What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

Setting aside "The Emperor is Back!" I think going back to Rey's familial ties is a real betrayal of someething I really liked about the 2nd one. Kylo Ren tells her that her family is just space junkers, she has to fight on anyway. I thought it was perfect---the genuine heart of the 2nd film is to abandon thoughts of fate, or how important your family is in your destiny, etc, which have surrounded the series since the original trilogy. It was great! Any person could tap into the force. It feels like a real shitty troll for this to be revisited and, it turns out, Luke and Leia knew the whole time what her lineage was and she's Palpatine's grandaughter. What a tremendous fuck off to the 2nd film themes, that subversive non-traditional star wars message (which I liked!).

What is the arc for Rey? For Kylo? As much fun as it was to turn traditional Star Wars in its ear, I’m not sure there’s a satisfying place for that story to go other than to make it even more fucked up, which even for me, a huge sequel trilogy and TLJ fan, would have been too far. It sucks that so much was walked back, but I was still entertained by the story they did tell when it comes to Rey and Kylo Ren. I’m more upset by the treatment of every other character, especially Finn. A defected stormtrooper with force sensitivity? That would have been a great story to explore.

Rise of Skywalker is not good. It is not a good movie by any stretch of the word. Chewbacca finally getting a medal does not make it good. It is shockingly sloppy, badly written, badly paced, badly edited, and worst of all it seems like a 15 year “super fan” wrote it with the intent of appeasing other 15 year old super fans and Kylo/Rey shippers.
Josh is 100% correct- there was no gameplan here. There was no overarching _vision_. Say what you will about the prequels (and oh, I have PLENTY to say about them), at least there was a distinct, consistent vision for what the story was trying to do. ROS is slapdash, lazy, and very clearly the result of committee writing – it’s as cynical toward its audience as a Michael Bay Transformers movie. You can almost hear JJ Abrams shrugging and saying “just give them what they want”.

Problem is, what they think people want it is apparently nonsensical bullshit. The 15 year old superfan thinks it would be awesome to see 10,000 Star Destroyers with Death Star-class superlasers. But the reality of it is that concept not only completely outstrips the scale of Star Wars, it also is just plain bullshit. So Palpatine is chilling out in his Adeptus Mechanicus crane, pulling the First Order strings, totally doing a Twilight Imperium and holding back on actually deploying this massive fleet because…? How many thousands of workers were needed to build all of those ships? How about to crew all those ships? Where did they STORE all of those ships? Did they have the red Sith Trooper armor in storage waiting for Palpatine to come out of hiding?

The big battle at the end, where all the ships show up…my son leaned over and said “This is just like Endgame”. And he was dead right. But unlike T’Challa and everyone showing up to bail out Cap and the Avengers, there was almost no emotional impact. It was like “oh wow, a million ships”. That really didn’t do jack shit other than to stop Poe from yammering about how nobody was coming. Remember the incredible space battle at the end of Rogue One? Why didn’t this top that?
Sure, you can say “It’s Star Wars, laser swords and stuff” but the fact remains that NONE of the great Star Wars films or stories have had that kind of lazy, sloppy writing. I mean, we know the names of the companies that build X-Wings and TIE Fighters and it’s not even in the movies. But this…this is quite literally just throwing some shit up on the screen.

As is the whole Force pass thing. I totally bought Rey and Kylo’s connection and that they could link and “see” each other. But now they are handing each other stuff across thousands of miles. How does that happen exactly? How does the Force, a living energy, let you hand somebody an inanimate object? That is pure bullshit. Granted, Kylo’s “come at me bro” moment after that was freakin’ amazing.

As for Kylo Ren. What a fumble. In The Last Jedi, he became the best SW character. Yes, better than Vader. He represented a Satanic temptation for Rey. He was alluring but self-destructive and completely torn apart. And by the end of this movie, the message is that the angry incel dude gets better, kisses the girl, and then he dies. Again, almost random bullshit thrown on the screen to appease certain fans. They completely blew it with Kylo Ren. I was down for his redemption, but by the time we’ve got Kylo and Rey bringing each other back to life and all that, I was just like you’ve got to be joking. My wife actually walked out on the movie at that point.

There’s so much in it that was just garbage writing. The whole thing with Chewie getting on the “other transport” that wasn’t even established…so sloppy. Don’t get me started on the suddenly godlike power Rey has to halt the ship- again, the scope was just too big for Star Wars. The business with the GPS thing and the dagger…huh? It wasn’t cool or interesting, it was just like “HERE ARE ITEMS TO MOVE THE PLOT ALONG”.

Finn is a complete waste- remember how compelling it was, a former Stormtrooper, possibly Force sensitive, and learning the moral gray areas of the war between the First Order and the Resistance? Completely thrown away. As was Rose- Abrams and company completely chickened out on her because the white boys didn’t like seeing an Asian girl in Star Wars. She was built up to be a love interest and then…oh look! Here’s another black woman, surely she is meant to be with the black man!” Thanks a lot, white boy SW fans.

The reality of it is that Rian Johnson offered Star Wars a new path – he built on Abram’s nostalgic TFA and pushed into new territory that was compelling. He was saying “hey, maybe Star Wars can be something NEW, and that meant burning the books and having Yoda laugh about it. Remember in TLJ, the scene with Snoke, Rey, and Kylo? That was the first time I think in any SW movie barring Empire where I did not know what was going to happen. I remember just gasping when they were fighting back to back. It was thrilling. But in this movie, the “thrilling” is supposed to be seeing repetitive, poorly conceived scenarios and those scenarios blown up to an untenable scale. So they threw away all of the interesting stuff and tried to please fans. What a fucking mistake.
But I did not hate the movie. I felt numb and indifferent toward it. After the movie, all I said was “that was a whole lot of Star Wars”. There were things I loved – Lando, Hux’s “heroic” turn, the Knights of Ren, the big festival, the Ewoks, and it was the best photographed SW movie to date – but there was a lot that I either actively didn’t like or felt completely put off by. The last act was almost a complete disaster.

I love Star Wars. I’ve put up with a lot of garbage Star Wars, and I still love it. I still do. We went out and bought Fallen Jedi for PS4 with gift cards last night and we’ve been playing a lot of Battlefront II. I’m looking forward to the Obi-Wan series. But man, I gotta say…this was a total dud of a finale by any measure. If it were not Star Wars, it would never have been made – it’s almost as bad a film as Attack of the Clones, but there again, even that movie had a clear direction. Last night I watched Revenge of the Sith and the whole time I was thinking a) this is better than I remember it and b) this is so much better than RoS. I got to thinking about Solo, which I thought was OK, and how much I actually liked it more than RoS.