Well I for one would like to hear more!
Yeah but you can’t touch me because I’ve got a force-cancelling lizard on my back. Nyah Nyah!
Thanks to a little-known codicil in the Jedi Code, you’re now on the double secret list.
Snark (mostly) aside, was it the Thrawn novels that had the descriptions of Kashyyyk and the Wookie coming of age hunts on the super dark forest floor with the big monsters? That was baller.
Now that I think about it, those were probably tied to Lumpy (bwaaaah) and much shittier novels. But the description of Kashyyyk was awesome.
Which is nice about the animated shows, they’ve brought back what is good and what works, while jettisoning the rest. Thrawn? Yeah he’s back. Slight changes but his defining features are there, and he makes a great foil in Rebels. TIE Defender (and why it isn’t seen in the movies)? Yup.
But the dumb stuff like the Vong? Let the past go, kill it if you must.
So I just finished watching Rogue 1.
I think this is one of the best Star Wars movies ever.
Oddly, I think it works for a few, perhaps somewhat strange sounding reasons.
1 - very little force mumbo jumbo. For sure, it gets referenced but it’s not centre stage.
2- very little Skywalker blah blah. But recognisable characters are there and are pretty good. Vader has a fight scene and he is badass.
3- the movie ties into the greater arc of the main trilogies, but is very focused. Its alot easier keeping track of and rooting for 3 or 4 characters, who are well portrayed. By that I mean they are believable, human, relatable. From memory: Jin, Intelligence guy who has done things he isn’t proud of, blind ex temple priest and his bodyguard, kick ass robot, pilot defector. SJW alert for the triggered, none of those is white except Jin. And you know what, here it felt totally normal, and not forced. In Ep 7 and 8 I felt they were pushing diversity more as a tick box exercise (or, if one were cynical, as a cash grab attempt whilst virtue signalling) but here it felt more believable.
4- the biggie for me. People die. Like all the characters introduced in the movie die. That’s brave for SW. It’s also in direct contrast to The Last Jedi where it seemed none of the main characters died, except Luke who may or may not actually be dead. I heard he’s in Episode 9 as a force ghost still. in TLJ Boyega’s character tries so hard to die, finally, and ROSE * saves him with that downright rubbish line about “we win this war with love.” And then she dies iirc? Pointless saving of Boyega, pointless death. Had his character got into that tractor beam thing maybe he could have saved everyone. That scene really pissed me off in TLJ. So I was downright ecstatic when the pilot defector had a grenade thrown into the ship, and died. When Jin and intelligence guy died in the fireball at the end. When blind ex temple guy flipped the master search, and then got shot. When his bad ass side kick got blown up by the grenade. When that reprogrammed robot died. You get the idea. It’s a war, people actually died. In TLJ mr stupid pilot who thinks too much of himself is still alive. Finn (Boyega’s char iirc) is still alive. Yeah Luke is dead maybe. Leia floated in space, as you do, and is still alive, even though the actress is dead, which is all sorts of weird…
5- the characters. None of the main characters is huge in the canon. I liked this. The writers made the universe alive and made the story much more personal. I thought the characters were well done. Even Forrest Whitaker’s character seemed well thought out (extremist even by Rebellion standards.) That robot…he rocked. Well done and delivered lines.
6- It actually explained something that has bothered me ever since I saw episode 4. Namely, who is stupid enough to design a death star with such a specific and obvious weak point? Now I know, and the backstory makes a fair bit of sense.
The only real issue with having seen this is it now makes me think less of Force Awakens and Last Jedi.
There are lesser issues, namely the combat scenes, like the street ambush in Jedha, that made me cringe a bit, but Hollywood combat scenes are a bit if a bugbear for me.
I’m curious to see how Ep 9 works.
edit: I was informed via PM that writing Trans instead of Tran’s character had the potential to confuse, so I googled the character’s name, and replaced it.
You definitely did not remember correctly. Rose lives. She’s in the end in the Falcon with everyone else, and she’s in the next movie.
100% agree about rogue one. Its so good, its actually painful to even think about TLJ as being in any way part of the same series.
Also it shows you that decent writers can actually write decent sci fi without all the brain dead bullshit plot nonsense in TLJ.
My favorite part about Star Wars debates is how factually everyone states things. Like how shitty the Rogue One writers are because they don’t understand characters, their motivations or how they work in ensembles. See? I can just say that like you’re the crazy one if you disagree! It’s so productive!
And if you had any actual observations to back those assertions up with, we could have a conversation about it! Whee!
Is that different than the debate for any other movie? Or do people use “IMHO” more often when discussing other movies? I think people just state how they feel, recognizing that others will know that they are stating an opinion.
TFA was no masterpiece – there are some good dissections of where it went wrong. But TLJ just pissed on everything it built up. You can’t do that in a trilogy. You can’t present a new way of attack that calls in to question every movie in the whole series, and the very strategy of having big ships. You can’t turn a hunt for the savior of the galaxy into a meaningless interaction with a tired old man who betrays everything he ever stood for. You can’t have a meandering B-plot (or is it the A-plot? Hard to tell) that leads nowhere – that in fact hurts more than helps. You can’t have a plot showing our daring pilot use common sense and question authority, which is supposed to be the rebellion’s way rather than the Empire, only to be shown that he’s an idiot for not having listened to the wise purple haired woman who showed up out of nowhere. You can’t take the big bad and just kill him off in a very obvious way without explaining anything about him. You can maybe tolerate having one or two of these, but not all of them together in one movie, and there’s a lot more crap in there.
TLJ is the anti-Empire Strikes Back. It’s the movie that takes TFA and sinks it to new lows, all while pissing on its its sandwich. TFA wasn’t a masterpiece, but with a good middle movie that advanced the ideas JJ had, the trilogy could have been good enough to compete. Now, it’ll really take a miracle to turn this ship around.
The first trilogy had Return, so maybe 1 out of 3 being a stinker can still work. They can potentially pretend nothing happened in TLJ and just completely ignore it, with the exception of Luke and Snoke dying and Luke’s location being a meaningless mcguffin. I actually think it’ll be so awesome at this point for JJ to completely reset it though. Luke isn’t dead – when you saw him fade away, that was just him visiting the Jedi dimension to realize he still had purpose. And Snoke pretended to die as part of an elaborate ploy.
I think I was hoping at least she would die…
This being the bit where they went to the gambling world, right
Good summary.
Add to that, there was a ton of nice visual foreshadowing involving Luke’s X-Wing at the bottom of a pool of water. Except it wasn’t foreshadowing, because instead of Luke (or someone) lifting that X-Wing out of there, in what I expected to be a cool mirror image of Degobah and Luke flying across the galaxy to save his sister, he just projects his image. And then instead of this being a good thing (“hah! I wasn’t really here!”) it doesn’t matter, because he dies anyway. What was the point of that? There was no good narrative reason for him not to be there in person, and plenty of ways that it undermines that part of the plot.
Poe didn’t need to be an idiot. Finn didn’t need to go on his stupid subplot with the lass whose name I’ve already forgotten that did nothing. Why was everyone just coming and going from the apparently locked-down rebel fleet in what seemed to be the slowest chase scene in history? It was just nuts.
I dislike Abram’s fast paced nonsense directing anyway, and was hopeful his absence would be a positive. How wrong I was!
I would feel more poignant about the whole “The Saga Ends” in the trailer, if I had any belief that this is true.
I don’t see any indication that Disney really knows what to do with the Star Wars franchise , so unless IX bombs (which I don’t believe it will), there’s no way we won’t be seeing more movies with one (or more) of the current cast + of course the obligatory prequels (Young Kenobi, Young Boba Fett, etc) and other endless retreads to mine people’s nostalgia for as long as possible.
Edit: Just in case anyone thinks the last bit ia a knock on TLJ, it’s not. I think irrespective of whether you love or hate TLJ, it’s very clear that Disney is very uncertain on where to go - every decision they’re taking (the Lord/Miller debacle around Solo + bringing back JJ) shows that they’re without a real plan for the franchise.
So much wrong…
-
The idea that jumping into hyperspace to destroy another ship - why would we have seen that earlier? Part of the reason it works here is because it was a rather large ship jumping into another larger ship - and even then, it didn’t wipe it out (good thing, with Finn and Rey still being on board and all), it just tore it in two. And it wasn’t the lightspeed itself that did it - it was the mass behind the light speed that did that. Sending an x-wing into lightspeed at a huge ship like that would be like a bug hitting your windshield. And you don’t ‘sacrifice’ large-ass ships - and the people who’d have to fly them - that easily.
-
Luke never betrayed everything he stood for. He was a broken man. And the reason? Yes - he had a momentary thought about striking down the potential evil in Ben Solo because he saw a vision of the evil he would become. But he had already turned away from that thought. Problem was, Ben saw it differently from his side, and Kylo Ren was born - which led to the destruction of the school he was teaching at and all the pupils who didn’t go with Ren. Everything Kylo Ren did after that could be traced back to that momentary lapse of reason - which even if he was going to back away from actually following through, wasn’t enough. It’s no wonder he’s broken, and why he doesn’t feel the Jedi are worth continuing.
-
The B-plot was a bit long. But it went into why Finn went from someone who was just interested in himself and running away from everything into someone who believed in fighting the First Order, once he saw past the shiny veneer of Canto (?) and to the layer of shit it was built on, and the terrible way the animals and the poor taking care of all these rich people were treated. More a commentary on modern society, perhaps, but it was enough to turn Finn into someone who cared about others rather than only himself.
-
That ‘daring pilot’ defied orders and lost an entire squadron of bombers. And not just the ships, but also all the crew. That will get you into trouble in any military in existence. And it should. Yes, he was able to take out the dreadnaught, but the cost was deemed too high. So why, exactly, would the powers that be trust him with anything right after that? Poe’s actions were in the right place, but done in a terrible way. And as for Admiral Purple-hair? As her title points out, she was an Admiral. She didn’t show up ‘out of nowhere.’ For you, perhaps, but not for anyone actually in the movie.
-
Can’t take the ‘big bad’ and kill him off w/o explaining anything about him? You mean like Tarkin in the original Star Wars? Or Darth Maul in Ep. I? Who really (other than you) cares? The big bad was not Snoke - it’s Kylo Ren. Just like Tarkin wasn’t the big bad, it was Vader. Or Maul wasn’t the big bad, it was Palpitine (which really, most people should have already known). Hell, even the Emperor was killed without explaining much about him. The fact he was evil is all you really need to know.
-
And although you didn’t say it, I’ve seen others complain about the whole movie being a chase, and why couldn’t the Order just jump ahead of the Rebellion. And that’s because it’s not how their tracking works. It tracked them to what system they jumped to - NOT what they did once they jumped to their system. It’s like tracking someone here on Earth to what airport they flew into, but not knowing what they did once they landed.
I understand this is just my opinion of the movie, but this is an explanation for why not everyone feels the need to crap all over TLJ and try to ruin it for everyone else. I get it - you don’t like it. But don’t be pissed off just because not all of us agree with you, and actually like the movie a lot.
I’m not sure that really is true (i.e., that it is “huge” in the current cultural landscape - I don’t doubt the rest of the things you write).
Anecdata:
I watched ROTJ as a kid, and was immediately smitten. I got action figures. All my friends had action figures. I watched those movies more times than I can count. I’ve stayed away from most of the Expanded Universe crap (other than the old Thrawn novels), but I’ve consumed Star Wars and personally have more Star Wars Legos than I care to admit.
I have two boys - one of whom is older than I was when I got struck by Star Wars fever. The two of them have literally zero interest in Star Wars - despite having been gifted lots of Star Wars toys and having accessible Star Wars media to watch (the Lego series is pretty good - and the kids love the very similar Ninjago). I coach the kid’s sports teams, so I know about twenty or so kids in the same age group fairly well. The story is pretty much identical there; the things they find interesting are Fortnite, Minecraft, Harry Potter, and Marvel Superheroes. Sometimes Pokemon.
Literally everyone I know of who actually care about Star Wars, are adults. And to be fair - SW has a lot more competition these days than it did in the 80s, but I just don’t see SW interest or sales as being driven by much past nostalgia at this point.
And I don’t doubt for a second that episode IX will make a billion dollars (and easily at that - everyone will want to see the “final” chapter). But I don’t see how anything that follows is going to make anywhere near that, because - while some people will no doubt continue to consume everything SW-related, I’m pretty sure a lot of people are going say goodbye to the franchise at IX. And that would have happened anyway, but with the franchise flip-flopping and unable to decide whether it wants to continue to bank on nostalgia or try to appeal to a new generation it’s going to hit even harder than it might have.
Did you recently watch the scene of Holdo hyperspacing into the First Order? I did, and none of your explanation makes sense. Her hit didn’t just split the flagship in half. It also instantaneously disabled (and in a couple of cases, destroyed) the escort ships thanks to some kind of hyperspace explosion magic when the ships impacted.
Nice try on the sacrifice of personnel and ships, but droids and autopilot exist in these movies. I assume either solution would work since Holdo piloted that ship by herself. As for the ships, I think any commander would gladly sacrifice a mid-sized cruiser to take out a Star Destroyer if the Holdo maneuver worked.
Hell, going forward, why wouldn’t the military all over the universe start making cheap kamikaze ships made out of asteroids with an hyperspace jump engine stuck on them? That would cut a bunch of space battles short!
It’s a Rebellion - they’re not flush with cash. They can’t afford to just go sacrificing their larger ships, even if they did pull everyone off and leave it in the hands of droids (most of whom seem to be sentient beings, so…). And if the escort ships were right behind the flagship, then maybe I can buy them being destroyed - I don’t think it was an area affect - it seemed to be an ‘in-line’ effect. Which makes sense.
And even if not - it’s all space magic anyway. X-wings couldn’t fly like they’ve been portrayed to in the entire series when in space. The battles were scripted more/less after WWII battles - which is fine except ships don’t move like that in space in the absence of gravity. So I can suspend disbelief in the ‘hyperspace’ trick in the same way I can for pretty much everything else that happens in space in this series.
How is expressing an alternate opinion an effort to ruin something for you?