Question SPOILER DISCUSSION Star Wars ep IX: The Rise of Skywalker

I don’t know much about Sith lore outside of the movies and EE’s stories. While I liked Rise of Skywalker, it could have been two movies or even 30 minutes longer to spend more time on Sith history. Otherwise, the location didn’t matter and the stakes were not nearly as high (for me). I appreciate the need for JJ to put it to bed.

After seeing the film, I thought of LOTR Return of the King, which deservedly won Best Picture. Rise of Skywalker had potential to get a best picture nomination but not without some major tweaks.

While there were good scenes, the plot sucked.
I lost count of the number of times deus ex machine saved the rebellion; once is OK in this type of movie, but it was horribly overused.
The personal affairs seemed to have been written by different authors at different times, and the end scenes just didn't resolve them or indeed make any sense.

Rey should have stayed dead after killing the big bad it would have made a much stronger ending that 'oh, she just got better'

Nice CGI, but CGI alone doesn't make a good movie.

Based on what I've seen in reviews. The Rise of Palpatine is going stright to my do not watch list.
For one thing I hear they completely broke the established ideas of what the force can and can't do. Now it just does whatever the plot demands becanse magic.

I saw it today, and I enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. It was also stupid as fuck. They actually managed to out-stupid Ep VIII. It was impressive!

Kettlekorn wrote: I saw it today, and I enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. It was also stupid as fuck. They actually managed to out-stupid Ep VIII. It was impressive!

Okay, you set a level of stupid. But the important question, does it take this year's "Spock's Brain" award for suckiest science fiction to grace the small or big screen?

My take is that it was enjoyable, but I wouldn't call it good. While Abrams helmed the start and end of the trilogy, I'm in the camp that The Last Jedi was the more interesting film and was done the best. Abrams was stuck with both establishing and closing the trilogy, yet there's some sort of contention between the two directors, as in many ways Rise of Skywalker undoes a lot of the progress made by Johnson in terms of plot, characters and themes.

With the trilogy over with, it all reeks of being very poorly planned and managed - there are some quotes from Johnson regarding The Last Jedi that shows he had to make some assumptions about things - that he apparently didn't have access to information as a director speaks volumes about how it was all handled.

My main complaint is that it wasn't a very effective as a film.

The first half of the movie is so horribly rushed and just a non-stop exposition dump. We don't get to see how the characters are impacted or how they react to this or that, because we don't have time for that, they have to tell us. Or tell someone else on screen.

If they had spent any time at all to slow down, maybe let the events breathe a little, I might have actually gotten engaged with the characters and the plot. I can't really remember many shots in the first half where the characters interact in any way other than exposition dump to one another.

I enjoyed the second half which is paced much better than the first half...even if it didn't really make that much sense either and was often just spectacle or what I can only assume is blatant fan-service and non-stop references.

Katssun wrote: My main complaint is that it wasn't a very effective as a film.

The first half of the movie is so horribly rushed and just a non-stop exposition dump. We don't get to see how the characters are impacted or how they react to this or that, because we don't have time for that, they have to tell us. Or tell someone else on screen.

If they had spent any time at all to slow down, maybe let the events breathe a little, I might have actually gotten engaged with the characters and the plot. I can't really remember many shots in the first half where the characters interact in any way other than exposition dump to one another.

I enjoyed the second half which is paced much better than the first half...even if it didn't really make that much sense either and was often just spectacle or what I can only assume is blatant fan-service and non-stop references.

Oh yeah, it was so thoroughly rushed. Again it astounds me how this trilogy was mismanaged to the point of being so thoroughly disjointed.

JG wrote: I just really wish they hadn't tried to go over the top with the Death Star Variants. Just because the empire in the original series blew up a planet doesn't mean that has to be the baseline for all future star wars crisis events.

I really didn't like how Starkiller base in The Force Awakens was just awkwardly invoking older imagery of the planet-killing Death Star and its canyon run, but I do love some of the info about it that's never stated in the films:

One thing to bear in mind with at least 9, is that they had the unexpected and horrible passing of Carrie Fisher, and were very limited in terms of dialogue and footage that they had of her to work with. That being said, the degree of care they handled it was very well done IMO. They also managed to make a plot out of all of that that worked, so.. props to them on that. Is it the ideal plot that could have happened if you could have filmed everything from scratch? No.. but... well it did work.

Rise of Skywalker passed the 'blockbuster test'. It was spectacular, mostly entertaining and it made pretty much no sense as a story. If there had been more explosions it could have been Michael Bay movie.

It was not as bad as the internet rage makes it out to be, but then nowadays the internet is in a constant state of (out)rage so I tend to tune most of that out.

I'll skip the whole tedious 'hundred plotholes' debate and the 'this movie ruined my childhood' one and go straight to a more meta analysis, in as much as I am capable of that

Plotwise this was pretty much a stand alone movie. It had familiar characters but in effect Abrams rebooted his own reboot by ignoring The Last Jedi completely and starting up a new, unrelated, plot as if The Force Awakens had not happened.

Script wise we got a remake of The Return of the Jedi, which was the weakest of the original trilogy for much the same reason why Rise of Skywalker fell flat. In both movies the Emperor comes pretty much out of nowhere, does not do much execpt taunting the hero and let others do the fighting for them and the thing ends with a big 'redemption equals death' scene. And leading up to that big fight was a McGuffin chase in both cases. Granted, Rise of Skywalker was more explicit about it, but both movies the whole setup was disconnected from the final act where the hero confronted the big bad, who in neither movie ascended to a level of threat or menace to warrant that monicker.
In Return of the Jedi that was acceptable because there Vader was the big threat and he was plenty menacing to dominate any scene he was in. A madly cackling emperor only left one with the question how this poorly written b-movie mad man could control Vader.
The emperor in Rise of Skywalker sadly did not have a genuine menace to play off of, and there never was any character built up to allow him to carry a scene, never mind the narrative of the movie.

The overly stuffed, disjointed, narrative shouts of extensive executive meddling the to script and left us with far too many scenes that were visually impressive(*) but story wise just happened because it was in the script.
A lot of these scenes are discussed as 'plot holes' by people who by and large do not seem to really understand what a plot hole is and what isn't but that is somewhat beside the point. At the end of the day Rise of Skywalker is mostly a string of revelations driving the plot forward, where there director (or the editors, or the studio) forgot to include the setup to the revelation.

The most damning problem with the movie as I see it is that after the internet meltdown over The Last Jedi, Disney got nervous and decided to cather to the wishes of the loudest (and often most toxic) of the self proclaimed 'true fans'. Episode 8 was decried as 'too radical' and 'not a real star wars movie' and it seems the studio took that to heart. So we got a nostalgia trip for episode 9. All the (surviving) famous characters and story beats from the original trilogy were crammed in regardless of if they had any reason to be in the story or not.
So we got an emperor because these fans decided that a 'true' star wars movie had to have him.
And we got the pointless force lighting battle, the empty (the second time around) redemption arc, Kylo had to wear a helmet again (because Vader), we got the Death Star (v4.0) expy, Lando showed up for no apparent reason, Rey had to be 'special' after all, and so on and so on. It was all very familiar, it made no sense at all as anything but mindless blockbuster entertainment and most damning was that underneath the spectacle it was all predictable and boring.
The internet fandom has been howling for a return to the familiar after Johnson's attempt to give the franchise a new direction, and by all accounts these same fans found the (predicably bland and boring) result very hard to swallow indeed.

I did not go into the theater with high expectations (or any, really) and I have no vested interest in the franchise (unlike my husband, who is still steaming about the movie almost a month late ) so I was not disappointed. I was not pleasantly surprised either. I just enjoyed an action spectacle with a paper thin plot that could not survive even the most superficial scrutiny.
If you go to the movie for action and spectacle, it delivers that in spades. But if you are hoping for a conclusion of a trilogy of trilogies then, no, it fails utterly at that.
Perhaps with another three hours of movie to properly set up the story and the individual plot points, it could have succeeded, but even that I have my doubts. The basic premise of the movie (a rethread of Star War's greatest hits) in my opinion excludes a great story. The best Abrams could have achieved with more time was a more grounded story. Not one that was inherently more interesting, just more complete.

After The Last Jedi the franchise could, and should, have gone into any direction. Except fo the return to the familiar well trodden ground we got. The series very much did not need that. And I guess that Abrams was not the best director to drag the franchise out of the 1980s and into the 21st century. He is a great director, but he is not exactly known for his ability to wrap up a story in a satisfying way. If anything he is famous for (re)starting franchises and setting up fascinating mysteries. His record for explaining these mysteries is spotty, to put it politely.

I am not going to speculate what I think would have been a better episode 9, nor even how to 'fix' the perceived failures of the story that we got. Excessive fan theories and rabid clinging to them even, or especially, in the light of them being proven wrong, is one of the biggest problems Star Wars has with its fan base.




(* I thought that The Last Jedi had impressive cinematography, but in many scenes Rise of Skywalker left that movie in the dust, raising an already impressively high bar to dizzying heights)
p.s. And I am a little miffed at the treatment of the women from The Last Jedi by Abrams. One was vanished from the story, one was retconned into a fluke and a bit of a joke, and one was reduced from the hero into the McGuffin for the protagonist and antagonist to fight over.

I just saw it, I personally liked it, I am not going to complain about it being fan servicy because it was always going to be such, a little rushed, yes, but it was undeniably Star Wars, the cheese that was there was Star Wars cheese, the kind that has been part of the franchise's lifeblood since A New Hope,