Rise of Skywalker Spoiler Thread

Adam Driver is also a hell of an actor and there’s no doubt the writing is light years better; Lucas was lousy at dialogue. But I saw Shattered Glass and Hayden Christiansen is just not a great actor. He’s good at looking anguished.

I forgot to mention that a bit of fanservice I very much appreciated was Chewbacca finally getting his fucking medal.

Worse than Clones

I won’t disagree that it makes no sense as presented, I’m just naturally an alternate text reader & so will always TRY some hand-waving to work it out. But if you HAVE to hand wave it, then it’s stupid and should have been addressed in the goddamn text.

Bringing back Palpatine was stupid af; he never did anything for me as the Emperor (as a random aside, I have issues with all of Lucas’ random use of feudal titles, and let’s not even get into the concept of “electing” a teenage as “queen”), and bringing him back because “well the viewers all know him & already know how evil he is so hey, total shortcut instead of building up a new character!” is just unspeakably lazy. Also why the fuck would you set it up so your grandkid, rather than your child, would take over?  Why wait that long? Just clone yourself a little Sith army (unless the Force doesn’t work for clones idek) 

While I won’t fully commit to saying “Kylo Ren redeemed himself”, I will grudgingly admit that, had he lived, he would have been on the redemptive path. I’ll buy his change more than I will ever buy Vader’s because Kylo showed some level of conflict from the get-go. I still don’t like the character* & Adam Driver just hits the wrong chords with me, but true steps away from the Dark Side were taken, rather than a last-minute “ huh maybe I should save this son I’ve never had any relationship with or connection to at all”. **

Also I like Hux, & man, they really just did not know how to use him as a character. I’m fine with his “fuck that guy” motivation, but Abrams & Johnson both played up his naked ambition as comedy, rather than the visiciousness it should have been.

And yeah, no matter how awesome they looked, there were too many lightsaber battles just for the sake of having lightsaber battles. 


I wish they hadn’t dyed Isaac’s hair; his natural grey works for me like gangbusters. I also really like Poe and Rey clashing, rather than just all three of them getting along. 

OK DID NO ONE ELSE SEE WEDGE THO LITERALLY NONE OF Y’ALL HAVE MENTIONED IT


*Han may have forgiven Ben, but I am not Ben’s parent & I most certainly will not forgive the patricide. Like, ever.
**probably bears mentioning that I am not a person who buys the “family is everything even if you have never met them before” trope.

.

Didn't BB-88 get disguised when Rose and Finn sneaked onto a First Order spaceshit in Force Awakens? I thought they put  thing on him to make him look evil, but could be misremembering things.

Was Freddie Prinze Jr. actually playing Kanan or was he just some nameless dude where the fact that the dude who voiced Kanan was now playing some anonymous Jedi was an Easter egg for people who watched Rebels?

I hope to Christ Jesus it's canonically Trioculus from those shitty young adult Star Wars novels "chapter books" from the 1990s.
I mean just look at this fucking asshole!

In my mind they put a garbage can over him but I don't think that's right.

I reread Dark Empire last night to confirm if the movie seemed like an adaptation and ended up even more convinced that Abrams had a copy of the Dark Empire trade in front of him when the script was being written. Palpatine's plot makes a bit more sense in this context: one of the things in Dark Empire is that Palpatine has become basically a disembodied Dark Side thing that can possess and occupy bodies. He talks about taking over Luke's body at one point, he threatens Leia with occupying her unborn child. I think Abrams copied the plot point without the explanation.

I think there's also an outside chance that there was a game of plot telephone going on here - Colin Treverrow still had a story credit. I think it's entirely possible he's the one copying Dark Empire and Abrams took it and ran. Once the media starts openly discussing the story, I'm hoping for some background on this. This movie struck me as possibly the single weirdest Star Wars movie yet, and I"m really curious what exactly its development process was.

You articulated it better than I could have, the plot is a mess, even by Star Wars standards. I will just add a couple more observations. 

The whole thing felt like it was both sagging under the weight of all the backstory while at the same time devoid of any gravitas that said backstory should impart. Maybe this is because of the lack of consequences. Did they really need to kill off so many people just to undo it a few minutes later? Chewbacca, C3PO, Rey, Finn, and fuck, Kylo was killed 3! times and only one stuck. It seems like the only people who died were Leia, Kylo and that Porkins guy from Heroes.

I was thinking of Avengers during the final battle. Here are all of these ships coming to the rescue just like all the heroes show up in Avengers but it lacks any real emotional punch because you have no idea who any of these people are outside of Lando and random girl that Poe knows. They tried to build a movie around an emotional payoff but they failed to put in the work to build up to it.

I think I am incapable of really disliking any Star Wars movie. I will even defend most parts of the prequels. So, no this did not ruin Star Wars for me, nor even this trilogy, but it does leave me pretty disappointed in what could have been.

I think this movie may give Mr. Plinkett a heart attack.

ed. The Half in the Bag review is up and Mike is trying to shift the blame off himself since Mr. Plinkett actually advocated for J.J. Abrams to direct Star Wars 10 years ago. 

OH, OH! Also, I'm pretty sure that line that we all shit on before was this - "It's the Knights of Ren." "Ghouls!"

I was watching for it to laugh about it, but it might be better if I heard it correctly.

Off topic. Did anyone else's showing have a trailer for the Harrison Ford Call of the Wild movie?

Was it just me or was that CGI dog freaky as hell? That looked like some early '00s straight to video type CGI. I was amazed and appalled at the same time.

Did Ford agree to be in RoS in exchange for them running that preview before the movie? I cannot imagine anyone paying the kind of money you would need to pay to run a preview before the biggest movie of the year for that awfulness.

Yeah, you’re not wrong that Palpatine is generally batshit all over, but it feels like they just turned the batshit up to 11 because..reasons.

Also I’m always very meh about the Tatooine thing; I’d like to see other places, but I get why Tatooine is used so often, narratively speaking,and from a meta standpoint, it’s probably much cheaper to use California deserts.  

Also also I LOVED seeing it on The Mandalorian, as a rathole where Imperials are hiding out, and seeing the shitty Mos Eisely cantina.

Yea, that’s fan service done right

He was asking because he thinks she’s his daughter!