LogFAQs > #931932457

I didn't care much for Force Awakens. I thought Rey had zero personality, Poe didn't feel more than a side character on par with Chewy, and Finn was awesome but underutilized.

Last Jedi wasn't a masterpiece by any means, but I can respect that it dared to be different. And I liked some of the ideas it developed on.

Mainly I liked Luke's rejection of the old Jedi Order and how bureaucratic it became. I liked how he disillusioned Rey to the idealistic hero figure he became known as and his desire to be humble again. Even though the dialogue was awful, I liked when Kylo told Rey that her parents were nobodies and that she came from nothing. Granted I'd have liked to have seen that rather than be told it, but it was still a good moment. It showed Rey accepting her surrogate family with Finn and Poe, rather than needing a traditional family to validate her.

I liked the end scene with the kid using the force on the broom, showing that you don't need to be someone special. And I liked when Kylo Ren rejected his desire to be more like Vader and instead pursue his own goals.

But parts of both Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker backpedaled on a lot of this. They go back to the notion that you need to be born with the gift of the force. In fact, Abrams said in an interview that during the quicksand scene Finn was going to tell Rey that he can sense the force, but left it unsaid because it would discredit the "bloodline" thing.

During the film Rey constantly rejected being with Poe and Finn and kept going out on her own. And the times they were together were filled with awkward feelings and arguments between them. Never once did she realize she needed them or their help to succeed. They felt like an "A cast" and "B cast" who had separate adventures that didn't come together until the hug at the end.

And they backpedaled on Kylo Ren being different from Vader. At the very start of the film he reforges his mask and he goes on to be redeemed just as Vader did.

The one line I absolutely love from Rise of Skywalker is when Ghost Luke says to Rey that "It's the Jedi's destiny to confront fear." This shows maturation on Luke's view from Last Jedi and it still holds onto the ideal that anyone can be a Jedi. A Jedi doesn't need to be born with "Over 20,000 midichlorians", they just need to believe in the force and fight fear. By this definition, Finn was just as much of a Jedi as Rey was.

Finn was such a wasted character. He had an awesome actor and a lot of potential. Last Jedi delegated him to a shitty B Plot and Rise of Skywalker had him and Poe interact minimally with Rey. Hell, BB8 was Poe's Droid from the start and yet is the only other character standing with Rey at the end.

I'm not saying Rey's a bad character btw. She improved a lot since Force Awakens. But they didn't utilize the group's chemistry at all, and their attempt at mimicking Han, Luke, and Leia fell flat.

Anyway I'm kinda going all over the place with these opinions, but that's because the whole Sequel Trilogy was all over the place. Ultimately it suffered from two directors playing tug of war with themes and storytelling and failed to add anything really thought provoking or new to the saga. Anything that it tried to say was either lukewarm in presentation or backpedaled on by one of the directors in a later film.

---

Rainbow Dashing: "it's just star wars"
AutumnEspirit: *kissu*