The new trilogy cribs too much of its plot from the first trilogy.
I’d be more impressed with Abrams there if he hadn’t fucked it up just as bad with “hyperspace skipping.” Turns out, traveling through hyperspace *is * like dusting crops.
I was pretty meh on the film. JJ Abrams has great ideas that go nowhere. He has no idea how to handle the story that Rian Johnson left him, so he creates a whole new one - then bungles the end to that. Bringing back Palpatine as some sort of Force lich is a great idea. That should have been the first movie in the trilogy. It gives the whole series a unifying theme of multiple generations of the Skywalker family fighting against Palpatine. Instead, we get Luke’s one major accomplishment - restoring the Jedi order - undone in the first movie in the trilogy, and his other major accomplishment - killing the Emperor - undone in the third. At least he still has “letting a mass murderer go to Jedi heaven” to fall back on.
Also, when Rey’s all, “I have all the Jedi with me,” or whatever, how do you not have an army of Force ghosts behind her, with every recognizable Jedi from the franchise front-and-center?
YES! That would have been AMAZING, and also demonstrate just how powerful becoming part of the Force is supposed to be, demonstrating exactly how being a spirit would provide the support Rey needed. Whispery voices don’t mean diddly.
I think I loved most of this movie, but it was clearly an almost 3+ hour original edit that was trimmed down into the movie we see. The opening 30-40 minutes felt edited down a lot and was very rushed.
Still, it worked as a movie quite well…though I have questions:
How did the Emperor come back to life after Darth Vader killed him? Dominic Monaghan had a very quick line about “dark cloning” or something. Uh, it would have been easy to have the Emperor discuss his survival. “In spirit form I roamed for years until I found a body…” Kind of like Voldemort.
That arena area at the end. Were there really a bunch of people there chanting as the Emperor talked about the ritual. Were they real or just ghosts of sith? I have no idea what was happening with this ending.
The Emperor can:
a. shoot his lightning way up into the sky
b. control it so well that it only fries the opponents ships
Is that right?
Like the Resurrection Stone does with Harry Potter. I thought they were going to form a ring around Rey or something. Nope, just voices. I wonder if they could not get the actors in the way they wanted.
Well first off some of them are cartoons (Kanan and Ahsoka), some are dead (Alec Guiness), and a few look nothing like they did when they died (Hayden Christensen and Liam Neeson). I’m sure they could have gotten around most of that but the reality of getting ALL of them back just for that one scene would have been quite a bit of trouble and they would’ve had to completely skip the cartoon characters which would have been a shame. And if you can’t get them all it wouldn’t be the same.
When Rey first entered, I thought I saw giant piles of skulls in the walls behind her, so I’m leaning towards “Sith ghosts.”
I figure the Emperor sitting on his throne in the heart of a ancient Sith fortress has a lot more juice to play with than usual, so I can give that scene a pass.
Haven’t read through the thread yet but just got back. That was 4 hours of movie crammed into two hours that felt like an exhausting 3.5 hours. And not in a good way. Also probably the worst editing I’ve seen in a major film since Suicide Squad.
Story was… meh. I was bored and ready to get up in the first 20min (but my wife was there so I didn’t). Bunch of humor that didn’t land (no one in the audience laughed at all the obvious sight gags) and bunch of usual pew-pew stuff done before.
Plus he had just sucked out Rey and Ben’s juice as well. I think it’s strongly implied that, in that moment, he’s the most powerful Sith Lord that’s ever existed.
I’m going with “never died” entirely due to how fucked up his body was, most people seem to think it was a clone but it doesn’t make much sense to me. Don’t think they actually explained it.
Yeah, Dominic Monaghan mentioned “dark cloning” or something(it was one two-second line).
Anyway, I think there had to be an explanation, even if it was kind of quick and lame. Leaving it without even a hand-wave explanation was bad. The editing was very rough on this movie, but they should have left some lines in for this.
Just finished it. Haven’t read the thread yet. My initial thoughts - lots of great stuff, but I don’t think it worked as a whole. Just too much “epicness” with not nearly enough build up and tension. It never felt particularly substantial, even with all the huge things going on.
I see that a lot of people are either ‘meh’ or downright antagonistic towards bringing back Palpatine as the big baddie, but the thing is I actually think it would have been perfectly fine and cool to do that if that move had been properly telegraphed in TFA and carried through this entire trilogy.
Seriously, these sequel films are a textbook example of how to spectacularly fail at outlining a story arc and sticking to it. I don’t care about any spin that JJ et al are spinning now, but IMO it is obvious that TROS’s answers re: Rey’s parents and Palpatine were the consequence of JJ and his cowriter having to retrofit a bunch of story beats onto a narrative that did not go where it was originally supposed to go. The result is a sudden revival of Palpatine that is never explained and that makes no sense.
On the one hand, you can thank Rian Johnson for creating an entirely inconsequential and dumb TFA sequel - Rey receives no training and she moves some rocks; that’s it, that’s the movie! - but the higher ups at Lucasfilm deserve some flak too for not forcing Johnson to stick to whatever endgame JJ had originally outlined. Such a mess.
The way I read it was that he managed to preserve his consciousness after death much like how the Jedi can become Force ghosts, and he eventually managed to implant himself into a clone body the cultists on Exagol made for him. Snoke was probably an early, imperfect clone that he was controlling.
I also didn’t like the Palpatine thing, and didn’t like that Rey was his granddaughter. Maybe it could have worked if this had been the plan all along, with twists and hints and build up. But out of the blue, I don’t think either really worked.
Lots of great moments, but not enough build up and tension for those great moments to feel earned. Except maybe the Kylo/Ben heel-face turn. That had been hinted out through the whole story, and even if it was compressed in this movie, I still bought it, probably because Driver is such a phenomenal actor.
The things I liked best were Rey and Kylo, and they’ve been the best parts of all 3 movies. The fight in the ocean was really terrific. TLJ was my favorite, by far, of the new trilogy because of how it handled them, as well as how it handled Luke (IMO the only possible way Luke would have sat on his ass while Kylo murders billions in TFA would be if he had had some sort of existential crisis of meaning, and Rian Johnson managed to make that work and feel real).
But overall… I don’t know. I think I’d like to see it again, because there was so much stuff that I’m sure I missed some call backs and cameos and the like. But I don’t think it’s going to make the out-of-the-blue (and unexplained) Palpatine resurrection, and Rey’s bloodline, any less random-feeling.
It was uneven, but I enjoyed it. You could almost see the Disney hand behind the scenes, looking for merchandising options and locales for new rides. Too many jumps around in the first half of the movie, they were unnecessary. The second half was better even if you could see them setting up the “epic” closure and bookend from the first movie.
The way Rey finished off the emperor reminded me of the end of Wonder Woman. Seeing Ben smile was nice. The cameo from Harrison Ford gave me a little sniffle. They First Order spy was obvious, but with little payoff. The Sith fleet was pretty over-the-top, especially the planet killer cannon. I never would have guessed Keri Russel as Zorii. Nice that Chewy finally got his medal.
As I said, I feel like the story of how Palpatine convinced some woman to bear his child is worth telling. Rey was born in 15 ABY, and her father looked to be in his mid-thirties or so in the brief flashback we saw, so he was probably born between 25-15 BBY - either while Palpatine was Chancellor, or after he became scarred and deformed and declared himself emperor. Either possibility is potentially tragic and terrifying.
