Star Wars Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker

[Enhance]

2 hours ago, Redux said:

Gotta again disagree.  If this were a side story with different characters and villains, that happened between TFA and whatever Ep. 8 would have been, it would have worked.  So much happens yet nothing happens in this movie.  Take out the Luke and Rey stuff.  Replace Finn and Poe with a couple other characters.  Add in the Knights of Ren as the bad guys plus some other weird sorcerer to replace Snoke.  This whole thing works as an off shoot.

I see what you're getting at, but my criticisms of the writing go deeper and into the core structure. I'm removing virtually all the set pieces and looking at it as a story, and I just don't think it works. The casino world was pointless. "Leia Poppins" was ridiculous. Poe's story arc was sort of pathetic. Holdo's decisions and motivations are left vague. The Resistance's cat and mouse game that lasts for two hours is written in such a way that it's clear they want to have the resistance win, which is lazy.

 

I guess I can agree that if you take this out of the Star Wars universe, maybe it works a little bit better, but in a vacuum I don't think it works as a story in general. The problems only get compounded when you consider that it is a Star Wars movie.

[knapplc]

3 minutes ago, Enhance said:

I guess I can agree that if you take this out of the Star Wars universe, maybe it works a little bit better, but in a vacuum I don't think it works as a story in general. The problems only get compounded when you consider that it is a Star Wars movie.

 

I actually agree with points you and @Redux are making, but to me, the fact that not only is it a Star Wars movie, but a central storyline movie that will forever be canon, and it's still this shoddy, is my main takeaway.

[Landlord]

14 hours ago, Redux said:

 

People say TLJ was poorly written, I disagree.  I think if you took the same movie and made it a standalone with different characters we didn't know, it would have been a lot more accepted.

 

You know, I used to 100% agree with this. Probably for the solid year after it came out I held this position in defense. But I now disagree. At first I only disagreed with small micro examples but now I hold that and a big picture view as well. Here's a few riffs:

 

• The opening bombing scene is total nonsense. First of all, the design of those ships and the function of those bombs dropping in space is at best illogical and unexplained, and at worst completely nonsensical and retarded. It's got to be the most poorly conceived space 'battle' in a movie franchise with 10 total feature films FULL of space battles. Also, we're just supposed to accept and shrug off that Poe's SUPER MACHO BRAVE HERO strategy to stall with jokes was noble or justifiable when TONS of people and nearly their entire fleet were destroyed I guess. 

 

• There are really important plot and progress details that happen off screen which is a great (bad) sign of poor/lazy writing. Like Rey escapes the throne room and Kylo, runs around an enemy ship unarmed, escapes in Snoke's private escape craft and then somehow joins up with Chewey in the Falcon to show up just in time on Krait or whatever, and we don't see any of it happen. 

 

• The chase scene is hilariously boring, dull and slow and also more importantly doesn't make a lick of sense. The dreadnaught can't catch their cruisers because the cruisers are faster and.... lighter? Things don't weigh anything in space. The First Order also had...idk, at least 100 TIE fighters in there and they sent like three lol. Also, some resistance ships lose fuel and.....fall....backwards? Also, some resistance pilots sacrifice themselves in ships that get blown up. Why? It's space, the ship will keep moving in a straight line stop piloting it and go to the other ship! The final light speed jump through the super destroyer was cool, but idk there's like 8,000 other times either side could have done that any time but i guess no one ever thought of it, and there were also a million other possible ways to help themselves. All of that is even just on a pure reality based logical argument. That's not even getting into contextual arguments in universe, where the movie long scene only works if you ignore everything we've seen over the last 40 years.

 

• In the final battle 99% of the resistance is outside (individual people) firing blasters at massive AT-ATs and TIE fighter spaceships, when there is a humongous blast proof door right behind them?? Then, they flight straight at the first order, don't fire a single shot, and even have all the TIE fighters distracted by the millenium falcon. Then they decide to turn around. Except for Finn, who's going to sacrifice himself and the front of his metal ship starts melting though his exposed body (the speeder is a convertible) does not melt. But before he can sacrifice himself Rose insanely defies the laws of physics to jump through a film editing wormhole to knock him out of the way and save him. Then Finn drags her back literally several miles to the bunker. 

 

• Big picture, the movie doesn't commit to it's concepts. It talks a big game but eventually pulls its punches. Luke wants to end the jedi and Yoda even encourages it, yet Rey still sneaks off with all the ancient texts. It flirts with blurring the lines between the light and dark sides, even going so far as to have Kylo kill Snoke, then turns around and he just used it as a power grab pulling Rey to his side instead of them both living somewhere in the middle. Like literally the whole movie is trying to paint this moral ambiguity ahead of a binary black and white sort of spirit (Benecio Del Toro mentioning the same people sell ships to the resistance that do to the first order, Poe committing mutiny, the reveal that Luke the good guy is the one that pushed Kylo to the dark side, and so on) but then by the end we've got an entirely familiar good vs evil showdown. It tries to give a message of embracing failure and learning from mistakes, yet nobody's mistakes in the film ever really result in any huge consequences to the story or to themselves. It tells us we should forget the past, but then the end is just a new generation being inspired by the legendary story of the hero with the name Skywalker. 

 

Okay I spent way too much time on that.

 

 

 

13 hours ago, knapplc said:

 

And the crazy thing about this is, Disney spent four billion dollars on a franchise beloved the world over, and then allowed that to happen. It makes no sense to me that they would spend all that money and be such poor stewards of the story.

 

I almost wanted to disagree with this, or at least say, "Hey I respect them for being ballsy enough to try something bold and different." But I've convinced myself out of my own argument. I'd call this Disney behavior/product something like.... neo-commodity. Disney is overall pretty damn smart. They know how to make money. More importantly maybe they know how others fail to make money. They know, very clearly, that if they make something that is so obviously safe and conservative and formulaic as a cash grab that people will sniff it out miles away and they'll get crucified for it. So they make what should be an incredibly crafty and sly move to really sell the idea that they're taking a big risk. But maybe they didn't realize the actual risk they took, that they failed at, was trying to pull a fast one on everyone.

 

 

[Redux]

5 hours ago, Landlord said:

 

Okay I spent way too much time on that.

 

Yes, yes you did.  That made me laugh, I gave you a laugh emoji for it because it still counts as a +1 which you get for all that.

 

There's absolutely a ton of stuff that needs little tweaking or fixing.  I too thought some stuff off camera could have made it in to cut the whole casino crap.  I also thought Rose saving non melting Finn was....weird.

 

But again, I stand by it.  The general story that is told, it works as a story.  Film or video game, it could have worked really REALLY well.  Unfortunately Rian either over thought or just ignored all the bad s#!t.

[whateveritis1224]

On 4/19/2019 at 8:13 AM, Redux said:

 

Yes, yes you did.  That made me laugh, I gave you a laugh emoji for it because it still counts as a +1 which you get for all that.

 

There's absolutely a ton of stuff that needs little tweaking or fixing.  I too thought some stuff off camera could have made it in to cut the whole casino crap.  I also thought Rose saving non melting Finn was....weird.

 

But again, I stand by it.  The general story that is told, it works as a story.  Film or video game, it could have worked really REALLY well.  Unfortunately Rian either over thought or just ignored all the bad s#!t.

Rian's just a lazy writer. Poe and Finn were originally supposed to go to the Casino Planet, but Rian created Rose due to Finn and Poe being too similar. A child soldier forcibly enlisted to fight on the evil side and someone who's volunteered to fight against said evil for pretty much his entire adult life. Very similar Rian.

 

Also feels like he only cared about Kylo's character to the detriment of everyone else (Rey used as a prop between Luke and Kylo), deliberately obfuscating the fact that Kylo was undermining Luke at the academy and within 5 minutes of Luke entering his hut when he's sleeping, he's massacring everyone but the ones whom decided to follow him (though this is more preference than specifically bad writing).

 

Then there's the fact that you can hit the failure message without making Luke a jackass.

 

Rian is a good director/cinematographer, but a pis pour writer.

[ZRod]

Some nostalgia

 

 

 

[Redux]

Hated TLJ?  Well, it could have been much....much.....MUCH worse had Lucas kept the franchise:

 

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/06/george-lucas-reveals-his-plan-for-star-wars-7-through-9-and-it-was-awful/

[Moiraine]

My < 10 year old self loved the ewoks and that battle.

[whateveritis1224]

8 hours ago, Redux said:

Hated TLJ?  Well, it could have been much....much.....MUCH worse had Lucas kept the franchise:

 

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/06/george-lucas-reveals-his-plan-for-star-wars-7-through-9-and-it-was-awful/

Would have been weird. But a quick recap can make something bad sound great and something great sound terrible.

[knapplc]

On 5/8/2019 at 5:13 PM, ZRod said:

Some nostalgia

 

 

 

 

Just watched that. That was awesome!

[Redux]

48 minutes ago, whateveritis1224 said:

Would have been weird. But a quick recap can make something bad sound great and something great sound terrible.

 

Shrinking down.......no

[Mavric]

1 hour ago, Redux said:

Shrinking down.......no

 

That's not what he said.  That's what they imagined he meant and played it up.

[Redux]

24 minutes ago, Mavric said:

 

That's not what he said.  That's what they imagined he meant and played it up.

 

Yeah cause George would never do something stupid like that.....

 

[Mavric]

[knapplc]