LogFAQs > #931834624

Here's why.

The Force Awakens, while shaky at points, was a really decent Star Wars movie. It played it safe, but erring towards the older movies was not a bad idea considering the reputation of the prequels. People argued whether a good new Star Wars movie could even exist thanks to the prequels, and I think the overwhelmingly positive reception TFA garnered upon its release was a good step towards salvaging the brand. I only started to see really extensive backlash when I started posting on CE in 2016, and while I personally disliked the inescapable Star Wars hype at the time - not everything in life has to be about your fucking space magic movie, you nerds - The Force Awakens stands as a solid enough effects movie, and an enjoyable action movie.

The Last Jedi isn't as bad as I remember it being - I saw it on release, and I indulged in it because I knew how hard it was gonna fuck up the fanboys. But even then, the movie was overly long, full of bad jokes and a ton of it ultimately went nowhere. The pacing of TLJ is ultimately its greatest weakness - it's the longest movie in the franchise, but it has the slowest pace of the lot. The framing of the movie is pretty flat and dull just about every time there's an interior scene, the only big action set piece before the finale is a big CGI animal chase sequence that reeks of Disney jerking off all over it, and arguably the best part of the movie - the ending where the rebels are fighting on Crait - feels like it's tacked on and only contributes more towards the movie's bloat. I've defended Canto Bight as recently as 2 days ago, but pretty much the entire plot of TLJ with Finn, Rose and Poe is filled to the brim with bloat.

This factors into my opinion of TRoS.

The biggest problem with TRoS is that it's trying to fit 2 movies worth of Star Wars into a movie that's shorter than The Last Jedi. I've seen people complain about The Rise of Skywalker's pace by calling it "video game pacing", and I don't disagree. The first half of the movie is so rushed that everybody's lines feel like they're cut off before they should have a chance to end. In order to bring this movie in at a reasonable time, they had to be as efficient as possible with the dialogue, and the first half of the movie suffers especially from that.

With that being said, it picks up well enough eventually, and eventually it becomes a decent enough popcorn muncher. I think TFA is ultimately the most cohesive and well-paced movie of the trilogy, but I was down with most of the TRoS hype stuff. This movie has a rocky beginning, but it's not a 55% type of movie. It's a better flick than TLJ, hands down. It does music, action and fanservice much better than TLJ, though I still think that TLJ did the "Jedi Master Skywalker" thing well enough.

Maybe this trilogy wasn't so flash, but I liked TFA pretty well and I actually enjoyed TRoS for the most part (when the movie slowed its pace, which took a while). TLJ is ultimately the rotten banana of the bunch. I would go as far as to say that if half of TRoS' plot was present in TLJ, this would have been an excellent trilogy and the pacing of the trilogy would have been fine.

But TLJ barely got anything done, and TRoS had to pick up the slack and jam 2 movies worth of content into one movie. The Force Awakens was a solid-ass introduction to this new trilogy's characters, and TLJ had a compelling plotline marred by an A-plot that amounted to nothing. TRoS had a decent enough Star Wars plot, with a bunch of action and hype that's some of the best stuff of this new trilogy. But the pacing is off, and I think the characters suffer a bit from this - and it undoubtedly falls short of The Force Awakens.

But The Rise of Skywalker was a solid movie. Not perfect - it needed two movies to flesh everything out - but it did an admirable job trying to right the ship after TLJ set everything off course.

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And I am done with my graceless heart, so tonight I'm gonna cut it out and then restart
Now Playing: Yakuza 5, Final Fantasy X-2, Minecraft