I really liked the whole “feel” of this movie, but it also felt rushed and seems like it had some massive continuity issues. Here’s some questions and observations.
I thought the second Death Star was destroyed on the forest moon of Endor, home world of the Ewoks. Did it migrate to some new moon or planet while we weren’t looking? That moon / planet looked nothing like the Ewoks home world.
Did they really just gloss over how Luke’s blue lightsaber came back?
Palpatine gave a weak showing in his showdown with Rey. He was constantly shifting the goalposts, and not in a good way. At first he wanted Kylo to kill her. Then he wanted to rule with Rey at his side. Then he wanted her to strike him down so the Sith would go into her. Then he was plotting to have Rey and Kylo together so he could suck their combined powers. Then he wanted to merge with all the prior Sith. It’s like he was making it up as he went along rather than having a grand strategy that he had plotted out beforehand.
For two decades we have claimed that if anyone other than George Lucas was incharge we would have a great movie (s).
As the sequel trilogy ends, we realise that was not true.
The dialogue and acting are much better (aside from Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor, who really were great in the prequels). But the story’s not. Prequel stories probably made more sense, too. It’ll be interesting to see what we’re saying in another 10-20 years.
Maybe it was a call back to Disney’s Return to Oz, in which Dorothy returns to an Oz that looks nothing like the Oz she left behind, so much grittier, dare I say even a little… goth/punk-fusion. Actually, I kind of liked the more down to earth feel of Oz in the return.
That part did bother me a little. Luke had a green lightsaber in ROTJ. The blue one he had in ANH/ESB was Anakin’s saber, which was destroyed in TLJ. Leia’s lightsaber looked like the one Luke had in ROTJ, but it also had a blue beam.
I guess Rey/Leia rebuilt Anakin’s saber, and for some reason Leia replaced the kyber crystal in Luke’s saber so it’d be blue instead of green.
I think the green one must still be out there somewhere else. There was that one scene when Luke was training Leia when he had the green one. Yeah, it was probably so we could tell them apart since they were both wearing helmets in that scene, but at least we got to see the green lightsaber one last time.
Didn’t Luke have the green saber in the TLJ flashback, where he was on the verge of killing Kylo? Maybe he left it there, as he made the decision to close himself off from the force and go into a self-imposed exhile.
I almost feel like there needs to be a ROS Pit thread for people to continue their rants on how terrible the movie/franchise is, and a Cafe Society thread where the actual plot, characters, settings of the movie can be discussed. I don’t want to curb anyone’s opinions or thoughts of the movie, but it gets a little tired constantly reading about how bad Star Wars sucks in Star Wars movies discussion threads.
That was my thought. The green saber was just gone, probably still on the island.
I’m curious about how the galaxy rebuilds its government after all of this. The New Republic government was completely wiped out in TFA, and the First Order has been wiped out after ROS. Who’s gonna run the show now? After the Empire fell, the Rebel Alliance had built a structure over the previous several years, so there were probably people ready to step up to form a new government then. But now there seems to be a total power vacuum. The Resistance is largely wiped out, and all of the random “people” that came to support the Resistance at the end, aren’t really part of any power structure. Seems like it’s just gonna be star systems jockeying for power now, which could make for some interesting stories (books, comics, etc).
Star Wars means different things to different people. There’s so much baggage to Star Wars that it has to be really difficult to create a story that would work successfully as a guaranteed crowd pleaser, where you have to appeal to casual fans of the movies; the intensely nostalgic fans; the obsessive nerds who loved the Expanded Universe in the books, comics, and games; and the new audiences you want to attract in.
I’m sure I could come up with five or ten ideas that might be decent stories that could be comfortably told within the Star Wars universe, but would they have the forty-quadrant appeal Disney would demand? Then you have to direct them, which takes someone comfortable with ensemble adventure films full of complex visual effects and stratospheric budgets.
What will be good about the new TV series is the risk is less pressure, and they can try out some new voices, new eras, new characters, new styles, and then potentially expand them into a new movie series. A popular choice amongst the Expanded Universe fans is The Old Republic, the timeline set a thousand years or more before the familiar saga, the origins of the Jedi or Sith etc, where the technology is largely the same, but there’s no baggage of the familiar Skywalker saga at all, so you can tell all new stories. But that is an unfamiliar locale for the casual fan, so a risky prospect. Better to try that on TV or animation first.
This trilogy has been an expensive experiment, and though it paid off in terms of return on investment, it was hard fought and arguably not won, so going back to a safe space for a while where they can lick their wounds and venture forth when it’s clear to come out again is a good plan.
Good points. I guess that’d mean Leia crafted her saber to look like Luke’s. It does open up a plothole when Leia talks about Anakin’s saber as if it were Luke’s creation, and Rey acting like she’s not worthy of earning it when she’s already been wielding it for awhile.
I’m gonna go ahead and fall back on “a wizard did it”.
The strong implication throughout the decades has been that, at a sub-galactic level, the Republic was inherently a coalition of feudal monarchies - you’ve got all sorts of kings and princes and dukes and counts running about, some of whom are constitutional monarchs and some of whom are actively governing their planets/systems. If I were in charge of Star Wars, there’d be a “Galactic Dark Age” coming where the galaxy is split into countless states constantly at war with each other, and I think that’d be a ripe field for stories to be told.
Hey, if the force can keep you from dying in the vacuum of space, it can keep you dry, too, properly wielded. That’s where we are now with the force. It just does whatever, like those giant eagles in Lord of the Rings.
This one felt like it was written by a guy soliciting ideas from a crowd and writing them all on a whiteboard, promising to find a space for each one. “Mushroom looking people? Great! Green smoke world? Let’s get that on the board. White pillar world? Can never have too many worlds. Giant Space Worms? Of course! Five thousand planet-destroying lasers? We can get that in…”
Remember Lost? Remember how right off the audience was like, “they’re dead!”, and they were like “Nuh uh!”, and then that turned out to really be their endgame?
That’s how I feel about this. They came out with The Force Awakens, many people correctly guessed what was going on (Rey being a Palpatine a big one), they threw some misdirection in with The Last Jedi, that unexpectedly did not go over well with the fans, and then swerved back on track.
Rey was NEVER supposed to be a Mary Sue with unimportant parents. Maybe Rian Johnson thought JJ had stupid ideas and tried to discard his stupid ideas, but that was not the original intent.
This movie was messy, and I blame that partially on duelling director visions, as well as unexpected things like Carrie’s passing. But, it was pretty much what I expected it to be. Maybe that’s not a good thing, but I’ll give this a 6/10.