Star Wars Universe (Rebels, Clone Wars, Comics, Books, Video Games) • Page 179

So much for that 2023 release I guess

 

Well, its been 2 and a half years and I finally rewatched The Rise of Skywalker. It was much less offensive to me on the second viewing. It’s still not great, it’s extremely rushed, and loaded with questionable decisions. Maybe i’m just softening in my old age, but I do hope they continue the story eventually. It does a good job of shedding all the past burdens of the franchise. I just pray whoever takes the reigns next gets the chance to tell a planned out story and doesn’t shit on everything except the original trilogy.

 

Yeah. I watched it earlier this year. I still don’t like what it did to the overall story arc. But the movie itself is fine. Still bottom tier, no change there.

 

I've only ever seen it the once. And tha'ts probably the most stunning indictment I can think of for my circle. I've seen AOTC probably 25 times lol

 

I’ve rewatched it at least twice at home and it honestly only gets worse. It’s a failure on so many levels. As it’s own movie, as the end of the trilogy, as the end of the Skywalker saga, as the end of Rey’s story, the end of Ben Solo, and on and on.

 

Woof. I can’t do that one anymore. It’s so cringeworthy the whole way through.

 

Me neither. it's so bad. But that I can tolerate for re-watches and I've yet to have the courage to re-watch rise of Skywalker is telling of how I feel about it lol

 

As someone who grew up with the prequels, there is absolutely no way someone seeing them for the first time comes away thinking AOTC is better than Rise of Skywalker, and Rise of Skywalker stinks haha

 

Let's not relitigate TROS. It depresses me.

 

AOTC has Ewan as Kenobi with a decent story. The rest of the first hour is awful. The romance stuff is horrendous. The second half of the film is pretty stupid, but Lucas goes for it by having all the Jedi show up and Yoda fighting. It’s still flawed but there’s some entertainment value to it.

TROS has the Han scene. And ummm the light saber delivery form Rey to Ben. And ummmm… I guess Dark Rey looks cool visually, but is basically pointless. Leia teaching Rey is nice and I think they did the best they could with the character given that they refused to do a cg face on another actor beyond the flashback scene. The whole finishing her Jedi path means the end of her son is weird since her not continuing on that path didn’t seem to help Ben at all. The act of Ben saving Rey was a good redemption moment, but having die because of it was stupid. I actually like the idea of Rey carrying on the Skywalker mantle, but it doesn’t hit as hard for me knowing her now true origin.

As for the outright awful things: Rey being a Palpatine. Just the absolute worst choice for the character. The Last Jedi gave us Rey nobody. The clear next step is her struggling with being a nobody and realizing she can choose who she wants to be and still choosing to be a Skywalker. Instead rather than Rey focusing on herself and who she truly is outside of her family, she has to focus on her bloodline. Her blood is what made her powerful, not the force choosing her. She realizes she has dark tendencies because she’s a Palpatine, not because she grew up traumatized from being abandoned by her parents and living alone in an old AT-AT as a scavenger for like 10-15 years. who then meets a father figure who immediately gets killed in front of her the next day. Who then seeks out another mentor set up as a savior who is the opposite of what she was expecting and let’s her down and is forced to abandon to turn to someone she has seen as a monster, yet has a connection with. She hopes to redeem them to save everyone , only for him to save her but double down on the darkside, forcing her to reject him, as well. If they wanted to have her reject or lose someone else before owning her identity, it needed to be someone who she could look up to or view as a mentor/father figure that would ultimately let her down and force her to reject them and turn inward to herself and choose who own path. Almost any other character could have fit. Instead they chose the most evil clearly bad beyond redemption character in the saga. Which would leave Rey with no conflict, because while she has those temptations, we’ve seen who she really is, even if she has trouble seeing it at this time. There are zero reasons for her to be tempted by Palpatine. The conflict isn’t an internal struggle over who she truly is, it’s the incredibly boring “my genes are bad, so am I bad?” situation. It’s just so so stupid and such an incredibly bad choice for the character. They strip her of being a nobody by having Kylo deliver one of the worst, if not the worst, line of dialogue in all of Star Wars. They sold you to protect you. Why would they need to profit off of trying to keep her safe? It’s trying to not completely disregard the revelation of her being sold for “drinking money” from The Last Jedi, but fails to understand how that added context changes the parents motivation and fails to explain why they didn’t just all hide there with her. Instead it tells us they wanted to profit off of her before abandoning her. It’s bizarre. Imagine if instead of making her struggle with her genes (so dumb), she struggled over her trauma I mentioned before and how her emotions cause her to lash out at times, but realizes she should control such things. And have her grapple with making those kind of decisions while giving Finn and actual story and have them share their struggles and have Finn remind her that he was on the wrong side for years but ultimately looked inside himself and knew what he was was not right and he chose to go a different direction, and even then it took the Last Jedi to find a selfless path. They could bond over making those tough decisions and internal conflict. They could still reveal Finn was force sensitive all along, but you know actually do something with it. Instead Finn yells “Rey” a lot. Yay? And having Rey kill Kylo out of anger and then being like “oopsies, guess I should fix my boo boo” was silly. This doesn’t really give her some internal struggle over her actions. She immediately decides to isolate as Luke did. She just gives up right away, despite fixing her mistake immediately, but not processing her motivation in her actions.

As for Kylo, having them reveal Palpatine was behind the voices of Vader and in control of in charge of Snoke the whole time and just immediately telling him is so dumb. After the Last Jedi, why would Kylo listen to a word he says after he learns this? He should have killed him then and there. He is beyond needing someone like him. For him to go along with him, even if just as first is just not a good choice. Ultimately having Palpatine back at all was a very bad choice. It undermines Anakin’s actions in ROTJ by explaining that Sheev just left that body as he fell. No big deal. He had another body. It’s not ideal, but he made a seemingly able bodied son that for some reason wasn’t a suitable host. This is not explained at all. But Rey is fine so ultimately Anakin didn’t really do shit. It cheapens his final actions. Back to Kylo, while the Last Jedi had him leaning into the darkness, redeeming him seemed inevitable. So that’s fine. It’s a kids movie at the end of the day, let’s redeem people if we can. While the Han scene was great, the fact that when he is Ben again that he has a single line of dialogue the rest of the movie and it’s just “ow” is baffling. The Han scene should have been Leia, but given the restrictions they had to deal with, that just wasn’t possible, so I don’t hold that against the movie. I’m probably mostly okay on the rest of the Kylo stuff given the decisions they made. But redeeming him, then killing him off, to then not have him appear as a force ghost with Luke and Leia is another baffling decision. It implies that he either wasn’t fully redeemed as Anakin was or that it wasn’t good enough and Luke and Leia don’t seem to mind his absence and disregards “no one is ever really gone.” Either way it cheapens the end of Ben Solo.

I’ve kind of already hit my big issues with Palpatine as it all relates to Rey and Ben. But of course, I can’t not mention the lazy line of “somehow, Palpatine returned.” And announcing that in canon in fortnight? Wtf? The erasure of Rose as a legitimate character. Poe is fine. The Chewie death fake out they roll back so fast. 3PO giving up his memories to help the others being rolled back as soon as he sees R2 again. Rey burying the sabers on Tatooine despite Luke hating it and Leia being a slave there is odd. Going back to a planet destroying weapon AGAIN and doubling down on stupid by making it hundreds of them is so lazy. The movie ignoring the final legend of Jedi Master Luke Skywalker to inspire the galaxy to just make it that they don’t want blown up and needed Lando to ask them to help is dumb.

I’m sure there’s more, but I’ve said quite enough. The saga should have just ended with The Last Jedi.

 

I could never be one of those people, but I think most people would rethink AOTC after the abomination of TROS.

 

Greg just Randall’d the Star Wars thread.

 

(But I don’t disagree with your points).

 

I can’t really respond cause I don’t know what that means.

 

Randall posts 5 paragraph essays all the time in the NFL thread. Except they’re about the Jacksonville Jaguars, so I don’t usually read them. But this was about Star Wars. So I did.

 

Lmao big "I'm happy for you or sorry that happened" Randall energy was my first thought

 

Lightsaber switch is so fucking cool. Forgot it existed until the rewatch.

 

At least you didnt have to play Fortnite to have a better understanding of Attack of the Clones.

 

Amazing post but what about about the stupid fucking kiss between Rey and Kylo?

 

Oh, I hated it. But I decided to not rile up any Reylo’s that may be here hahaha

also it’s so quick and then it’s over that it isn’t as offensive to me as the stuff I mentioned. You could cut those 20 seconds or whatever and the movie would still be just as bad.

 

Can't wait for them to cast a deaged Daisy Ridley in 50 years

 

Disney definitely going to go 100% CGI actors in 50 years