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

What a powerful point of leverage Kylo Ren had over her with that revelation...and it expanded the SW universe in a way the films hadn’t been successful at doing since Empire. She was just a nobody...not a blue blood noble with the privilege of birthright. And then we see the kid at the end and the hope was that this war between factions led by privileged Scions would end with -real- hope and meaningful individualism carried forward by real people and not just nobles and their footsoldiers.

But nope. Kylo was just kiddin’. The Force is absolutely -not- available to commoners. Don’t be silly. This is about THE SKYWALKERS and I guess THE PALPATINES...

They may as well have written it like TLJ wasn’t even canonical. The only big idea carried forward was the Force Skyping and that was turned completely into a farcical lazy plot device.

Hey, remember all that cool stuff where Finn and Rose talk about war profiting with DJ and how he paints the whole war gray? Oh yeah, that was thrown away too.

Imagine if the film after Empire was all like “nah, all that neat stuff ain’t gonna work out actually”

ChristopherMD wrote: The most annoying part about any bad Star Wars movie is how easy it would have been to make a good Star Wars movie. All Abrams had to do was take a Samurai story, recycle it into a Western, then recycle that into Sci-Fantasy. Jon Favreau could do it in his sleep.

My wife totally went off on this point. It isn’t hard to make good SW. They were handed everything they needed. They created the best SW character. A challenging filmmaker blew open new possibilities. And then they worked overtime to make a morass of a film over engineered to respond to internet trolls.

It’s a film without any soul or heart at all. Just beats that are manufactured to appeal to SW fans. It’s completely cynical and defeatist. It’s like a Michael Bay film but instead of sun-drenched American flags we get empty nostalgia moments.

A New Hope was a maverick, filmmaker’s film. It had vision. Empire expanded that vision and gave it scope. The opportunity here was to repeat THAT cycle but they took the lazy route.

You know I watched Revenge of the Sith a couple of times recently and although it is still mostly bad, there are some GREAT things in it. I think the first 20 minutes, everything around rescuing Palpatine from Grievous, is top notch SW. It falls apart once we get into the Coruscant stuff and Natalie Portman’s unspeakably bad makeup and hair, but it never felt as hollow as RoS. It wasn’t working to “undo” the crap storm that was Attack of the Clones or to bow and scrape to “fans” to make sure they don’t go away. It was still a George Lucas vision, for better or worse.

Thank god for The Mandalorian, which is almost perfect as far as SW goes. It will salvage the brand without shitting on TLJ.

Gary Sax wrote:

Sagrilarus wrote: My suspicion is that they don't leave that alone in #9

They, uh, do not leave this alone. It's probably my biggest beef of the whole thing.

So it's another superheroes movie.

Michael Barnes wrote: Thank god for The Mandalorian, which is almost perfect as far as SW goes. It will salvage the brand without shitting on TLJ.

This is the way.

Rise of Skywalker - right before the Christmas break, I asked a coworker what he thought of it. He said, "It's a movie." After watching it, I agree. There's a lot of really nice scenes in a pretty mediocre film.

I'm not going to defend the decision to throw out TLJ, but I can see why they did it. For good or bad, it's been 40+ years of the Skywalkers' and Palpatines' story, and episode 8 of a 9-movie series might have been a little late to just drop it. But like what some of you folks have pointed out upstream, you'd think that with literally billions of dollars at stake that someone at Disney would have sat down and figured out where they wanted to go with the conclusion of the previous six movies.

And I have beefs:

jpat wrote:

“Utterly not worth talking about...”

“Five-six page review...”

Um.

OMG the snake. I forgot about the snake.

The best part is that this giant ass snake apparently SNEAKS UP on them. It’s like they turn around and it’s right there. That is lazy, sloppy writing. And it is 100 percent there to establish the new Cure Wounds ability...which was actually already in The Mandalorian anyway.

Phrasing it in D+D terminology really brings it home for me.

I haven't seen RoS, and I liked FORCE AWAKENS (but felt it was a retread) and LAST JEDI (but felt it had too many storylines working at madly different paces). I absolutely fucking hated the prequels and I not going to revisit them in any capacity. So where does RoS fall out for me? Is it prequel bad?* Or just not a good movie? I mean, I saw MATRIX REVOLUTIONS and it was Not Good®, but it wasn't a horrible experience. Would I regret seeing RoS?

* ie: bad writing, bad direction, bad acting, lazy stereotypes, hand removal ocd, &c

It's about the same as The Force Awakens, good and bad.

jeb wrote: So where does RoS fall out for me? Is it prequel bad?* Or just not a good movie?

It's weird. On the one hand, I would argue it's a very competently made movie. Things are set up and paid off. You see Rey use a Force healing ability. It's used again later. You see that Rey and Kylo's Force connection has a physical element. It comes back at a dramatic moment. Basic cinematic stuff that feels like a retort to Leia's sudden space flight in Last Jedi* which too many people went off on. So on that level and the level of having an engaged cast, Rise of Skywalker is a much more watchable film than any of the prequels.

On the level of telling its own story and providing a satisfying conclusion to the Disney trilogy and six Lucas films? Absolutely not. For basically all of the reasons stated by everyone already.

Can anyone remember the phrase "Skywalker Saga" even being used by Disney before this film? Lucas has said that his six films were about the rise and fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker, and though it gets lost in the poor directing and writing of the prequels, it is a story potently told (in the broadstrokes). But then Disney decides the final movie of its own trilogy is the real cap to the eight movies that preceded it even though that clearly wasn't the plan with Force Awakens and Last Jedi? When its next trilogy comes out (and it will), will that be the real real end to the Skywalker Saga, or will Disney finally commit to its own thing?

*I will go down fighting that Leia flying through space was one of my most thrilling moments in a theater ever. In a series that had already demonstrated it was very prepared to kill off it's former leads, seeing the character whose actress had in fact died, live again dropped me. The execution might have been a little silly, but what it represented made me feel feelings.

Saw Uncut Gems: dichotomouspurity.blogspot.com/2020/01/rough-stones.html

Hrm.

DarthJoJo wrote: *I will go down fighting that Leia flying through space was one of my most thrilling moments in a theater ever. In a series that had already demonstrated it was very prepared to kill off it's former leads, seeing the character whose actress had in fact died, live again dropped me. The execution might have been a little silly, but what it represented made me feel feelings.

That moment hit me exactly the same way as when Fonzie literally jumped the shark way back in Happy Days. It was a wild, exciting sensation that the writers didn't give a fuck anymore and it was just fiction dammit so why should anybody care. That, and uh, WHEEEEE!!!!! I had mixed feelings about The Last Jedi. I liked that it genuinely surprised me at times, but Leia flying through space was a bad sort of surprise because it looked cheap and felt utterly disconnected from what I thought I knew about the whole setting.

Grudunza wrote: jpat wrote:

“Utterly not worth talking about...”

“Five-six page review...”

Um.

Heh. You got me there. My review, though, wasn't really about the film that much but about my relation to it and the circumstances that seemed to have produced ROS. I meant that I didn't discuss plot points at all, or almost not at all, because nothing that happens has any consequence for me.

What's really good, though, is Greta Gerwig's Little Women. This was my first real engagement with the story beyond, oddly enough, having owned a recording of an opera (in English) based on the novel. There are clearly ways in which the movie is geared toward speaking to a modern audience, but to me its emotionality never felt sentimentalized, and every laugh and tear felt earned.