One thing I noticed back in TFA and was even more evident here - **J.J. Abrams has no idea how to stage space combat. **It’s all about the juxtaposition of fast and slow, big and small. With Abrams, though, it’s just zipping around and never giving us a clear look at what’s going on. That final battle should have been amazing; instead, it was just a blur.
Reading some reviews and this thread, it seems your opinion on Last Jedi (which I liked, altough it certainly isn’t perfect) is a good indicator on how you feel about TROS. If you hated TLJ, you’ll like this… if you liked TLJ, you’ll be disappointed.
After reading some of the rotten tomatoes reviews, the 57% rating seems generous if anything. Some of those fresh reviews are pretty critical and give barely passable scores… Altough I was disappointed, I’d probably still give it 6 out of ten for being Star Wars…which would count as a positive rating there.
The point that it feels like a sequel to a chapter VIII that was never actually made, feels like a very good description of what TROS is.
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“Seek for the light saber that was broken…” 
I think most people’s criticisms are at least broadly on point; yet still, I had an enjoyable time at the cinema. There’s some truth to the idea that the original movies have come to be venerated beyond what their actual quality justifies, so new movies of comparable quality are going to feel like a bit of a letdown, but still, I think that this one broadly holds up in the end.
Perhaps its saving grace, to me, was that it seems JJ Abrams finally realized that he can’t actually do Sci Fi, and hence, didn’t. Space and tech were just a backdrop, and didn’t need to be anything more. Whenever Abrams decides to introduce some Big Idea, the exploration of which is the core of what makes good Sci Fi to me, he just ends up bungling it, leaving us with abandoned game-changers like transwarp transporters that end up having no real consequences at all.
Also, he just doesn’t have a sense of how a universe hangs together, both in the ordinary spatial and in the narrative sense; this sort of backdrop, which ought to constrain the story, to him always is manipulated by whatever means necessary to reach the next plot point, leaving one with the feeling of an inconsistent mess. But as I said, I think he mostly avoided that in this one—essentially by completely ignoring it.
I think we forget that these are the sith we are talking about who are both duplicitous and opportunists. His grand strategy was the fleet he had developed and possibly passing the mantle to some other worthy successor, everything else was basically reacting to new information and new opportunities. This also happened in the prequels were he had a strategy for taking over the republic but then found that he would be able to corrupt Anakin which would help him in that goal. Or in the original trilogy where he went from wanting to destroy Luke to seeing the possibilities if he turned him.
So yes, there was a grand plan, but when he found new opportunities, like the unusual connection between Kylo and Ren, he moved to seize them immediately. I agree that it would have been better if there had been a slower build up, but I did not mind him playing it by ear toward the end.
Also, the fact that he was brought back hooked up to a machine made sense to me because after all, he was the one who essentially kept Vader from dying after his encounter with Obi-wan. It makes sense that he would have technology to keep himself alive in case of emergency.
//i\
I liked both quite a bit.
Plus, Palpatine hooked to the machine, moving around on some great appendage, was both visually and symbolically arresting: he was essentially something like a giant predator’s lure, a human-shaped appendage dangling from something huge and unspeakable—meaning not the machine, but the dark side and all the Sith that came before him. Like the light of an anglerfish, or an insect-shaped leaf on a carnivorous plant.
I think he knows EXACTLY how to stage space combat. For a movie to be seen by people who don’t know or don’t care about physics.
Believe me, I’m with you. I would love to be able to nerd out over authentic space combat. But then in my mind “authentic space combat” would be pretty boring. You’re on your way somewhere, and then before you even know it (much less know what hit you), you’re dead, and so is everyone around you. The end.
I agree with Alessan — a good comparison is the final space battle in ROTJ or Rogue One. We saw them progress, along with the tactical decisions and why they were made - first fighter skirmishes, then larger engagements, then “closer, engage those Star Destroyers at point blank range!” and such. I thought those were much more coherent and exciting space battles than the final one here.
The Sith fleet just sitting there stationary did make the space battle a lot less exciting.
Okay, if you mean he doesn’t even know how to do “Sci-fi” space battles (with an emphasis on the “fi”) then I suppose I agree with you on all accounts.
Among the voices heard by Rey were ahsoka’s and Kanan’s (Ashley Eckstein and Freddie Prinze Jr), which means that not only is Ahsoka dead at this point, but she apparently re-joins the Jedi.
Okay, next question: did anyone see it in IMAX and NOT see the Tenet prologue?
I’ve heard that it’s showing at “select” IMAX theaters and I’m trying to figure out which have been selected.
My wife’s understanding of Palpatine’s plan. We both find these things hard to process after one theatrical viewing, so this may be in error:
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Tell Kylo Ren to kill Rey - however, not really. He figures Kylo will bring her to him.
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Tell Rey, once she is there, to kill him so…all the sith will go into her, including him. I guess he would be alive in that scenario and “in charge” or something.
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Wait, now that the two of them are here, he realized the bond is even stronger between them than he realized and he can suck out the Force-power from them and simply fully heal himself and be the true Emperor. In this final move, he is abandoning the rest of the Sith spirits.
Neither of us understand for sure if he survived that fall at the end of Jedi. I guess he did? That was his decayed/damaged corpse, not a “dark clone” or anything?
Maybe their cloning technology is just not as good as the kaminoans, Snoke looked like hot garbage after all.
I really enjoyed the movie. However…
No one stays dead.
Luke, Han, Palpatine, Chewie, C3PO, Rey, Carrie Fisher…
All dead and brought back or wasn’t really dead or at least appearing as visions.
I don’t care for the expansion of force powers. Rey can heal deadly wounds and pull transports out of the sky. Ren can snatch a necklace off a neck or grab a light saber behind the back from across time & space. Palpatine can disable the Rebel fleet until distracted. And Leia was apparently a Jedi for a few minutes.
It wasn’t just the fall, he had to survive (or escape) the explosion and later crashing of the Death Star 2.
The more I think about it, I think it was the same physical body that went down with the second Death Star. The clones that they were talking about were Snoke and the even more deformed Snokes that they showed.
If I have followed the chronology correctly.
- Papa Palpatine died on DS2. He outright says it.
- He had some sort of cloning ability or rudimentary body stashed away somewhere.
- He had a Voldemort style Horcrux or instead of becoming a Force Ghost, he became a spirit that could take over bodies, like the ones mentioned in 2. The body obviously was not ready for prime time. He needed what appears to be some sort of life support system.
- He then set to the work of recreating the Empire, using first the Knights od Ren, then the First Order then well…
Question about the end: when Kylo Ren was coming to help Rey fight the emperor, were those the Knights of Ren he was fighting off?
My wife got the impression that Rey sort of absorbed Ben’s essence in the end. It would explain why he didn’t show up as a ghost along with Luke and Leia, and give her an actual tangible feeling of being a Skywalker.