spoilers [SPOILERS] Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker

[sologdin]

i hear you.  but what does it add to show him beating up an empire wannabe? bracket the nostalgic aesthetic question for a moment, is all. 'played out' is a criticism a fortiori against an uncritical heroic individualism. the way it went is by contrast confrontational, challenging the audience. it is borderline brechtian.

 

as for mcdiarmid's sex life--we know the siths be fucking because that's why christensen breaks his maoist-buddhist vows.  

[Corvinus85]

Once again, we get dumb Imperials who simply have no idea how to react to dumb tactics of the good guys. General Pryde should have said: ok guys, hold position, we'll just go up where there's almost zero atmosphere, and then come back. Be back in 5 minutes.

JJ on space: anyone can get anywhere in a few minutes. We could see a streak of an energy beam from across the galaxy. The Millennium Falcon can zip to the core worlds and gather enough ships to drown a cinema screen, and then take them all to the Uknown Regions right in the nick of time. Space is not that big.

Also JJ on space: the Emperor has gouged out the resources of who knows how many planets to construct a ridiculously massive fleet, and steal babies from all around to create a monstrous cult of followers, because you know space is big, and no one will notice.

JJ makes fun of the Holdo manuever, but goes and does that stupid lightspeed quickstep or whatever the hell is called, ignoring the most basic stuff about lightspeed travel established all the way back in the original film.

[HexMachina]

14 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Also, to @Lord Varys and @Darryk - the point of training in the Jedi Temple wasn't to learn how to use force skills. As we've seen countless times in basically every single movie, cartoons and the Mandalorian now, force power is basically innate and largely inherited (ugh). If the force is strong in you you can do a whole lot of things without particular skill or training - including things like force lightning, jumping, pulling, pushing, and in TFA mind tricks. Psychometry is another rarer ability too, and one that neatly explains why Rey knows the existence of the jedi mind trick - she can see the past of things through objects, and touching Luke's lightsaber gives her a whole lot of insight. You might want years and years of training to matter, but it doesn't. 

No, the point of the Jedi temple is indoctrination. Yoda wasn't worried about training Luke late in life because it's too hard to train them to use abilities - it's because it's too hard to train them in that specific form of religion and viewpoint that late in life, because they have all those things that fuck it up - things like attachments and love and caring for others. You can teach kids early how to be good little child soldiers who have no attachments and no belongings and no physical needs, but older kids or adults? Way too hard. Way too easy for them to do the wrong thing and care about others or see the inherent unfairness in the Jedi ways. 

This is also consistent with the Council being concerned Anakin was too old and cared too much for his mother

3 hours ago, Ran said:

I just realized what the actual explanation is. When Pryde sees Chewbacca, he orders him to be put in an interrogation chamber. So Chewbacca, whether through torture or through Kylo using his Force memory grabbing thing, revealed that they were planning to go to Kijimi to crack open C-3POs head.

Wasn’t their ship also followed by another ship, i think the Knights of Ren? I thought it was then, but it may have been later

[Relic]

1 minute ago, sologdin said:

i hear you.  but what does it add to show him beating up an empire wannabe? bracket the nostalgic aesthetic question for a moment, is all.

 

i think there is a version of this story within which Luke actually EARNS his redemption. And it doesnt necessarily have to involve a lot of ass kicking. I mean, dont get me wrong...i definitely wanted to see bad ass Jedi Master Luke Skywalker. And i am in no way ashamed of that. 

[Relic]

2 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

JJ makes fun of the Holdo manuever, but goes and does that stupid lightspeed quickstep or whatever the hell is called, ignoring the most basic stuff about lightspeed travel established all the way back in the original film.

Yeah that was pretty hilarious. Fix one blatant inconsistency and immediately introduce three more. 

[HexMachina]

Also i (genuinely) just loved Domnhall Gleeson “I AM THE SPY!”  and his “i dont care if you win i just want Ren to lose” fit perfectly with his petty small mindedness

[Relic]

2 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Also i (genuinely) just loved Domnhall Gleeson “I AM THE SPY!”  and his “i dont care if you win i just want Ren to lose” fit perfectly with his petty small mindedness

Really? They made him completely useless and superfluous to the story, much like the silver armored storm trooper who did FUCK ALL. 

[HexMachina]

I liked him for being so snivelling, pathetic and useless and petty and small minded though

[Ran]

25 minutes ago, Relic said:

They made him completely useless and superfluous to the story

Saving Finn and Poe doesn't seem superfluous, given their outsized roles in the final act.

ETA: Lightspeed skipping is, technically, not impossible according to the rules in OT. It's just incredibly dangerous, and becomes exponentially more dangerous with each "skip". In the EU, a number of examples of successful blind jumps exist, though in at least one or two cases they involved Jedi pilots who let the Force guide them in punching coordinates. I really hated it in the movie, but it's another of those Abram "Rule of Cool trumps canon" things. This one is particularly galling because not only does it have them lightspeed skip multiple times, TIE fighters manage to follow through each of the skips, and one of the skips clearly sticks them in the atmosphere of some planet where they have to dodge those tower things. Ugh.

[Relic]

8 minutes ago, Ran said:

Saving Finn and Poe doesn't seem superfluous, given their outsized roles in the final act.

anyone could have done that. i dunno, again, lack of a three movie arc really makes everything sort of superfluous. And its absolutely clear by the end of this movie that there WAS NO PLAN, and that's just INSANE. Give me a billion dollars to produce 3 star wars movies and i guarantee you I would do a better job than these fucking hacks just did. 

[Ran]

17 minutes ago, Relic said:

And its absolutely clear by the end of this movie that there WAS NO PLAN, and that's just INSANE. Give me a billion dollars to produce 3 star wars movies and i guarantee you I would do a better job than these fucking hacks just did. 

I agree with this. J.J. Abrams tried to salvage a conclusion to the Skywalker Saga with very little to work with coming out of TLJ, IMO, and while I think the conclusion succeeds in capping off the nine-film saga, it was very rough and far from perfect. 

Disney has to be the one to blame for this, and Lucasfilm. For all Lucas's faults, he was the guy who had overarching approval of everything put on the screen in the previous six films, and so even when other writers and directors handled them they reflected a aesthetic and thematic unity that made it all feel a part of a whole. If they had assigned Abrams or Johnson as the lead on all three films, this would almost certainly have come out much less divisive. 

@HelenaExMachina

Ooooh, you are right! I remember trying to recall whose ship that was. You're spot on. 

(And good, I didn't like the idea of Chewie breaking under torture.)

[Ran]

1 hour ago, sologdin said:

there's a reason for this: persuasive reasoning here on the textual evidence of a palpy ridley prior to IX.  good stuff.

This is excellent, and one of my favorite food bloggers is involved(!)

[Lord Varys]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

ETA: Lightspeed skipping is, technically, not impossible according to the rules in OT. It's just incredibly dangerous, and becomes exponentially more dangerous with each "skip". In the EU, a number of examples of successful blind jumps exist, though in at least one or two cases they involved Jedi pilots who let the Force guide them in punching coordinates. I really hated it in the movie, but it's another of those Abram "Rule of Cool trumps canon" things. This one is particularly galling because not only does it have them lightspeed skip multiple times, TIE fighters manage to follow through each of the skips, and one of the skips clearly sticks them in the atmosphere of some planet where they have to dodge those tower things. Ugh.

Actually, per OT rules you don't jump into hyperspace in a planet's atmosphere - the first time we get some guys jumping in atmosphere is in the first season of TCW. The idea that you can jump from planetary atmosphere to planetary atmosphere in a matter of seconds has never been properly established anywhere, and definitely not in this new movie.

[Lord Varys]

3 hours ago, Jeor said:

I also don't really know how Snoke works as a plot device. Either he was an overly complicated puppet of Palpatine's, in which case why didn't Palpatine just continue doing his hologram shtick with the admirals instead of hiding behind Snoke, and with all those Star Destroyers (which can also kill planets) why did the First Order have that whole Starkiller base thing when they could have just been loaned half a dozen of that massive fleet? There were a few plot holes or difficult to understand concepts.

All that makes zero sense. Nobody wanted to use Palpatine back when they were making TFA and TLJ.

After all, the Sith are not so much as mentioned in TFA - and the first time a Sith comes up in the new movies is in TLJ when Luke mentions Darth Sidious (a name that's strangely enough absent from TROS) in passing - not to indicate he or the Sith were still out there. Neither Snoke nor 'Kylo Ren' are Sith. I mean, what the hell was that? If you wanted to make some sort of Sith threat (which Darth Sidious in the end was) then why wasn't Snoke Darth Something and Leia's son Darth Something Else?

They would have called themselves Darth Something if they had tried to follow the Sith tradition - especially the guy who fantasized about and fetishized and most likely masturbated to the feeling and thought of permanently wearing grandpa's magical mask. I mean, seriously, he would have likely called himself Darth Vader II, and his mute 'knights' would have been 'the knights of Vader'.

And if you as a writer wanted to make the new trilogy about a new Sith threat culimating in the return of Palpatine - and you used all those Sith imagery (Evil Hologram, maked guys, hoods, capes, etc.) then you certainly would have hinted at that possibility in the first movie.

In fact, as things stand the best way to tell the Palpatine story may have been to make him the guy who seduced Leia's son - and have him have multiple clone bodies with Ren killing one in the second movie, and then being outmaneuvered by the fact that the big bad is sort of immortal because he has many clone bodies on storage and can transfer his spirit to another whenever his body dies (which basically was the old Dark Empire story).

4 hours ago, Ran said:

Does Yoda?

Actually, the Jedi do. They are supposed to not form emotional attachments. It is nowhere said they have to be chaste. It is sort of the difference between celibacy and chastity. They should not have families, but as per Lucas himself he nowhere said Jedi have to be chaste.

4 hours ago, Ran said:

Personally, yes, I'd have liked the idea if the "son" was actually a clone Palpatine made that rebelled against him somehow, but I'm fine with him artificially creating him through his powers of the Dark Side, or through the expediency of artificial insemination for reasons to be explained in some future book or comic, I guess. I definitely don't think he naturally procreated, and I doubt the mother was a willing subject of his plans.

The way they frame Rey's story there is that she is 'a Palpatine', a member of that family. That evokes traditional procreation, not weirdo Sith science nonsense. It doesn't mean that this couldn't also play a role there, but chances are very low that this is the message the movie wanted to sent. If they wanted to tell some sort of good story behind this weird plot then they should go with the son being some sort of legitimate heir who turned his back on his father after his alleged death - and also make him some sort of disappointment to his father even before because he had little interest in the whole Empire idea, etc.

[Lord Varys]

Thinking about ending and title I really think it is both a weird ending for the world and a rather stupid title.

Since the rise clearly is Rey's, it should have been 'The Rise of Rey' to make that crystal clear - but it is also clearly supposed to be the end of her story, since she is literally burying her head in the sands of Tatooine now. Who is going to rebuild the galaxy now? Who will protect it against other weirdo evil guys? Definitely not she. There will also be no new Jedi, of course, because Rey Skywalker, the last Jedi, is turning Ben Kenobi (or rather: Luke Skywalker as per TLJ).

In fact, you see how shitty and stupid this new setting is with the fact that there was literally no change with the Jedi situation since Darth Sidious destroyed them in ROTS. Yoda and Obi-Wan and Luke completely failed at rebuilding both the order and the galaxy. The victory over the Empire in ROTJ accomplished literally nothing - and neither did, presumably, the victory in TROS. At least not in the Jedi or the return to a proper form of government considering that nobody seemed to have any plans in either of those departments.

[sologdin]

dunno. i interpreted the fancy yellow lightsaber as an intention to bury the blue saber past and innovate into the future.  i didn't assume that she's gonna live on the old desert planet.

seems that the empire remains purged and the first order is decapitated by a spontaneous democratic uprising as guided by the vanguard of the revolution. 

[Corvinus85]

My second thought about the yellow lightsaber (first being, when did she make that?) was she better not be a fucking Grey Jedi now. 

[Corvinus85]

I'm going to have to watch this movie again, and that annoys me. I was tired, wasn't feeling well, I was preoccupied by something that had happened earlier, and the theater room was stupid cold.

[The Last Storm]

Was complete garbage. On par with Season 8 Thrones. What a sad excuse of a film.

[RhaenysBee]

I just watched this film and I have to say I have never before experienced an entire movie theater bursting out laughing at a scene intended to be an emotional peek to send off a main character. 

It was more absurd than anything I have ever seen on screen. Every minute of it was visually stunning and not one second made any sense at all. But I suppose that’s 2010s and beyond entertainment industry for you. Everything for the eyes, nothing for the mind.

My soul got a little ticklish when Lando returned or flew in for the rescue with Chewie, and it was predictable though still sweet to see Harrison Ford as Han Solo one last time. I also liked the music and the first 30 seconds of that carnival scene. And... the greenery on the resistance base planet. And... about four or five lines of dialogue... and... the subtle callbacks to previous Star Wars films (not the in your face ones, just the subtle ones)... and...  well I can’t think of more for the life of me. 

I do feel very ambivalent about the concept. If this had been the second film of the trilogy and ended with Rey burning that random ship on Luke’s rock and the resistance chewing their nails about what to do next, the idea could have been made into a truly Star Wars worthy finishing trilogy. That opportunity was, alas, lost to modern capitalism. 

overall, I would rate it around... 5... ish. Because it’s Christmas. 

Oh and does anybody know anything about the Leia scenes? Were they smart manipulation of previously recorded footage of Carrie or was it entirely CGI or what the hell was it? Anyway, creating entirely new scenes and CGI’ing the faces of actors from 40 years ago or the faces of deceased actors is an ethical issue Hollywood needs to go to their room and think about.