Loved it. Hit all the right beats for me. Ridley was great.
Did I want that *particular *BBE? Not really. But it really did nothing to diminish my enjoyment, because I’m both an adult who knows the world doesn’t just revolve around what I want; AND because I’m still that 7 y.o. kid coming out of the cinema making lightsaber noises, and there was some cool 'saber action in this one.
I thought it was a lovely shout-out to the Japanese roots of the series.
There’s Willrow Hood.
Yes, *that *guy totally has a canon name and backstory.
This is really the fundamental disconnect for these three movies. Even though I enjoyed them - and really enjoyed some of the turn-it-on-its-head of TLJ - not having an overall plan really worked against consistent tone.
It’s encouraging that the later announcements of Rian Johnson to put together a trilogy and the Game of Thrones guys - since rescinded - to do one. People may disagree with the choices, sure, but the idea that one creative force should oversee an entire arc is a good one that should be helpful.
I though the Force Awakens and Rise of Skywalker were ok movies, but ultimately very forgettable and mediocre. Last Jed is my favourite of the new trilogy. Despite some serious missteps, I thought Rian Johnson was taking it in a very interesting direction, and I especially liked Luke’s arc in that movie. The trilogy needed a more solid overall vision and direction.
There’s also people who didn’t have any preconceived ideas on how the trilogy should end and just thought it was a bad movie with poor pacing, editing, story-writing and fairly lackluster action sequences (undercut by the poor pacing and editing).
The people who seemed to like it the most are people leaning into the nostalgia factor and seeing this or that character get their moment.
Agreed. Maybe those people disliked how the movie seemed like five scripts fused together. How it had an ancient dagger that marked a spot that only just existed a few decades earlier. How every plot point was we need the thing to do the thing. How Kylo’s growth happened in seconds. How Rey solemnly buries Leia’s saber in a place she never saw or visited. I could go on. My disappointment is with the movie as it was, not what I wanted it to be because I honestly had no notions of what I wanted it to be.
Face it. The Star Wars 9 movie series has one great movie (and it isn’t Empire. Giant space worms? A non-ending ending?). The entire universe is living off the reputation of that one 1977 movie.
I admit I’m part of the problem. I keep expecting them to make a good one again. I see them all. I own them all. But none of them are that good.
Yes, that is exactly what I didn’t like about all three of the new films. Plus every new film seemed to shit on the last.
For all their flaws, the original trilogy (and Rogue One) at least had a cohesive story across all three films. It developed the relationships between the core characters (Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, C3P0, and R2D2).
It had a consistent enemy (the Galactic Empire, run by Palpatine, with Vader as his enforcer).
The battles had a strategic logic (in the context of the Star Wars universe) and grand scale.
Characters that needed growth and development, grew and developed over the course of the three films - Luke becoming a Jedi and his relationship with his father. Han and Leia’s angry romance. Chewbacca basically staying a sidekick and the droids as comic relief.
When they introduced a new character (like Lando), his story continued into the next film. Or in other cases (like Jaba or Palpatine), these were characters who were at least referenced as significant plot points previously. They just didn’t materialize out of thin air.
Lucas picked one kind of film for each movie to be. A New Hope is a group of heroes coming together to rescue the princess. Empire is a chase film/road trip movie (with a training film layered on). Jedi is a Guns of Navarone style commando war movie.
The problem I have with the latest trilogy is basically what you describe. It’s a bunch of disjointed scenes, bad storytelling, and half-assed reveals disguised by cool action scenes and snappy JJ Abrams dialogue.
Each act is just finding some McGuffin to direct us to where the next action set piece will take place.
Has Poe Dameron been in the same room with Ray for more than ten seconds?
Why does Rey believe Kylo is anything but a irredeemable monster?
Every “battle plan” seems to consist of "oh we can just sneak a team of dipshits with no military training aboard some giant base chock full of stormtroopers and blast their way to the magic button that blows up the fleet or whatever.
How did Palpatine create a fleet of thousands of star destroyers without anyone noticing? I feel like you would actually need the resources of a galactic empire to accomplish that.
Why did the First Order need to hollow out a planet for their planet-killing weapon when they could have just grafted awkwardly large planet-killing guns to some ancient star destroyers?
What did Luke know about Rey’s lineage and when?
Why is there a knife carved to look like some Death Star wreckage that points to a map of the secret Sith base? How did anyone know where to stand to line this thing up? Did they hide the map in the wreckage or was in on the Death Star when it blew and someone hunted down all the pieces to find it?
Why should a care that Rose only got a minute and a half of screen time? Was she important to the plot? Boba Fett only got like ten minutes of screen and fans actually like him
Why would Rey bury Luke and Leia’s lightsabers on a planet she’s never been, on a farm where Luke spent the first 19 years of his life trying his best to get away from? Because that’s where Luke was raised by two people he cared so much about that the sight of their burnt skeletons elicited a “well…nothing left for me here.”
I could go on…
What is the issue that people have with the “Holdo Maneuver”? Certainly ramming ships suicidally into each other is a legitimate tactic in warfare. Remember that the Executor was disabled in Jedi after an A-Wing crashed through the bridge while the shields were down.
I’d also expect it to be a relatively rare tactic because a) you need a ship of sufficient size to bust through the enemy ship’s shields and b) such large ships are relatively rare and valuable to the Rebellion.
It’s also easy to fanwank that the super-mega-Star Destroyer she rammed was uniquely vulnerable to that kind of attack. Really, it didn’t bother me at all - and it produced one of the top 5 visuals in Star Wars history.
Not really. As I brought up in a SW thread years ago, the Star Wars setting has 1.) highly advanced robotics and artificial intelligence 2.) cheap portable antigravity and 3.) extremely fast FTL. These three things should result in a post-scarcity, post-singularity society. Want a fleet of a million Star Destroyers or a thousand Death Stars? Drop an automated droid factory* on a suitable planet. Set it up to build mining and refining droids and use the materials that they mine to build more droid factories. When you have enough of those, start disassembling the planet and solar system to build your death fleet. Any moderately wealthy person should be able to do it. Lando probably would have had enough money himself just by selling Cloud City. The problem with Star Wars is that everyone doesn’t have a gigantic robotic death fleet.
*(as was used to build battle droids in the prequel movies)
(ETA: and if you need human crews for your ships for some reason, you can clone them by the millions–just one more job for the army of droids.)
These two, I’m okay with. Palpatine sets up on an uninhabited world with a droid-run factory and a cloning facility, and lets both run for 30 years, he could pretty easily come up with a fleet that big. And the First Order didn’t have the technology to miniaturize a Death Star canon to that degree.
If nothing else, the film deserves props for making the big doomsday weapons something other than a giant battlestation.
I was writing up an explanation for why the Holdo Maneuver is dumb, when I realized a perfect explanation for why nobody had done it before.
Up 'til now, hyperspace was a perfect escape. If you could jump, you got away - nobody could tell where you went. If you were in a tight spot, and you could jump to lightspeed, you jumped away. The Empire, by introducing hyperspace tracking, broke that paradigm. Jumping to hyperspace isn’t jumping to safety anymore. If having a ship that can jump to lightspeed doesn’t make you safe anymore, you might as well use the ship as a weapon.
It still doesn’t answer the question, “Why not strap hyperdrives to asteroids?” though. Or make giant starship-shaped slugs of metal and put hyperdrives on those. But it does make that specific scene work better for me.
I dunno; this is a society that hasn’t mastered the USB drive yet.
The First Order had the tech and wherewithal to transform an entire planet into an FTL-capable battleship that could absorb a star and transfer its energy into a weapon that fires across hyperspace and destroys multiple planets in a single shot.
We’re talking at least a 2 on the Kardashev scale.
Call me when they can transfer a simple message without needing fifteen minutes and some giant data cables (or a blurry 96 bit rate hologram)
Luke didn’t kill the Emperor, though. Vader did that. Luke’s mission was never to kill Palpy, it was to confront Vader. His personal motives were to turn his father back to the light. He succeeded, and that can’t ever be undone. I really don’t understand this particular criticism.
Kevin Smith gives a pretty good synapsis of the film [basically SPOILERS for the entire film]:
The other discussion on his channel is much better, since it includes Marc Bernardin…who is a bit more critical.
As Kevin Smith says at the beginning of the video you posted: he doesn’t really do reviews…
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They have a deep psychic connection. I thought that was made quite obvious, I’m surprised you missed it.
Watching the movie was an enjoyable enough two hours, but on the whole it wasn’t anything special. There were strategic missteps built into the premise, some of which may have been the least-bad answer to structural problems arising from not having planned out the final trilogy from the start, and having to adjust to the whiplash of different writer-director visions between Abrams and Johnson.
Ultimately, though, I could look past those if the movie itself was entertaining. Unfortunately I think that Rise of Skywalker failed on a basic block-and-tackle storytelling level. The only element of the movie that seemed to build over time was the relationship between Rey and Kylo, which on the whole I thought was handled pretty well. Virtually everything else consisted of disposable “gee whiz” moments that weren’t really earned or structured to fit together well. It was as if Abrams came up with a boatload of images that he wanted to include that would evoke nostalgia for past movies or otherwise push that “Star Wars feeling” button, and then just strung them together without much thought for making a coherent movie out of them.
At no point in the movie did I ever feel that the characters were struggling with having to make a decision, with the stakes of that decision made clear to the audience. At no point did it feel like the characters’ actions were motivated by their personalities or past experiences – everything that happened was the result of the director pulling the strings, arranging the action figures as required for the next set piece and then yelling “action”.
The result is that the film felt bumpy and illogical. But it’s not conformity with reality that’s required – I can swallow a lot in a science fiction film. It’s conformity with the rules of storytelling.
For example, there’s a scene where Poe runs into an old flame / ex-criminal partner, Zorii. They fight, very briefly, and then Zorii’s on Poe’s side, helping him out. They talk about how they still don’t trust each other, but it’s never shown, and glossed aside pretty quickly. We learn Zorii has a valuable resource – the medallion that will let her get off the planet. Within minutes she has turned the medallion over to Poe to help him get onto the Star Destroyer. It doesn’t take much for her to hand over her only lifeline. The medallion is used in the next scene and then vanishes from the movie.
Later we see the planet that Zorii’s on destroyed. So there’s a consequence; she has died in order to aid the Rebellion and Poe personally. Poe doesn’t make this connection. Minutes later Zorii shows up, with no explanation of how she escaped, and becomes part of the crew for the big battle at the end. There’s no emotional resonance, no “You left me to die!”, no inspiring sacrifice. It’s just a bunch of things that happen, because that’s the kind of thing that’s supposed to happen in these movies.
There are countless examples of this sort of thing. Stuff happens because the guy pulling the strings thinks it will be thrilling for the audience, not because any of the characters would act this way. There are sacrifices, but they’re virtually all unwound within minutes – the Chewbacca fake-out is particularly egregious. There’s no risk to anything.
Running into Lando in disguise is fun. But why wouldn’t Leia tell Rey’s party that Lando is on the planet and there to help them? Why wouldn’t they just meet up? The only answer is that it’s potentially more fun for the audience; there’s no in-world answer that makes sense. Why does Rey have a two-minute fight with Dark Rey? Again, all for the audience – the encounter doesn’t have any effect on the characters, there’s no revelation like Luke had in his similar encounter with Vader on Dagobah. It’s all icing, no cake.
The image of Rey pinwheeling into the air and slicing the wing off of Kylo’s tie fighter is awesome and memorable. But what was Kylo’s plan there, to just buzz really low and knock her over? Was there any reason for this to happen other than “it looks cool, and gets us to the next confrontation scene in the desert?” I suppose if you put in the effort you could come up with something, but it would be adding material to the movie, not discovering stuff that was put in there deliberately.
When a character does something or says something in a piece of fiction, there needs to be two reasons for it. One, it has to be fun for the audience. Two, it needs to make sense in the context of the story. I feel like Abrams focuses entirely on the first thing and just assumes that will be enough. And to be fair, if you move fast enough, throw enough special effects in, and particularly if you have this deep well of nostalgia to draw on, then you can get away with that. For me at least, though, the good feeling fades quickly, like a sugar rush, and after an hour or so you’re just left with that empty calorie feeling.
I like that thought.
But I keep thinking that all of the Jedi needed to be dead in order to all work together with Rey in the showdown. Didn’t Vader do the critical parts of that?
Definitely the film’s best moment.
Overall, I enjoyed it. It did enough.