(This was indeed in poor taste and gross)
I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, think about the Original Trilogy: You get a fun Luke/Leia/Han adventure on the Death Star, then they’re separated for most of Empire, and then a fun adventure with Jabba (and a little time on the Ewok planet). Three movies, and that’s all you get. Maybe we’ve been spoiled by 500+ hours of Marvel movies, but with most trilogies you’re limited to 6-7 hours, tops.
So yeah, we get some fun interactions between them, but then the movie is over. But it’s better than no fun interactions at all.
Goddammit rei.
Anyway, the whole “end of the Jedi” theme + yellow lightsaber thing kinda points at the whole thing being retired and the dark/light melding idea being the thing moving forward, no?
Whatever. Just find competent writers and directors who don’t hate each other for further movies plz disney, thx.
Don’t be creepy.
This is the key element that irks me about the Abrams movies. The danger is so over the top and any perceived deaths are reversed so often that even moments that should feel exciting often don’t. That’s something that I felt Johnson did really well in Last Jedi. He made it feel dangerous, that everyone was in real danger and everything felt like it was on an edge.
What amazed me was that I felt the same way later when re-watching Last Jedi. Even though I knew who survived and who didn’t, the scenes where there is danger still felt dangerous, and I was taken on that same journey with the characters even on a re-watch.
Plus I’m a little sad that they destroyed the planet (Kajimi?) before we could visit it in games, for instance. I guess now if they want to let us explore that planet in a game, it has to be set before Rise of Skywalker.
Like when Leia force-pulled herself out of space?
That was a weird moment for a couple of reasons. First because of the death of Carrie Fischer, I was expecting to her to die in that movie anyway, and secondly, I didn’t know she was force sensitive until that moment.
I guess it didn’t make the movie feel any less dangerous to me, because it was one moment instead of one of 6.
EDIT: Oh! That reminds me of one of my favorite moments from Rise of Skywalker though. When Luke and Leia are dueling with each other, both younger versions of their characters, clearly exploring and learning together after Return of the Jedi. A very nice moment that put that Leia moment where she pulls herself to safety in space in Last Jedi in a new perspective.
This is gross. I can’t believe you posted that. Did you scrub three movies for expressions of the guys too? Probably not.
See, I felt the exact opposite.
Leia: “Oh no, everyone except me got blown out of the bridge and killed!”
Poe: “Oh no, every other capital ship except ours ran out of fuel and got destroyed!”
Poe and Leia: “Oh no, every other transport except ours got blown up!” (Okay technically it was 24 out of 30 blown up.)
Poe and Finn: “Oh no, every other speeder except ours got blown up!”
Who survived: Every named character except for Admiral Ackbar and Holdo
Who didn’t: Every unnamed background character
No one knows about lightsabers, ok.
When Leia force disrupts Kylo Ren and turns him to the lightside via Force Change Alignment, I at first thought she might have also severed his connection with the force…which actually is supported by the scene where he drops clumsily and gets hurt trying to scale down some architecture…
But nope, fake out. He still has the force? It would have been funny if he got killed by the knights of Ren.
It’s apples and oranges though. Yes, Johnson spares the audience the absolute worst outcome, but it still has a massive impact on the movie. Leia is still incapacitated, there’s a leadership vacuum so Holdo takes over, Poe sends Finn on his harebrained mission and mutinies, and characters grow and learn. Leia getting blown into space has weight and consequence because it’s what makes the rest of the movie happen.
If Chewbacca doesn’t get captured and fake killed, what changes in Rise of Skywalker? You cut out 10 minutes of running and shooting on the destroyer that has no impact on anything. If C-3PO doesn’t have the block against Sith language in his programming so he doesn’t need to be fake killed? That’s another 15-20 minutes of meaningless noise cut out. The only thing that happens that could charitably be called consequential in that stretch is Rey and Kylo force-skyping, and you can force skype from anywhere.
I went into this hoping that Abrams would deliver at least a somewhat satisfying ending.
My reaction to what I saw: ¯\(ツ)/¯
On the positive side, I did like some of the visuals; it’s not a movie that looks bland or boring. Also, if you’re a Star Wars fan, some emotional moments will inevitably get to you, e.g. Chewie learning about Leia’s death.
Speaking of which: with Carrie Fisher’s part they certainly were stuck between a rock and a hard place. You can’t unknow that the actress had passed, so whenever you saw Leia, you couldn’t help but be aware that they’re trying to mine whatever footage they had found on the cutting room floor and adapt the script to that. I think it’s probably the best of all solutions - none of which would and could have been ideal. The Leia character is too central to Star Wars for her to be ignored or die off-screen (worst solution: opening crawl). And go full CGI would have been a disservice to Fisher and most certainly also looked not good.
Overall, the movie felt rather rushed, unimaginative, and often required you to accept lapses of logic. It’s not like previous Star Wars movies are perfect and don’t do that, but to me that’s never an excuse not to do better.
I think packing the (at that point: alleged) comeback of Palpatine into the opening crawl was an underwhelming choice. It does have this in common with the opening text crawl of TFA where they simply cram 30 years of history into whatever time that crawl takes and expect you to run with it and possibly read some novels or comics. That said, the characters learning about the return of the Big Baddie could have been a terrific moment in RoS, especially with its and weight implication for the canon, i.e. Vader’s sacrifice being nothing but a bit of a setback for Palpatine.
I got already slightly bored only a few minutes into the movie when it became clear that it was another plot heavily based on a MacGuffin. Which, at some point, became even 3 MacGuffins, i.e. the Wayfinder, the dagger, and the Sith translation in C3POs head.
It, of course, severely relies on plot convenience and coincidence. How about our main characters having their speeder destroyed and landing right on the proper patch of (nicely non-deadly) quicksand where they need to be? And what the shit is up with the Sith dagger? It’s constructed so that it points the way to the Wayfinder right from that particular spot where Rey is standing on the cliff where she conveniently has a hunch of what she needs to do right there. What? What’s with the Death Star being fully destroyed, but the chamber with the Wayfinder being the on thing still working?
I also agree with the above sentiments that the third act space battle is overall a bit underwhelming and doesn’t hold a candle to the one we have in Rogue One.
While I’m not over the moon with how the new trilogy ultimately worked out, I can’t help but disagree with those who think that the prequel trilogy actually is better than this. The prequel trilogy has some of the worst and bland directing, it’s full of CGI that didn’t even look good way back and hurts the immersion because many of the sets just look utterly fake. It has some of the worst/unengaged acting performances every delivered by the actors involved; McGregor an McDiarmid being the exceptions. They characters/actors have no chemistry at all, which makes the Anakin/Padme love plot and the supposed friendship between Obi Wan and Anakin utterly cringy and unbelievable.
The actors in the new trilogy are are definitely more invested, the characters actually likeable, and their relationships believable. And whether its Johnson or Abrams - the directing and cinematography is leagues above the prequel trilogy.
That said, Lucas certainly had a solid idea of the story he wanted to tell across 3 movies. I’m baffled that Disney never set up this kind of stewardship after the Lucasfilm acquisition since it was clear that they’d be milking the hell out of the franchise. I mean, they already did own Marvel and had a few Marvel movies under their belt at that point. RoS feeling like patch work is a consequence of that, and neither Johnson nor Abrams are fully to be blamed for that. I also wonder how much of the script is still a leftover of Trevorrow since he still has a writer credit.
I surely did not like how much they went back to repeat RotJ plot beats. One could argue that some part are inevitable simply because it’s the concluding part of a trilogy, but here we are again with the same villain, the prior villain having its redemption arc, Lando piloting the Falcon, the plan to destroy the navigation node so that the fleet is vulnurable for a few minutes mirroring the Endor shield generator plot thread. (Question: Did the signal tower have some shield? Why did they need ground troops in the first place? It certainly looked like something any smaller spacecraft could have damaged or destroyed with its laser.)
You have once again Palpatine detailing its big plan in trademark villain speech because he sort of didn’t learn a thing from RotJ. You have him once again open some windows to show the protagonist (Luke/Rey) the destruction of the fleet they’re with to get them riled up. At least, I did like McDiarmid in this as I liked him in all previous movies because he seems to have a good time playing that character and hamming it up.
I liked TFA, but wasn’t fond of how closely they aped ANH’s plot elements. People said that Abrams simply had to do that to tap into the nostalgia and make people comfortable with Star Wars again after the disappointing prequels. In RoS it feels simply like a mix is of not having any original ideas while also playing it safe and pander to people who hated LotS. Now I’m not a huge fan of that movie, but I at least that Johnson’s tried a few things - even if I didn’t particularly dig the execution or the space chase main plot or the Canto Bight side quest.
The way RoS tries to undo that with single lines just felt a bit lazy and also obvious. Rey’s parents being no ones? “Geez, I meant to say they chose to be no ones. Semantics!” Luke? “Yeah, I was wrong.” Holdo maneuver? “Super unlikely to work.” (I’ll give it to them that they would have had a hard time to ignore the Holdo maneuver or pretend it didn’t exist though because everybody in the audience would have asked the “So, why don’t they simply …?” question by the time the third act begins.)
Looking back at all the movies made in the Disney era though, to me “Solo” is the worst by a mile. Utterly devoid of any creativity and imaginative directing, brim with lackluster cinematrography, driven by a plot that tries to cram every best-of of Han’s background into one script, and ultimately very much superfluous. I think that’s the one were Star Wars movies stopped being an ‘event’ for me.
Chewies reaction to Leias death wasn’t as sad as him sitting alone looking sad as everyone else was celebrating.
Also, for those saying the kiss was cut in China…
It may have been cut in other countries though.
Singapore.
As you guys know, I didn’t care about these movies one way or another except decent action films until Last Jedi, when I became a fan, and I was trying to figure out why. What changed, what was different, and the article that was posted in that thread that best helped me answer that question was in this post:
So thanks again to @Nightgaunt for posting that one back then.
Anyway, since I loved that article so much, I wanted to see if Film Crit Hulk had written something about this movie. And he has.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/32504876
I enjoyed reading that so I wanted to share.
Oh man, that’s so good. Thanks for sharing.
Hulk is always so great. Wonderful read.
I’m sure the cool thing to do is to hate The Rise of Skywalker, but I really enjoyed it last Saturday night. Lots of fans service, but I like fan service, LOL. Probably the worst thing about the movie is the title…
Ugh.
While I was watching that scene, I was already ready to roll my eyes for a father reveal. Turns out that things might just be that dumb.