Rise of Skywalker Spoiler Thread

"Mom said I can't go out and play until I finish my homework and do the dishes."

Wouldn't you agree that if they were going to do all this fucking horseshit they should have at least brought Salacious Crumb back to laugh screechingly and sceam "UNA!" at people?  Like maybe he could be Palpatine's pet now instead of Jabba's?  Even if this wouldn't have made the film better, you have to admit, at least it wouldn't have made it worse, right?

What was Dominic Monaghan doing in this fucking film?  Nothing against him, but his character has literally no reason to exist.  Nothing he adds is remotely essential to the film.  

The Last Jedi was on TV last night and I did have a few more thoughts on ROS after seeing it again.

a) it is a tragedy that Rose didn't have more to do, honestly. Of course that excuse is bullshit. I know Carrie Fisher dying threw a wrench in the plans but they could've written scenes for KMT back at the base on her own.

b) I truly don't have a problem with Rey being Palpatine's granddaughter. When Kylo Ren goes on his whole "your parents were nobody drunk junk traders" speech he seems sincere, but also he's EVIL and trying to get Rey to join him on the dark side. There was a lot of speculation after the movie about whether he was lying. And Luke seems a bit afraid of Rey the whole movie, and says early on, "nobody's from nowhere" (then she says Jakku and he jokes "well, that is pretty much nowhere"). So there are seeds there that he's lying/not telling the whole truth.

I think he saw powerful darkness in her, and her strong bond (dyad) with Kylo/Ben, whether he saw Palpatine or not is impossible to say but I think it's plausible. Either way he was afraid of her power and of the chance that she'd turn out like Kylo. 

This part at least makes sense now, but at the time TLJ came out, it was pretty clear he was talking about Ben being the other powerful person he'd been afraid of. At least their bond AND the Palpatine connection can exist concurrently.

But Palpy's "You're a DYAD! There hasn't been one of THOSE for GENERATIONS" speech was fucking stupid and didn't fit.

Snoke being a clone of Palpatine just makes little sense. Why is he like 10 feet tall, why if you are cloning someone just make him half burned and fucked up physically? Obviously you can fuck with genetics if you are making this dude 10 feet tall.

Seven feet tall, close enough--his projection was more like 30 feet tall

I think, ultimately, one of the fundamental problems this trilogy had with coherence was the way it was put together. Abrams was hired to do, essentially, a one-off, "remind people what they love about Star Wars after the prequels alienated people" film, which he did a pretty good job with. It was retready and unoriginal, but it was also familiar and fun, and well-cast, and people weren't too upset about it because, again, there were the prequels to compare it to. And Abrams didn't have to worry about the repercussions of anything that that movie did to the timeline, because he wasn't going to be making any of the sequels. 

Then that got handed off to Rian Johnson, who is a much more interesting and talented filmmaker, but also one very reluctant to take the easy or obvious choice with his filmmaking. He took the bones of what he was handed by Abrams and made a very Rian Johnson film, starting with the premise, "what can I do with this retread of a story that's unexpected?" and made a movie with an extremely strong theme about learning from failure. But the movie also did relatively little to advance the main story (which was barely present to begin with), and so things weren't really that different at the end of TLJ than they were at the end of TFA.

And so Abrams took over where things left off, which, as it turns out, meant he had to deal with the fact that there had never been a big overarching story planned out, and it wasn't really clear what should happen next, and relatively little had happened in the previous two films to lay out a real structure for him to take the film. On top of that, he was never especially creative to begin with; I think he's very talented at many technical aspects of film, but he's not someone you want to envision a big picture. So, with no real framework to make his third film, he grabbed an existing story he could use as a framework, and basically told a story (Dark Empire) and decided to ignore much of the first two movies and adapt it in the setting without worrying about the trilogy seeming even somewhat coherent. In a lot of ways, this was one of the problems with the sequels, too: the meat of the story told over that trilogy was told maybe 5% in TPM (and that's being charitable), 20% in AotC, and the remaining 75% in RotS. That's part of the reason that RotS is generally considered by far the best of the prequels - it's the only one anything happens in - but it's also why RotS isn't especially good, because the story doesn't have any room to breathe.

At the same time, I think Abrams suffers from wanting to make everyone happy (which Johnson clearly doesn't care about at all) and so he wanted to minimize the character who was getting harassed by neckbeards from the previous movie, but also didn't want to seem like he was giving in, so he kept her in some, and then added a couple more female characters to boot, even if it meant that they were necessarily watering down screentime for established characters. And he knew that BB-8 was a hit, so let's add another cute droid, and maybe a tiny alien, and at a certain point it seemed like he was just stuffing the movie with as much stuff he though people would like so that everybody would have something they liked and everyone would like it.

And the result was a mess. It was an entertaining mess, doubtless - way too much is happening, some of it incredibly poorly conceived,  to ever be bored - but some of the decisions were so wrong-headed that I genuinely wonder how they were made. Palpatine was so out-of-nowhere that you'd think someone would have said something to Abrams about it at some point, and making Rey his granddaughter - with absolutely no hints anywhere in canon that he even had children - had me absolutely cracking up. 

With all that said, I think an Abrams trilogy would have been stronger than what we got, because he would have had to plan an actual story and tell it properly over three movies. And I think a Johnson trilogy would have been MUCH stronger than what we got, because he would have been able to do what he wanted without being bound by Abrams's setup. Ultimately, what we have is a "trilogy" that is really a set-up film, a tight sequel to the set-up film, and a barely-connected separate story that connects loosely to the first two films. That said, I'm really looking forward to what Johnson does next with Star Wars, assuming his trilogy is still a go, and, perhaps more than anything, I really, really want to know what was in Lucas's sequel trilogy treatment. I'm guessing it wasn't this.

Yeah his projection was HUGE, way over 10 feet, but he was also still much taller than the average person in TLJ

Jon M. Chu, director of the truly execrable Crazy Rich Asians, wants to make a Star Wars movie focused on Rose and I'm torn

To reiterate what others have said, Palpatine coming out of nowhere in TRoS is just bad writing. Other than snoke retroactively, the only foreshadowing was a FORTNITE crossover. Yeah, a fortnite crossover of all things, where the message Palpatine sent out could be heard. Then BAM, in the opening crawl there is Palpatine. It isn't even like a myth that people are questioning. No, "this can't be real, but it is duh duh duhhhhh". Just Palpatine is back and that's that. Like if they were bringing him back they could have been so much better about it than this lazy shit.

This, exactly.  Man, how much better would Disney's ownership of Star Wars been received if they'd just avoided the temptation to get a new trilogy out IMMEDIATELY.  I'm not even saying wait longer to make movies, just spare yourself the pressure to fit into that 3 movie story structure.  Episodes VII-IX are really going to suffer from the natural comparison to Rogue One and Mandolorian, which strike a much better mix of crowd-pleasing nostalgia and having an actual story in mind to tell.  They could have done all sorts of one-off stuff like that FOREVER or at least until they worked out an actual plan for a new trilogy.  You could have even found a way to involve the old cast in 1 or 2 of them if you really wanted to.  Would a one-off "Han and Lando, geezer smugglers take on one last job" movie not been much more satisfying than what they did in these movies anyway?

It sucks because it's shitty people's fault but...is there even enough of a character established there to carry a whole movie?