spoilers [SPOILERS] Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker

[felice]

33 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I've been watching everything in order on Disney+ and got to Star Wars last night and thought this was hilarious. Like at least tell them to call him Luke Lars. And then Obi-wan takes on an alias of "Ben" but keeps his last name? The fuck?
Plus so much of what Obi-Wan says to Luke in that movie is not true.

Those are mostly problems with the Prequels, not ANH! But Vader and the Emperor don't know Luke exists, so they have no reason to search for him, and no reason to take any interest in local events on an insignificant fringe world like Tatooine. There are probably lots of Skywalkers on the planet - Shmi obviously has ancestors, and they would likely have other descendants. And that an old hermit who lives a few hours away from the Lars farm is named Kenobi  is hardly going to be hot gossip across the planet; if anyone hunting him gets close enough for it to be an issue, using an alias is unlikely to make much difference.

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Toth said:

I tried to ignore this thread for the sake of my sanity, but now that I got the notification.^^

Well, not quite to the same degree. At least A New Hope gave a justification for everything and everyone being where they are. The Tantive 4 was intercepted above Tatooine because Leia wanted Obi-Wan to join her party. 

Okay, that's fair - except we have no idea why he should go to Alderaan, or why Obi-Wan wouldn't have been recruited before now. Why is Bail looking for him now, of all times? And why combine both the plan to bring the death star plans AND the plan to pick up Obi-Wan?  

1 hour ago, Toth said:

The droids with the Death Star plans were captured near Luke's farm because R2 was on the way to Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan himself was where he was because he was keeping an eye on Luke as he grew up. The only minor stretch is Owen buying the droids as R2 makes sure that he does, but R2 still escapes for the sole purpose of finding Obi-Wan, with no heed for Luke himself. 

That's kind of a huge stretch though! The droids end up being captured by Jawas and then sold, miraculously, to the person that Obi-Wan is supposedly looking after instead of being sold to almost anyone else. Hell, Luke being home at that point is miraculous, as he informs us of his power converter plans. Hell, that's an even better one - how the hell does R2 even know where Obi-Wan is? It's not like he has a postal address. And it's not like Obi-Wan was out looking for them or anything. He was just sitting around doing fuckall. 

1 hour ago, Toth said:

Now compare that to TFA. With BB-8 coincidentally being picked up by Rey as he is escaping the First Order, Rey and BB-8 coincidentally encountering Finn as he coincidentally arrived at her village after being shot down where coincidentally the Falcon is waiting for them at the same day coincidentally Han Solo arrives to search for it. If anyone had missed the other one by 10 minutes the whole story wouldn't have happened. This all just feels exactly like Star Trek 11s Kirk landing on the same planet as Old Spock was dropped off by Nero and coincidentally encountering him as he was running away from the native wildlife. 

Similarly, if Luke is at Toshe station the whole plot doesn't work. Obi-Wan goes off with R2, goes to Mos Eisley, hires Han (though he might possibly need to steal a land speeder to sell) and Luke is stuck at home the whole time. While it's certainly more compressed and has more coincidences (which is basically the ST's issue entirely throughout, save probably TLJ), it's not particularly different because, well, we're aping it entirely. Hell, for all we know the reason that Max Von Sydow is on Jakku is because he's attempting to look after Rey! 

 

[Kalbear]

5 minutes ago, felice said:

Those are mostly problems with the Prequels, not ANH! But Vader and the Emperor don't know Luke exists, so they have no reason to search for him, and no reason to take any interest in local events on an insignificant fringe world like Tatooine. There are probably lots of Skywalkers on the planet - Shmi obviously has ancestors, and they would likely have other descendants. And that an old hermit who lives a few hours away from the Lars farm is named Kenobi  is hardly going to be hot gossip across the planet; if anyone hunting him gets close enough for it to be an issue, using an alias is unlikely to make much difference.

That's fine for him staying on-planet, but it goes completely off the rails once he gets noticed by Vader. If Luke is named Lars or something like that, Vader has no idea about who the hell he is or why he's so powerful in the force. He doesn't go tearing up the galaxy attempting to find his son, because it's just another force-sensitive user. Maybe he cares some, but chances are good he just executes the little shit, just like he has virtually every other force user worth a damn that he's come across. I mean, this worked flawlessly with Leia, after all - he doesn't detect that she's force-sensitive, he spends a bunch of time yelling at her and interrogating her and then almost kills her because he has no idea who she is. 

It's a very very dumb plan with no real upside save that "Skywalker" is a badass name. 

[Lord Varys]

17 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Even without going into the new stuff, the movie made it clear that Qui-Gon Jinn was unorthodox, didn't always follow the Jedi code, and wasn't afraid to defy the Council.

He basically said he would train Anakin whether the Council agreed to or not. That's pretty big stuff. At this point, I'd say he was definitely ready to leave the order to train Anakin if need be. The Council didn't exclude him because they preferred keeping an eye on them. But the split between the Council and Qui-Gon could hardly have been bigger.

I never got the vibe that this defiance would ever get Qui-Gon into deep trouble. All the negative consequences it had for him seems to have been (as per TPM) that he wasn't on the Jedi Council himself - which he likely didn't want to be, anyway. Nobody indicates that Qui-Gon's defiance is going to get him disciplined in a severe fashion, or that he risks being expelled from the Jedi Order.

17 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Both Sifo-Dyas and Dooku had visions of the future and of the return of the Sith, but did not trust the Council enough to alert them.

I'm not sure what Sifo-Dyas did was all that wise - and especially not what Dooku did, although I don't know yet how the audio book has him hook up with Darth Sidious. In the end, he helped to bring about the downfall of the Jedi and the Republic, he did not stop it.

The perverse idea to use cloned soldiers was apparently Sifo-Dyas' idea - not a very Jedi thing to do. And in the end the clones were claimed by the Republic and used by Palpatine, not the Jedi.

17 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Even with the movies alone, we know there was widespread criticism and distrust of the Council before the separatists emerged.

We also know that the Council was incapable of using the force correctly, and it's easy to deduce that was because of the constraints of the code.

I'm not sure how that should have prevented them from seeing things - and there are things like the Sith rituals of the various Baneite masters throughout the centuries deliberately obscuring the visions of the Jedi.

17 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Yoda has this line about "the dark side clouding everything," right? Perhaps Yoda's problem is that he was so unwilling to have negative emotions that he could no longer foresee dark futures. Of course he eventually is able to see much better, but by that point he hardly has a choice since the war has started. The problem wasn't the force, surely Palpatine was not powerful enough to cloud the vision of all Jedi ; the problem was that the Jedi were also actively blinding themselves.

Yet Yoda is also the only/main Jedi who knows/believes the Sith are out there and will return. He is perhaps the Jedi who takes the threat most seriously. I mean, it would have been great if Yoda had had a story of his own, making mistakes and the like, but there is nothing of that there. He fails in the end when he confronts Darth Sidious, but it is never indicated that he failed before that. Or that the Jedi Order as such had failed.

In fact, now that I think of it I had not expected that Yoda would be the most important Jedi. He could have been a much more interesting character if he had been as important in the Old Republic as the Targaryens were back in Valyria. That way there could have been other Jedi who made crucial mistakes, with Yoda being a more Qui-Gon- or Cassandra-like character.

17 hours ago, Rippounet said:

I like this perspective.
I think it's possible to say that the Jedi order was in fact going in that direction before the crisis in episode 1. We do see Yoda meditating a lot and it takes time for members of the Council to get their hands dirty IIRC. There's even a moment when Yoda is given crucial bits of information and he simply says "meditate on that, I will." Obviously, he was way too much into contemplation and thought at first.

That might be ... but then, I really don't know how they could have stopped the Sith. Do you have any idea how this could have worked? I mean, is there a guarantee that a less strict code or more dark emotions could have helped them? Could that not perhaps led to more Jedi joining Sidious rather than opposing him?

17 hours ago, Rippounet said:

In fact, I always assumed that Qui-Gon did not want to be on the Council for this very reason: because members of the Council tended to stay in the temple, meditate, and order others around (not to mention judge their fellows), while Qui-Gon liked to be free to roam the galaxy and do as much good as he could, following his instincts and the force.

With those movies one could make a very solid case that Yoda's condemnation of Anakin in TPM was very justified. All he did accomplish was to become Vader. He never stopped the Sith, he never was the Chosen One - Darth Vader's very existence even corrupted his grandson. It needed a Palpatine to rectify everything the Skywalkers fucked up.

17 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Building on this, one could say the war forced the most powerful Jedi to step out of their ivory tower. But by that time it was too little, too late.

The impression I have most Jedi didn't hang out in the temple. Even the Council masters did go on missions occasionally. The the average Jedi was having a lot to do - after all, things were gradually worsening in the last decades of the Republic, putting a lot of strain on the Jedi. They did end up as generals of the Grand Army because they knew if they would not do this the Republic would fall.

17 hours ago, Rippounet said:

PS: perhaps we're in the wrong thread by now... We're no longer discussing Rey, are we?

That's right. If you want to continue we can do it in the thread on the trilogies, the general thread, or the one on EU stuff ;-).

[Centrist Simon Steele]

1 hour ago, Corvinus said:

Yeah, but you failed to realize that Luke was protected from Vader by all that sand.

Obi-Wan does say some conflicting things. Does he say "before you were born" not just "for a very long time"? Also, Obi-Wan cleverly says "I don't recall owning any droids", doesn't say he doesn't remember R2. And I don't he ever did. Not sure if he owned R4, the droid that accompanied him in AotC and that gets destroyed by the buzz droids in RotS. R4 may have belonged to the Jedi Order. The Owen Lars stuff is entirely a retcon.

And speaking of the Lars homestead, personally I felt that Rey should have buried the sabers with Padme, since she, presumably, has a tomb. Only Luke is connected with the Larses, not Leia.

 The sand line. You got me. Lol.

[Suzanna Stormborn]

19 hours ago, Ran said:

I think this is a great insight. I don't love-love this trilogy, anyone can look back and see my problems with what Abrams did with the first film and what Johnson did with the second film, and even this third film has a first act that I find wrongheaded and annoying and overall involves too much plot-coupon hunting. 

But this is the film that won me over and made me care about the new cast (besides Kylo/Ben). And so that's where the cathartic elements come from: they are rooted in characters one cares about surviving (or not) and winning (or not) against all hope. Catharsis, created by the kinds of catastrophic and eucatastrophic moments that Lucas had in the original films, is what made me love Star Wars. It's part why I hold Rogue One in such high regard, because that's a film about the main characters, every one of them, sacrificing themselves for a cause and managing to win out against all hope. Every moment of that film and its plot is informed by this.

But there is no catharsis in the PT, in my experience. None, at any time. I don't like them, though I can acknowledge that I can see the bones of something good, where Lucas should have treated these films like, I don't know, the EU or cartoons where he just signed off on stuff that he felt he had no objection to and others did the heavy lifting.

This sequel trilogy was badly flawed. None of these three films are as good as their counterparts in the OT. But for me it successfully managed to conclude the Skywalker saga.

The new characters (Poe, Finn, BB8, Rey) all won me over in TFA, a movie which I very much loved. And Kylo I liked by the end of TLJ. This 3rd movie was just not good for many reasons. The prequels were and remain bad, however to the point being made in the thread— suddenly after TROS I hate the prequels a little less for some reason, maybe they have just grown familiar after 18 years. Sort of like Trump and W. Bush. I thought Bush was the worst ever possible and I was wrong. 

After PT I would think Disney would have done everything they could to make sure Episode IX finished strong, but the script lacked, the plot lacked, the leaps of reasoning made it worse... and the part that makes it so bad is that VII, VIII and IX were basically just a way to kill our 3 heroes from the 80’s who would have otherwise lived eternally in our imaginations. I didnt need to see Luke and Han die, I really didnt........

Maybe someone here knows the answer to this. When Palpatine was a senator from Naboo, was he married with 2 kids a dog? I would assume it is normal for members of the Galactic Senate to campaign and give the impression of a decent human who has a family and procreates right? I doubt Palpatine ran on a platform of an unmarried-total Sith domination of the galaxy...

[Raja]

This is kinda sad

[dbunting]

I am sure there are thousands of reasons to hate on the film but I liked it. Loved some of the visuals. Noticed that a lot of the storm troopers were voiced by women this time around, a female Star Destroyer Captain, and there was a same sex on screen kiss which surprised me since this is Disney.  I liked Chewie getting his medal finally. I thought they did a good job using the Carrie Fisher footage. Now it makes sense why they didn't have her die in the last film, because she had a large role to play in this one.

My biggest issue with the movie and all three really is that the three heroes don't mesh well when together (I can look past the 100's of Destroyers magically appearing like the GreyJoy fleet in GOT). The scenes when Rey, Poe and Finn are together are just cringe worthy to me.  The dialogue is bad, they speak too fast and it all feels fake.  All in all I liked it and it felt like a good ending to the saga. I did kinda think that Rise of Skywalker was referring to Ken coming back from the hole after Rey died. Him rising up as a Skywalker.

[Lord Varys]

By the way, how fucked-up failures do Luke Skywalker and Lando Calrissian have to be to be unable to find something Rey and her gang stumble on by accident? Such a disgrace.

Thinking about diversity and such - they could have had alien stormtroopers and Imperial officers. That would have made sense in light of the fact that the Empire (I'm not talking about weirdo orders - one wonders why Palpatine didn't call his gang 'The 66th Order' or 'Order 66' ;-)) was having trouble recruiting people.

The whole xenophobia of the Empire was always an EU thing. It sort of appears this way, but it could just as well have been an outgrowth of the whole clone army thing. And besides - a lack of troops would have changed things, so this would have been an opportunity.

[Jeor]

3 hours ago, Suzanna Stormborn said:

VII, VIII and IX were basically just a way to kill our 3 heroes from the 80’s who would have otherwise lived eternally in our imaginations. I didnt need to see Luke and Han die, I really didnt........

Maybe this is one of the key points why people don't like the sequel trilogy.

Han, Luke and Leia were all essentially killed off and more or less denied their happy ending (Force Ghost or not). The victory in RotJ was rendered inconsequential and the decades in between Episodes VI and VII were shown to be an empty space where those heroes failed abysmally, and in the sequel trilogy they all died. It's basically one long, drawn-out tragedy for the Big Three.

I understand the desire to use those characters again, especially with the actors still around at the time. But it would probably have been better creatively to have the threat be a little less direct than, "They failed and the whole big Empire is still there, just under a different name."

[Lord Varys]

4 minutes ago, Jeor said:

I understand the desire to use those characters again, especially with the actors still around at the time. But it would probably have been better creatively to have the threat be a little less direct than, "They failed and the whole big Empire is still there, just under a different name."

I think nobody would have had issues with them (or some of them) dying if it had made sense and had not ruined and destroyed everything we thought they had accomplished.

The idea that Han's ingrate son essentially killed all of them is just sick.

[RumHam]

I just finished Return of the Jedi and the ending is just ridiculous now. What the hell was that big explosion of energy emanating from the shaft if not the emperor dying?

Then Anakin shows up as a force ghost at the end (which never made any sense anyway since no one taught him the trick.) I guess slaughtering a bunch of children, killing your pregnant wife and then countless other people is all forgiven once you throw an old man down a reactor shaft and he doesn't even die. 

[Jeor]

1 hour ago, Lord Varys said:

I think nobody would have had issues with them (or some of them) dying if it had made sense and had not ruined and destroyed everything we thought they had accomplished.

The idea that Han's ingrate son essentially killed all of them is just sick.

Yes, the original trilogy and the characters we knew and loved were all utter failures; essentially they accomplished nothing. In fact, you could make the case that they all died in situations worse off than when their heroic lives even began. Consider:

Han: Separated from Leia, returned to his life as a smuggler (pre-ANH) and killed by his own son.

Luke: Bitter hermit for years and the last remaining member of a dying Jedi order (pre-ANH Jedi situation), then dies himself.

Leia: Separated from Han, leader of a tiny resistance barely holding it together (pre-ANH) and then dies.

I think this is why I don't like the sequel trilogy. TFA was fine if derivative (with First Order essentially undoing all accomplishments of OT), but 8 and 9 really stuck it to the old guard and the sense of victory at the end of 9 was somewhat hollow, given that we've already seen the precedent where the happy ending of RotJ obviously didn't stick.

[sologdin]

the argument that later setting developments undo the ending of VI is counterfactual: the mission on planet VI.1--free the scoundrel--was successful; the mission on VI.2--finish mystical training--was also a success; and the mission on VI.3--blow up orbital space station--was furthermore an unqualified success.  the mission of no part of VI was 'end the empire' or 'exterminate the sith' or, heaven forfend, 'abolish evil.'

that said, revolution is a praxis, not a poesis--the product is less important than the process. we would be inept anti-fascists if we whined that trump's election undoes the WWII victory.

[Jeor]

26 minutes ago, sologdin said:

The mission of no part of VI was 'end the empire' or 'exterminate the sith' or, heaven forfend, 'abolish evil.'

I don't think I agree with you on this one - what was the point of the Rebel Alliance if not to end or at least significantly remake the Empire? The fact that Leia is leading another ragtag bunch of rebels with a virtually identical mission shows that the entire goals of the original Rebel Alliance were an abject failure if they're still struggling and in the same situation as they were before.

And while I agree that there were some significant accomplishments made in RotJ, and that factually of course those aren't wiped out (they're still historical events), it's common sense that subsequent events can cheapen the prior accomplishments.

A more appropriate version of your example would be if a second Nazi Germany rose thirty years after World War II and a second Hitler was conquering Europe all over again. Yes, great that you won WWII, but somewhat of a bummer that the Nazis have come back again so easily in your lifetime. If you were a WWII veteran in that situation, would you be as happy with your old victory given that it obviously didn't stick?

[Underfoot]

11 hours ago, Corvinus said:

And speaking of the Lars homestead, personally I felt that Rey should have buried the sabers with Padme, since she, presumably, has a tomb. Only Luke is connected with the Larses, not Leia.

This is honestly the thing that has bugged me most! In general I didn't like how Leia's character ended (though I fully understand that there was no perfect solution), but the disrespect shown to Leia's character by the creators by tying her memory to something that belonged only to Luke... feels really bad.

(It also would've been nice to have some sort of shout out to padme in general, especially with this trilogy's obsession with parentage. I guess they really wanted to pretend the PT didn't exist?)

[Ran]

 

4 hours ago, Jeor said:

I don't think I agree with you on this one - what was the point of the Rebel Alliance if not to end or at least significantly remake the Empire?

Sologdin's right in that there's no explicit notion that the destruction of the Deathstar or even the death of the Emperor is going to, necessarily, end the Empire. But sure, the film frames these things as significant victories that will, indeed, reshape the galaxy. 

4 hours ago, Jeor said:

The fact that Leia is leading another ragtag bunch of rebels with a virtually identical mission shows that the entire goals of the original Rebel Alliance were an abject failure if they're still struggling and in the same situation as they were before.

That's not exactly right. While it's not onscreen, because it's in the gap, there was a period of time in which the Republic was resurgent and Imperial holdouts were absorbed or driven away until the First Order came out of the Unknown Regions. So they won a period of peace, a period in which people were born and lived and had a chance at a life without the Imperial boot who might not have. Luke established his Jedi temple. Yes, things went sour, but if they hadn't somehow, where's the conflict?

That said, I too was disappointed with the retread of the Imperial/Rebel dichotomy. This may be my Heir to the Empire bias showing, but I wanted an established but fragile New Republic dealing with whatever the problem was, not Rebellion-lite "Resistance" armed militia. I wanted some of the political aspects of what it means to overthrow tyranny and re-establish some sort of democracy, and what it's like when you have to reconcile a violent past with a future in which you have to work alongside those you used to fight against because they, too, would have a constituency.

But then, maybe what I wanted was just a slightly more mature Star Wars, one that grew up with me to a point, and that's something best left (I guess) to other media than films when so much is invested in attempting to reach the broadest possible audience, including some current authoritarian nations with large GDPs who aren't really happy to allow such things within their borders... (Though that said, Rogue One essentially did feature some more mature considerations on things like insurgency and order, so another reason why I love it.)

4 hours ago, Jeor said:

A more appropriate version of your example would be if a second Nazi Germany rose thirty years after World War II and a second Hitler was conquering Europe all over again. Yes, great that you won WWII, but somewhat of a bummer that the Nazis have come back again so easily in your lifetime. If you were a WWII veteran in that situation, would you be as happy with your old victory given that it obviously didn't stick?

You don't need a counter-factual for this. WWI was the "war to end all wars", stopping an expansionist Germany... only to see it all undone twenty years later. I'm sure there were many veterans of the first who were proud of their role but disappointed that it didn't seem to really settle matters for good and all. I know much blame was thrown towards the politicians and diplomats who failed to find a way to make that peace permanent.

[Toth]

14 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Okay, that's fair - except we have no idea why he should go to Alderaan, or why Obi-Wan wouldn't have been recruited before now. Why is Bail looking for him now, of all times? And why combine both the plan to bring the death star plans AND the plan to pick up Obi-Wan? 

Well, Alderaan is where Leia's father is, who is an important founder of the rebel alliance. I assume that the construction of the Death Star had many of the rebels shitting bricks, so they had to gather all allies they could and have an emergency meeting on how to bring it down with the plans they've already stolen. In fact, now that I think more about it Leia being so familiar with Obi-Wan and thinking it quite possible for him to join the alliance could easily be interpreted as Obi-Wan having been in contact with Bail the entire time, keeping taps on the state of the galaxy (and of course Leia's well-being). So he's acting nowhere near the broken recluse some in this thread want to make him out to be.

14 hours ago, Kalbear said:

That's kind of a huge stretch though! The droids end up being captured by Jawas and then sold, miraculously, to the person that Obi-Wan is supposedly looking after instead of being sold to almost anyone else. Hell, Luke being home at that point is miraculous, as he informs us of his power converter plans. Hell, that's an even better one - how the hell does R2 even know where Obi-Wan is? It's not like he has a postal address. And it's not like Obi-Wan was out looking for them or anything. He was just sitting around doing fuckall. 

Obi-Wan is a Jedi looking after Luke and Jedi are shown to be able to perceive when someone close to them is in danger from half the galaxy away. It is not too far of a stretch to assume that when Luke headed out alone to search for R2 Obi-Wan would sense that he'd get into trouble and come towards him. I mean seriously, that's his one job, so I assume he's going to do it. Also from what the dialogue between 3PO and R2 heavily implies, R2 knows where Obi-Wan lives. That's his only goal during the entirety of this part of the movie, rolling towards Obi-Wan's hut in a straight line no matter who gets in his way. Connecting that with above observation that Bail must have known Obi-Wan's whereabouts and given them to Leia to go get him, it seems actually quite possible that Leia gave R2 the coordinates. What else was Leia's plan to reach Obi-Wan if she doesn't know where he lives? Tatooine isn't exactly a small place to look for a single person, being a planet and all...

14 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Similarly, if Luke is at Toshe station the whole plot doesn't work. Obi-Wan goes off with R2, goes to Mos Eisley, hires Han (though he might possibly need to steal a land speeder to sell) and Luke is stuck at home the whole time. While it's certainly more compressed and has more coincidences (which is basically the ST's issue entirely throughout, save probably TLJ), it's not particularly different because, well, we're aping it entirely. Hell, for all we know the reason that Max Von Sydow is on Jakku is because he's attempting to look after Rey! 

Would Obi-Wan go without Luke? Hardly. Obi-Wan didn't fight for the alliance so far exactly because he knew that he can't take on Vader and the Emperor on his own, that only Luke has the potential to bring the fight to the empire. Luke getting the droids in itself is pretty inconsequencial because no matter who bought the droids, R2 would still escape and go to Obi-Wan one way or another. Basically Obi-Wan would only accept Leia's call to arms if Luke goes with him. If the Lars' refuse to let him just walk in and grab Luke for some adventuring, then he'd just stay where he is. It's the stormtroopers killing Luke's aunt and uncle for buying the droids that actually gets the ball rolling.

But then again, I don't think you are getting why I think those are two different kinds of coincidences. In ANH or any half-way decent movie there is always cause and effect in play. There may be events without which the story wouldn't get rolling, but it is at least possible to trace the following events back to them. There is a logic even in circumstantial events. It's not like characters magically know where to go to make the plot happen or characters acting in complete disregard of common sense or just their established characterization to make plot happen. That's the kind of contrivances I'm talking about.

[polishgenius]

I just had a thought, and I'm sure it's not totally original, but hey: a lot of people blamed RJ for their dissatisfaction with how Luke was in TLJ, and yeah, I don't agree with every decision (I think they needed to find a better breaking point than him standing over a child ready to murder him while sleeping), but...

...who was it that laid down the idea that Luke had vanished years ago and was found on an isolated planet all on his own? That was Abrams. Clearly wanting Luke to be a Yoda figure but Yoda had a reason to have gone off into hiding and JJ didn't think that out. Johnson had to find some plausible reason why Luke would do the same thing.

[Lord Varys]

8 hours ago, sologdin said:

the argument that later setting developments undo the ending of VI is counterfactual: the mission on planet VI.1--free the scoundrel--was successful; the mission on VI.2--finish mystical training--was also a success; and the mission on VI.3--blow up orbital space station--was furthermore an unqualified success.  the mission of no part of VI was 'end the empire' or 'exterminate the sith' or, heaven forfend, 'abolish evil.'

that said, revolution is a praxis, not a poesis--the product is less important than the process. we would be inept anti-fascists if we whined that trump's election undoes the WWII victory.

Those seem to be attempts to post hoc justify the existence of the inadequate sequels. A proper sequel/continuation would have taken into account the status quo at the end of ROTJ and created a different story/setting from there, not essentially using the time in-between to allow for exactly the same setting in TFA as we had for ANH.

As I think I said already somewhere the way to illustrate is this to imagine ANH as a sequel to ROTS with the Republic restored in that movie, the Galactic Empire being a pipe dream of Palpatine which immediately collapsed after the end of ROTS, and the Trade Federation resurgent again, to blockade Naboo.

5 hours ago, Underfoot said:

This is honestly the thing that has bugged me most! In general I didn't like how Leia's character ended (though I fully understand that there was no perfect solution), but the disrespect shown to Leia's character by the creators by tying her memory to something that belonged only to Luke... feels really bad.

(It also would've been nice to have some sort of shout out to padme in general, especially with this trilogy's obsession with parentage. I guess they really wanted to pretend the PT didn't exist?)

This is something I thought about, too. The Palpatines do not exactly have a connection to Tatooine, and neither does Rey, personally. But Luke's and Leia's mother was Padmé, so seeing Naboo at the end - or at any point in the movies - would have been pretty good.

The Lars place is only something Luke is connected to, not Leia.

Considering they essentially ignored Coruscant we can be very sure that the 'artistic approach' of the new movies originally was to ignore the PT.

But then, they very much botched that with TROS by talking every other minute about the Sith - Sith this, Sith that, when the OT never so much as mentioned the existence of the Sith. Weirdly enough, we do have Palpatine always called Palpatine when in a Sith context his proper name should have been Darth Sidious (which I think was the name used for Palpatine in TLJ during Luke's mad ramblings).

3 hours ago, Ran said:

Sologdin's right in that there's no explicit notion that the destruction of the Deathstar or even the death of the Emperor is going to, necessarily, end the Empire. But sure, the film frames these things as significant victories that will, indeed, reshape the galaxy. 

That is exactly the message ROTJ is sending - and it is exactly the same message TROS is also sending now. Would you say that it would make sense for the Empire to rise again and Palpatine to return yet again after TROS? Surely the impression of that happening seems as likely in both movies - which very much underlines that the entire setting was something that did not exactly naturally grow out of the message the ending was sending.

3 hours ago, Ran said:

That's not exactly right. While it's not onscreen, because it's in the gap, there was a period of time in which the Republic was resurgent and Imperial holdouts were absorbed or driven away until the First Order came out of the Unknown Regions. So they won a period of peace, a period in which people were born and lived and had a chance at a life without the Imperial boot who might not have. Luke established his Jedi temple. Yes, things went sour, but if they hadn't somehow, where's the conflict?

Stuff like that should have been in the movies. Even if there had been a relevant Republic and a Jedi Order in-between the movies - it is still insignificant and irrelevant in relation to the new movies because those things are (barely) mentioned.

I mean, the greatest joke of TFA is that this 'Republic' just consists of one system - and its destruction doesn't then cause outrage and anger throughout the civilized reaches of the galaxy but the kind of non-existent support for the Resistance we see in TLJ.

Unlike the Galactic Empire, those First Order thugs were never painted as the powerful guys effectively ruling the galaxy. They were just a powerful faction.

3 hours ago, Ran said:

That said, I too was disappointed with the retread of the Imperial/Rebel dichotomy. This may be my Heir to the Empire bias showing, but I wanted an established but fragile New Republic dealing with whatever the problem was, not Rebellion-lite "Resistance" armed militia. I wanted some of the political aspects of what it means to overthrow tyranny and re-establish some sort of democracy, and what it's like when you have to reconcile a violent past with a future in which you have to work alongside those you used to fight against because they, too, would have a constituency.

That is what anyone would have expected to happen, that's not much of a bias.

But they certainly could also have reached a point in time - it was thirty years after ROTJ, was it not? - when the Galactic Civil War was pretty much behind them and whatever new government they had had different problems than any remnants of the former Empire. They could have all been absorbed in a New Republic by then, with the new story being about something completely new.

Even if the Sith were to return in such a setting, they could have taken on different forms - perhaps many Sith fighting each other and the Jedi rather than the Rule of Two thing.

3 hours ago, Ran said:

You don't need a counter-factual for this. WWI was the "war to end all wars", stopping an expansionist Germany... only to see it all undone twenty years later. I'm sure there were many veterans of the first who were proud of their role but disappointed that it didn't seem to really settle matters for good and all. I know much blame was thrown towards the politicians and diplomats who failed to find a way to make that peace permanent.

If you want such a story then you better focus on that. We essentially have no explanation why the hell the First Order exist, why people follow Snokatine, etc.

9 hours ago, Jeor said:

I don't think I agree with you on this one - what was the point of the Rebel Alliance if not to end or at least significantly remake the Empire? The fact that Leia is leading another ragtag bunch of rebels with a virtually identical mission shows that the entire goals of the original Rebel Alliance were an abject failure if they're still struggling and in the same situation as they were before.

It is cringeworthy ridiculous how Lando gets hero worship in the new movie... How he did it? He never did it, guys, that's why you have to do it now. They never defeated the Empire and they never defeated Palpatine. Endor was a completely meaningless victory.

11 hours ago, RumHam said:

I just finished Return of the Jedi and the ending is just ridiculous now. What the hell was that big explosion of energy emanating from the shaft if not the emperor dying?

Well, I don't think they said he never died. Merry Brandybuck (apparently a great expert of Sith lore just as he can competently explain Fangorn stuff) knows that cloning did the trick.

But I honestly always thought there was some energy down in that shaft and the Emperor hitting caused this explosion thingy. I never interpreted this as 'dark side energy dissipating' or something like that - although it is quite clear that many EU authors interpreted it that way.

'Dark Empire' could at least be seen as Anakin's sacrifice damaging the Emperor, driving him mad and forcing him to have to work with defective clone bodies that are quickly consumed. But the Palpatine in TROS is more powerful than ever, especially after he rejuvenated himself.

11 hours ago, RumHam said:

Then Anakin shows up as a force ghost at the end (which never made any sense anyway since no one taught him the trick.) I guess slaughtering a bunch of children, killing your pregnant wife and then countless other people is all forgiven once you throw an old man down a reactor shaft and he doesn't even die. 

Well, in the end the redemption thingy is all about personal choices. You can be forgiving anything if you just want to turn to the light, etc. Even the new Vader wannabe - he murdered his father, caused the death of his uncle and his mother, butchered hundreds of people personally, and played a crucial role in planetary genocide ... yet resurrecting one person earns him light Force ghost status.