh she trained to be a Jedi in her spare time. Look, a flashback'.

Wait, is that a thing that actually happened in RoS?  Holy shit.

I remember after TLJ trying to think of all the ways they could have revealed Leia as a Jedi that would have been better than her flying through space.  I lost count, but I think the best one I came up with was a scene where Poe makes some smarmy crack about the Force (a callback to Han's "hokey religions and ancient weapons" line from ANH) and then half a minute later while he's distracted by something else Leia mind-tricks him in some trivial way, like she just needs to get him out of her hair so she goes "don't you need to go check on your ship?" and he blinks stupidly for a second and then says "don't I need to go check on my ship?" and fucks off.  Leia smirks, end scene.  Now we get to wonder what other tricks she has up her sleeve.