JfishPirate posted:

I feel like most of my gripes with this movie have been covered, but one thing is still gnawing at me:

Did the Resistance actually win? At the end of TLJ, the First Order has them outnumbered and outgunned, down to the last few fighters. In this movie, we see an alliance of the last remaining Resistance fighters and various galactic citizens destroy the Last Order/Sith fleet, though there are heavy losses on both sides. However, isn't the actual First Order fleet and overall governing structure still around? The commander who was on Exegol died, and there will need to be a new Supreme Leader, but there's surely some sort of second-in-command on another planet aligned with the First Order that can take up the reins. I feel like the First Order only lost a commander and a command ship, which is a setback but not a crippling one. Doesn't the Rebellion still have to deal with, essentially, the exact same problematic situation from the end of TLJ? This movie resolved the Sith/Jedi conflict, but I feel like the First Order is, at worst, at 90% strength, and the Rebellion is even weaker than before. Unless all the galactic citizens (that didn't get fried by the Palpatine lighting storm) are willing to take the fight to the First Order (when they weren't before), nothing seems to have changed.

General Dog posted:

Well, it’s been a persistent gripe of mine that even in the wake of the Starkiller incident, the combined military might of the rest of the galaxy should almost certainly dwarf the First Order’s fleet. The first 2.9 movies of the sequel trilogy conveniently ignore this fact, but the very end would seem to suggest that the forces to easily crush the First Order were always present, they just needed someone to show them they could believe in themselves!

Jewmanji posted:

Lando just rounding up the entire galaxy by flying from planet to planet offscreen for a few minutes was probably the laziest cheat in the series. Unbelievably lazy writing.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

‘Wokewashing’ is bad, but never trust anyone who makes it their sole concern.

Like, riddle me this: do you know Redletter’s political stance on literally any other topic?

Steve Yun posted:

Somebody make a South Park style chef clip with Carrie Fisher from this movie with badly pasted dialogue from previous movies

Steve Yun posted:

Which

Maxwell Lord posted:

There's a scene where Leia is about to lay down and die and it's shooting her largely from the back.

jivjov posted:

This will be the final word in the posting of jivjov

So I toxxed myself out of this thread a while back, because I was tired of arguing with idiots who couldn’t recognize that two planets with similar biomes weren’t actually the same planet. On that note; gently caress you, I win. If absolutely nothing else, TRoS settled that one for you people once and for all. But, as a condition of that toxx, I get one last post. Here’s my one post about my thoughts on The Rise of Skywalker, and the Sequel Trilogy as a whole. I’ll spoiler tag individual sections so its not a complete mess to mouse over—but the entire thing is gonna be full of plot and character details.

Brief Thoughts
I honestly didn’t really like it all that much. There’s a few beats and moments I enjoyed, but on the whole this last entry in the Skywalker Saga feels rather soulless, and as an entry in the Sequel Trilogy it feels downright malicious. I describe it as if Abrams was challenged to write a story that held to the letter of what TLJ (and honestly parts of TFA) established, but played merry hell with the spirit of those films. It’s almost like JJ was asked to give “real answers” to all the things salty Fandom Menace shitstains were mad about…but not to full-on walk back anything because the majority actually did enjoy The Last Jedi. Textbook case of trying to please everybody instead of picking an audience.

The Film, Structurally
This movie is on speed. At no point does it every really slow down for a break. The first act is just a staccato rapid fire of cuts and jumps and perspective changes. I read a tweet on release night that said something to effect of “Abrams must’ve decided he had wanted to write his own episode VIII and thought it would be a great idea to cram it in to the beginning of his Episode IX”. I like a lot of the ideas set up…Poe and Finn on Resistance missions, with various supporting cast like Artoo, Chewie, Klaud, etc, while Rey trains further in the Jedi ways with Leia…but everything in that sequence rips by SO FAST. Nothing is given any room to breathe. What I could possibly see as a familiar and comfortable banter between characters plays instead like these characters actually can’t stand each other and are only forced together by circumstance.
The plot of the first act-and-a-half being a quest for various macguffins also doesn’t play well for me. Star Wars has always had random trinkets to find-the Death Star plans, “go find Yoda”, the Kamino Saber Dart, etc….But “gotta find a dagger to find a holocron wayfinder to find a planet” just felt like a fetch quest in a really lazy way. I like the pulp adventure feel of it…but it was just a hair too much.
Then, the big twist comes fully into play and the movie just becomes “gently caress it….Sheev time!” for the second and third acts. Palps delivers a ton of exposition, we get introduced to interesting concepts such as “The Final Order”, Sith Troopers, etc…but again, none of it has any room to breathe or develop. This is gonna be GREAT fodder for the other types of Star Wars stories I enjoy in the books and comics and RPG supplements…but it leaves this film itself feeling like a roller coaster of thoughts and ideas when I’d rather it be a guided tour. I legitimately wonder if JJ was hoping for an Endgame-esque runtime and was told to keep it to 2.5 hours.

Individual Character Thoughts

Rey
Man, I hate where Rey ends up by the end of this movie…despite being a fan of where it initially looks like its going. Rey feeling alone and isolated from her friends because of the massive weight of being a Force user and potentially the last Jedi in existence is a really powerful place for her to start the movie in. Especially when given the weight of expectation of possibly being able to commune with every Jedi who ever was. The “Be with me” payoff late in the film is ACES. But over the course of the movie I find her character writing to just not really make sense with her stated motivations. She’s opposed to her friends coming along on the mission to Pasaana, but when they’re all there together, she’s prone to wandering off alone and being very cagey about her thoughts and feelings. I understand her wanting to play things close to the vest, especially once the Rey Palpatine reveal happens, but there’s a difference between “close to the vest” and “complete lack of regard for others” and she ends up on the latter side of that line fairly often. Speaking of the Rey Palpatine thing….this is the biggest offender of the whole spirit versus letter of TLJ thing I mentioned earlier. “Rey, your parents may be random drunken nobodies…but that doesn’t mean you can’t step up and be an important person, and you don’t need to be related to a special fated bloodline to be powerful” is a decent enough distillation of what she learns over the course of TLJ. TRoS reveals that her parents were nobodies…by choice, by a desire to keep Rey out of the grasp of her paternal grandfather, Sheev Palpatine. This pulls the rug out in two very critical ways. 1) It establishes that Rey did in fact have a loving and caring family, they were just torn from her in their attempts to keep her safe. 2) Whoops, turns out she IS the scion of a fated bloodline and that’s used as “justification” for her powers. Its not all bad…she still gets the opportunity to refute her “inherent” darkness and choose to be a good person…but it just feels needlessly convoluted to spend two movies hammering home that “the belonging she seeks is ahead, not behind” and then make her big final confrontation literally a genetic predecessor of hers.
I like Rey’s idea of exiling herself on Ahch-To like Luke did in concept…but not so much in execution. I’ll go into that more when I get to Luke.
And then there’s her ending…she takes the legacy lightsaber of Anakin and Luke Skywalker and buries it on the planet they both couldn’t wait to leave. Sure, she’s made her own saber (and I love finally having another ‘non-standard’ saber color on screen in a film) but she’s also ending the movie pretty much where she began the trilogy—more or less alone, on a desert planet, with no real family or community. (Incidentally, the track on the soundtrack for that final sequence is titled “A New Home” which is why I believe she’s there for good, not just to drop off the Skywalker twins’ sabers.) I’ll dig more into the relationship with Ben in his own character segment…but tearing the two of them apart seems so needlessly cruel. For a franchise, a saga, that’s supposed to be all about hope, tearing apart this “dyad” in the Force is so baffling to me. Especially after the repeated motif of Rey seeking family. She spends a long moment just observing some carefree children on Pasaana that really screams “desire for motherhood” to me. Though I guess if they decide to pull out an Episode X down the road, they could run with the idea that the Force healing and Force dyad led to a pregnancy. Plus…why did Rey even take the name of Skywalker? She never expresses any real desire to take up a mantle from Luke, even in the somewhat revisionist scene on Ahch-To in this film, and she seemed to straight up end TLJ in a place of acknowledging Luke’s importance and place in the galaxy…but wanting to forge a new path. Instead she’s back to what she spent all of TFA and the opening of TLJ doing…grafting herself into a family image. If anything, I would have preferred her to take “Solo” as a surname after Ben.

Ben Solo
Adam Driver does some fuckin WORK in this film. Supreme Leader Kylo Ren is clearly a different type of leader to Snoke…he’s out and about in the galaxy, but apparently spends more time jetting off on personal missions than actually leading the First Order. This leads to a neat (but rushed--like everything else in this film) dynamic of Armitage Hux turning traitor not because he wants the Resistance to win, but because he wants the new Supreme Leader to lose. Ben’s reaction to the dead Emperor speaking being “hat up and go kill the bastard” is so in character with his prior depictions and being his father’s son.
Speaking of hatting up, though….reforging the mask really seems to serve no narrative purpose. He doesn’t seem to use it as a mask in a metaphorical sense, he doesn’t have much of a problem showing his face, he seems, at least on the surface, pretty okay with being unmasked…but for some reason we get a really cult-y scene of the mask being reforged. JJ even teased in pre-release interviews that it was a concept lifted from the Japanese practice of Kintsugi, and that there was real narrative weight to the mask’s return…but the only real weight seems to be “Sell a new head sculpt of action figure, and because it looks cool”. I’ve got zero problem with something being in Star Wars to look cool, but I tend to expect just a hair more out of main character stuff like that, especially when the mask’s destruction was such a major character beat.
Ben’s inner turmoil when it comes to Rey, and the “Reylo” relationship as a whole, is really well done here. One of the very few things I buy as being a good continuation from TFA and TLJ is how he is so conflicted about wanting her to join him. This is spoiled a bit by the Rey Palpatine reveal, as his motives are derailed a hair with how much importance he seems to put on Rey’s heritage. But ultimately, Ben’s arc is an inversion of his grandfather’s…love is what brings him away from the dark side rather than what leads him to fall into it. But much like Luke needing one last push from Yoda back in TLJ…Ben needs one last push from his dad. The Han/Ben scene was one of the most genuinely emotional moments of the movie for me, what with the reprise of “I don’t know if I have the strength to do it” motif with regards to Ben’s decision making.
Ben’s travel to Exogol and the final showdown with Palpatine and the Knights of Ren was also really solid. Ben and Rey using the depth of their Force dyad bond to hand off the legacy lightsaber is one of the most incredible things ever done in the entire Saga. Sadly though…Ben dies at the end. This just seems so rude and cruel and unfair given what the rest of this trilogy was setting up. Redemption-by-death worked for Vader because he was a distant antagonist for the original trilogy. He shows up and directly interacts with our heroes for a couple scenes and makes their lives worse, and then goes back to doing Empire things. We don’t ever really spend any time seeing his worldview or life, other than being a ruthless HR manager. All the depth of his pining for Padmé and tragic loss is Prequel Trilogy additions. Ben Solo, on the other hand, went from Antagonist to Deuteragonist somewhere along the line in TLJ and seemed to be set onto a redemptive path that would lead either to a Happily Ever After with Rey, or at least an existence of seeking a way to atone for his sins. Death is the easy and lazy endpoint of a redemption story…a villain making a choice to die a good man is so much easier than making a choice to LIVE as a good man. Plus, as mentioned above, splitting the dyad just seems so hollow and empty of an endpoint for what is ostensibly a hopeful story.

Finn
Poor Finn…you really got nothing to do of any real consequence here other than Some Action Scenes and Yelling. I just plain don’t understand why Boyega was throwing shade at TLJ over the last couple weeks before the release of TRoS when his role boils down to such mundanity. All the rumblings of a Stormtrooper Rebellion or something were for naught. And we never do get a clear answer on what he so desperately wanted to tell Rey. I’ve seen a lot of speculation that it was a confession of love…but I chose the more charitable reading that its about his developing Force sensitivity; something that is SO OBVIOUSLY HAPPENING in the film, but (like so much else) nothing really gets done with. I also don’t like the implication that The Force is the only reason Finn deserted, and Jannah’s company defected. RIP to any other kidnapped children that don’t get the magic god-whisper, I guess? Again, I’ll tell myself something much more charitable…that everyone gets that moment of “wait, this is wrong…” and they just choose not to act on it.

Poe Dameron
Another textbook case of letter v. spirit of TLJ. Poe has to do a whole new cycle of being a good leader here. We find out Leia’s named him acting general before her death…but he’s gotta get run through the wringer one more time before he steps up and owns it. His little hissy fit on Kef Bir with the whole “he’s not Leia” thing just felt like retreading the same ground.
That said, I like the reveal that he ran with a bad crowd for a bit. I look forward to the inevitable novel or comic series about that period of his life. Though the introduction of Zorri seemed to only really exist so that there was a “reason” FinnPoe wouldn’t happen.

Luke Skywalker
Oof, here we have the biggest and most glaring walk-back of TLJ. Luke ends TLJ having finally made peace with the fact that being a Jedi Knight doesn’t have to involve violence or warfare…and his first line in this movie is “A Jedi’s weapon deserves more respect”. Like….what? The last time we know of that Luke held a lightsaber it was when he almost lopped off his nephew’s head in a reflexive panic. (Okay, I know Rey hands him the legacy saber, but that’s not the same thing, and he immediately chucks it). The Luke Skywalker we see in that film would probably want to see a new Jedi Order that doesn’t carry sabers as a matter of course. At least Leia’s saber is stuck in the wall rather than out on display.
And then there’s the fact that his old X-wing is still functional…to me that spits in the face of Luke’s whole exile. He tells Rey that his fear is what kept him on Ahch-To (pretty clearly his fear that he had become too dangerous, that the galaxy was better off without him or the Jedi in it)…which is why we all thought it was pretty obvious that he has scuttled his only way off the planet. Even made a door for his hut out of a wing panel. But…welp, guess he could have just up and left at any time. We even see in TLJ that Luke’s wishy washy about the whole thing, what with the heavy implication that he’s “decided” to burn down the tree and the texts multiple times but kept chickening out. Abrams, or some suit somewhere, decided that Luke’s last stand as an absolute paragon of Jedi ideal just wasn’t’ quite cool enough, and they had to try to slip in one last little bit of Edgy Cool into Luke’s story before the end.

Leia Organa
I don’t want to speak ill of the dead here. The filmmakers were hamstrung by Carrie Fisher’s death, and all they had were a handful of unused snippets from TFA. This is not the filmaker’s fault. But god…Leia just feels so stilted and pointless. Her “sacrifice” can’t even be her appearing to Ben, cause there’s no footage for that. She calls to him and then he sees his dad instead. It was unavoidable, but still so incredibly disappointing.

Sheev Palpatine
My first, big petty complaint is that not one single person utters the word “Sheev” in this film at any moment. I wish we had gotten a solid answer on how he survived the whole Death Star thing…but I’ve gone with the explanation that he was in fact a malevolent force spirit that ended up possessing his own corpse. For any Jojo’s fans in the audience, I’m getting some Part 5 parallels there. I really dig the whole concept of the Final Order and the Sith Legions and whatnot…but once again the movie blasts through everything so fast that I don’t really get to chew in to what it all means, what all the implications are. Plus it kinda doesn’t gel super well with all the First Order lore we have kicking around. I thought it was the First Order that was militarizing off in the Unknown Regions? Guess it was both? But only highly placed officers in the First Order know anything about all this Sith stuff? Having Ian McDiarmid ham it up one last time was pretty great, but I’m really feeling the lack of setup for his return. I can buy that its an idea that had been kicking around for a while (see: Palpatine leitmotif during the Snoke interrogation scene in TLJ) but they went SO HARD with the giant Sith armada stuff that I feel like it desperately needed some more setup earlier in the trilogy.

Missed Opportunities: or, Everybody Else

Rose: JJ saying that the best gift Rian gave him was finding Kelly was a loving horseshit lie. “Hey Rose, you wanna come with us on this adventure?” “No, I have to stay here and do homework on ship schematics, bye!”

The Knights of Ren: I’m not surprised they went the way of Boba Fett, all style and no substance…but I was hoping for just a little bit more from them. Oh well…their smoke-spewing ship was cool, at least.

Jannah: Just another casualty of the terrible pacing. Her bonding with Finn could have been such a cool thing…but instead its just a single moment

A Cameo from the Final Battle (There’s an image behind this one): I at least got the one thing I always wanted out of the ST. Thanks, Disney. Thanks for bringing back my boy.

C-3PO: Threepio sacrificing himself for the mission could have been such a powerful moment, finally giving goldenrod something truly meaningful. They also could have done something interesting with digging into his old memories from the Prequels. Yeah his memory was erased, but maybe they just never copied over those sectors? But they treat it all like one big joke, and then walk it back a few scenes later.

Chewbacca: Speaking of walking back….they got me with the Chewie death misdirect. At least the rest of the characters are going through the misdirect too; better than the Threepio one. It occurs to me that what Chewie needs to do is find a way to jump into the Legends continuity; all his best friends are alive there, and having cool space adventures into their 80s.

Some Voices (bigger spoilers than usual behind this one): The voices of Jedi past was such a cool concept…and then they just…don’t…do…anything….with…it??? At least a couple of them should have manifested fully. And they should have been speaking to Ben too. He’s crawling his way out of that pit, coming to heal his newfound love…Ben should have heard “rise up” just as hard as Rey did. And when he’s sitting there cradling Rey’s body…that was when he should have finally heard the ACTUAL voice of his grandfather, rather than Sheev’s manipulations. “Save her. Save the one you love from dying like I never could.” I hope the expanded novelization has something like that in it.

Snoke: Another weird revision-that’s-not-quite-a-retcon to TLJ, Snoke is a manipulated being serving as a figurehead for Sheev. I’m uncomfortably reminded of, from James Bond, Spectre-the-movie retconning Silva from Skyfall as having been working for Spectre-the-organization the whole time. It works, technically, but it undermines some of what made the villain cool in the first place. Those gross vats-o-Snoke was a cool image though.

Lando Calrissian: Here’s here just to be here. Like they made it two movies into the ST patting themselves on the back about bringing back the OT cast…and suddenly Abrams sits up in the middle of the night and says “OH GOD WE FORGOT BILLY DEE!” Han, Luke, and Leia all had some story purpose to serve, even if Leia’s was derailed by Fisher’s untimely passing….but what the gently caress is Lando’s purpose other than for us to go “Hey its Lando!!” Even getting to SEE him rounding up the free peoples of the galaxy to come to the last battle would have helped in this regard.

Maz Kanata: Less shoehorned in than in TLJ, but that’s not saying much. She exists as a go-between from Leia to the rest of the audience. And yet, they never use that shot of her handing the legacy saber to Leia. And I’m legit shocked that JJ decided not to follow up on the “excellent story for another time” gag. Hell, I was expecting her to reference that story and then have a fast cut away so the audience doesn’t get to here. Go full “Avengers Assembled” with it.

The Resistance: Gonna lead with the controversial “Look at our onscreen LGBT+ representation!” moment. It was slightly better than Endgame’s in only one respect; at least D’acy was a prominent minor character in TLJ, so its not like they invented two randos to check off a box. Snap Wexley died and his stepdad can’t even shed a tear over it. Klaud was a cool design, I legit want to see more of him in tie-in material. Dominic Monaghan seemed high on spice the entire movie and I didn’t even catch his character’s name. I would have bet money on Connix getting slightly more to do just for being the closest thing to Carrie that could be put in the movie, shame.

The First Order: Hux being the traitor is, as I said before, a neat twist that I actually really really like. “I just want to see Kylo Ren lose” is a perfect motivation for him after their antagonism in TLJ. Shame that Pryde just offs him unceremoniously. And speaking of Pryde…I actually really like the idea of him being old school imperial just making his way in the First Order. He’s cut from the same cloth as Canady back in TLJ.

Now that I’ve gone on for 4000 words or so…I just want to conclude by saying that overall this is quite possibly going to remain my least favorite Star Wars movie. I hate that. I mean, something is always going to have to be at the bottom, but until now, I at least liked more than I didn’t like about my least favorite. Now I’m not sure I can still say that. I still love this saga, I’ll still be there for what happens next, but after a year and a half of waiting since the last film, or two years since Episode VIII…I just feel let down.

Admiral Bosch posted:

i think someone said it in this thread best - they managed to make all three of these movies suck in completely different ways. pity, because there are parts that i really enjoy in all of them.

anyways sorry i'm late here you go

Admiral Bosch posted:

stev posted:

I'm surprised people haven't made more of that flashback scene with young Leia using her lightsabre. Now that was ghoulish as gently caress.

Isometric Bacon posted:

Like everything else in this movie the pace of it was so quick it just flew by without giving any time to take it in. With their blast shields down I swear the actual creepy CG bit was only two seconds long.

To me it felt like the other scenes that acted as a checklist apology / explanation for TLJ, particularly for all those people who had a weird problem accepting that Leia could 'fly' - as if the original trilogy didn't make it extremely clear that she was powerful in the force.

kidkissinger posted:

I don't think people had an issue with Leia using the force to pull herself through space. It's just it looked awkward and the scene served absolutely no purpose within the plot.

kidkissinger posted:

I don't think people had an issue with Leia using the force to pull herself through space. It's just it looked awkward and the scene served absolutely no purpose within the plot.

I said come in! posted:

Disney with all of its wealth and supposed talent, and they still couldn't come up with something this creative and funny using the Star Wars universe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xl0Qr0uXuY

Polo-Rican posted:

Yoda in TLJ looks so good. Best looking Yoda ever and that counts baby Yoda

General Dog posted:

Well, it’s been a persistent gripe of mine that even in the wake of the Starkiller incident, the combined military might of the rest of the galaxy should almost certainly dwarf the First Order’s fleet. The first 2.9 movies of the sequel trilogy conveniently ignore this fact, but the very end would seem to suggest that the forces to easily crush the First Order were always present, they just needed someone to show them they could believe in themselves!

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

This is the real thing that makes rlm tedious. They complain about tokenism and rainbow capitalism, but they never even use their platform to push good work by nonwhite filmmakers or movies that are smart about the black experience or women’s lives or anything, which is literally he easiest thing they could do. When they use their platform to give exposure to a smaller film, it’s always some white nerd thing like Under the Silver Lake. They only care about social issues when they can complain about nerd media doing them badly.

Isometric Bacon posted:

Things like revisiting the Mos Eisley cantina - but it's served by droids, which weren't allowed in there in A New Hope.

ungulateman posted:

what the gently caress