That looked super familiar to me, too, and I’m not sure from where. There’s a bit of the Borg Queen introduction to it, but I vaguely recall seeing imagery that was much closer to the RoS imagery somewhere.
Sometimes I think J.J. Abrams has a bit of a cargo cult mentality when it comes to movies. Like the apocryphal natives building a phony runway in the middle of the jungle, he knows what they’re supposed to look like and where everything goes, but he has no idea what the parts do and what their purpose is.
In my view what’s unique about things like Star Wars or GOT is that some people struggle to understand that their opinions are just that, opinions. Nothing more and nothing less. They insist that their view is THE ONLY CORRECT VIEW. Then they struggle to understand those that don’t agree and accuse them of liking garbage, or not caring about quality or all kinds of nasty things.
These statements are not the same:
- I didn’t like this movie
- This movie is objectively bad
1 is an opinion and is fair to say. 2 is implying that this is simply a truism and anyone that doesn’t agree is either struggling to admit it, or is deluded, or dumb etc…
all these complaints remind me of Shatner on SNL when he said “Get a life” , people take this stuff too seriously.
I don’t think he’s all bad; I actually liked the Star Trek movies he directed. But they were a reboot and a sequel to the reboot, so he didn’t have to really adhere to all the existing canonical Star Trek stuff out there, and both were standalone movies that weren’t part of a trilogy.
That’s the difference- the preceding Star Wars trilogies were coherent and self-contained, if not always terrifically executed. We knew that the first one was about Luke’s journey from farm kid to Jedi and the defeat of Vader/Emperor, and the second was about how Vader came about/how the Republic fell. But the third seems to have been a pastiche of multiple things, depending on which movie you watch. I suppose you might say it was Rey’s origin story, but even there, it’s terribly muddled- mostly just action sequences showing how powerful she is, and how she’s got some kind of weird connection with Kylo Ren via the Force. But we don’t find out who she really is until halfway through the third movie, and never find out anything about the weird connection. Nor do we get much character development for her either. And we never really find out much about Kylo Ren/Ben Solo either, other than he’s Han/Leia’s son, he fell to the dark side, and he’s now the big bad guy. Nothing about how he fell, why he fell, etc…
Meanwhile, we get no information about how the First Order arose, or how the New Republic became so impotent. Or how the Resistance formed, or anything like that- it’s all in place and unexplained at the beginning of TFA.
Few of the new characters are developed much- we don’t know what sort of inner turmoil Finn has after switching from being a Stormtrooper to a free person. Or much of anything really about Poe Dameron or Rose Tico.
Why? Because we’re too busy spending time having big visual scenes and not spending time on the dialogue, story and characters.
Think about it this way; we knew more about Jyn Erso and what makes her tick at the end of Rogue One than we do about Rey after THREE movies.
If I ever accost JJ Abrams and demand an apology, he’ll be correct to laugh at me. But BS’ing on a message board to pass the time isn’t really a sign of a serious obsession 
Also, there are different kinds of nitpicking. I enjoy thinking about how movie narratives are put together, what works and what doesn’t, what makes for good storytelling and all of that jazz. I like listening to the Scriptnotes podcast and reading film criticism. Applying that to a popular movie that a lot of people have seen and discussing what’s done effectively and what isn’t is, to me, enjoyable and productive conversation.
But I’m completely uninterested in arguing about what color a particular Kyber crystal is, or whether the Romulan script in episode 17 is different from the one used in the fourth movie, or how many Daleks can dance on the head of a pin.
I’d like to think it was that sort of thing that Mr. Shatner was fed up with in that SNL skit, but I wouldn’t presume to put words in his mouth. He (or his character in the skit) might be just as irritated at both kinds of fine tooth combing. Which is his right, of course, as it is the right of anyone here on the message board.
In which case, luckily, there are hundreds of other threads that might better hold such a reader’s interest.
I do hold, though, that discussion of screenwriting technique and story structure isn’t just a matter of opinion. That’s not the same as saying that certain things are objectively good or objectively bad. It is saying that when a writer or director does X, it tends to have effect Y. Whether people personally like effect Y is a matter of taste and kind of uninteresting, but teasing out that ‘rule’ exists and can be found in all kinds of media is, to me, a good thing.
The problem is that you are starting with a couple of films that are largely regarded as some of the greatest films of all time and which created a cultural phenomenon that lasted decades. They have spawned a total of eleven films, many of which, in spite of the big budgets, spectacular effects, and massive box office numbers, seems to leave a lot of people leaving the theater thinking “why didn’t I like that?”
Speaking of accosting JJ Abrams rumor has it that if you tell George Clooney you saw his Batman movie he will refund your ticket price.
I agree about the manic pacing—that was a huge problem for me. I thought of that same scene from Episode 4 while I was watching TROS.
Another thing from the original trilogy that came to mind was the series of scenes in ESB depicting the Empire’s search for the rebel base. We see the Empire sending out robot probes, Vader and an officer debating what one of the probes has discovered, etc. Meanwhile, the rebels realize they’ve been located and being preparing for battle. All of this takes a plausible amount of time. In TROS, the same sort of thing happens in seconds. The idea that the galaxy is huge with lots of places to hide is thrown out, and hyperspace travel is now instantaneous.
That was another thing that made me think of the original trilogy. In ROTJ, the construction of a second Death Star is depicted as a vast logistical undertaking, with thousands of people struggling to meet a deadline and materials being shipped in from all over the place. In TROS, a similar project was completed without anyone noticing.
Not so fast. I love Jupiter Ascending, for pretty much the same reason. “Makes sense” is overrated. It’s a nice-to-have for my spectacle Sci-Fi movies, not a deal-breaker if it’s not there. I only *require *2 things - cool visual spectacle, and actors I like. *JA *gave me both, as does RoS.
The Mrs. and I finally got around to seeing it last night. She and I saw Star Wars together back in 1977 it’s opening week too.
Her opinion: “OK, but not as much fun as the first two”.
Mine: I really liked about 15 to 20% of it. I enjoyed the relationships between Kylo and Rey, Rey and Luke, Han and Ben. It was good to see Lando again. 3PO amused.
Otherwise, meh. I had no great expectations, it was good to finally finish all 9 installments, had a few rushes of nostalgia, and went away sorry it wasn’t done better, but no big deal.
So I’ve been thinking about the trilogy as a whole, and it seems to me that the Rey and Kylo relationship is the one part that everyone agrees is the strongest throughline that succeeds almost entirely throughout. While every other character is just secondary or even tertiary and have stories that are inconsistent in tone, don’t really go anywhere, or just limply fill in the background.
The original trilogy had equal strength in each character’s storyline. Luke and Vader’s were the strongest, but Leia and Han held up their end too. Lando was just an addition that wasn’t paid off very well in the end.
In the prequels there’s no strong throughline. It should be about Anakin and Palpatine, but that was not very well handled. Or Anakin and Padme, less said about that the better, or Anakin and Obi-Wan, and that never really flowed very convincingly.
So if there had been more consistency in the secondary characters for this new trilogy, if Poe or Finn had just had a stronger impact on the main story, maybe it would have hung together a bit better.
True, and while I agree that (1) is an opinion, that doesn’t mean that a film, or at least elements of a film, can,t be fairly described as objectively bad. It is, in my view, perfectly reasonable to hold to (2) as well.
For instance… if all throughout the movie the picture is not in focus, outside of some kind of art film where that’s done intentionally and is supposed to be a metaphor for the uncertainty of life (or something), it’s safe to say that the camerawork is objectively bad. The same can be true of scripts or any other element of filmmaking.
But.
Just because a film or elements of a film are objectively bad, doesn’t mean you must therefore subjectively dislike it. You may well enjoy it, and for my part I won’t think any less of you unless you like it for reasons that I personally find distasteful*. I may even enjoy it. But it is absolutely possible to judge films and other artistic works on more than just a subjective level of enjoyment.
*For instance, if you like Birth of a Nation (1916) specifically because it’s racist (or rather you think it’s “totally not racist, and just depicts historical realities without catering to the PC crowd”), I might just think less of you. For that matter, I don’t think it’s all that great of a film in part because I think it’s entirely fair to judge a film by its message and the standards of OUR time, regardless of how “totally okay” people were with overt racism when it was made. But that’s neither here nor there, except inasmuch as I think we could demonstrate that the standards of our time when it comes to race and racism are objectively better than the early 20th century standards.
This shows up in Abrams’ Star Trek movies too - the Federation fleet takes like two minutes to warp from Earth to Vulcan, and Kirk can see the destruction of Vulcan in real time, with the naked eye, while he’s in a completely different system. Abrams seems to lack an understanding of how big space is. (I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.)
This is more or less where I am with Rise of Skywalker.
I was in college when the first film was released in 1977—I saw it on opening night with my friends, and we had already heard that Lucas planned to make eight more Star Wars films! At the time, that seemed like a pipe dream. Despite my overall disappointment with TROS, I had a pleasant sense of closure afterward; it amazes me that I finally saw the words “Episode IX” on the screen. I wish it had been better, but it’s just a movie and I’m not obsessing over it.
I’ve also realized that, although I’ve considered myself a Star Wars fan for most of my life, I’m not in the target demographic for Rise of Skywalker. I didn’t “grow up with Star Wars” and I don’t have the same kind of emotional investment in it that many younger people do.
I saw TROS with my son, who is 34, and he loved it. His generation got the movie they wanted, so good on them.
Ditto. My only involvement with the ‘Star Wars Extended Universe’ or whatever it’s called was reading the original movie’s novelization, plus “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye” by Alan Dean Foster back in 1977. Oh, and listening to the soundtrack’s vinyl LP over and over in my college apartment.
It was okay.
I could go on.
At this point I’m watching these merely for nostalgia and a sense of obligation. There’s absolutely nothing to admire in them. The plots are nonsensical. The characters are forgettable. Nothing coheres. It’s just one set piece after another.
The “suspended from a giant mechanical arm” bit was fairly recently seen in the crappy Assassin’s Creed movie.