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Star Wars: The Circle is Almost Complete


Myrddin

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3 hours ago, Nictarion said:

The review I’ve been waiting for the most is out, and it’s not a particularly good one (although not terrible either). Sounds like a mixed bag. It’s spoiler free btw. 

 

I can answer him. 

People like the prequels much more nowadays because the sequels are so bad that made people appreciate the prequels. 

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45 minutes ago, divica said:

I can answer him. 

People like the prequels much more nowadays because the sequels are so bad that made people appreciate the prequels. 

That was a good review. I'm quite selective about the internet personalities I consume these days so I was ready to click him away, but that was a thoughtful and spoiler-averse review from someone who really likes his Star Wars. Good link.

Eta: That's fucking weird. I distinctly remember quoting @Nictarion , who posted the video in question. Don't know how to fix it. Sorry.

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I come not to bury The Rise of Skywalker, but to praise it.

Yes, it has a messed up, sloppy, exposition-heavy first act. It really does. The way it clearly backtracks from Rian Johnson's vision of what the end of the Skywalker Saga should look like is awkward and distracting. I feel like a lot of the critics who are lambasting it secretly just embraced Johnson's new vision and are now bitter that Abrams wrested it back because, I don't know, a great deal of jaded cynicism on the one hand and the real problems it gives for this trilogy as a whole.

At the end, for me, it delivers the wonder and catharsis that the original trilogy gave me when I was a kid. The last forty minutes felt like Star Wars to me. in a way that I haven't felt other than in fleeting moments in the previous two films, and (yes, I'll say it) with Rogue One, the only other film of the new bunch that really made me feel transported to that galaxy far, far away.

I was dewy-eyed for a lot of its moments, I have to say.

Also, Adam Driver is bloody amazing and in all honesty I'm not sure how well these films would have worked if someone else had had the part.

More detailed, spoilery thoughts later after I ponder more.

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Spoiler

Driver is BY far the best part of the movie. But half of my packed theater laughed when he died the second time. It was just soooo poorly done. I'll agree that the last 30 minutes was sort of cool, in a light saber kind of way, but nothing about what happened made a lick of sense. Had this trilogy actually had a real arc it might have been okay, but everything is so rushed that it all comes out feeling completely and utterly pointless. It was nice to see Han, sure, but Luke was totally useless, and Maz explaining Leia's death should be used in film schools as a prime example of the exact opposite way of doing proper exposition. Most of the drama came off as comedy. Anyway, im glad its done and over, and i never need to think about it again. 

 

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6 hours ago, Darryk said:

Havent seen the new one yet but I imagine it's a lazy rehash of ROTJ with bland characters, just as TFA was a lazy rehash of ANH with bland characters, and even though everyone seems to have this weird idea in their head that TLJ was a "fresh take" on Star Wars, in actuality it was just a lazy rehash of ESB with bland characters and some ridiculous fanservice in the form of Yoda appearing and laughing like a gremlin for no reason.

Nah, it is basically another rehash of TFA on the plot-level - with the McGuffin this time not being a person (Luke) but a planet whose name I've already forgotten. They honestly have to find a secret planet in a manner of hours (!) in a galaxy where you couldn't just teleport from one place to another until ... apparently now.

That premise in and of itself is a joke.

6 hours ago, Darryk said:

People keep saying "well you just liked it cause you were a kid, and the kids of today will like the new ones the same" I don't buy it. There's not a single character from the new movies who will stand out in people's memories like Vader, Han Solo, Obi-wan etc; who's gonna give a crap about frigging Po Dameron in twenty years. And Finn? They had a chance to do something interesting by making him a former storm trooper, but they might as well have must made him a smuggler cause his storm trooper backstory doesn't seem to have any significance on his character arc.

You do have to ask actual children what the new movies mean to them - many children actually very much like the PT, no matter how people who were already adults in the early 2000s judge them, so that's that. You can also ask how people who watched more, you know, modern movies before they eventually got around watching the OT felt about those.

I certainly think they are made well enough to still be fun after all those decades, but in the end it depends on how you see them.

6 hours ago, Darryk said:

As for Rey, there's no heroes journey, no struggle; you don't get to see her grow and develop the way you did with Luke on his journey from whining farm boy to brash star pilot to sanguine Jedi Knight. I've got no issue with progressive filmmaking, in fact I was quite happy when I heard they were casting a woman in the lead (George Lucas briefly played with the idea of  making the Luke character female in ANH anyway), but at least tell a compelling story.

The chaotic writing certainly hampered Rey's journey, but she gets one in the final movie, a pretty strong personal conflict, too (which is barely visible in Luke since nobody ever believed in either TESB or ROTJ that he would ever join the dark side, right? And this weird connection Rey had with babyface (I'm still not calling that guy by his proper name) also added some more depth to their story than Luke-Vader-Leia ever had in the OT movies.

In fact, if you take the OT as a whole story then ANH is just a pointless prologue. It wastes a lot of time with droids and desert scenery instead of introducing the proper characters. There should have been first hints about the Skywalker past and the Emperor, etc. in the first movie, yet there is pretty much nothing of that. There should have been some darkness in Luke, a glimpse that this Jedi thing was something that could go both ways, etc.

And as for Luke's development in the OT: That's a joke, right? The boy never gets any formal training at all. He spends, say, five minutes with Obi-Wan and then ten minutes with Yoda. In fact, one could say that losing his hand and changing his wardrobe is the only 'development' he gets.

She gets about as much 'training' and 'insight' in the force in TFA as Luke does in ANH.

6 hours ago, Darryk said:

The one thing this Disney rehash trilogy has achieved is given me a newfound appreciation for the prequels. I mean, don't get me wrong, they were awful films. But at least they expanded on the world, tried to tell a different story, and managed to introduce SOME memorable characters, like Darth Maul and Qui Gon.

That is very much true. In fact, I'd say all three of them work much better as Star Wars movies than the new ones because of that. Whatever Lucas' flaws were, he did not try to copy himself insofar as design and plot were concerned in the PT movies.

7 hours ago, Darryk said:

I'm also glad they put Mark Hamill back in the limelight and got him to live a healthier lifestyle, but they wasted him. The one interesting thing about TFA was that Luke had disappeared and no one knew what he'd been up to for all these years. I thought that was an interesting hook. Maybe he's seeking out lost Jedi secrets? Maybe he feels the Jedi lost their purpose, and is travelling to ancient Jedi temples to try find out how the order began? Maybe he senses a greater darkness behind the emperor and is trying to prepare for what's coming?

That was pretty much a very stupid hook in my opinion. It wasted the potential the movie could have had if we had been thrown into a story in medias res where the old guard was facing serious troubles. They could have introduced us to their children, who could have then been given their own stories and quests. The idea to waste an entire movie searching for a guy (and creating 'tension' by revealing the old guard only slowly and gradually) is very bad. You basically do that kind of thing when you have no idea what else to do. I mean, how great would be a Bond movie where people were looking for Bond until the last minute? Even if there was a sequel to that movie it would be a tremendous waste of time.

And the other half of TFA was essentially a literal re-hash of ANH and ROTJ with another super-deathstar.

40 minutes ago, Ran said:

I come not to bury The Rise of Skywalker, but to praise it.

Yes, it has a messed up, sloppy, exposition-heavy first act. It really does. The way it clearly backtracks from Rian Johnson's vision of what the end of the Skywalker Saga should look like is awkward and distracting. I feel like a lot of the critics who are lambasting it secretly just embraced Johnson's new vision and are now bitter that Abrams wrested it back because, I don't know, a great deal of jaded cynicism on the one hand and the real problems it gives for this trilogy as a whole.

The film essentially has nothing to do with TLJ. Going in completely unspoiled aside from the trailer(s) my jaw literally dropped when reading the opening crawl. This was really a joke. Although it was quite clear that they would have to pull something out of their asses after the ending of the last movie. Babyface simply never was a compelling or convincing villain, so what on earth could the story of the last movie have been about after TLJ?

The only other way they could have taken there is to make babyface a true villain in the end.

Still, you are right, once you accept this new premise and assuming you can ignore the ridiculous premise of 'we have to find the secret evil planet in a couple of hours' (which I actually could during the first watch but most likely not much longer) the core story of the movie actually does work.

40 minutes ago, Ran said:

At the end, for me, it delivers the wonder and catharsis that the original trilogy gave me when I was a kid. The last forty minutes felt like Star Wars to me. in a way that I haven't felt other than in fleeting moments in the previous two films, and (yes, I'll say it) with Rogue One, the only other film of the new bunch that really made me feel transported to that galaxy far, far away.

The end really had some cathartic elements, and I think they could actually have been much more courageous there - I expected babyface to show up to lead the 'popular movement' against evil or him to show up at the jungle planet to become the leader of the good guys. That would have been real magic. What they did instead also worked pretty well, even though it is an overall disgrace how little back story anything got there. Who is Rey's grandmother, pray? Who was her mother? And what makes her more important in the overall ritual stuff than Rey herself? Couldn't her father have accomplished the same kind of thing for the old man? Were her parents running away only after ROTJ or before that? Were they kept on the secret planet or had the nameless son a proper role at the Imperial court?

In any case, all this could have worked much better if they had actually build up this kind of story from the start - which they clearly never planned to do. One could have had that kind of story with a New Republic starting to disintegrate in TFA, a war ripping itself apart the galaxy in TLJ and the evil one raising his ugly head in the final movie (after showing up as a hologram in some of the earlier movies). One could have even had a version of the evil hologram character they had in TFA and TLJ who acted as a Maul or Dooku character without the audience being aware of that.

Rogue One is not bad, but it has too much backwater setting and is too focused and dirty humans to be a proper Star Wars story for my taste. Still, it is easily the best of the new movies.

40 minutes ago, Ran said:

I was dewy-eyed for a lot of its moments, I have to say.

Yes, in the end there were those qualities. I even sobbed at a moment (and I really laughed about all the Threepio jokes - those were great!). But then, TLJ also had many such moments, at least on the first watch. Leia moving through space was amazing, Luke confronting his nephew, too, etc. Such things more show that you are very much emotionally invested and not necessarily that you were watching a good movie ;-).

40 minutes ago, Ran said:

Also, Adam Driver is bloody amazing and in all honesty I'm not sure how well these films would have worked if someone else had had the part.

This is were I think we part ways. Driver certainly plays the part pretty well (when you see his face) but the character as such is completely ridiculous. It is not depth when you show somebody who is conflicted about being evil - when you don't really get any explanation as to why he wanted to be evil in the first place. Trying to illustrate something by wearing grandpa's mask explains nothing. It just makes him look weird.

This is where the fucked-up middle movie really shows how much it sucked - because by giving Evil Hologram essentially no back story/motivation whatsoever there is really no substance whatsoever to milkface being evil.

Anakin sort of got some motivation as to why he turned evil, but the new guy got literally none. And since he wasn't just another Darth Vader (whose back story came in the PT) the new movies should have explained why he did what he did. But there is zero background there. Aside from this rather silly 'the evil is in your blood' kind of nonsense they also try to play with in the new movie.

And while that's true for pretty much the entire ridiculous setting of the new movies, it much worse with a character who is supposed to be and is played as a complex villain. You do need a reason to want to be a megalomaniacal tyrant. That's not something people just want to do without reason.

40 minutes ago, Ran said:

More detailed, spoilery thoughts later after I ponder more.

If you do some thinking: Did I miss something or did we never see a vision of Rey on the evil throne? She talks about that, but we, the audience, never saw that vision, right?

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Spoiler

"Luke was totally useless"

Big disagree here. I liked that Abrams called back to Luke having hidden himself away and learning it was wrong thanks to Rey, by having Rey attempt the same thing and Luke telling her it was wrong. Plus the nice callback to The Empire Strikes Back by having him lift his X-Wing out. There was a very pleasing symmetry, and it allowed Luke a chance to be a mentor.

 

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Hmm, the fact that Elio and Linda gave it a good review gives me pause. Still, think I'm gonna wait for a few more reviews from others Youtubers I trust before deciding whether to see it.

Was kind of looking forward to boycotting it to be honest. Got very little desire to see the third episode in a trilogy where the first two were bad and there was clearly no overall story arc until JJ tried to salvage one from the wreckage of TLJ.

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This was a very mixed bag. Everything with Kylo Ren and Rey is pretty good, a lot of the other stuff is cheesecorn and the last 30 minutes was an unrelentingly, at times truly moronic assault of fanservice which got so desperate as to be insulting.

Spoiler

WEDGE IS BACK! FOR LITERALLY FOUR SECONDS! W0000t! LOOK PORGS! SHIT THE BED, HERE'S SOME EWOKS! LOOK SOME GAY STUFF, BUT ONLY FOR THREE SECONDS SO WE DON'T LOSE ALABAMA TICKET SALES! LUKE'S OLD X-WING DOES SOME COOL STUFF! JOHN WILLIAMS DID NOT COMPOSE A SINGLE NOTE OF ORIGINAL MUSIC FOR THIS MOVIE AND JUST HIT SHUFFLE ON HIS STAR WARS GREATEST HITS PLAYLIST!

The film also felt like it had more endings that Return of the King, except these endings seemed to consist entirely of JJ Abrams grabbing hold of each individual audience member and bellowing in their face, "LOOK! STUFF YOU THOUGHT WAS COOL WHEN YOU WERE TWELVE! BEHOLD THE NOSTALGIA!" in the hope that they liked it.

I'm also pretty certain the only reason we got to see the film is that Lucasfilm blasted their way into Abrams' secret editing bunker and dragged him away before he could add a scene of an Ewok getting it on with a Porg because "the fans would love it!"

Ridley and Driver are doing a lot of the heavy lifting on this trilogy and it's to their credit - especially Ridley who had almost no previous experience - that they pulled it off.

A bit of a worrying sign: the cinema was pretty empty for an evening showing and there was uproarious laughter at several moments that weren't supposed to be funny, especially the very ending (which to be fair is so outrageously corny that I thought it was genuinely turning into a satire).

Still, I'll raise the film from 6/10 to 8/10 purely for the fourth-to-last line of dialogue in the entire Skywalker saga being:

Spoiler

 

"UTINI!"

 

You do you, JJ, you do you.

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8 minutes ago, Werthead said:

This was a very mixed bag. Everything with Kylo Ren and Rey is pretty good, a lot of the other stuff is cheesecorn and the last 30 minutes was an unrelentingly, at times truly moronic assault of fanservice which got so desperate as to be insulting.

  Reveal hidden contents

WEDGE IS BACK! FOR LITERALLY FOUR SECONDS! W0000t! LOOK PORGS! SHIT THE BED, HERE'S SOME EWOKS! LOOK SOME GAY STUFF, BUT ONLY FOR THREE SECONDS SO WE DON'T LOSE ALABAMA TICKET SALES! LUKE'S OLD X-WING DOES SOME COOL STUFF! JOHN WILLIAMS DID NOT COMPOSE A SINGLE NOTE OF ORIGINAL MUSIC FOR THIS MOVIE AND JUST HIT SHUFFLE ON HIS STAR WARS GREATEST HITS PLAYLIST!

The film also felt like it had more endings that Return of the King, except these endings seemed to consist entirely of JJ Abrams grabbing hold of each individual audience member and bellowing in their face, "LOOK! STUFF YOU THOUGHT WAS COOL WHEN YOU WERE TWELVE! BEHOLD THE NOSTALGIA!" in the hope that they liked it.

I'm also pretty certain the only reason we got to see the film is that Lucasfilm blasted their way into Abrams' secret editing bunker and dragged him away before he could add a scene of an Ewok getting it on with a Porg because "the fans would love it!"

Ridley and Driver are doing a lot of the heavy lifting on this trilogy and it's to their credit - especially Ridley who had almost no previous experience - that they pulled it off.

A bit of a worrying sign: the cinema was pretty empty for an evening showing and there was uproarious laughter at several moments that weren't supposed to be funny, especially the very ending (which to be fair is so outrageously corny that I thought it was genuinely turning into a satire).

Still, I'll raise the film from 6/10 to 8/10 purely for the fourth-to-last line of dialogue in the entire Skywalker saga being:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

"UTINI!"

 

You do you, JJ, you do you.

Keep it. Keep the struggle.

:bowdown:

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One thing I did appreciate:

Spoiler

"Let's Holdo Manoeuvre the shit out of that fleet!"

"Don't be silly, Meriadoc Brandybuck! That really was some kind of total bullshit that Johnson pulled out of his arse! Never mention it again!"

 

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15 hours ago, Ran said:

I come not to bury The Rise of Skywalker, but to praise it.

Yes, it has a messed up, sloppy, exposition-heavy first act. It really does. The way it clearly backtracks from Rian Johnson's vision of what the end of the Skywalker Saga should look like is awkward and distracting. I feel like a lot of the critics who are lambasting it secretly just embraced Johnson's new vision and are now bitter that Abrams wrested it back because, I don't know, a great deal of jaded cynicism on the one hand and the real problems it gives for this trilogy as a whole.

At the end, for me, it delivers the wonder and catharsis that the original trilogy gave me when I was a kid. The last forty minutes felt like Star Wars to me. in a way that I haven't felt other than in fleeting moments in the previous two films, and (yes, I'll say it) with Rogue One, the only other film of the new bunch that really made me feel transported to that galaxy far, far away.

I was dewy-eyed for a lot of its moments, I have to say.

Also, Adam Driver is bloody amazing and in all honesty I'm not sure how well these films would have worked if someone else had had the part.

More detailed, spoilery thoughts later after I ponder more.

 

 I was so bummed by the negativity that I was actually going to skip it. You've given me... new hope. Thank you!

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On 12/19/2019 at 12:53 AM, Darryk said:

The one thing this Disney rehash trilogy has achieved is given me a newfound appreciation for the prequels. I mean, don't get me wrong, they were awful films. But at least they expanded on the world, tried to tell a different story, and managed to introduce SOME memorable characters, like Darth Maul and Qui Gon.

Don't forget Dooku and Grievous. I don't think the Prequels are great films. There are a lot of foolish moments, and the romance story could have been executed a lot better if it had to be included at al. But I think they're fine enough. And I think they offer more nuance in regards to the issue of the force than The new trilogy. The Jedis are not good guys in the prequels. I mean they do try to assassinate the Democratically elected leader of the republic of the very slim justification of him might be a Sith and were making plans to take more direct action against him because of his public talk of wanting to curb the powers of the Jedi. They repeatedly equate their supremacy with the force being. They are shown to be bad, shown to be arrogant. In the new trilogy, Luke mostly just says that they were bad because Anakin became a Sith. I mean he could have at least mentioned how the Jedi chose to intercede in a civil-war and(with no formal military training), became generals on a racist and extremely corrupt republic. 

22 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

This is were I think we part ways. Driver certainly plays the part pretty well (when you see his face) but the character as such is completely ridiculous. It is not depth when you show somebody who is conflicted about being evil - when you don't really get any explanation as to why he wanted to be evil in the first place. Trying to illustrate something by wearing grandpa's mask explains nothing. It just makes him look weird.

Yeah, it Is weird that he's taken inspiration From the Guy who mostly Helped destroy The empire, And helped The rebellion Succeed in His Final Moments. 

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The original trilogy holds up pretty well

i don't get this, really. in looking at IV-VI now as an adult, i see that they are not really that good at all, in terms of writing--the technical side of the films has always been strong, of course; i can't opine on the acting.  VI is substantially a remake of IV. the familial revelations in V-VI are just silly--even if there is a classical pedigree for narratives about the wrongful conflation of polis with oikos, it only makes sense in a city state with a population of thousands--as opposed to a galactic polis with a population of trillions. I-III opened the fairly limited narrative of IV-VI to the polis in its entirety; the addition of trade disputes and rationalized fantasy of midichlorians makes quite a bit of sense. on the other hand, what is hinted at in IV's conflation of legislative and executive power in the senate's abolition could've been handled at length in I-III, but is kinda just rushed  through to get at more laser-sword dueling.

i see now that the only thing that holds all of it together for me is nostalgia, which is fine. but i doubt i should pretend on the basis of my own mere personal emotionalism that the first three films are high art from which all other products have somehow deviated.  this is all lowbrow kitchsy crap intended to act as extended ads for toys and lunchboxes--the true innovation is in getting the audience for the toys and lunchboxes to pay directly for the advertisements therefor in the form of ticket prices.

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I don't get this really. That in order to say that the new movies being dumb as a pile of bricks, completely falling apart at the seams when the audience applies the tiniest bit of scrutiny to them, is somehow okay because the old movies were not perfect either. That's some very twisted logic right there. Surely the prequels had a heavy case of the plot depending on everyone to be a total idiot to never question where the clone army came from. But not to the degree that every single scene, every character's action makes no sense and only serves to tape a bunch of pretty visuals together instead of, you know, actually bothering to tell a story. It's even more hilarious when looking at the original trilogy. Sure, was the Empire being beaten by Ewoks or getting defeated after the death of the Emperor despite massively overpowering the rebels contrived? Yes! But hey, it's just one thing in a movie that at least was thematically tight with its family drama and conclusion to the civil war set up by its predecessors.

If you like the new movies for the spectacle, good on you! You may iff quite a lot of people for enabling Disney and proving them right that they can sell literal garbage and don't need to bother with telling stories. But please, just don't tell people who come seeking good  stories (or at the very least ones that don't insult your intelligence) that they are wrong for expecting one in a major culturally impactful franchise that lasted for decades. I mean, I get the idea that people think mass produced = bad quality, so you shouldn't expect a bold narrative masterpiece from mass produced high budget blockbusters. But... why exactly is that? Why should we just blindly accept that more money means less creativity? Because that's not really how it has to be, has it? A good script isn't all that expensive for crying out loud! All you need to do is hire people who come to you with a vision, not hand the usual hacks a checklist of what you expect the movie to be like and call it a day.

While I'm at it: What is it with fans of the new ones criticizing the originals for being too slow? Defending the Sequel Trilogy's existence by saying they have to be this breath-takingly fast because you can't sell it to modern kids otherwise. Is that what people really think? I thought more that's what faceless executives think when putting together movies as a checklist of things they assume sells well. But to think that ordinary people like those children's parents have adopted that mindset that children need sensory overload that prevents them from thinking during the movie consumption to be satisfied with the experience is actually really horrifying. Because I actually think that's the only thing this is about: Here look at how shiny this all is, please never think about any of it! Now praise us for how awesome all of these forgettable pictures are and buy our stuff! And this once again is all bullshit, because I have seen so much good storytelling in children's media over the years that wasn't in need of completely overwhelming the viewer with effects and cuts. At least nowhere the way Abrams is known to do it to hide his movies' hideously gaping plot holes.

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20 hours ago, Werthead said:

One thing I did appreciate:

  Hide contents

"Let's Holdo Manoeuvre the shit out of that fleet!"

"Don't be silly, Meriadoc Brandybuck! That really was some kind of total bullshit that Johnson pulled out of his arse! Never mention it again!"

 

I don’t get why people seem to think this is a dig at the last movie.  People wanted an explanation for why they couldn’t do this every time and here it is.  There are so many moments where they refer back to the last movie I didn’t get the vibe that they were trying to undo it at all.  

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