Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Discussion Thread (SPOILERS!) (1 Viewer)

[Carlo_M]

Speaking of no grey areas, only black and white...just bought two of these as a belated Christmas present to myself, for my road bicycles. Since I have one all-black and one primarily-white-with-black-accents road bike, it matches both!

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

 

[Tino]

He was obviously on the transport that she blew out of the air.

No he wasn’t. There were TWO transports shown as he was being loaded onto one.

 

[TonyD]

I only saw one.

 

[Tino]

I only saw one.

Definitely 2. Saw it three times.

 

[Mike2001]

Yup. Two. Saw it again yesterday and was watching for that.

 

[Sam Favate]

I only saw one.

The first time I saw it, I thought there was only one, so I figured I must have missed something, and I did. There were clearly two transports.

 

[Tino]

It’s a very quick establishing shot.

 

[Carlo_M]

And this is why we need to have them re-voice it in a future "special edition" to have someone say "Alert my Star Destroyer to prepare of the arrival of not one...but two shuttles...one of which will carry a Wookie." And then the addition of several more shots of both shuttles. #fixed #bringmyshuttle

 

[TravisR]

I have to agree, unfortunately. I made the same observations, not only on the subject of movies.
It seems that there’s no room for grey areas anymore. It has always to be black and/or white - good or evil. Which brings us back to the topic of Star Wars.

"If you're not with me then you're my enemy."
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes."

 

[Colin Jacobson]

Definitely 2. Saw it three times.

Shouldn't that mean you saw SIX transports???

 

[JohnRice]

At one time, I used to believe that, but I'm not so sure any longer for some people. Just a general observation that's not meant for any specific person.

Uh-Huh.


(BTW, I agree...)

 

[Greg.K]

And this is why we need to have them re-voice it in a future "special edition" to have someone say "Alert my Star Destroyer to prepare of the arrival of not one...but two shuttles...one of which will carry a Wookie." And then the addition of several more shots of both shuttles. #fixed #bringmyshuttle

Good idea. Maybe we can have Chewbacca shout "Nooooooo!" or "I have a bad feeling about this!" or "Maclunkey!" in Wookieese.

 

[RolandL]

Saw this in Imax 3D. Their subwoofers must work pretty well as I felt the floor shaking at times.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

Good idea. Maybe we can have Chewbacca shout "Nooooooo!" or "I have a bad feeling about this!" or "Maclunkey!" in Wookieese.

How do we know Chewie hasn't been yelling "Maclunkey" all the time???

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

So, I was 10 years old when the first of these Star Wars films came out. 52 at the release of this last of the "saga" which means...well...it means I am 42 years older.

Also, of course I am not going to feel the same way about a film I was seeing for the first time when I was 10 as I do seeing a film for the first time at 52.

So, here's how I feel about this "saga" now that it is complete...

Lucas should have stopped when the first three films were complete. Nothing happened in any of these other Star Wars films that made this "universe" any better or more interesting. He never should have called the first three films 4, 5, and 6...giant mistake. He never should have made the "prequel" films and Disney should have never got involved in soft rebooting this whole thing.

In the end what it all brought about was a whole new level of weird and crazed fan reaction that in the age of the internet has just been pure poison. Now a "Star Wars fan" is either someone that is furious or so beat up by all the lunacy they no longer want to discuss the films anymore. It did not make the series more beloved, it did not work to really greatly expand the Star Wars fan base...if anything I think as many people hate Star Wars as love it now. It has to be the most divisive movie franchise in the history of film.

Apparently putting out 5 Star Wars films in 4 years along with whatever other TV stuff they have made in that time has successfully burned out the Star Wars fan base.

Really if you look at this honestly there is one simple reason for this...this series ran out of good story to tell after Empire. The first two films were really good. The third film was justified because the first two were so strong AND OF COURSE because they made so much cash. It clearly ran out of gas with the third picture and then Lucas walked away...and he should have just stayed away.

He couldn't though because he invented all the nonsense of calling those first three pictures 4, 5, and 6. So, time and a lot of money brought him back to make 1, 2, and 3. At that point he really was done because he discovered the fury of the Star Wars fan and that he of course had now just done three pictures that did nothing to improve the stature of what he had created with the first three.

Plus in the meantime he had reworked the original films and he was now hated for that. Lucas could take his cash and go live quietly away from Star Wars.

Even the people that work on these pictures seem to want to run the hell away from them when they are done. Why would you want to be part of this madness?

I can't comment on what they should or should not have done with the story. I can say that just from a writing perspective these last couple "saga" films have been pretty dreadful. Truth is though that seems to be the case for all recent big budget films not just Star Wars so, I mean that's just to be expected.

I was a fan of Star Wars at 10 and also for Empire. When we reached Return of the Jedi I could tell they just did not have any place left to go and it had run out of gas. However, I did think and still do think they got it over the finish line...with a great deal of struggle but it got there.

The best film after the first three I thought was The Force Awakens. That seemed about as good as you could do with rebooting the thing and wringing some nostalgia out of it. Sure, it was basically a reworking of the first Star Wars film that threw introducing new characters into the mix...I mean they were aiming to bring in audience that was not even born not just when the first films were made but also when the prequels were made.

So, with that ridiculous task dumped on them I think they did just fine. When they made The Last Jedi...well...now you could see they had no real idea what to do or place to take things and were just swinging at air. What I understand about that is before he made the film Johnson asked Abrams if he should be doing anything specific with the picture and Abrams just told him "No, do whatever you want."

That's interesting on the level of a major blockbuster because you would think they would have been a bit more restrictive of where the "franchise" was going but it seemed as if as long as some new toys they could market were built into the movie, the story itself was not as important. I sort of respect that and wish Johnson got way weirder with it but I mean in the end I'm sure he knew there were limits.

Yes, the final film seems an exorcise in marketing and modern big budget filmmaking. It's less a "movie" than it is some response to some person's market research report. With all the spastic writing and rapid cutting that seems to indicate an ADD 10 year old with short term memory issues assembled it. It's like they can't keep track of what just happened two minutes earlier in the film never mind whatever the hell has become "canon' in 42 years of Star Wars.

My feeling is this final film is just an exorcise in "dead not dead" as all it seems to want to do is show over and over that nobody is ever dead in a movie. You can bring them back no matter how you might have killed them off. Palpatine is dead! Kidding, he's not. Chewbacca is dead...nope just fooling you. Luke is dead but not really cuz the force. Kylo Ben is dead! No, alive. Rey is dead! Ha, not really. Han is dead but we still can bring him back for this movie. Kylo is dead again but just be aware if we want to bring him back we will. That worm died but not dead because nothing is dead in one of these films. You would think Chewbacca would start farting out the force ghosts of the Porgs he ate...or at the very least every time he takes a crap it would get up and walk away because...well...not dead.

At a certain point in this picture I got the feeling that it was intentionally designed to piss off people that questioned and complained about the other two films in this final trilogy.

Jokes aside, I just think this is what happens when you do stuff for the money.

 

[Carlo_M]

I agree with a lot of your post Reggie, with just a few slightly different personal theories. None of us were in the room, so the best we can do is guess at their motives. Personally, I don't think Lucas did it only for the money. I think well documented frustration at the difficulty behind making the first two--there are tons of contemporary accounts about creative tensions, a lot of people challenging his screenwriting decisions, how Star Wars was saved in the editing room by his now ex-wife, and how the greatest film of the three was not even directed or screenwritten by him followed by a third act which obviously was made more just to wrap up the series--made him want a Maclunkey mulligan for Ep 1-3.

Side note: this is one of the rare times I'll acknowledge the existence of the PT in one of my posts. My personal opinion is that they were so terrible, they bear a lot of the blame not just for the disenfranchising of many old fans, but also the failure to attract a lot of new fans, and also hamstrung the final trilogy in having to do retroactive fan-service work to win fans back versus just hitting the ground running with fresh new, bold ideas. And yes I was around in 2005 when people said "oh you're just mad at Lucas destroying your childhood, kids today will love these films." Well those who know me personally know I work at a university and my department employs over 100 students at any one time. I don't ask all of them, obviously, but it's been 15 years and I can tell you that those who have talked about the SW films, absolutely none have ever been complimentary of the PT. To be fair, few have the same love for the OT that we in our 40s and 50s do, but they generally regard them as good films, and the new ones to be pretty good as well. This is one of those rare times where I've lived long enough to be vindicated by history. Don't get me wrong, we can dig high and low and find those 18-25 year olds who love the PT, but those numbers are far fewer than I was led to believe there would be by people who thought I was overly harsh in my contemporaneous critique of the PT.

/mini-rant over

Anyway, by the late 90s Lucas has enough revenue from his various other companies to re-do a lot of what bothered him from the OT. Many of us, thinking all he was doing was fixing special effects, rewarded his efforts financially by throwing even more money at the screen. I know I saw the SEs multiple times on release day/week in the theater. I wasn't until a little later that I had that sinking feeling about the retconning he had done, mostly because I was just so overwhelmed to see SW on the big-screen (I had only ever seen them on home video, except for RoTJ which I was not even 10 years old for).

The PT was his "I am now in total control" moment and he surrounded himself with Yes-People, and basically got his first drafts onscreen. Just like anyone who has ever been in a creative endeavor--my personal example is a musical band because that's something I have experience in--even if you are the major creative force, it is true that no man is an island. There are dozens, hundreds, and in today's motions pictures, thousands who have input and put hard work in your movie. And more often than not, you never get your first draft onscreen, and you are challenged creatively along the way and, if you've surrounded yourself with talented people, the final output is superior to what you had on the screenplay going in. As RedLetterMedia so nicely culls from the behind-the-scenes footage in the PT DVD/BDs, it was clear that no one dared challenge Lucas's vision, and while I'm certain some minor alterations were made, the PT is pretty much evidence of what happens when someone films their first draft. To take it back to the band analogy, probably the "best case examples" are The Beatles. John, Paul and George had some great solo work that I love. But none fill me with the unadulterated joy of listening to The Beatles. And history is rife with much worse examples of solo projects where the individual members failed to capture the magic of their former band, even if they were the primary creative force.

Which brings me to the FT (final trilogy). I think as films, they're fine albeit with their flaws. As I mentioned before, Abrams' last four films have been essentially remakes (Super 8/ET, Star Trek/Khan, TFA/Star Wars, RoS/RotJ) so all of the complaints about 7 and 9 being rehashes are valid. I think Johnson tried to take it in a different direction (and no I don't think he was making fun of Star Wars as some have implied) but it clearly was a tone and story shift that ultimately Abrams had to do some course correction on when he was brought back on board. I think the two biggest factors for the FT not being as great as I'd hope are, 1) as previously mentioned, having to spend precious screen and story time winning back SW fans by giving them "that old familiar feeling" due to the terrible-ness of the PT, and 2) not having a unifying vision...I think the "Kathleen Kennedy is no Kevin Feige" comment is actually a very astute one.

I think they saw a lot of what the MCU did, with having very different voices for the films and then having the Russos bring it all to a satisfying conclusion, as possible for Star Wars. But what they didn't account for was 1) the MCU had 22 films, and let's be honest, not all of them were gems, and 2) even with the MCU's misses, none were as devastating to the fanbase as the PT, which fully accounted for 1/2 of all the SW movies at the time it was released.

And while yes I'm much older than I was when the OT was released, I am not immune to falling in love with good movies. Sure, being in my forties I may not dress up as any MCU character (though I didn't dress up as a Jedi when I was a kid either). But damn it I was super emotional at the end of Endgame. I can still be moved, you just need to make a great story to do it.

As I mentioned in another post, I think so much of the unrealistic expectations of SW may have been borne out of the brilliance of The Empire Strikes Back. Looking back on it, that's the outlier, a brilliant follow up to a very good first film. But it is the one that opened up the SW universe, and promised wonders that the next films never delivered. Unlike the MCU, where it essentially started with Iron Man and his one-rich-man-exploits (yes I'm ignoring the Hulk films), and continued to expand and expand, mostly getting better over time. Even some of my less-appreciated MCU films like the early Thors I find watchable now that Infinity War/Endgame have given them more meaning, something that will never happen with the PT because of the poor writing, directing and execution. I also noticed that the FT spent most of the time wrapping up the OT with much fewer callbacks to the PT...and IMO that's a good (and telling) thing.

 

[Tommy R]

I would definitely have preferred an Episode IX that could have matched the brilliance of TLJ. Hell, I’d have preferred a whole sequel trilogy to match the brilliance of TLJ. But the second J.J. was brought back, I had enough time to temper my expectations, and just hope for some good ‘member berries like TFA. It definitely exceeded my expectations, as I think it’s definitely a step up from TFA. A very fun trilogy!

 

[Jeff Cooper]

For me the biggest problem with the final trilogy is that it is so painfully obvious that they did not have an overall story arc figured out before starting the trilogy and that it was just made up from episode to episode as they went along.

I'm sure this happens all the time for multi-film projects, but it is almost always handled in a manner that makes it transparent to the audience. In this case though it is very obvious.

All the surprise twists in ep,9 weren't at all shocking to me, they were more like 'ooookaaaayyyyy... Where the hell did that come from?'

 

[Colin Jacobson]

For me the biggest problem with the final trilogy is that it is so painfully obvious that they did not have an overall story arc figured out before starting the trilogy and that it was just made up from episode to episode as they went along.

Kinda like the OT, huh?

 

[Jeff Cooper]

Kinda like the OT, huh?

Heh. Like I said, it happens all the time, but they did a hell of a lot better masking it in the OT than here. Or maybe my kid self just was oblivious to behind the scenes stuff that's public now. On of the reasons I don't ever watch bonus material on movies.