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The Rise of Skywalker Shows It's Time for J.J. Abrams To Be Impeached From Star Wars
The final film in the Disney-era trilogy is a pointless, abysmal letdown that won't fully satisfy anyone.
(Disney/Lucasfilm)
For the last four years, we have been living a collective nightmare. Our shared values have been undermined. Our cherished culture has come under attack. At its least harmful, this nightmare has taken the form of empty nostalgia, in which the leaders who have been entrusted with ushering us into the next era have instead looked into the past, distracting us with symbolic gestures that serve no purpose except to cover up a lack of vision. At its worst, a combination of incompetence, erraticness, and sometimes sheer malice has squandered decades of progress. The ensuing conversation has been fruitless and ugly, and the experience has left many of us polarized, angry, and exhausted.
This week, it finally started to look as if that nightmare might end—but only in the weakest and most slapdash manner. This resolution, which is not really a resolution, is not only a disaster: It's a disappointment, a pointless, abysmal letdown that is virtually certain to fully satisfy almost no one. The result is a rushed and poorly executed product of bad management, empty thinking, and shallow wish-fulfillment that will only further the public's loss of faith in the entire enterprise.
I speak, of course, of the Star Wars franchise, which in late 2015 returned to movie theaters under the managerial oversight of Lucasfilm's Kathleen Kennedy, with a strong creative influence from Hollywood's reigning prince of blockbuster mediocrity, J.J. Abrams.
Although other writers and directors have worked on the films, to varying effect, these two have been the chief visionaries. Kennedy managed the brand, and Abrams co-wrote and directed the first and third chapters in a new trilogy meant to expand on the sci-fi soap opera that franchise creator George Lucas started back in 1977.
And now, with The Rise of Skywalker, the third chapter in the trilogy that Kennedy and Abrams began four years ago, the full impact of their creative leadership has become clear.
Skywalker is a frantic, disjointed mess—not a movie with good ideas poorly executed, not even a movie with bad ideas, but a movie with no ideas at all, save for saccharine paeans to fandom and nostalgia. As a story, it is empty and unengaging to the point of boredom. As a cinematic product, it is surprisingly lackluster, with shoddy effects and muddy visuals. And as an entry in the Star Wars franchise, an ostensibly major part of the pop-culture canon, it is a wasted opportunity: a total failure of both creative imagination and corporate brand management.
After Lucasfilm sold Star Wars to Disney, Kennedy cycled through writers and directors, firing several who were deep into the development process—and, in the case of last year's Solo, weeks into filming. Something similar happened with Skywalker, where writer-director Colin Trevorrow was taken off the project and Abrams brought back to close out the trilogy he started with 2015's The Force Awakens.
All that hiring and firing reflects an understandable anxiety over controlling one of Hollywood's biggest properties. But the frequency with which Kennedy's creative collaborations collapsed, and the timid, half-baked films that resulted, suggest something worse: a directionlessness and uncertainty about what the brand's value proposition was. Why do people love Star Wars? Why does it endure? Kennedy just didn't know what Star Wars was supposed to be.
Abrams, who had previously rebooted the Star Trek franchise and directed Super 8, a relentlessly nostalgic tribute to Steven Spielberg, stepped in with an answer. What people loved about Star Wars was…loving Star Wars. So he made a movie about a trio of young heroes who revered and worshiped the series' old heroes, who over the course of the trilogy were cast as mentors for the younger generation.
That trend continues in Skywalker, which positions resistance leader General Leia Organa as the trainer to Rey, the trilogy's protagonist, who once again must swashbuckle her way through an onslaught of CGI gobbledygook in her quest to…ah, who cares? Certainly not any of the characters, who duly intone about the importance of the mission but seem about as engaged as if they are standing in line at the dry cleaner. Hotshot pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and Finn (John Boyega) have been relegated to the sidelines in previous films; here they are onscreen more often, yet no less irrelevant. Only Adam Driver, as the Darth Vader–esque Kylo Ren, seems to hold the screen. (And even Driver is undermined by Abrams' hectic pacing, which never seems to trust viewers to linger on a thought for more than a moment.)
Even the relationship between Rey and Leia plays out awkwardly. In part that's because it relies on digital trickery and repurposed footage to resurrect Carrie Fisher, who died in 2016. And in part that's because there's so little dramatic inertia, since the movie all but wipes out The Last Jedi, the polarizing middle chapter of the trilogy.
Instead of following through on that flawed, frustrating film's universe-expanding narrative, Abrams has brought the trilogy back to his original idea: What people love about Star Wars is being reminded that they love Star Wars. So Skywalker is structured as a series of callbacks, a slideshow of favorite moments and characters, no matter whether they (or the actors who play them) are dead, and no matter whether they belong in this particular story, whatever it is. Skywalker is not so much a movie as a $200 million fan-made YouTube highlight reel. It might as well have been titled Why We'll Always Heart Star Wars.
In that way, it bears more than a small resemblance to today's political moment, with its endlessly outraged partisans and pointless displays of symbolism and substantive void. It is probably not an accident that the discourse over The Last Jedi descended into an ugly, intractably polarized debate over the movie's nods to wokeness and diversity. Much of that debate was a stand-in for arguments about President Donald Trump—arguments that managed to distract both fans and critics alike from more sober and interesting assessments of the movie's real stylistic strengths and serious narrative flaws. The parallels to our poisoned political discourse are plain to see.
Star Wars has always refracted and reflected the politics and culture of its day. In the 1970s, when Lucas kicked things off, that meant gay robots, peasant shirts, a soulless evil empire, and new-agey spiritual self-helpisms. It didn't offer wholly new ideas, but it did offer a new synthesis, one that blended a pop-mythical storytelling sensibility with film-school formalism and more than a little bit of tie-die weirdness. Lucas spun this into an empire of toys and lunchboxes and spinoff stories. Star Wars was a great movie, but it was also a triumph of creative cultural management.
Kennedy has no such managerial deftness, and Abrams lacks Lucas' trippy brilliance. Under their watch, Star Wars has retreated entirely into itself, content to recycle and repeat its old mantras in increasingly crude fashion in increasingly desperate hopes of making Star Wars great again. If Skywalker reveals anything about the world around it, it's that we are living through an era of mismanagement and lack of vision, of dead-end rehashing, on-screen and off. (Even I have made a version of this argument before.) It's time for those who brought us to this historically low point to finally face some consequences.
NEXT: Mitch McConnell: This Is the 'Most Rushed, Least Thorough, and Most Unfair Impeachment Inquiry in Modern History'
Star Wars Movies Science Fiction Impeachment
December.19.2019 at 12:57 pm
I think one of the fundamental problems with the entire trilogy is the decision to make the protagonist a woman. Now it would have been one thing if they had made the protagonist into an actual female character. That might have been interesting and fun. But they didn't do that. They just wrote a completely asexual character and hired a generally asexual and unattractive actress to play it.
There is nothing female about the Rey character. You could hire an adolescent boy to play the part without changing a single line and no one would notice. Deprived of any sexuality the character just falls flat. It is about as interesting as making C3PO the protagonist.
It is more than a bit ironic that Cathleen Kennedy set out to make the movies about "girl power" but ended up making movies that are totally devoid of any real female power or sexuality. Rey is as a character closer to Peter Pan than she is an actual adult woman like the original Leia or any other powerful female roles over the years. Kennedy writes femininity and feminine power out of the Star Wars universe in the name of destroying masculinity and making it supreme. What she and every other Hollywood feminists don't understand is that masculinity and femininity are a ying and yang; one cannot exist without the other. Destroy the masculine and the famine is destroyed as well and you end up with the dull asexual universe of these films.
BearOdinson
December.19.2019 at 1:09 pm
Well said. I think one of the other fundamental problems is that there is literally no reason to care about this story. We saw the rebellion defeat the Emperor and win the Galactic Civil War. Then they (ostensibly) created The New Republic. And then 20 years later, essentially the exact same force destroys the ENTIRE New Republic with one shot from Starkiller base. Where the fuck did the First Order come up with the resources and people to create an entire space navy that rivals, or possibly is larger than the Imperial Navy at its height. And create something with literally thousands of times the power of the Death Star (oh and the shots can travel through hyperspace). And seriously, after the Galactic Civil War, are there that many systems who would welcome a return to the Empire?
I didn't give a fuck about the woke bullshit in The Last Jedi. Just that the movie had some VERY bad plot points (the side trip to the casino planet???WTF??) '
I mean literally any middle school geek could have come up with a better storyline for the new trilogy than these tools did.
Lucas did a pretty crappy job on EPI-III, but they were still "Star Wars". And it did wrap up the threads decently about what happened prior to EpIV.
But this crap isn't anything. These movies don't even rise to the level of doing a shitty job. It is not that they are incompetent. It's like they just don't care.
The super weapon in the Force Awakens has to be the most ridiculous plot device in the history of film. Ed Wood came up with more believable things than that. They are sucking the energy out of a sun? WTF?
And yeah, there is really no reason to care about any of this stuff. That is because none of the characters have any real background or substance. Rey is an orphan who runs around stealing junk and selling it. She is a size 0 teenage girl but somehow doesn't have a boyfriend or in anyway use her sexuality to get out of the life of destitution she is in. The villain hates his parents for reasons no one can seem to explain and does so with about the same level of believably of a 13 year old boy angry that his parents don't own the electric company and that he has to go to bed for school in the morning.
The one thing the original trilogy had was charismatic characters. You want to be Luke Sykwalker or Han Solo. They are cool and interesting. Same with Leia or Obiwan. Hell, even Yodi is kind of a funky version of ET. But the last six movies have not produced a single character that you can look at and say "yeah, it would be fun to be that guy". And that makes for really boring movie making.
JoeJoetheIdiotCircusBoy
While I agree with the comments on the Force Awakens super weapon, the original Death Star weapon was pretty ridiculous too. Please tell me how 5 different laser beams become magically concentrated into one super laser beam without some kind of lens or additional device hovering in space.
But, without a doubt, the dumbest thing is the "bomber" scene in the last jedi. Please tell me how you "drop" ordinance in space? How exactly does that work?
The Death Star was ridiculous but it at least made sense as a dramatic stand in. It was at least a weapon that destroyed planets. I still have no idea what the weapon in the Force Awakens was supposed to even do. So you suck all of the energy out of star. Okay, now what? It is all on this planet which isn't going anywhere. What are you going to do with it?
JWatts
That was bad, but the "all the sudden you can kamikaze ships into each other" breaks the entire logic of the universe. Why haven't both sides been doing that the entire time? Why wouldn't you sacrifice every freighter you can get hold of, put on cheap shield generators and destroy Star Destroyers? The kamikaze ship didn't even have a crew, just the one sacrificial person. And why was she there? They could build AI robots, but not an auto pilot?
None of that made any damn sense.
Last of the Shitlords
Indeed. And it made no sense that most of the world depicted were largely ghettos. With the advanced tech to generate energy as easily as they do in these movies, the standard of living should be much higher. And with droids available, why would anyone with two credits to rub together bother with slaves? Other than for sex.
EISTAU Gree-Vance
Haven't seen any of these newer movies. Was watching return of the Jedi from the original trilogy in 83 the other day on tv. Wow. I didn't realize it was all so cheesy. I don't get the appeal.
December.20.2019 at 12:41 am
Its nerdy and all, but i love it when Vader throws the lightsaber, "If you will not fight, you will meet your destiny" great line.
Red Rocks White Privilege
The movies were always used to pimp toys, but RotJ is really when Lucas fully embraced the "merchandising! merchandising! merchandising! " ethos that Mel Brooks goofed on in Spaceballs.
"didn't give a fuck about the woke bullshit in The Last Jedi. Just that the movie had some VERY bad plot points"
I liked the part where they came up with the brilliant plan to escape and lost 90% of their entire force.
I'd guess this is handwaved aside in the new one
"I think one of the fundamental problems with the entire trilogy is the decision to make the protagonist a woman."
There's a film on Amazon Prime called The Aeronauts.
It's a true story about two people that set an altitude record to record the conditions of the upper atmosphere way back in Victorian times. They did it without pressure suits or respirators with oxygen. They risked their lives and almost died. It's supposed to be a pretty good movie.
I said it's a true story, but, actually, they changed the sex of one of the two members of the team so that it was a woman.
If they could get away with it, the next remake of The Lord of the Rings will feature both Aragorn and Frodo as women.
They would. And the character wouldn't be a woman. It would just be the same male character played by a woman. They are not putting women in films. They are just hiring women to play men. And in the process erasing real women from the movies.
Unicorn Abattoir
Would this be a bad time to mention Martin Scorsese's "Godmother" franchise?
Luke wasn't getting any and no one cared. Rey doesn't get any and suddenly it's "OMG! Asexuals taking over the kulture!!!"
Luke was clearly a guy and certainly wanted some. He wasn't Peter Pan. And that is what Rey is.
Rey certainly wants some too. She has the hots for Finn, as anyone with two eyeballs can see.
The Rey-Finn romance plot line was straight out of Disney Jr after school programming.
Yeah, but wasn't that his sister?
Don't look at me!
Incest is best,
give your sister the test.
>>they changed the sex of one of the two members of the team so that it was a woman.
Battlestar Galactica pulled it off.
BillyBob
I'd like to add on to this. I believe Katee's Starbuck in the BSG reboot was an extremely well written female character. She had conflict and sexual tension between several characters, she was really good as a soldier and a pilot, but not perfect. Her character was flawed and she dealt with her flaws and consequences of them throughout the entire series. The writers of BSG wrote the part for Katee, and they used the "issue" of Starbuck being female to its advantage. But they didn't use her gender to completely define who she was. While her gender had a large effect on how she acted, it didn't overpower her ability to be a genuinely interesting character. She was human, which is why I believe she was so interesting. Rey in Star Wars doesn't even seem to be written as a human, almost a demigod that appears to struggle on the surface, but just brushes aside her issues like they're nothing by the end and moves on without any other consequences. Rey was terribly written.
Also, she has a man-jaw, so likely high T count. She was as masculine as the other men in many of the situations.
So high testosterone AND high midichlorion count?
all this agreed.
Necron 99
They wouldn't do that, look at how true to the story 'The Hobbit' was followed. Why I remember as a kid reading about Tauriel being in love with Legolas and Kili in the original J.R.R. Tolkien masterpiece.
"Why does it hurt so much?"
"Because it was real."
Please tell me you're being sarcastic. As a Tolkien fan, the hobbit movies were disappointing to me. T auriel was never a real character, and Legolas wasn't in the book the hobbit.
Of course. I loved the LOTR movies, they weren't exactly true to the story but deviations helped pacing and character development while adding to the story in a caring manner. The Hobbit had crap made up from nothing for no reason other than make if feel like the LOTR movies (dollar bills, y'all) while taking a dump on the source material. I went to the theater to see the first, saw the second on DVD, and caught the last one on television. Ugh, it was so bad. I recently purchased a hardback copy for reading to my grandkids, and will strongly recommend the animated movie over the new ones.
'Where there's a whip, there's a way'.
Wait a second..Legolas was male?
"There is nothing female about the Rey character. You could hire an adolescent boy to play the part without changing a single line and no one would notice. "
I think what you said is largely true, but that's still not the biggest flaw with Rey's character. The big flaw is that without any kind of reasonable explanation she's better than experts at things she's never done. She's a classic Mary Sue. If you replaced the character with a male character he would just as bad for exactly the same reasons.
Krayt
I disagree. This never felt odd to me — I don't know where it comes from. If I thought about it, it was just a mystery yet to be explained.
Anyway, these are stories of mythological heroes, like Dune or Harry Potter, who fulfill multiple prophecies, patterned on real world mythos where different prophecies of different things get merged into applying to the same person over millenia of retellings. Not six stories with six heroes, but one hero with all six prophecies.
There were things wrong with the first one, but this isn't it. In the light saber battle, when he force pulls the saber and it flies right by his face into Rey's hand, that was one of the greatest moments in any movie I can remember.
If one got hung up on BUT TRAINING! you missed a grand experience.
Let go of your hate.
Anyway, these are stories of mythological heroes, like Dune or Harry Potter, who fulfill multiple prophecies, patterned on real world mythos where different prophecies of different things get merged into applying to the same person over millenia of retellings.
Sure, but even in the OT, Lucas was smart enough to show the main characters grow through genuine struggle and loss. The OT started off as a Campbellian Call to Adventure story that morphed into a redemption arc for the antagonist after the first movie became a mass media sensation. Luke starts off as a whiny, smart-mouthed brat who, over the course of three movies, loses his mentor, embraces his connection to the force (and he needed the help of Biggs, Wedge, and Han to finally get the shot off that blew up the Death Star), gets his ass kicked twice in Empire by a Wampa monster and Darth Vader, losing his hand in the process (just a couple instances in Empire where the Rebellion and the leads get a mudhole stomped in them), before finally humbling himself enough to get the training he needs to confront both the Emperor and his father, enabling Vader to redeem himself through his love for his son. This also takes place over a period of several YEARS, arguably in real time between the events of Star Wars and Return of the Jedi.
That's the whole point. Rey NEVER struggles. There's no growth with her, and the attempts to shoehorn it in are done in the most ham-fisted ways (and not helped at all by Abrams' insipid fetish for mystery boxes). She pilots the Falcon single-handedly, and demonstrates a Jedi master's grasp of the force from the get-go. Her "training" in RotS is pointless, because in the span of a week or two, which is the actual timeline of the first two movies, she's already shown to be a master swordsman with a lightsaber (a weapon she's NEVER picked up before, and no, wielding a staff is not the same as a sword), can perform advanced-level mind tricks, shoots multiple TIE fighters out of the sky with a single blast, and move dozens of boulders with ease. Leia has literally nothing to teach her.
To try and excuse her lack of flaws as her being a mythological archetype is just lazy. Even the Greeks showed their heroes undergoing incredible struggles, and they often have significant character flaws. Hercules, for example, is a schizophrenic who goes insane and kills his family. Achilles is supremely arrogant and gets taken out with an arrow in the heel by Paris, who's the biggest fop in the Greek canon. Perseus and Theseus don't just waltz in and kill Medusa or the Minotaur, they have to use their wits more than their strength, and are nearly killed in the process themselves. Rey, on the other hand, is never in any real jeopardy, so there's no investment or payoff when she triumphs. She's already overpowered from the start. She's an avatar.
Finn is a much more realistic character archetype, and Abrams and Johnson fucked him over by reducing him to a comedic minstrel sidekick role, and bludgeoning into the dirt the genuine growth his character was experiencing despite the horrid execution of his narrative arc.
This. This is why we can't have nice things. Damn it John, grow the fuck up.
Your takes are always bad and feminine
"There is nothing female about the Rey character. "
The problem is not that Rey is female character. The problem is that she is not a character.
Through their unwillingness to show Rey as "weak" or needing help, they created a character who never needed to grow. Luke started as a whiny brat who blows up the death star. From the beginning of the movie, he goes from an indecisive person, wanting glory but afraid to actually grab it, to the guy who shuts off the targeting computer and blows up an artificial moon. That wasn't masculinity- it was just growth- a growth that anyone, male or female could identify with because we've all been children needing to step out for our own.
Through their WOKENESS need to show grrll power, the writers created the worst character ever. They did the same with Captain Marvel- created a complete badass with no weakness- her whole journey being "get the other men to realize how badass I am". And they staked the marvel universe on her, while killing off Black Widow? Ugh.
That is a good point. That is a large part of why the character sucks so badly. But I think it is true in addition to my point. She is not a female and also shows no weakness or growth making her the most boring character ever.
Her growth or arc was finding her place in the world. She says so straight up in the second movie, "I need someone to show me my place in all this." The character growth wasn't as a Jedi.
"The real growth was the friends we made along the way."
To be fair, that stayed pretty close to the source material.
Demosthenes of Athens
I really like this observation.
Bill Dalasio
I don't think the problem was, per se, that she was a woman. It was that she was a woman written by the existing makers of Star Wars. The truth is that empowerment doesn't make for good story-telling. A compelling character, whether in comedy or adventure or drama, is someone who is flawed. If a character is perfect, there is nothing about them to laugh at. If a character is perfect, the slings and arrows of life shall pass. If a character is perfect, we needn't worry that the hero (or heroine) might fall.
But, Hollywood, at least right now, doesn't have much of an appetite for acknowledging flaws in women. It's disempowering. It flies in the face of the mythos of the omni-competent woman. They can't acknowledge women as potential screw-ups because doing so might suggest that something other than bigotry or grand conspiracy might hold them back.
Wizard with a Woodchipper
"Skywalker is a frantic, disjointed mess—not a movie with good ideas poorly executed, not even a movie with bad ideas, but a movie with no ideas at all, save for saccharine paeans to fandom and nostalgia."
Thus spake the Critical Drinker
I've come to the conclusion that the Critical Drinker is nothing short of a hilarious drunken genius.
Go away now.
There are many problems with the new Star Wars trilogy, which is garbage, but making the main protagonist a woman is not one of them. But of course that is what a conservative is gonna whine about. But of course. And to top it off, John can't imagine a female character without sexuality. This is literally the definition of a male writer fucking up a female character, turning her into nothing but a sex object. I bet you enjoy the works of Frank Miller.
Nobody gives a shit what a bigoted midwit thinks, eunuch
You have no value
But of course that is what a conservative is gonna whine about.
Yeah, no conservative ever enjoyed an action-adventure film with a strong female lead! I believe NASA spotted the heat signature of the strawman you burned.
How does it feel to parrot the same "unPrECEdenTEd StrAHnK WaHMenN!" crap being shoveled out by the entertainment industry's PR rags?
So you think Mark Hamill was a good choice for a protagonist because of his overt sexuality. Noted, John.
Your reading comprehension is lacking. Maybe I should send you a jumbo size bottle of Drano for you to drink. As a Christmas present.
Vegtam
Well, that's a terrible take. The decision to make the protagonist a woman is not bad at all. Even your own argument doesn't make that case. By your own standards, the problem isn't that they decided to make Rey a woman; it's that they didn't write her well.
The character doesn't need any sexuality. No one was complaining about them making the protagonist a man in the original trilogy (at least not people like you), and yet Luke was as asexual as Rey is. It has nothing to do with sex, gender or sexuality. It has to do with writing good characters.
Your attempt to explain "femininity and masculinity" to Hollywood fails miserably. Most characters in the main Star Wars movies were not very sexual. They were mostly only interested romantically when needed. In the new trilogy, Finn and Poe weren't exactly sexual either, but you're not complaining about them. You're only complaining about the one female character because it fits your "anti-woke" narrative. There are times when writers make a main character female but then just write her as a male character anyway (True Detective season 2), and that fails. But this isn't one of those times. Even if Rey had been male, she would have been the same bland character.
Besides, just the fact that they "decided to make her female" illustrates the default males are in entertainment. It's a "decision" to make a main character female. As in, they could have just gone with the default, and made Rey male, but they made the conscious decision to make her female. That in and of itself is the problem: the fact that male is the default.
Because half the world isn't?
Anyway, they bungled it because it was always with, "…because the old way is a bad thing, screw you for liking it." Which is BS because Alien, Aliens, and Terminator 2 were all women as the strong leads and nobody cared and the same people loved those movies. The exact same. They just weren't released with a snide nudge nudge, wink wink you men are the problem and this is for your own good.
Reverendcaptain
This is exactly the point. The claim that female heroes are somehow new and hard to be accepted by sexist fanboys to total bullshit. They love their female heroes.
There's no problem in male being the default for action heroes. Action heroes are inherently masculine.
Gender norms aren't evil. They're reality.
The movies like Alien and Terminator do female action heroes right, with women who overcome their femininity, without losing it, to become heroes out of necessity. The fact that they're females fulfilling a masculine role isn't something you think about while watching the film, but after it's over and you reflect on it.
Their gender is not distracting, it's not the point. That's where modern films lose the way. They don't tell stories, they try to tell you rightthink
yet Luke was as asexual as Rey is
LOL, seriously? Leaving aside the whole awkward incest implications that came up later as a result of Lucas's retconning of their relationship, he clearly has the hots for Leia in the first film, and acts like a smug shit when she kisses him to spite Han at the beginning of Empire.
In the new trilogy, Finn and Poe weren't exactly sexual either, but you're not complaining about them.
Talk about trying to shoehorn sexuality where there is none. I'm sure if we ignore the parts in the ST where Finn is openly thirsty for Rey, this comment makes complete sense.
Right, Luke wasn't completely asexual, and neither is Rey. That's the point. I said they're equally asexual, meaning neither is particularly sexual.
Finn having a little crush on Rey but not talking about it or acting on it at all isn't exactly "sexual".
The point is no one cares when a guy isn't really sexual, but suddenly it's a problem when a woman filling the same role isn't really sexual.
I said they're equally asexual, meaning neither is particularly sexual.
And you'd be wrong, based on Luke's actual character portrayal.
Huh, so you're arguing that Finn being "sexual" means that he would have to immediately start trying to feel up or kiss Rey after knowing her for all of five minutes. And of course, let's just leave aside his comment asking her on the Falcon if she had a boyfriend, or his clearly portrayed infatuation with her at various moments in the first two movies.
It says a lot more about you that you're implying that "sexual" means that they're all should be trying to get in each others' pants, rather than simply demonstrating normal human emotions of attraction.
And sexuality isn't entirely romantic either.
For example, Ripley in Aliens and Sarah Conner in Terminator. Both are feminine characters thrust into masculine roles because of the circumstances they find themselves in.
But Sarah Conner is still a damsel in distress in the first movie, she just fights back. In the 2nd, she's entirely driven by being a mother and protecting her child. Ripley has the cat and the little girl.
They don't need to announce "I am woman!" because they demonstrate their womanhood. They don't reject their femininity, which is what so much of modern female characters do.
That's one thing that a lot of media critics don't get.
Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor are unabashedly female. They aren't guys in female skin suits. They survive primarily through sheer determination and a bit of luck/plot armor, but they're also quite vulnerable and the audience identifies with that.
It's not really a surprise that Rey doesn't have nearly the same gravitas among the Star Wars pop culture canon that Leia and even Padme did. The latter were also explicitly feminine characters that happened to be strong-willed, but still vulnerable at times. They're far more relatable than Rey ever was, which is unfortunate because there was a lot of potential in her backstory about being abandoned by her parents.
CLM1227
This! Thank you.
I'd also add the distinct characteristics that come with being female. I know that's totes un-PC, but guess what? Women and men are different!
Luke's whole motivation in the movie was to rescue the princess. And get some. He went into monk mode when he left to train with Yoda and found out that incest was best.
Star With and Empire were massively sexual in that aspect.
Luke wasn't asexual. He had a crush on a pretty girl he rescued, competed with Hans for her attention, won a kiss, and got to be grossed out by it when he learned who she (and he) really was.
That's not asexual. Its understated and not flamboyant like a GrrMartin book, but it's there in an innocent way.
This is a good point and one I've noticed as a trend in many recent movies. The women do not behave as women but have all the qualities of men but in women's bodies. What is with the aversion to female attributes and strengths?
The weirdest to me right now is how many women heroes or just badasses (assassins usually), are now either lesbians or bisexual. Do they think now that women heroes have not not only be men in women's bodies but also fuck women…just like men?
DEdwards
They're not "hoping to make Star Wars great again," FFS. This shit is not what greatness looks like or what someone aiming for greatness would achieve. Most of it's not even good storytelling and hasn't been since Empire. They're hoping to cash in on something they don't understand and don't believe in. A New Hope was so popular because it was a new way of telling an old story: clear-cut good vs clear-cut evil, with the good guys winning against all odds and having fun doing it. That's been the last thing on anyone's mind—including Lucas's—since Empire.
John, Odeon feminism is not really about women, or femininity. It's about hatred of men. Not even so much masculine behavior. Just masculine behavior from MEN.
It's part of the disease that is progressivism.
'Modern feminism'
Incredulous
Well said. These movies have become vehicles for left wing social engineering with unrealistic depictions of genders and sexuality. There is a desire for gender fluidity which is not reality. In real life, men and women are different, masculine and feminine.
Crap. I got tickets for this thing.
There has been six movies since the original three. You cannot say you were not warned.
I haven't been to the movies since they introduced JarJar every Star Wars move from then was blah. I do watch them when they come out on tv just to keep up and I'm not impressed.
Fucking Jar Jar! Even worse than Rey and child Anakin.
We have tickets. I didn't buy them. My woman insisted we go see it on opening weekend because she cares about spoiler. Then she read some reviews and…
Ha-ha!
Cancel them, I think you can as long as they aren't within 24 hours of the showing
J.J. Abrams ruins everything he touches. I don't see anything with which he is involved.
As do you
Saw it last night. Not awesome, not terrible. B-
>>Adam Driver, as the Darth Vader–esque Kylo Ren
they didn't tell us why he hates his parents or who the fuck he is at all really then next thing you know he's killing Han wtf I'm still pissed.
They did the same thing with Darth Vader in the prequals. Why did Anakin Skywalker go all dark side on everyone? Beats me. The guy's wife dies giving birth and suddenly he wants to slaughter and enslave the entire universe.
Both examples point to the most fundamental flaw of the entire series going back to the original three; George Lucas has no understanding of what evil is or why anyone would be attracted to it. That didn't matter in the first couple of movies because they didn't try and explain much of the back story. The lack of back story or explanation made Vader an even better villain. But once they tried to explain who Vader was and why he did what he did, the whole thing fell apart quickly because Lucus really had no fucking clue what the answers to those questions were.
They didnt even work in the back story of the jedi ethos how the dark side could manipulate life and death through the force? It would make sense for him to turn to try to save his wife.
And the worst thing is that the explanation for what the dark side is and why it is tempting is sitting there like a giant wookie trying to pull your arm out of socket.
Jedi's have the power to use the force to fool people and manipulate them. You know the whole "these are not the droids you are looking for" thing. It is not hard to imagine how easy it would be to be corrupted if you had such power. The dark side is the temptation to use the force to mentally enslave and fool people into doing what you want. The temptation of it is that you convince yourself that you are fooling them and enslaving them to do good. Only someone who has true discipline and morality can resist the temptation to overpower people's free will in the name of doing good. Vader goes bad because it is hard and it sucks to be good. Being good means letting idiots run the universe and letting people do stupid and self destructive things. What is easy and tempting is stepping in and using the force to enslave them for their own good.
Why Lucas couldn't figure this out is beyond me.
"What is easy and tempting is stepping in and using the force to enslave them for their own good."
The wet dream of every progressive, ever.
"What is easy and tempting is stepping in and using the force to enslave them for their own good. Why Lucas couldn't figure this out is beyond me."
He couldn't figure it out because he actively believes that the universe needs Top Men to run our lives. That isn't evil, to him. That is why Jedi's hold this massive influence in the republic before they are destroyed, even though they are the definition of elitist asshats.
I really think you could rewrite Revenge of the Stith in a way that would be very interesting. You are right, the Jedi are kind of assholes. You could really play with that idea and make them flawed and interesting.
My idea would be to make being a Jedi some kind of mutation that people have at birth. And the Jedi Knights grab kids when they are toddlers and train them and give them discipline to keep them from becoming monsters because of the temptations that come with their power. They then become law givers for the Republic. Sort of super natural judges who can read minds and come to the just decision in conflicts.
The flip side of that is that if they don't get you early, it is too late to train you and they have to kill you. So, the Jedi send Obi wan out to get Ankin who is on some backwater planet. Anekin is a teenager and has the power. And he is using it in teenager ways. Screwing with his teachers, getting laid, stealing stuff, things like that but nothing really evil. Kanobe gets out there and quickly realizes that Anikin has really amazing powers though not yet developed. His job and duty is to kill him. But Kanobe just can't bring himself to do it. How can he kill some 14 year old kid who never learned any better? And if doing that is what it means to be a Jedi, maybe being a Jedi isn't so great. So, Kanobe disobeys orders and takes Anekan back to the capital and before the Jedi council to try and plead for his life and to offer to train him himself believing that he can save Anekan and make him a force for good. And then things start to go off the rails.
That woudl be my idea.
This is a great concept and it really bothers me that you misspelled every. single. name. If that's a troll I tip my hat
You are right, the Jedi are kind of assholes.
Well, that should have been obvious by the end of Empire. When you realize Darth Vader is Luke's father, the obvious conclusion is that the first true Jedi we run into (Obiwan) basically lied to a kid about who his father was, accused his dad of killing his dad, in order to convince him to murder his father. I'm not sure the Sith weren't evil. But, I'm damned sure that the Jedi weren't exactly good guys.
In an alternate timeline, Lucas makes a prequel trilogy about Anakin starting out as a cocky, yet dedicated Force prodigy that is established from the very start as Obi-Wan's teenage apprentice (no Qui-Gon, as cool as the character was; it should have been Anakin and Obi-Wan who showed up as ambassadors at the beginning of Episode 1), whose idealism is slowly worn away by the compromises the Jedi make during the course the Clone Wars to win the conflict, and finally snaps when he finds out that he was actually taken away from his parents, who are now dead, by Obi-Wan himself.
And it's all written and acted well. The prequels had a few big problems, but I think the handling of Anakin's turn to the dark side is the worst. It's rushed and not at all believable. A more gradual slide like you describe makes a lot more sense.
Yeah, Lucas didn't give that evolution nearly enough time to develop; it really only happens over the course of 1 1/2 movies, and like you said, it feels rushed and contrived instead of a natural process.
Stan Lee figured it out with Spider Man in 1962. As summed up in the 'Homecoming' film when Stark asks him why he doesn't do something like okay football with his new abilities, he responds "if I couldn't do it before, it means I shouldn't do it now". Or why Superman tries to be a good example for humanity, to be something to aspire to, as opposed to dominating it.
Nerd hat on.
The Emperor literally tells him he will teach him the secrets of manipulating life and death so he can save Padme. It's the reason he cuts off Mace Windu's hand and kneels.
Nerd hat off.
Trollificus
While they didn't explain Vaders' evil nature in the original trilogy other than an off-hand "turned to the dark side", Lucas spent the entire prequel trilogy telling exactly that very story. And a nice, dark story it was, though buried under cringey romance, awful dialogue and bad casting. I can see why people don't give the prequels much credit, but the story is there, and the explanation of Vader is in it.
Also, your idea for a structure of Jedi/Sith in that society is far superior to the poorly-thought-out version Lucas came up with.
ALSO, when the Jedi fail to find/neutralize someone w/ the mutation, there is an organization of non-Jedi Force wielders who find them, with their own aims. he initial one, of course, being to protect themselves from the self-appointed "good guys".
If that doesn't contain the seeds of many, many interesting and intense stories, I dunno what does.
Oooh! And there's a third group, a shadowy group of "Grey" Jedi, who have avoided being controlled by either group. Very powerful (they'd have to be), and morally uncertain, who knows what they're up to? Damn. I'd be eager to see movies made from that basis.
I would love to make it a novel but I don't know how I could change it enough to keep Disney from suing me and everyone I have ever met into poverty for copyright infringement.
Expect Reason to get a cease and desist for what little you've written here.
Way to go John.
They could easily explore all of that without a lot of existing baggage if they started making 'Knights of the Old Republic' films. Which would be set thousands of years before Episode One.
Azathoth!!
It does. Marvel wrote them. It's the X-Men.
You might be right about that. More than anything Lucas needed an editor. All three of the prequals were blotted and needlessly complex. The plots were just horrible. So, I am willing to admit that there were some deeper things lurking in those movies that I may have missed because they were just so boring. Attack of the Clones is one of the most boring movies I have ever seen. It just goes on and on and on without any real point. There is so much going on and no reason to care about any of it.
It was Lucas's intention to recreate the serials of the 1930s and there is no backstory. It's only a trope to begin with and each episode becomes the backstory for the following one. If you try to change it the story breaks, and that's exactly what happened here. Purely accidentally (except for Rian Johnson, who may have done it purposely) the Sith just won. Rey is the granddaughter of Palpatine, she killed him and took his mantle, all the Skywalker's are dead and it ends with her stealing the Skywalker name and squatting in their house. She's hiding in plain sight after eradicating the light side clan.
Rey is the granddaughter of Palpatine, she killed him and took his mantle, all the Skywalker's are dead and it ends with her stealing the Skywalker name and squatting in their house. She's hiding in plain sight after eradicating the light side clan.
Which is hilarious, because at the end, with all her power, she remains nothing more than what she was at the beginning of the ST, a scavenger.
Except Vader was presented as the ultimate villain already. He just was a bad guy and very powerful. That makes sense and is acceptable. The backstory is not completely necessary. But with Kylo, he's a young guy who is obviously conflicted the whole time. From the beginning he was supposed to be more than just "awesome, cool, powerful villain". With that in mind, we need more of a story and more reason to take him seriously as the bad guy.
agree Dillinger, but that is kind of Lucas' MO. After all, they really didn't explain anything at all about Indiana Jones backstory or context or anything in those movies (until arguably the 3rd movie…but even that was basically: "he has dad issues").
Terrible actor, terrible character
It's time for Star Wars fans to admit that most of the movies actually aren't that good. The universe that it inhabits is really cool and vast. The characters have a lot of potential. The musical scores are top notch. The special effects are usually pretty awesome and in the original trilogy they were groundbreaking. You can take those ingredients and couple them with huge budgets to make truly great, epic, sci-fi movies. Or you can be George Lucas, Disney, and JJ Abrams and use these great ingredients to serve up mediocre slop.
There are three Star Wars movies that I consider to be actually good movies as they are: A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and Rogue One. Obviously I mean the original cuts of A New Hope and Empire. Everything else is just ok, lame, or total shit.
I am glad you included Rogue One, because I did really like that one. It actually had great dialogue and got us to care about the characters. Even though we knew going into it, they were all going to die. (If they didn't, then were the fuck were they in IV, V and VI!!)
I still love Return of the Jedi. Not because it was a great movie. But, sentimentally the scene that Vader turns back to the light side and throws the Emperor down the hole is one of my favorite scenes of all time from any movie. Though the Ewoks can fuck off.
Though the Ewoks can fuck off.
Little kid me watching it in the theater said, "WTF is this shit?" when the muppets came out.
Like kids wouldn't have preferred The Wookiee planet.
Fucking Ewoks.
Don't you dare badmouth Zeke!
Best running back in football
Roman Moroni
I guess I was the right age for it as well because I loved that movie, Ewoks and all. Luke's plan at the beginning might not stand up to perfect scrutiny, but damn it was cool when he did that diving board thing!
And yes, Vader's character turn with no dialogue and no adjustable expressions on his mask totally worked. It was brilliant movie making, letting the audience connect the emotional dots and doing the work themselves just by context and the juxtaposition of shots.
It was just one of those perfect movie moments that will always stick with me.
But then again, I was 11.
I agree with you about the three that are good, but even in Rogue One they felt it necessary to show us a CGI Leia (they could have just shown us a shot of her from behind about to get the plans and we would have known who it was). I got a shiver of "uncanny valley" from that one scene and it took something away from the film for me.
wstu
Yeah, CGI Leia wasn't as well executed as CGI Tarkin.
I have a theory that the first hour of A New Hope was so interesting and so well made and the universe so compelling that everyone was so transfixed that they didn't notice the rest of a New Hope and even Empire were not that great. It wasn't until the second half or Return of the Jedi that the spell started to wear off and people went "WTF, those are Muppets running around".
Ok, yeah, the final battle over the Death Star was a bit on the silly side, but it was entertaining at least.
Did nobody care that they ate the captured stormtroopers?
The fact that when they captured Han and Luke and took them straight to the cook fires shows that they knew what they were doing.
I was a bit taken aback by it when I watched it as an adult.
Remembered the ewoks from when I was a kid, did not remember them eating people.
I'm just surprised nobody ever talks about it
They don't eat people.
They eat the weird alien invaders.
I was six years old watching that in the theater – I'll never forget my disappointment. I felt like they were treating me like I was half my age. And although those three years don't seem like much, that was insulting af back then.
Having a very smart 7-year-old myself, I'm going to go ahead and call BS. This reeks of trying to sound cool.
Umm, what? I'm calling BS on the idea that a 6-year-old was disappointed and felt like he was treated like he was half his age due to RotJ. I pointed out that I have a smart 7-year-old right now, for reference.
I'm not gonna go so far as to call anyone a liar. It's certainly possible that some kids genuinely didn't like the the Ewoks, but none of my friends had a problem with them at the time.
It was only years later that I was told how lame they were. But to a certain demographic, they overwhelmingly worked at the time.
To me they were no weirder than any other costumed characters. They were just silly and fun. But not muppets. Yoda was the only obvious muppet and nobody thinks he didn't work.
Rogue One was spectacular.
The Empire and their Stormtroopers actually came across as actually competent and powerful instead of cartoonish like in all the other movies.
I went in knowing it would end full-Shakespeare bc it had to, and it still blew me away.
The Empire and their Stormtroopers were pretty damn competent in The Empire Strikes Back. They annihilated the rebel base within a few hours of landing. True, the Rebels got away, but that's required by the plot. And the best the heroes could do on the Rebel side was slow the shit show down long enough to let the good guys get away.
Rogue One" isn't that the one where they made the battle essentially a cheap Vietnam epic from the palm trees to even the military garb straight out of every Vietnam movie. What were they saying with that
I heard they were actually referencing Iwo Jima.
Honestly the guys who make videos tearing Star Wars apart are now far more interesting than Star Wars itself. Red Letter Media, Mauler, the Critical Drinker and any number of others make great videos pointing out plot inconsistencies and problems with the characters that help most of us bring into focus what seemed wrong about these movies that we couldn't quite articulate. I'm not going to go see this Star Wars movie, and I didn't go see the last one. My 10 year old self sitting in the theater watching the original in 1977 would never have believed that he would grow bored with Star Wars, but here we are. At the very least I can enjoy entertaining critics who remind me of what I once loved about the series while they tear the current crop of films apart.
That is so true. I love the ones (I can't remember who did the best ones) that retell Episodes I-III the way they should have been told. Not brand new stories, but taking the main frame of the existing stories and executing them better. They could have been very good movies with the right person at the helm.
As opposed to the fucking hash that is the last trilogy (I won't even honor them with episode numbers). There is damn near NOTHING to salvage from them. The characters aren't worth caring about. (Finn maybe COULD have been, a stormtrooper who turns). Kylo Ren is nothing but a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum. He can LITERALLY suspend a blaster bolt in mid-air, but can't defeat a person who until the day before had no idea about the force and had never held a light sabre. As John very eloquently pointed out above Rey is nothing more than an androgynous mannequin. Leia should be on a beach sipping margueritas, and Poe is about as original as a 90's sitcom.
The dialogue isn't even bad. It is completely forgettable. I can quote lines from hundreds of movies. And I love quoting even the bad lines from the prequels ("From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!") I literally can't quote any significant lines from any of these fuck-ups.
I want to hate what these ass-clowns did. But, I just don't care that much any more. As far as I am concerned, the Star Wars saga ended when the Rebellion won the Galactic Civil War (not counting some of the great novels that are no longer considered canon).
ravenshrike
If they had treated Finn as an actual child soldier rather than mildly cowardly but perfectly adapted to life outside the life of a first order trooper sidekick he could have been a pretty damn good character.
Finn had real badass potential in his original characterization, which comes out in various moments. Unfortunately, he's largely relegated to being a minstrel character. It's fucking criminal what they did to his character, and if the rumors are true, he's as pissed about it as most of the fans.
There's a really good video somewhere on Youtube which shows what the first Star Wars movie looked like when it was shot and sequenced as it was intended by Lucas and what we got after it was edited by someone who could see what the movie might be. The video shows how the editor made it work and what a mess it was before, without any tension or flow. But then Lucas got the outsized reputation from the original trilogy and he was able to shed his editors (including his first wife). So I could see how someone on Youtube coud edit the mess we got in the prequels into something coherent and compelling.
I agree. We got two opposite trilogies: one with a very good plot and character arcs but bad writing, acting and dialogue, and then one with a terrible (non-existent) plot and character arcs, but good writing and acting (and at least decent dialogue). The prequels could have been much better with better writing and acting. The new trilogy, I just don't know how to make it better.
There is, well used to me more likely, a 3 hour recut of the prequels on YouTube. Among other things, they drop all the idiotic raging Annakin stuff that would have driven Padme away, and replaced it with cutting room floor scenes early on where he shows a sweet nature and poof, suddenly their romance is completely believable. There is a great movie hiding in there.
If the Critical Drinker started doing a daily podcast on current events, I'd subscribe in a heartbeat. I'd love to hear him rip on politicians the way he does on shitty movies.
He's great but a daily podcast is probably not the right format for him. He says that he writes a script for all of his reviews and, while that works for some podcasts (especially those about a specific topic) a daily show, like Adam Carolla's podcast, requires a lot of improvisation.
OpenBordersLiberal-tarian
This review spends too much time attacking Kathleen Kennedy. Like Obama said, women are better than men at pretty much everything. So even if there are problems with the recent films, it's not her fault.
#TheFutureIsFemale
Boo-you should have said #TheForceIsFemale. You don't often drop the ball that badly.
Francisco d'Anconia
Well, all the critics hate it. So, it's probably fantastic!
Many times that is true. But sadly, sometimes a movie sucks so bad even the critics can see it.
Abrams, who had previously rebooted the Star Trek franchise and directed Super 8…
Super 8 was good enough for what it was, but his treatment of Trek was an honest-to-space-god abomination.
It started with a Time travel plot and then went down hill….
What makes it so much worse is that everyone who actually makes these films are so talented. The actors and creatives in Trek are so good and the product is soooooooo bad. Could you imagine being the DP that has to do that idiotic lens flare?
phillhamian
Once I heard a Beastie Boys song, I was out. I think I went home and watched Darmok to get that slimy Jar Jar Abrams vibe off of me.
Michael Ejercito
There waa no Beastie Boys song in TRoS.
So you're saying the bad news is Kathleen Kennedy is involved so the movie is filled with progressive PC identity politics bullshit but the good news is JJ Abrams is also involved so it all gets blown up after a high-speed chase and a 142-cut, 3 1/2 minute incomprehensible battle scene?
I think CGI have become the death of movie making. It makes making battle scenes too easy. In the past when you had to stage such things with actors or models, the filmmaker really had to think about what he was doing and pair down his ideas to just the good ones. With CGI, you can put everything on the screen and movie makers do just that. And it ends up being a complete mess.
Mostly agree. I actually just listened to Rogan's podcast when he interviewed Rick Baker and they talk about this. You know, for the most part, I would actually trade "less real" looking stuff that was actually real than "more real" looking CGI stuff. I recently rewatched the first Aliens vs. Predator movie (bad bad movie, but in a way I am drawn to). However, the first big fight between one of the aliens and predators was done with two actors in body suits. That decision made it so much more realistic and visceral watching these monsters go at it. They could have done it in CGI, but it would have just been another battle scene….(like the "flashback" scene from the movie where the predators are fighting waves of aliens on top of Mayan pyramids….like I said, bad bad movie).
"The final film in the Disney-era trilogy is a pointless, abysmal letdown that won't fully satisfy anyone."
In David Ricardo's famous example of wine production, he showed that specialization and exchange makes it so that more people in England can enjoy more wine for less if they specialize in something that Portugal wants and let Portugal trade them wine. I don't believe he accounted for the impact of mass production on the quality of the wine. Yeah, Gallo's cheap, but because it's made for a mass market, it tastes like wine flavored Kool-Aid.
Movies made for a mass market on big budgets can only be of so so quality. Star Wars wasn't made for wine aficionados. It was made for tweens in Berlin, Cairo, Johannesburg, Mumbai, and Shanghai as much as it was made for kids in the suburbs of Chicago, and success is measured in dollars and cents. Star Wars was the first movie I ever saw, and I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Then I saw the one where the Ewoks took down the Empire.
I grew up a lot that day.
Ewoks? You mean the Space Vietnamese?
"It's easy! You just don't lead them as much."
If Rian Johnson really wanted to subvert everyone's expectations, he abso-fucking-lutely should've made the Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now! of Star Wars movies.
He really killed the franchise good & proper. He had Leia's death scene, her sucked into the vacuum of space in the can before Carrie passed and he purposely kept the character alive and forced it into the next and final episode. I don't think there's anything that could have been done that would be more destructive to the entire franchise. It's unreal, and the fact he's still working and got away with it I can't wrap my head around.
That's the pinnacle, maybe, but hardly the only thing he ever did. Holdo's plot-destroying maneuver turned pretty much any given ship into a weapon with the potential to match the Death Star and made the stupidity of lobbing laser blasts, bombs, and torpedoes through space seem idiotic. He effectively wrote Captain Phasma out of the plot and wrote Rose in. Abrams made Rey a Mary Sue, but Luke was pretty OP in A New Hope, Johnson cemented her as the self-made bestest ever and he proved it by killing off the mysterious supervillian and did so with some of the worst editing in movie history.
Good metaphor Ken. Same thing happens with beer. A lot of my beer nerd friends often complain that the big guys beer is tasteless and that those companies couldn't make a good beer if they tried. I think it is more about economics. If you try to brew a beer that millions of people with different taste buds will drink, its going to have to be fairly muted.
Are there Ewoks in this picture? No Ewoks, no see. Yub! Yub!
Someone needs to make an Ewok, Jar Jar mashup film. An entire film around the most hated characters in the series.
juris imprudent
You'll appreciate this John, a friend on FB created a neologism/typo right from your keyboard: ewoke.
Ewoks and Jar-Jar vs. The Porg Menace!!
The funny thing is that if there had been a call back to Jar Jar somewhere in Rise, I'll bet everyone would have thought to themselves that he wasn't near as bad as they remembered. That's how much Rise of Skywalker sucked. I thought there was a perfect opportunity to insert at least a statue of him in that whole Sith temple digs and have a fun reference to the Darth Jar Jar theory (which is strangely compelling).
The Ewoks could eat Jar Jar, who could pass along some bacteria harmless to him, but eats the flesh of Ewoks.
Total win-win.
Commenter_XY
Can we impeach Brown, Binion, Boehm and Sullum from journalism?
I think there were two main issues (ignoring the SJW/"It's our franchise now" bullshit). First was the decision to completely throw out the decades of expanded universe lore that was pre-disney and just try to build something from scratch. I'm not gonna say that all of the EU was good, but it definitely had great stories that would have been interesting, from the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, to Mara Jade and the Solo kids. It also explained why the empire was still around after the emperor died, the New Republic didn't just take over everything, you essentially had the galaxy split into factions, warlords, and historical groups. It would have at least been a great basis for the new trilogy.
The SECOND issue was The Last Jedi. That movie was sooo bad, with a horrible, non-sensical plot that basically made Finn irrelevant as a character and dropped plot lines from the first movie (not to mention the decision not to kill off Leia when given the chance). The backlash was swift, and as a result, Abrahams replaced the other guy as director for Rise of Skywalker. I view this movie as the inevitable conclusion for what happens when there's an obstacle in front of a cargo ship and it doesn't have enough time to turn out of the way. Yes, the obstacle is a mile away, but the cargo ship needs 2 miles because of how big it is. Abrahms was dealt a bad hand and basically had to satisfy angry fans, money-obsessed disney execs, and an SJW boss, and he has to do it with an already poor backstory. This was going to be a trainwreck no matter what. Kennedy needs to be fired and never given any power ever again
John Cuyle
Abrams dealt himself a bad hand. You can't come into a franchise where the most recent movie involves a rebellion finally overthrowing the Empire and do another rebellion vs empire movie with the words "Rebellion" and "Empire" crossed out and "Resistance" and "First Order" written in with crayon and expect to have a compelling anything because you've just demonstrated that there are no actual stakes in that universe. You've gotta go somewhere new. Have Mon Mothma become a despot after taking over and the Galaxy governed like a banana republic where everyone is impoverished due to the collapse of trade. The Chiss start to expand, as an organized power, into the vacuum bringing their odd caste system to worlds that don't really fit into it. Have a breakaway remanant of the Empire in control of some of the outer rim worlds have their leader be a solid tactician who never really agreed with imperial politics and got backwatered there as a result establish a small representative federalist state consisting of those worlds. You know, do something interesting, that maintains the core concept of power corrupts, plus the very Star Wars theme of "A single good leader can really make a difference" and "You never know where that person will come from" but it flips the old players upside-down to make the point, while maintaining some degree of social relevance (Chiss are stand-ins for the Chinese, the New Republic is Venezuela, and the Free Imperial Remnant is a plausible thought experiment.) Or maybe not that, but seriously, somewhere NEW.
You know what, you're right, this did start with Abram's decisions all the way in episode 7. But yes, make it something new. Have it be different. Instead, we've got this shit.
I reiterate, just adapt the Thrawn trilogy.
I mean, the idea that history repeats itself is worth exploring, but maybe not in the main Star Wars series, or at least not in this way. If you're going to explore that, explore it. Instead, Abrams just rehashes it all with no insight or new takes on it. (So, yes, I agree with what you're saying, in case that's not clear.)
Have Mon Mothma become a despot after taking over and the Galaxy governed like a banana republic where everyone is impoverished due to the collapse of trade.
A sadly realistic plot after real rebellions. Not one of the Arab Spring countries did anything but settle back in with a new dictator.
Technically, Tunisia, where it all started, has a functioning democracy, but overall you're correct–everywhere else either collapsed completely or just solidified their authoritarianism.
First was the decision to completely throw out the decades of expanded universe lore that was pre-disney and just try to build something from scratch.
Definitely. Why didn't they just try to adapt the Thrawn trilogy? Granted it's probably been 20 years or more since I last read them, but I remember having a ton of fun reading those books.
Just stop! It's a movie. Doesn't anyone just want to have fun anymore?
Bottom line! No one is ever going to make a Star Wars Movie better than the the original trilogy. Get over it!
So YES, this is ALL about nostalgia. I don't go to a Star Wars movie to not see the characters I fell in love with as 12 yo boy. I don't go to a Star Wars movie to not see epic space battles with X-wing fighters blowing shit up. Yes, of course it's just a big Death Star. How else do you top a Death Star?
They tried to "be different" in episodes 1-3. People, rightfully, hated it, because you can't top perfection. So…the mouse wants to make money, and I want to remember all the great shit from 1977. Give me the nostalgia!
I got a tear in my eye when Han and Chewie stepped on-board the Falcon for the first time in 33 years and proclaim "we're home." That's EXACTLY the kind of shit I want to see. I don't give a flying fuck about new material, or technological consistency, or whether the main character is a chick or a dude.
Everything's gotta be an outrage. Everything's gotta suck!
Just go and have fun for fuck sake!
We're libertarians, we're legally required by law to not be happy. Seriously, it's in the contract you sign when you join up.
Is that the social contract I keep hearing about?
The only good scenes in the Force Awakens were the scenes involving the characters from the first three movies. Fisher and Ford did an amazing job recreating older versions of their original characters. I don't know that anyone else has ever done that. They came back and played an older version of an iconic character 40 years after they first played it. That is a hell of an accomplishment on their part. And they walked away with every scene they were in.
I don't think the first three movies were perfection. The first two were quite good but the third was pretty forgettable. The other movies could have been good with a few pretty obvious tweeks. That is what makes them so disappointing. It is not they they fail to measure up to the first three, they don't. It is that they could have been so much better than what they were.
It's incredible it's because the characters were so well written to begin with. In the original Solo wasn't a good guy he was a smuggler/hustler who lied and thieved his way across the galaxy cutting corners everywhere he could and owed money to everyone. Luke was a naive farmboy desperate for adventure with zero understanding of what that meant.Lea was a princess who was hot but also in your face and had an attitude of being too sure in her convictions and right about everything. Those are all relatable but flawed characters that you can understand because you come across them in life. This new series none of the characters have really any significant flaws that actually cost them anything over the course of the movie. Luke loses his arm over basically naive hubris. Han gets frozen in carbonate over his debts. Lea loses her homeworld for being a true believer.
There are no stakes ever with the new characters because we don't actually care about them. The old characters literally steal all the scenes and storylines in the new films because they are good. We could care less about the new characters because they are one dimensional and suck.
Luke also loses his surrogate parents and best friend Biggs to the empire, and spends considerable time training (both on and off-screen) to go from whiny farm boy to Jedi Knight. Leia's implied to be tortured/space version of waterboarding. Han's debts are partly his fault, and legitimate bad luck, which pushes him to take more risks. None of these folks have it easy, and none of them get anything for free.
PRussell
Yes, but does it HAVE to suck? I mean the Bale Batman didn't suck. Why can't we just have some good writing and tell a good story. The Star Wars Universe is certainly big enough for it.
I hear The Mandalorian is really good.
Did you watch Rise already?
Jack Donovan
Seriously, right? I have enjoyed all the films, some to a lesser degree than others. But none have made me regret the ticket price or the 100 minutes or so of my time. Sure, I could nitpick about technological inconsistencies, or go on a rant about Viet Cong cannibal muppets, or irritating distractions like Jar Jar, or Leia-ex-machina, or discuss who's the bigger Mary Sue, inexplicably formidable Rey or Luke Skywalker, Lord of the Incels. But do I? No. I'm not a movie critic, I'm a movie fan. I'm content to sit quietly and enjoy the films. I'll take the low points to get the highs.
I'm fond of some of the new characters. I like Finn. I like Rey and Kylo quite a lot, actually. I also find Maz Kanata and General Hux entertaining, for different reasons. I'm warming to Poe.
It took streaming to demonstrate to me which of the films are my favorites. When I'm bored and there's nothing on I'll often stream a movie I've seen before, for familiar background noise if nothing more. The ones I turn to more than any others are A New Hope, Empire, and Rogue One. But I've streamed them all once or twice, or more, except for Return of the Jedi.
If I'm flipping channels and see A New Hope playing, that's the channel I stop on. I was 11 years old when that movie came out, so you can do the math. Even now my heart races and I get chills during the trench scene. That's the magic of movies.
Unless you wake up believing everything has to suck.
OneSimpleLesson
Sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
I thought RoS was the best of the new trilogy, with TLJ being the worst.
I see that there was fan service (Chewie's medal, lando, ewoks, etc.) but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I didn't think the fleet needed to be world killers, but the ending was genuinely climactic. I felt the stakes, and it had a great payoff.
Take a break, guys. In the end, Star Wars is for kids, but often enjoyed by adults.
Firezombie
Its science fiction people not some oscar glory type movie so enjoy it for what it is. All those complaining are probably still living in their parents basements with a collection of unwrapped star wars figurines. Go get laid you nerds!
Incomprehensible Bitching
All the cool kids love Star Wars 9.
And Tide Pods
If it means giving up my unwrapped figurines, no deal.
I keep looking for a girl like Rey but Mom says I'm being shallow and that my standards are unrealistic.
Not seeing it.
Did we just become best friends?
Agammamon
The Rise of Skywalker Shows It's Time for J.J. Abrams To Be Impeached From Star Wars
Hah! Everything Abrams has ever done showed it was never a good idea to put him at the helm. You seen Lost? Armageddon? Cloverfield?
FFS, you've seen what the man has done to Star Trek.
Dude's Michael Bay without the self-awareness.
How dare you bring Armageddon into this.
Rufus The Monocled
1) Go woke, go broke?
2) I don't know or care to know why but why is Kennedy still employed given her obvious shortcomings as I've read? Is it for diversity, eh? HM?
3) I'm one of those rare 'originals' of The Star Wars trilogy that ended with The Return of the Jedi. And I'm glad I never wasted a moment's precious time beyond that from the sounds of it.
4) Know why these modern remakes suck and fail? Because they take themselves too seriously. They lack charm (like the vapid Magnum P.I. reboot) and the plots are twisted with no imagination.
Add the politics of the zeitgeist into the plot and you get scolding, sloppy suckville.
Know why these modern remakes suck and fail? Because they take themselves too seriously.
Mainly it's because they remake things that shouldn't be remade. You don't remake fucking Total Recall. Who the fuck thinks anyone should reboot Ghostbusters? Arthur with Russel Brand? Reboot Jurassic Park 20 years later? I hear rumors that "they" want to reboot all these old kids classics from the 80s like Flight of the Navigator, Goonies, and Gremlins. What the fuck are you thinking?
"What the fuck are you thinking?"
That copying something successful leads to success. And it's easier than actually doing the work yourself.
At least, that's how I see it playing out.
Also, they don't know exactly what will hit when exploring virgin territory either. Plenty of miners and prospectors have gotten rich and plenty more have made a living smelting the gangue and tailings from old mines using newer, more efficient technologies.
Yes, I believe Total Recall is in the top 100 movies ever. /Sarc
There is nothing necessarily wrong with remaking a movie. Indeed, remaking B movies or flawed movies like Total Recall can make for a quite good movie sometimes. The problem is that only works if you have something interesting to say and are using the remake to do it. You need to have an interesting spin to put on it and it needs to be a movie that is flawed enough to allow you to put your spin on it and improve it. So, you can't remake classics like Ghostbusters. You can remake flawed movies. In theory remaking those old 80s movies isn't a terrible idea. The problem is that you need something to say and to add to them. And Hollywood doesn't have that. it will just take the movies and make them woke and boring.
From what I've seen, Top Gun: Maverick is going to be exactly what you would expect it to be. Unless you liked Top Gun because it was the gayest movie ever made, it's probably not going to be as overt/oblivious about that aspect of the original.
*Looks at TR reboot.*
What the fuck were you smoking when you watched the reboot if you thought the reboot was good? The original was sci-fi schlock that knew it was schlock and was a damned entertaining movie because of it. The reboot looked at Blade Runner, figured that since it too was a PKD story it could be cool, edgy, and slick and fell way, way short.
The original Total Recall was directed by Paul Verhoeven.
He's an ass, but dude can direct schlock with the best of them
The reboots can stand or fall on their own merit, but one thing you have total control over is whether you watch them or not. How does their existence harm anything?
They're banking on Gen-X paypiggies shelling out money for their recycled nostalgia hash. So far, the returns are mixed.
What the fuck are they thinking?
Well, they've got the jobs, the show runner, producer and director contracts (note: nothing to do with merit in any of that), and they know they're supposed to "make money", whatever that is, and they don't have any original ideas…so remakes it is!!
I can only hope many millions of normies have made the same simple calculation I've done, and decline to purchase the same product (only worse, stupider, and/or gender/race/gayness-swapped.) more than once. Perhaps this will prove to be just a phase?
"Go woke, go broke", I guess is why Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman and the new Star Wars trilogy have all done very well financially, right?
If you haven't seen anything beyond the original trilogy, then why are you offering any opinion at all? "I haven't read this book, but it's terrible." OK, sure, that's exactly the opinion I want to take seriously.
The reasons this trilogy failed is they didn't plan it out ahead of time, and they had Abrams do two of the movies. It has nothing to do with seriousness or "scolding" or "zeitgeist". The main characters could have all been white males, and these movies still would have sucked. The plot was just bad, and the writing and characters were no better.
Really? Take out Captain Phasma, a token female who had no purpose other than wokeness, and the movies get better instantly. Imagine the screen writing process where every two days the producers say they need a rewrite to include x-tokenism, and you get this message of a trilogy.
Oh I'm sure the writers were probably driven to excessive drinking over the SJW oriented notes they got from the studio.
Smashington
Is it really JJ's or Rian's fault Disney is trying to resurrect a series that's been dead for 40 years? The Luke Skywalker saga started and finished with episodes 4, 5, and 6. The rest are just a cash grab. They are unnecessary.
J.J. Abrams is Michael Bay without the explosions, or M. Night Shyamalan with action sequences.
There is literally no reason to expect better from him.
Huh? Abrams got plenty'o'splosions.
Think more of what a Bay film is minus the 'splosions!
Jeepers, Suderman. Just let us watch the movie. It's the last movie. Let us watch the last movie! I don't give a shit that we're not the UberFans, raging over every little inconsistency. Just let us watch the damned movie!
Mike in Atlanta
Did someone force you to read it?
I DIDN'T READ IT! I'm must pissed at all these ubernerds telling me not to see it because it violates their cult tenets or something.
If you speak against the holy canon, you are a heretic. You know the fate of heretics.
Who told you not to see it? You do realize it's some people's job to write about the biggest stories in pop culture, right?
And it's not that this violates cult tenets or whatever other BS you want to come up with. I'm not a big Star Wars nerd. I've always liked it but never got into anything other than the main movies, and even with them, I wasn't hardcore about them. This movie and the last one just weren't very good movies, regardless of "cult tenets" or whatever BS you can come up with.
And yeah, you can still go watch the movie. You don't even have to be here. You could just not click on this article altogether! I know, what a crazy idea, right?
It's inappropriate to say the names "Kylo Ren" and "Darth Vader" in the same sentence.
In The Force Awakens, Ren immediately succumbs to peer pressure from a teenage girl prisoner to take off his mask. Boy, they don't make intergalactic supervillains like they used to.
Vader, by contrast, struck terror into everyone, his direct subordinates more than anyone.
Kylo Ren caving to a "dare" from a teenage girl was the moment Star Wars jumped the shark for me, even as mediocre as the prequels were.
"Kylo Ren"? Don't you mean Darth Emo?
I long for the days when I thought the ewoks were the stupidest thing I'd ever see in a star wars flick.
Disney spent a shitload of money for a franchise that Lucas had already put into a tailspin, and they drove it right into the ground. What a shame, it could have been epic.
If I were a Disney shareholder, I'd be yelling for Iger and Kennedy's heads on pikes.
How's Disney's profitability these days? The mouse doesn't give a rat's ass about art.
IP law. The same way the rat has been popular for almost 70 yrs. Disney doesn't do original art and hasn't since… Tron?
Lion King?
If you are looking long term. One of those top ones to put in the vault. Not that I am giving anyone advice here.
In Abrams' meager defense; he competently took a rugged, beat up old story line and slapped a new coat of paint into it. It was Rian 'Shithead' Johnson who subverted everyone's expectations by driving the thing headlong into a brick wall. Expecting J.J. Abrams to cobble together a working vehicle from the absolute wreck Johnson left for him. If Abrams needs impeachment, Johnson should be drawn and quartered.
Abrams couldn't kick off a new story worth a shit to start this trilogy, and he can't conclude it for shit. Johnson's intrusion doesn't change a thing about that.
"P:E ratio" of everything in the franchise puts TFA right behind A New Hope. If George Lucas is brilliant, rich, and famous because he gave everyone the lightsabers they never knew they wanted, then J.J. is rich, and famous for giving them the lightsabers they wanted and doing so better than Lucas did.
Also, IMO, the lynchpin or litmus test is the Dark Lord Kennedy's influence. Plenty of bad decisions in TFA I can reasonably ascribe or split between Kennedy and Abrams but the abject amount and degree of stupidity in TLJ can only be owned by Johnson.
So much this^
The only reason there was a "wreck" that Abrams had to "rescue" was Abrams's decisions. He set so much up that's so hard to really pay off (as is his wont) that Johnson was essentially forced to go in a different direction. The real problem was them not laying out an overall plan for the trilogy from the beginning. If they had some main ideas to work through and let different directors hash out the details, it could work. But having different directors just come in and tell their own stories made it not work at all.
He set so much up that's so hard to really pay off (as is his wont) that Johnson was essentially forced to go in a different direction.
The tragedy of being given too much fertile ground and only being able to produce piles of shit.
He took the mystery boxes and filled them with Bathos.
George Lucas actually gave them some ideas that have appeared throughout the trilogy. Probably needed some more like minded directors to flush it out though.
If a new director can so dramatically veer a series in the wrong direction, what is the purpose of a producer?
what I find interesting is that they can make 27 different James bond movies with all new actors and the thing keeps moving along with some good and some bad ones. Can Star Wars make it to 27? it better since Disney spent millions on a ride
They need to focus on new stories within the franchise universe. So much is left untapped. Look at Marvel. They could make a hundred different movies with different stories and characters. Even that would barely scratch the surface.
Hank Phillips
Star Wars was libertarian, and instantly mystical conservatives made infiltrating and polluting it Job One. After the Ewoks Crusade, the communist-antifa-snowflake Empire struck back, and the thing degenerated into Saturday morning cartoons ever since. Sad.
Star Wars was not libertarian, Star Wars was intentionally and overtly Marxist. The creator of the film flat out said so.
Marxist? With the female lead being a princess? I don't think Karl Marx would have agreed.
Fuck you Hank. You're just an atheist bigot. I'm not even religious and I find your anti-theistic bullshit to be irritating.
Go back to whacking it Gosnell's live Birth abortion videos.
DarthHusker
Shhhhhh! Any criticism makes you "toxic" now, don't you know?
FML, I'll probably have to see the stupid thing at some point. I miss having hope that the next Star Wars movie would be good. Maybe they can just release new sequals with George's original plan and pretend these didn't happen… Just don't let him write the dialog or direct.
Good article except for one thing. 3po isn't gay. That sort of slant is pure 2019 thinking.
Yes. More asexual (as a robot would be), codependent and un-masculine. In contrast to R2's masculine/heroic bent.
Johnson didn't have to resolve every single mystery box Abrams set up. And he REALLY didn't have to carefully fill each one up with shit and then stomp on it. Which he did. Now, I know Johnson was operating under somewhat onerous rules from Kennedy: Rey must be perfect, no woman can take instruction from, or be subordinate to, any man, and every male must be a coward, a failure or just stupid.
It was, however, Johnson's particular venomous contribution to shit upon those crazy uber-fans by breaking canon and destroying the characters they loved.
Plenty of blame to go around in the hatemail that is The Last Jedi. And then they have the gall to lie about their motivations? Fuck those people and fuck Disney.
C3PO? Not gay, but British. Which can be easily confused. As can the British.
Mike Lorrey
All these criticisms should be contrasted against what has saved Star Wars: The Mandalorian. Refreshing yet retro-western, retreads classic tropes (seven samurai/dirty dozen, wolf and cub etc etc) in an exciting sciffy way with creative new characters. Heck Mando has more emotion and expression on that beskar steel mask than we see from Rey in three movies. Baby Yoda harkens back to the favorite character of the originals and the prequels in a cute and cuddly Baby Groot package with a talent for silent humor. We have yet to see Mando's face after seven episodes but he's still more loved than Rey, Finn, Poe, Holdo, and Rose put together.
Beyond that, there's the political stance. Where TLJ is classic woke SJW culture, hectoring us with their feminism and marxism, denigrating faith, The Mandalorian is Conservative. The Way of the Mandalore is Conservative culture: gun rights, self defense, home schooling, defending your family, serving your nation, private charity, adopting foundlings. And fans love Mandalorians. LOVE EM. Because underneath all that armor, metallic or emotional, Mandalorians are Americans.
sorry but although the Mandalorian started off strong, it quickly devolved into a lame adventure of the week with recycled plots that weren't that good the 15th time they were used in TV westerns. It's limping to the finish on the strength of the Yoda baby toy franchise.
LOL You made that post a few days too late.
I was saying to my siblings that I though it was trying to be Firefly and doing poorly, up until the last episode. That kind of redeemed it.
HOW ABOUT FOCUSING ON THE MAIN STORYLINE AND NOT 'THIS RANDO YOU JUST MET NEEDS YOUR HELP BUT ITS GONNA TURN OUT BADLY… repeat every week?
"lame adventure of the week with recycled plots that weren't that good the 15th time they were used in TV westerns. "
You and I know that. My kids, who have never even seen a single episode of Gunsmoke or Bonanza, do not.
After Game of Thrones, I don't trust ANY serial-episode show. Both because of structure and because of the revelation of the horrifying incompetence and arrogance of current year showrunners/directors.
The brilliance is it gave adults a reason to buy Disney+. Right now it is the only TV series I am following.
Oh my favorite theory. Baby Yoda is a clone. He uses his Sith like powers of super cuteness to control the Mandalorian and others including the rest of us who will go out and buy baby Yoda stuff.
The Disney trilogy showed promise, but it was overtaken by sexism and racism. Sexism because they created a central female character with zero character arc or development—a textbook Mary Sue that's perfect in every way from the start. That approach is sexist at its core because it posits that only males can grow and learn, but women must be born perfected because they cannot learn or develop.
It is also racist because they introduced a new, likeable, black central character with an innovative back story (a stormtrooper who defects to the rebellion) and promptly turned him into a comic relief character. Finn was the interesting character of the bunch (definitely far more than MaRey-Sue) and they wasted him and made him a joke.
Worst of all, Disney than had the unmitigated gall to condemn anyone who criticized their weak storytelling and flat characters as racist, sexist man-babies. First, fuck them and their obvious projection! (If Star Wars fans were ever sexist or threatened by strong female characters, how come they all love Leia?) Second, what the hell kind of business not only insults their customers but actually goes out of of their way to insult their longest and most loyal customers? Iger and Kennedy should both be fired, Jar-Jar Abrams is a hack, and Ruin Johnson is a disgrace for his deliberate destruction of Luke.
Oh, please. It's not sexism or racism; it's just bad writing. The only difference between Rey and Luke is that Luke had some kind of character arc. The only reason Rey didn't is because they needed to up the ante with her, not because she was female. They could still write her as a badass without making her a Mary Sue.
And same with Finn. It has nothing to do with race, just bad writing. And you don't help your case by claiming Disney is wrong to call you and others out as racist and sexist for calling out flat characters. You just called them racist and sexist because they had flat characters. That's quite the double standard you've got going there.
Maybe they're flat characters because the writers didn't see them as characters but rather "badass woman" and "black guy"
You keep recognizing the story is poorly done while trying to maintain complete denial of why it's poorly done
If you need to have Star Wars be your own personal fanboy fleshlight instead of something that matures with the decades, you are admitting that they are movies for children. And that's fine. Of course, a children's movie in 2019 should still probably be more sophisticated that a children's movie from the 70s. JJ Abrams is evil and must be stopped before he kills another beloved franchise. At least Johnson attempted to pick up the hacky pulp of Abrams's first shitpile and make something worth thinking about.
That would assume the series has matured with the decades. The evidence shows that it hasn't.
At least Johnson attempted to pick up the hacky pulp of Abrams's first shitpile and make something worth thinking about.
Oh please. Unless that "something worth thinking about" was "Jesus, what a total fucking hack job this is," there wasn't anything remotely mature about Last Jedi. It's nothing more than a series of set-pieces chopped together, with horrible plot and character development. Abrams is an unoriginal director, but at least you could tell that he respected the franchise's universe. Johnson's movie is basically a hate-fuck of it.
Remaking the same story only with bigger death stars is not respecting the franchise and it certainly isn't respecting the fans, who Abrams apparently feels are retarded children who can't handle nuance or anything but fanservice orgasms. The question is whether he's right to feel that way about them.
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I don't know when it started but at some point "callbacks" became the big thing for fans of franchises. And fans mistook callbacks for creative brilliance. So filmmakers just started stuffing their movies with meaningless, repetitive callbacks to fire up the forums and subreddits. I wonder how long it will take for these ecstatic fans to realize that they are being played for suckers.
The truth is that none of this matters to anybody that's earning a paycheck from this. The movie would make a billion dollars if the entire plot involved people sitting around in Star Wars costumes making arm pit fart sounds.
"people sitting around in Star Wars costumes making arm pit fart sounds."
Isn't that a description of every sci-fi convention ever?
If you've ever been to a sci-fi con, you'd realize that armpits are not involved.
AndyWingall
I'm not a fan of putting politics in movie reviews, we're already seeing it with Clint Eastwood's Jewell, from angry journalists who don't like being called out. This reviewer is no different. To be fair it's just another personal rant. I agree we live in vacuous times where art has been replaced by gray propaganda in which even actors no longer have to emote. But I don't get why the press uses every opportunity for a personal vendetta. You should read some of the crazy reviews on Jewell. It's paranoia written by narcissists and so is this review. The fact is Star Wars was never any good; the franchise has gone from bad to worse. From the start with that long opening written narrative in the first film it never made sense. The franchise is an accumulated mess of corny dialog and non-special effects sewed together by bright laser beams. The last good film George Lucas made was American Graffiti. The only ever interesting character was Chewbacca and that's because dogs are cute. We humans really do not need to be entertained to the point we throw temper tantrums when Hollyweird fails to deliver.
Clearly you're above Star Wars. Why do you think about it so much?
Peter, the other day when I said
"Loder writes for the purpose of reviewing movies, and politics creeps in. Suderman uses movie reviews (and pretty much every other topic) to emote his politics in print."
It was not meant as words of encouragement.
Woke puts me to sleep.
For people who didn't get that from his prior foray, at least.
Inflicting JJ Abrams on Star Wars is part of why Disney isn't getting any of my money any more.
BTW, the tags for this review are incorrect. Star Wars is not science fiction. It's fantasy.
DickieFett
WOW! What a disappointment that was for anyone to see. The sheer madness of this film has left me wondering, what the hell was Papa Giorgio thinking when he sold to those scum at Disney? The political garbage of today was what first killed this movie, along with the other two steaming piles prior to it! The other killer was that it felt like ten mini movies wrapped in a box of get fuct. I will now leave you all with my takeaways and non-takeaways!
Three things I took away from this movie were…
1. Rey is Palpatines grand kid
2. Kylo Ren is still bad
3. Kylo Ren is now good for five seconds
Three things that I will never take away from this movie are…
1. A sense of pride
2. A sense of self-worth
3. A reason to continue living
So please, do everything you can to inform the ones you love that Star Wars rise of shitewalker is not worth the price of a flaming bag of dog shit!
What Disney will take away:
1> Your twelve bucks.
what the hell was Papa Giorgio thinking
Maybe you missed the first 3 films in the franchise where the dark, imposing bad guy was bad right up until the last 5 seconds of the film when he redeems himself? Or the subsequent 3 films where we learn that the imposing bad guy was really just extremely conflicted and tortured?
Whether you approve of either of the above or not, turns out Abrams in continuing the fanchise, made his dark, imposing bad guy a tortured villain capable of redeeming himself at the last minute.
Seriously, WTF were you expecting from a Star Wars film?
The Rise of Skywalker is a perfect example of the 2.5 star film. It's not good nor bad. It wasn't the worst $6.95 I spent but I could have used that on a meatball parm.
Take it or leave it.
It's currently at 86% audience score on rotten tomatoes which, I wouldn't have put it that high (I'd say 3.5/5 stars), but is about what I expected and would think (popular, successful, but not overwhelmingly so). Abrams managed to successfully end the franchise without making me want to vomit or think "WTF just happened?"
Winston101
Its STAR WARS – a Saturday Matinee genre built for kids and adult children. It is not a documentary or a re-enactment of a true story. If you want to ask questions about why and what, start with NASA and ask yourself just exactly WHAT rocket motors push against in the "vacuum of space" to propel anything. A physical impossibility that prolly none of you dare question. Or how NASA plainly states it cannot get beyond the Van Allen Radiation Belts that are only several hundred miles above earth in 2019, when they claim to have done it 1969. Ask those questions. Demand those answers. You complain about Star Wars entertainment yet are as silent as tombs when it comes to blatant government deception.
All that hot air, and you don't feel it pushing against you as it comes out?
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Danathar
Im 50 and saw the first films as a kid.
Acting by some in the prequels was terrible. Loved the world building, effects, etc. plot wasn't bad.
LOATHED episode 7
Laughed at the absurdity of episode 8
Went into episode 9 knowing it's rotten tomatoes rating…
The movie was GREAT. Just about all the criticism in this article is so far from the truth that I consider it intentionally LYING !
After watching the movie I was genuinely angry at whoever wrote this article. I almost didn't watch it after reading this review.
I will say, however, I did find some of the "nods to wokeness" as he puts it, as a form of political propaganda, was very distasteful. And it's something I'm seeing a lot more of elsewhere, like shows on the CW. It's clearly manipulation, and it's insulting.
Steven French
Oh my gosh it is so bad! I just hope you know how to track a phone of JJ Abrams!
Subuli
January.1.2020 at 12:03 am
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The Metonymy
January.13.2020 at 9:28 pm
So the guy who couldn't defend a fixed position with the most elite soldiers in the galaxy from spearchucking teddy bears comes back from the dead to menace the galaxy with star destroyers that can't navigate out of a fog bank. The stakes are high, people.
Let's fix this mess by going back to the meta-story, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. George Lucas intended the entire saga to be R2D2's first-hand historical account recorded into the Journal of the Whills. Since R2D2 is essentially absent from the last 3 movies, all the plot holes and disconnection from the narrative structure of the prior 6 episodes can be explained as an unreliable narrator. Someone other than R2D2 is the author or the last 3 episodes, which means we don't know the real story and have been passed a fraud, a counterfeit.