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

Jake Lipson

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This film did not work for me at all.

I'm annoyed by a lot of the minutia of the plot, but the biggest problem for me was the decision to basically remake Return of the Jedi. I was on board with that for The Force Awakens in relation to A New Hope because there, Abrams had to reintroduce the series and establish new characters in a way that made up for the dreadful, dreadful prequels, and going back to the structure of what worked so well in the first film made sense to me for that circumstance.

But that was the first movie of this trilogy. This is the last movie, not only of this trilogy, but supposedly of the entire saga.

So why are we back here with the protagonist facing the Emperor? Why are the others once again trying to destroy a bunch of Death Stars? We've done all that before. It felt so tired and stale to me. I just sat there thinking, "We've seen this already. What else have you got?", and there was nothing.

Whether you liked The Last Jedi or not -- which for the record, I did -- there's no question that Rian Johnson made bold choices in it. I remember thinking when I came out of that movie two years ago that this was a real gift to Abrams, because Johnson had shaken it up enough that it would be impossible for Abrams to just come in and remake Return of the Jedi. It seemed like he was going to have to go somewhere new. Abrams proved me wrong, and that's a big disappointment.

There was so much potential in the end of The Last Jedi for this one to be really anything they wanted, and it's deeply unfortunate that Abrams chose to revert again all the way into the standard Star Wars tropes that have existed for seven whole movies before Johnson came in and did something new.

I just sat there and was bored for most of the time. Except for the Rey as a Palpatine twist, which made me furious. But everything around it was just...yeah, okay. I did not invest in this at all.

Rey being a Palpatine could have worked if that was something that was foreshadowed in the second movie, but it isn't there. There's something to be said about Rey (the biological heir to the Empire) coming to the light while Ben (the biological heir of the Skywalkers) was seduced by the dark. But it didn't work because this was just dropped in for the last movie and not something that was threaded through the entire series.

But that's not what they did. It goes back to what I think is probably the best thing in The Last Jedi, which is s Johnson's decision to say that Rey is not connected to anyone historically significant in the conflict at all, which I think is the best decision he could have possibly made. Although Abrams paid lip service to this by saying "They pretended they were nobody so Kylo didn't lie," making Rey a Palpatine is obviously a radical shift in the thinking for her place in the trilogy. There is no way that Johnson meant to lead into this, and if Abrams wants to change something, that's his prerogative because this is his movie. But it does create a tonal whiplash between the two.

I hate that twist so much that for me it just kind of shits on the entire trilogy, even though the rest of the movie is essentially competent. I also thought Palatine's resurrection is completely unnecessary. Making him the main villain of this movie is the worst case scenario of what I thought they might do with him when it was announced that he was coming back. I was done with him when he died in Return of the Jedi and felt no need to see him again. Plus, his return robs Anakin's final act of killing him of its significance, and that to me is a huge problem.

It would have been far more interesting to follow through on what The Last Jedi set up and see what happens when Kylo Ren is actually the big bad in charge, instead of just pivoting from Snoke to Palpatine. Having Rey call Ren out on just serving another master doesn't make it any less stupid of a choice.

I have defended Kathleen Kennedy on numerous occasions, but I think that this trilogy as a whole demonstrates a lack of vision overall on her part, because Abrams and Johnson have fundamentally different filmmaking philosophies and it shows. I do not say this disrespectfully to either one of them as they have both made Star Wars movies I liked before, as well as other movies I liked before. But it does make the trilogy -- and therefore the saga because this is now part of that -- feel extremely incongruous. Although I am all for allowing the filmmaker to realize what their vision is, she needed to have a firmer guiding hand saying "This is what the overall arc is," like how Feige lets each filmmaker play in the MCU sandbox, but it's his sandbox. There is no way she did that. There is no way.

In thinking about this trilogy as a whole, I wish that either one of two things had happened: 1) Rian Johnson made Episode IX; or 2) Abrams had made all three. I love, love, love The Last Jedi, but this ping-ponging between the two of them just makes no sense at all because they are trying to tell two different stories here, and it's not a cohesive whole.

This movie is not awful. But I have no desire to see it again whatsoever and it dents my enthusiasm for Star Wars going forward severely.

But I'm keeping the soundtrack I pre-ordered. Even though I didn't like the movie, John Williams did beautiful work with the score, and if you take that out of the movie and just listen to it as a standalone piece of music, then it's really quite wonderful.
 
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Carlo_M

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8AM showing at the TCL Chinese, their big Laser IMAX screen. Oddest thing I noticed: 50% of the seats were empty but when I bought tickets, Over 90% of them were sold. And this is a big theater so that's an awful lot of no-shows. Not sure why.

To give my background feelings on the other movies before I talk about this one:
  • Star Wars (8/10 the one that started it all, but does show warts over the years),
  • tESB (10/10, nuff said)
  • RoTJ (6.5/10, loved it as a kid, but now all the compromises Lucas put in there to wrap up loose ends--like bro/sis--really don't age well for me)
  • TFA (7/10, derivative of ANH but I think some...unknown...damage had been done to the franchise and that derivation was needed to undo it and bring fans back)
  • TLJ (7.5/10. some parts derivative of tESB, don't have problem with social justice subplot but just disliked Rose the character)
And for me, those are the only other Star Wars movies before RoS.

I won't give it a ranking just yet as, like others, I will need multiple viewings to digest. I am supposed to see it one more time with a friend in about a week so I should have more concrete feelings then.

I agree with the main complaint that a lot was crammed into a relatively small amount of time. But without turning this into a 3+ hour movie, or splitting it into two movies, I'm not sure what else could have been done. Massive trimming would have resulted in a lot of logical leaps that would have had to have been made.

I surprisingly had no problem with Palpy returning, despite when I first heard his voice in the early trailer saying "WTF you all are going to rehash that guy?"

I also was surprised at how well I felt Leia was incorporated. It's funny, I read all these comments about how her pre-existing lines hamstrung the writers/director in what they could do...I was the opposite. I kept waiting to be taken out of the story by Leia's presence and I never was. And I was surprised how long she was onscreen! I thought they'd only have one or two quick scenes with her, so I tip my hat to them for pulling that off.

I had zero problems with the kiss, and I did not hear groans from my (admittedly 50%) crowd. 50% of this theater is still hundreds of people (it holds nearly a thousand).

I never got the sense that any of the last two movies were "a middle finger" to the others. Plots and storylines change over time. People are made brother and sister who were never meant to be (and were made to kiss...multiple times). I think a lot of that is people reading into it what they want. Just like Wizard of Oz sync'd up with Dark Side of the Moon.

My initial reaction is that it's a fitting, if rushed, ending to the second (yes, that's not a typo ;):P) trilogy, and to the saga overall.

It's funny, but I think overall the other 5 movies are hurt by the brilliance of The Empire Strikes Back. In hindsight, that's the outlier. If that film were just a little less awesome, I think people wouldn't be so critical of the other five. :rolling-smiley:

Also, Lando should have just said "on your left..." at that last battle scene. Ouch! Yes I went there!
 

Carlo_M

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Also, with the "JJ remade RoTJ with this movie" comments...well that's not exactly new territory for him, right? His last four films have been "remakes" :D
  • TFA = Star Wars
  • RoS = RoTJ
  • Star Trek Into Darkness = Wrath of Khan
  • Super 8 = E.T.
 

Jake Lipson

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Also, with the "JJ remade RoTJ with this movie" comments...well that's not exactly new territory for him, right? His last four films have been "remakes"

Yes, you're right, and that's exactly why I didn't like it. He went back and did again what he usually does in making a remake. It would have been more interesting to me at least to see him push himself outside of that specialty and go somewhere new.
 

Josh Steinberg

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Revenge Of The Sith is my favorite Star Wars film so I do appreciate how some things in there are made to pay off here. Palpatine describes to Anakin in ROTS that only one person has discovered the power to cheat death, but that they could work to find it together. Whether or not they ever did... I realized I didn’t need a further explanation in TROS because the line from ROTS was enough for me to accept that it could have been in the cards.
 

WillG

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This film did not work for me at all.

I'm annoyed by a lot of the minutia of the plot, but the biggest problem for me was the decision to basically remake Return of the Jedi. I was on board with that for The Force Awakens in relation to A New Hope because there, Abrams had to reintroduce the series and establish new characters in a way that made up for the dreadful, dreadful prequels, and going back to the structure of what worked so well in the first film made sense to me for that circumstance.

But that was the first movie of this trilogy. This is the last movie, not only of this trilogy, but supposedly of the entire saga.

So why are we back here with the protagonist facing the Emperor? Why are the others once again trying to destroy a bunch of Death Stars? We've done all that before. It felt so tired and stale to me. I just sat there thinking, "We've seen this already. What else have you got?", and there was nothing.

Whether you liked The Last Jedi or not -- which for the record, I did -- there's no question that Rian Johnson made bold choices in it. I remember thinking when I came out of that movie two years ago that this was a real gift to Abrams, because Johnson had shaken it up enough that it would be impossible for Abrams to just come in and remake Return of the Jedi. It seemed like he was going to have to go somewhere new. Abrams proved me wrong, and that's a big disappointment.

There was so much potential in the end of The Last Jedi for this one to be really anything they wanted, and it's deeply unfortunate that Abrams chose to revert again all the way into the standard Star Wars tropes that have existed for seven whole movies before Johnson came in and did something new.

I just sat there and was bored for most of the time. Except for the Rey as a Palpatine twist, which made me furious. But everything around it was just...yeah, okay. I did not invest in this at all.

Rey being a Palpatine could have worked if that was something that was foreshadowed in the second movie, but it isn't there. There's something to be said about Rey (the biological heir to the Empire) coming to the light while Ben (the biological heir of the Skywalkers) was seduced by the dark. But it didn't work because this was just dropped in for the last movie and not something that was threaded through the entire series.

But that's not what they did. It goes back to what I think is probably the best thing in The Last Jedi, which is s Johnson's decision to say that Rey is not connected to anyone historically significant in the conflict at all, which I think is the best decision he could have possibly made. Although Abrams paid lip service to this by saying "They pretended they were nobody so Kylo didn't lie," making Rey a Palpatine is obviously a radical shift in the thinking for her place in the trilogy. There is no way that Johnson meant to lead into this, and if Abrams wants to change something, that's his prerogative because this is his movie. But it does create a tonal whiplash between the two.

I hate that twist so much that for me it just kind of shits on the entire trilogy, even though the rest of the movie is essentially competent. I also thought Palatine's resurrection is completely unnecessary. Making him the main villain of this movie is the worst case scenario of what I thought they might do with him when it was announced that he was coming back. I was done with him when he died in Return of the Jedi and felt no need to see him again. Plus, his return robs Anakin's final act of killing him of its significance, and that to me is a huge problem.

It would have been far more interesting to follow through on what The Last Jedi set up and see what happens when Kylo Ren is actually the big bad in charge, instead of just pivoting from Snoke to Palpatine. Having Rey call Ren out on just serving another master doesn't make it any less stupid of a choice.

I have defended Kathleen Kennedy on numerous occasions, but I think that this trilogy as a whole demonstrates a lack of vision overall on her part, because Abrams and Johnson have fundamentally different filmmaking philosophies and it shows. I do not say this disrespectfully to either one of them as they have both made Star Wars movies I liked before, as well as other movies I liked before. But it does make the trilogy -- and therefore the saga because this is now part of that -- feel extremely incongruous. Although I am all for allowing the filmmaker to realize what their vision is, she needed to have a firmer guiding hand saying "This is what the overall arc is," like how Feige lets each filmmaker play in the MCU sandbox, but it's his sandbox. There is no way she did that. There is no way.

In thinking about this trilogy as a whole, I wish that either one of two things had happened: 1) Rian Johnson made Episode IX; or 2) Abrams had made all three. I love, love, love The Last Jedi, but this ping-ponging between the two of them just makes no sense at all because they are trying to tell two different stories here, and it's not a cohesive whole.

This movie is not awful. But I have no desire to see it again whatsoever and it dents my enthusiasm for Star Wars going forward severely.

But I'm keeping the soundtrack I pre-ordered. Even though I didn't like the movie, John Williams did beautiful work with the score, and if you take that out of the movie and just listen to it as a standalone piece of music, then it's really quite wonderful.

that’s what you get with JJ. He’s very into fan service and McGuffins and “mystery boxes” and he likes to play things safe. And that’s almost certainly why they brought him back after the very polarizing TLJ. And if the RT audience score so far is to be believed he largely did his job.

I am someone who is now convinced that LFL never even had a real outline for these films, it seems absurd, but now that all three films are out, it’s pretty clear they made a ton of major shit up as they went along. Its not the first time a JJ related production did this to some degree. The show runners of Lost claimed for years that they knew exactly how the show would end and how it wasn’t purgatory, which turned out to be bullshit. In contrast to the OT, this makes me wish they could go back and make changes to Awakens and Jedi to fit where the story ended. Maybe more clues as that Palps was still out there.

And speaking of which, I am starting to feel more and more cheated that no explanation was given as to how Palps survived. That’s a pretty important detail that. It’s like how Annie Wilkes in Misery was talking about the old Serial cliffhangers and how the following episode cheated the preceding cliffhanger. HE NEVER GOT OUT OF THE COCKADOODIE DEATH STAR!
 
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Jake Lipson

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that’s what you get with JJ. He’s very into fan service and he likes to play things safe. And that’s almost certainly why they brought him back after they very polarizing TLJ.

Actually, Abrams was hired to direct this film before The Last Jedi was even released, so there's no way they could have known what the response to it was going to be. Lucasfilm announced the firing of Colin Treverrow on September 5, 2017. Abrams was announced to replace him on September 12, and The Last Jedi was not released until December. So Abrams would have been in place to do this film even if The Last Jedi had been universally beloved.

Also, Abrams had nothing to do with Lost going into the last season. He set the show up and left in the middle of season one to go direct Mission: Impossible III. Lost was being run by Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof after that.

Palpatine didn’t survive. He is dead in TROS.

Huh?
 
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Josh Steinberg

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“To cheat death is a power only one has achieved but I know if we work together we can discover the secret.”

The foundation was laid there.

There’s a throwaway line in the new film where someone mentions the Sith have used cloning and forbidden science.

And the now-decanonized sequel novels portrayed Palpatine as continuing past ROTJ.

Not a big leap for me personally.
 

WillG

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Actually, Abrams was hired to direct this film before The Last Jedi was even released, so there's no way they could have known what the response to it was going to be. Lucasfilm announced the firing of Colin Treverrow on September 5, 2018. Abrams was announced to replace him on September 12, and The Last Jedi was not released until December. So Abrams would have been in place to do this film even if The Last Jedi had been universally beloved.

Also, Abrams had nothing to do with Lost going into the last season. He set the show up and left in the middle of season one to go direct Mission: Impossible III. Lost was being run by Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof after that.



Huh?

Then I stand corrected on the timing of JJ named as director. Though I’m now recalling wondering if maybe Kennedy anticipated the reaction to TLJ was going to be polarizing.

I know that JJ was off Lost by the time it ended but if you believed the claims that they knew from the beginning how it was all going to end JJ almost certainly would have been involved.
 

benbess

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My new ranking of the nine films after seeing Skywalker a second time in IMAX 3D.....

The Last Jedi
The Empire Strikes Back
A New Hope
The Rise of Skywalker
The Force Awakens
Return of the Jedi
The Phantom Menace
Revenge of the Sith
Attack of the Clones
 

Jake Lipson

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Then I stand corrected on the timing of JJ named as director. Though I’m now recalling wondering if maybe Kennedy anticipated the reaction to TLJ was going to be polarizing.

In full disclosure, I incorrectly wrote in my initial post "2018," which is what you quoted, but that was a typo; I meant 2017 and have edited my initial post to reflect that.

I don't claim to know or suspect what Kennedy expected the reaction to The Last Jed to be. However, even though he was hired before it came out, I think it is a certainty that Abrams chose to "course correct," even though I don't think it needed course correcting. How much of this can be attributed to the response is an open question versus just being what he wanted to do. Stylistically, Abrams and Johnson are extremely different filmmakers, and they are interested in different things as storytellers. That really showed in this film and worked to the detriment of the trilogy as a whole.

I know that JJ was off Lost by the time it ended but if you believed the claims that they knew from the beginning how it was all going to end JJ almost certainly would have been involved.

Sure, and I absolutely do not believe that they knew there either. I really liked Lost. But it's clear that they made up a lot of it on the fly, for sure.
 

Tino

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My new ranking of the nine films after seeing Skywalker a second time in IMAX 3D.....

The Last Jedi
The Empire Strikes Back
A New Hope
The Rise of Skywalker
The Force Awakens
Return of the Jedi
The Phantom Menace
Revenge of the Sith
Attack of the Clones
Wasn’t it just tied for last?
 

Colin Jacobson

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He is a social justice guy. Exactly my point. Didn't JJ also write Force Awakens? The one where Rey and Finn and Poe are introduced? The central characters of this trilogy? I don't see how you want to lay this at Johnson's feet and not at Abrams.

I don't understand why the notion of some diversity in the "Star Wars" universe seems to be criticized as "social justice", ala the pejorative sense of that term.

Perhaps you don't mean to use "social justice" as a negative/criticism, but that's the vibe I'm getting from the thread's discussion of the inclusion of diverse characters...
 

Colin Jacobson

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8AM showing at the TCL Chinese, their big Laser IMAX screen. Oddest thing I noticed: 50% of the seats were empty but when I bought tickets, Over 90% of them were sold. And this is a big theater so that's an awful lot of no-shows. Not sure why.

Probably cancellations, not no-shows...
 

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