spoilers [SPOILERS] Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker

[Raja]

Except maybe the bit with Rey & the jedi within her, none of the other exegol stuff worked for me. Especially the 'battle' against those star destroyers. It all seemed a little unimaginative. I'd say the same about TFA's battle with the space ships. In TFA, I just wanted them to cut back to Rey/ Han/ Kylo as opposed to the space battle.

TLJ on the other hand had memorable battles throughout, starting with that bomber sequence ( the bomber sequence is particularly masterful given that it introduces a character that we don't know but immediately care for, or at least I did) as well as the ending in crait, when I initially saw that ending sequence, I assumed it would be Hoth 2.0, but they made it work and it looks stunning.

Both those sequences to me were miles ahead of anything in TROS, both emotionally and on a visual level - I think the only memorable sequence in TROS is the rey & kylo battle on the death star/ wave planet. TROS fails to do this, I legit cannot remember a single thing from the space battle that stood out to me. Thankfully the Rey/ Kylo/ Palp stuff, whilst clunky af, kept me interested enough, everything else was a bit of a snooze fest.

I also agree re: C3PO, I thought he was excellent in TROS and one of the few bright sparks that I'll look forward to when I revisit the movie.

[Ran]

Ugh, the bomber sequence with its overlong yo mama joke... Mileage, it does vary.

[Raja]

8 minutes ago, Ran said:

Ugh, the bomber sequence with its overlong yo mama joke... Mileage, it does vary.

Yeah, the humour of TLJ is something that really doesn't work for me. Everything with Paige and the rest of the bomber sequence is excellent though.

Like, at least I remember the frames & the emotional beats in that movie. TROS' final sequence or the 'battle of exegol' is just a goopy mess, which is weird because JJ *can* do spectacle well but for some reason that didn't happen.

[Suzanna Stormborn]

I just thought 3PO’s humor was forced. Also I dont need a punchline from him every other line for 15 straight minutes. To me he wasn’t funny because nothing he says is serious, every word out of his mouth should have been followed by [drum drum symbol]. Like we got some serious shit going down, we’re about to erase your memory and none of the other characters cares and 3PO is like  ‘This is such a drag’ or whatever other dumbass one-liners. And they spent so much time making a big deal out of getting his memory erased because ‘R2’s back-up files can be faulty so we may not be able to restore you.....???’

wtf was that about? R2 can do anything, he’s a droid who is Force sensitive and has been kicking ass all over the Universe for decades, but he may not be able to back-up 3PO?? Then they get to R2 and he restores 3PO in 2 seconds, to me it was just dumb.

3PO is funny in the Cloud City when he loses his body and Chewie has to carry him around and put him back together, but tRoS did not even come close to that.

D-O is completely different, he’s a great little new Droid that is a welcome addition who has a story and a purpose and an arc.

[Suzanna Stormborn]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

He was definitely funny to me in this film. Anthony Daniels has terrific comic timing, and C-3PO has always been pretty funny to me (I can't speak to the prequels, I barely remember the plots of II and III, much less what secondary characters do). Most of the laughs came from him, or the one Babu Frik line where he introduces himself to the memory-wiped C-3PO.

D-O was cute. The design made me think of Lampy from The Brave Little Toaster, which was maybe not deliberate but no doubt heightend the cuteness for me.

For that matter, I enjoyed the battle on Exogol, although because of its more "crowded" nature it certainly isn't up there with RotJ or Rogue One. But it's better than TFA or TLJ.  More importantly than the staging of it, though, were the emotional beats of it, for me. It's where the catharsis really started to happen, as they cut (quite deftly) back and forth between Rey and Ben and the battle, and the tensions in it.

ETA: Kevin Smith has his review out. Long and occasionally funny and sometimes insightful, but also a bit emotional at times. I particularly like his observation around the midpoint 34 minute mark about Leia holding Han's medal and why it resonated with him:

 

You are very fortunate that you don’t remember 3PO in Episode II when him and Padme and Anakin are all trying to escape the giant assembly line and then 3PO gets his head attached to a different droids body. That sequence is just as bad and stupid as Jar-Jar’s entire character and it makes me mad just thinking about it. 

[Caligula_K3]

I didn't like this movie either, but I think we can all calm down about criticizing/hating others for liking/not liking it. It's a movie; people will have different opinions and weigh different elements at different importance. That's fine.

I was pretty underwhelmed by the battles in this movie; they didn't seem to me to be imaginative, the editing (especially in the first half) was often frantic in its cuts to the point of distraction, and only the Death Star lightsaber fight felt like it had emotional stakes. Not coincidentally, that's my favourite fight and sequence in the movie.

As for the humour, there were a few funny lines, and I agree that C-3P0 got some of them. But, even though I know TLJ is hated for its humour, I found that movie to be much, much funnier, in general.

[Corvinus85]

On the Death Star duel, while it was emotionally charged and powerful, I wish they had taken a page out of the prequels and attempted to mimic some of the choreography. Both Rey and Kylo were at their full strength now, the TFA excuses were no longer valid. But this is just a minor criticism, I generally liked that part of the movie.

[Lord Varys]

21 hours ago, RumHam said:

Never read the books he was in. But on Rebels his super power is basically being the only competent imperial. 

Thrawn has some good scenes in Rebels but he isn't really the kind of genius he is in the books. They did that 'art tells us everything you need to mess with a culture/species' routine, but Zahn's Thrawn is essentially a super genius whose one flaw is that he thinks his enemies are too smart so he makes mistakes trying to counter plans they never made ;-).

The one flaw of TCW and Rebels both is that the Imperials/Separatists rarely, if at all, win - which is sort of weird in that sense the Clone Wars supposedly were pretty even-handed until the Republic was winning in the end, and the Empire was definitely much stronger than the Rebels until the very end.

[Corvinus85]

10 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Thrawn has some good scenes in Rebels but he isn't really the kind of genius he is in the books. They did that 'art tells us everything you need to mess with a culture/species' routine, but Zahn's Thrawn is essentially a super genius whose one flaw is that he thinks his enemies are too smart so he makes mistakes trying to counter plans they never made ;-).

The one flaw of TCW and Rebels both is that the Imperials/Separatists rarely, if at all, win - which is sort of weird in that sense the Clone Wars supposedly were pretty even-handed until the Republic was winning in the end, and the Empire was definitely much stronger than the Rebels until the very end.

Rebels Thrawn consistently outmaneuvers the good guys. When it comes to knowledge of warfare, he is clearly superior to the good guys. But he gets beaten by something he fails to grasp - the Force. He only sees the Force as a power that makes you do cool stuff (Not unlike how Rey understands the Force in the beginning). He could not anticipate what was going to come down on his head in the final battle.

[Lord Varys]

3 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

Rebels Thrawn consistently outmaneuvers the good guys. When it comes to knowledge of warfare, he is clearly superior to the good guys. But he gets beaten by something he fails to grasp - the Force. He only sees the Force as a power that makes you do cool stuff (Not unlike how Rey understands the Force in the beginning). He could not anticipate what was going to come down on his head in the final battle.

But at times he just watches them, or lets them go, etc. He is much, much better than the other Imperials, but overall I think the Rebels are too successful in Rebels - and the Empire not that much of a threat in the beginning. But I have to rewatch Rebels - just watched the last two seasons once.

[The Grey Wolf]

The lack of Anakin's Force ghost is a crime.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

This movie is doing better than the Last Jedi did on its second weekend. While critics seems split on it, audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes remain high. This makes me feel better about the negativity I see sometimes. This was a great trilogy, and I hope we get a lot more Star Wars. 

[Ran]

3 hours ago, Corvinus said:

On the Death Star duel, while it was emotionally charged and powerful, I wish they had taken a page out of the prequels and attempted to mimic some of the choreography. Both Rey and Kylo were at their full strength now, the TFA excuses were no longer valid. But this is just a minor criticism, I generally liked that part of the movie.

I'm not much of a fan of the PT depiction of Jedi. It gets very acrobatic and sometimes to a silly degree, ala Yoda bouncing around. I really like Bob Anderson's choreography for TESB and RotJ, which were more inspired by kendo and the pacing of European fencing.

[Lord Varys]

21 hours ago, Kalbear said:

I mean, here's a great example. You know those randos that Ren is slaughtering in the beginning? Where is that happening? Apparently it's on fucking Mustafar, and they were some weird-ass cultists that were hanging out around the ruins of Vader's castle. But would you know that from watching the movie? Nope! There's nothing indicating it's Mustafar, there's no visual cues that it is the same planet as a lava planet, there's no idea it's anywhere near Vader's castle, there's no indication that those guys are cultists or anything other than random peasants that Ren is killing. 

LOL, really?! I shortly thought they might want it to be Mustafar considering the fact that the planet looked red from space, but that's such a joke.

I mean, why not remake Tatooine into an ocean world? That would make about as much sense as that.

And yes, the silly setup of Palpatine dumping some compass-like artifact in his temporary Death Star resident and Vader even getting one of these is just nonsensical. Both Sith should have fucking known where their secret planet, and they would pass on the coordinates to those servants and agents and operatives that needed them to know.

I mean, there were hundreds or thousands of cultists in Palpatine's place there, and likely hundreds of thousands/millions of workers and crew building and manning those destroyers. These people all must have found the way to the place somehow (unless they always lived at that barren place) and none of them had a magical Sith thingy helping them with that.

The idea that Vader's perverse grandson also did not long ago raid his granddad's castle (or the ruins thereof) also made no sense - neither does the idea that the same guy never checked out the Death Star fragments if he actually bothered to go to Endor to do some mask-recoving/sniffing.

 

[Lord Varys]

20 hours ago, Ran said:

Reading more about it, it seems like this is an example of the Star Wars universe not remaining static. They laid in story prior to TRoS, in some sort of Vader comic and in  the Vader Immortal VR game, about why Mustafar was so volcanic and how in the years after Vader it began to cool and plant life started to return on a planet that was once apparently some sort of fertile garden before a catastrophe (regarding an attempt to resurrect the dead).

That is all very weird and directly contradicting the old ROTS setup for Mustafar (also evident in the movie itself) of it being both a very young planet was well as having a very large moon/partner planet with gravitational forces putting a lot of strain on the planets surface.

14 hours ago, Corvinus said:

I’ve watched it a 2^nd time, and have more thoughts:

Story and Plot

• What annoys me the most is that too much stuff happens off screen that is brought into this movie with little or no explanation. The previous two had this issue, of course, especially with regards to world-building, but this was one also covered plot devices. For example, TLJ left of with Rey holding a severed lightsaber. The saber’s kyber crystal had been severed, not just the handle. Movie starts with the saber fixed, no worries. If you want to know what happened you have to buy The Visual Dictionary, or some other book, to find out Rey learned from one of the Jedi books how to use to the force to heal the crystal, and then the rest was easy. It would have been nice if her story started with that. Lucas deleted the scene in RotJ where we see Luke build his green saber; JJ shouldn’t have followed suit.

That kind of thing is always the hallmark of a shitty movie. You should not need supplementary nonsense (which is basically just a way to make some more cash) to understand a movie or connect some relevant background stuff.

14 hours ago, Corvinus said:

• Another thing is that JJ and Terio didn’t even give two shits about the background stuff created by these new movies. When they find out that they need to go in the vicinity of Endor, Finn says “Isn’t that were the last war ended?” eh, no, according to the Disney-established canon, the Battle of Jakku was the final decisive battle, explored in at least one video game and one novel that I know of; and there was some treaty afterwards, too. But hey, nostalgia amaright?

The idea that they did not, in fact, actually go to the forest moon of Endor (where the Ewoks live) but to some other moon of Endor, the so-called ocean moon makes this look even more ridiculous. The second Death Star is visibly in a stationary orbit around the forest moon of Endor - meaning if parts of the Death Star crashed anywhere after ROTJ it would have been said forest moon, and not some other moon which would have been not as close.

 

[Rhom]

I was just talking with a patient about the Mandalorian and RoS.  In particular, I was talking about my confusion on why they bothered to up the release schedule of Mandalorian to Wednesday instead of Friday if there was nothing in there to pay off.

While talking about it, I had what I felt was a brilliant throwaway line that could have helped explain RoS as well as Baby Yoda.  (He's everywhere in pop culture... I'm not gonna spoiler tag that there is a baby Yoda.)  My one big question about everything is still "What is he?  A clone?  A new member of the species?"  

I feel like if one of the Imps in the Mandalorian had been talking about the Empire and made a comment along the lines of "And in the last days, they even turned to cloning the most powerful Force users in the galaxy..."  Would explain Baby Yoda and prepare the way for Palps return to the big screen. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

On 12/23/2019 at 6:06 AM, karaddin said:

That's what I get for posting before catching up - this is what I was referring to. 

I think the thing that got lost in the conversation to conflating "light side force user" with "Jedi". The Jedi are an organization and a religion, as long as you are abiding by current organisational standards then you're a Jedi. But the organization itself is what had become twisted and failed - it's not straying from the code making you not a Jedi, it's the Jedi code straying from what makes a good light side force user.

The Jedi got pulled into the war for the wrong reasons, and fought an unjust war with increasingly brutal tactics utilising clones with no agency against a for that was for most of it's membership in the right, although utterly compromised at the leadership level. It's quite a different situation from the questionably canon KOTOR era situation where the Jedi were too obsessed with their purity and allowed the war with Mandalore to wreak havoc on the Galaxy - those Jedi are probably closer to the opposite of the sith being discussed earlier.

 

On 12/23/2019 at 6:06 AM, karaddin said:

That's what I get for posting before catching up - this is what I was referring to. 

I think the thing that got lost in the conversation to conflating "light side force user" with "Jedi". The Jedi are an organization and a religion, as long as you are abiding by current organisational standards then you're a Jedi. But the organization itself is what had become twisted and failed - it's not straying from the code making you not a Jedi, it's the Jedi code straying from what makes a good light side force user.

The Jedi got pulled into the war for the wrong reasons, and fought an unjust war with increasingly brutal tactics utilising clones with no agency against a for that was for most of it's membership in the right, although utterly compromised at the leadership level. It's quite a different situation from the questionably canon KOTOR era situation where the Jedi were too obsessed with their purity and allowed the war with Mandalore to wreak havoc on the Galaxy - those Jedi are probably closer to the opposite of the sith being discussed earlier.

Agree with most of what you're saying um small grievance.  what is even defined as the ”light-side” and ”Dark-side” seem more relative than at first glance. Canonically the Dark side is mainly just dubbed by that because it's the part of the force that Jedi have forbidden. Also, those on the Dark side refer to it as such because the obvious secretive nature of their existence.

Another thing, most genuinely don't see themselves as evil. They do believe the galaxy is better off if they gain more power

Just look at Anakin at the end the prequel trilogy. He proclaims he brought, peace, justice, and and order to the galaxy.

He's the good guy. From his certain point of view. 

Also, yeah the clones were effectively slaves. The Jedi opting to lead them is kinda evil. And stupid given most clones would have been better suited to actually be the generals. The Jedi aren't trained soldiers. They're a mystical cult. Them thinking they have the competence to lead armies in a Galactic civil war speaks to their arrogance. 

[Astromech]

I finally found time to see it. Decent, but didn't kick me in the feels the way the other films did. Other than a few emotional scenes with Leia and the ending scene with Binary Sunset. That song always gets me.

JJ tried to fit a bit too much into this film. Not sure if erasing/correcting TLJ was the reason or not. A few too many new characters and call backs. The film felt rushed at times, racing from plot point to plot point, like that terrible lightspeed skipping they were doing.  

I'm still digesting it and will probably find more things I liked and disliked about it, like not enough R2. Adam Driver has been excellent as Kylo Ren and Daisy has been very good as Rey. Poe is still a poor man's Han, and Finn is just . . . there. There wasn't one goose bump moment for me though. Rey's taking out Kylo's ship was cool, but no equivalent to Holdo's lightspeed jump, or Luke's force projection confrontation with Kylo, or Kylo and Rey's first lightsaber duel in TFA.

But I knew all along that Villanelle was Rey's mother