Current Events > Seeing Rise in my skypants or whatever in 90 minutes.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Force Awakens: Loved
Rogue One: Trash
Last Jedi: Trash
Solo: A Star Wars Story: A Han Solo Movie - The Solo Story: Didn't watch
The Mandylion: Didn't watch

Rise of Skywalker expections: Fairly low. Haven't paid attention to supposed leaks or watched any trailers beyond the first one (or whichever one that ends with Palpatine chucklefacing). My general fear based solely on the existence of the emperor in the story is that they will try to course correct from Last Jedi backlash by just being as generic and fan-servicy as possible. Like, literally when they releaved the emperor my excitement meter fell through the floor. Still I'm hoping it will be good and even if it isn't, oh well it will have some space pew pew to keep me entertained. Will post some thoughts a bit after seeing it. Will keep everything plot related in spoiler blocks, but really I'd imagine literally everything aboot it will be considered spoilerific.
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Where are you watching it two days early? Or did it get an early overseas release?

MachineJaipur posted...

Where are you watching it two days early? Or did it get an early overseas release?

Bazinga!
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sitting in the theater waiting for previews. They better have some Frozen 2 shit for me.

DeadBankerDream posted...

Rogue One: Trash

I'm sorry what

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I always thought RO was boring, forgettable, and smacked you across the face super hard with all the callbacks and references.

ATSTs! ATSTs!

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I was planning to go after work tomorrow. But now I think I will just wait until next week and go with some friends. Might just watch it dubbed because that might make it more interesting somehow.

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ssjevot posted...

I was planning to go after work tomorrow. But now I think I will just wait until next week and go with some friends. Might just watch it dubbed because that might make it more interesting somehow.

What language? I ended up seeing Han Solo in Portuguese and it was alright I guess.

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Japanese, I saw Solo in Japanese. I try to see stuff subbed when I can, but it can be hard to make it work sometimes for timing. Where I live we only have one theater. So unless I am traveling to a bigger city (which I do for work at least once a month) it is hard to schedule around seeing things subbed.

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What a fucking baffling experience. Im a bit at a loss for words.

Alright having composed myself, considered the supposedly written by a human thing that I saw and discussed it with my friend I saw itit with, I have some thoughts to share.

First of all, if anything defines this film it is its existence as a reactionary product to the Last Jedi. Holy fucking shit. Disney was clearly more affected by the negative response to episode 8 than I would have ever imagined. There are numerous backpedals to controversial things that happened in that film. Most notably Rey's parents being nobodies. Also the Rose character that everyone disliked in the last film? She has like 7 minutes of screen time and she does nothing. I didn't like her character either, but this really feels like a dick move by Disney towards that actress.

In general the movie is entirely antithetical to the Last Jedi. Whereas that movie largely revolved around the completely revolutionary concept of "the past is in the paaaaaaast! Let it go! Let it go!", Rise of Skywalker says fuck that noise and is full to the brim with cameos and references, plus a general story, that is all about bringing the past to the forefront. But it is an incredibly shallow take and largely serves no narrative purpose other than "hey remember this? We heard you don't like new things so here's something that was popular 35 years ago!". Of particular note is Lando (text), who appears in the trailers to draw in people who liked them, but in the film has like... less than 4 minutes of screen time. There's no proper introduction to the story for the character. Just a pop up to remind you that they exist in this franchise and then they return for the climax.

In an absolutely pathetic moment of this kind of pandering there is a scene where Maz Kanata, another character who has no reason to be in the film, gives Chewie a medal. Why? Because remember the internet meme that Chewie didn't get a medal in A New Hope? Well he has a medal now. There's no logic to why this happens. There's no medal ceremony, there's no situation where just randomly giving out medals to one person would be logical or sensible. It's in the film solely because, hey, that was sad when Chewie didn't get a medal, right?

It's clear to me that this sudden "need" to rewrite the film to include these story beats of pandering and distancing itself from Episode 8 catastrophically hurt the movie's ability to tell its own story at its own pace. The film is two and a half hours long and it was still too short to tell the story in it. The pacing is appalling. It has the direct opposite issue of Last Jedi. That movie drew out a story of urgency to allow for characters to go frollick in a casino and meander on the issues of capitalism. Rise of Skywalker literally has not a second to spare for any scene cause it has so much shit to go through. Characters rapid fire their dialogue, you barely have a clue whats going on, then the scene switches (sometimes across the galaxy) to other characters who rapid fire dialogue giving you barely a chance to have a clue whats going on for the second time before the scene changes again. This becomes less of an issue as the movie goes on, but for a good 1/3 to 2/5 of it, it's like a chaotic day at McDonalds.

One thing I really disliked about Force Awakens was this focus on finding a map to Luke Skywalker. It seemed so arbitrary and constructed. Rather "gamey", if you would. Well, Rise of Skywalker turns that up to eleven and the first large chunk of the film is a series of macguffin chases that are all video game-y nonsense with one leading into the next. Gotta find a magic sith triangle, gotta find the guy who took the triangle, gotta find his speeder, gotta find the knife he wrote some shit on, gotta find some guy to crack open a droid. Its absurdly tedious and offers nothing in terms of characterization and plot advancement we couldnt have gotten otherwise. Finn and Poe bitch at each other like an old married couple, I've no clue why. Disney are clearly supporting the ship without going as far as to do anything that could endanger China money (film even has the by now classic Hollywood trope of the gay kiss between unknown characters in a cutaway scene so it can easily be picked out and thrown in the trash by Chinese censors)

These pacing issues make their first appearance in the fucking opening title crawl of the film, where we are told that the movie is not gonna reveal that Palpatine is back. That has already happened. All the people in the galaxy knows that the emperor is returned and the fucking film starts with, somehow him raising an army of super star destroyers from the depth of a sea and give them to Kylo Ren to control. Each of these ships have a canon that can destroy a planet. Yes, you don't need a planet-sized Death Star or Starkiller Base to destroy planets anymore, any large star destroyer can do it and there's like a hundred of them. Thats literally thrown at us in the first 2 minutes of the film. Jesus.

I don't know what they should have done to handle the Carrie Fisher thing, but I can't currently think of a worse way to do it than they did. Near every single scene, if not every single, she is in is clearly a composite of her from some old footage with whichever actor she is having a "conversation" with superimposed together over some probably CGI background. Her dialogue is largely composed of one liners like "No...." or "Don't leave" and has next to nothing to do with what is happening in the scene or the general plot of the film at the time. It's clear that they're using whatever scrap they can find of her audio and trying their best to superimpose it onto the film's plot. Lots of obvious back of the head double shots and focuses on hands break the already desperate illusion even more so. Again, I don't have an answer for this problem, but the way they did it, watching the movie 20 years from now its impossible to not go "oh right, Carrie Fisher died" during these scenes, or if you are someone who was born yesterday watching it 20 years from now you will go "what the fuck was that?"

Plot stuff with Palpatine is nonsensical drivel they made up on the spot. I have no other words. I really like they visual effects related to him, though. Those are great. I also really like Finn in the film. He doesn't have much development, but the way Boyega acts his character is great. In contrast to Last Jedi.

I'm not the biggest Star Wars guy so I dunno if this is actually a change to the canon of the force, but I think it is. In the movie suddenly the force can materialize objects to different locations. No I don't mean that you can use the force to "push" things, but that you can take an object in your possession and materialize it to another location in the galaxy,

I don't want to go into details regarding the ending, but I will spoil its basic premise to make a point here. The film ends exactly the same way as Return of the Jedi. The Sith and the empire is destroyed, everyone is celebrating victory and dawn of a new era. It's literally the same exact ending. Which effectively means the sequel trilogy has accomplished nothing. If the first order could rise in the ashes of the defeated empire in episode 7, there is no logical reason that a second order cant just arise from the ashes of the defeated first order the same way. The timeline has effectively become cyclical and thus without relevance. Whether this is to keep the door open for more movies or just utterly incompetent writing I have no clue.

I'm not sure if I like it less than TLJ. The Last Jedi seemed at least to have some reason in its madness even if it was as shallow as subverting expectations and if I vehemently disagreed with those reasons. Rian Johnson definitely directed The Last Jedi. I'm not sure that in my kingdom heart of hearts I can say this movie was directed by JJ Abrams rather than a room full of panicking Disney executives.

Also the lightsaber battle between Rey and Kylo is the most boring one in the franchise.
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i got my tickets reserved for Rise of the Skyscrapers next week. i imagine it cant be that bad... lol

How was the group dynamic between Rey/Finn/Poe, were they believable as the new "trio"?

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wow that sounds.... ugh

this was a good post, thanks for sharing

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Guy_Fieri posted...

How was the group dynamic between Rey/Finn/Poe, were they believable as the new "trio"?

The dynamic is kind of weird because it starts off as a sort of love triangle between the three with Finn and Poe expressing clear jealousy towards each other over Rey, but then (minor spoilers) Poe and Finn get their own second love interest in the form of entirely new characters so it becomes like a love pentagon. Or I suppose a love hexagon if you count the tension between Rey and Kylo.

I like all three characters in the movie individually. Finn plays off of Rey greatly, but the other two don't really pull their weight as a trio, I feel. Everyone also kind of branch off and do their own things at points.
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Bump
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Goddamn, what a clusterfuck.

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I so desperately want to avoid spoilers but the low ratings is really making me want to open those spoiler tags to figure out why it's so bad.

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I wonder if the usual suspects will defend this movie.