Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

[Frelga]

I didn't finish it either.

Donald Glover was fun to watch as Lando, but he was struggling upstream against the rest of the movie.

It's rather telling, I think, that this formulaic movie just ambled by quietly, while "fan" vitriol was heaped on the far, far superior TFA and TLJ.

[Túrin Turambar]

I didn't finish it either.

Donald Glover was fun to watch as Lando, but he was struggling upstream against the rest of the movie.

It's rather telling, I think, that this formulaic movie just ambled by quietly, while "fan" vitriol was heaped on the far, far superior TFA and TLJ.

I didn't think much fan vitriol was heaped on TFA, although it had its critics. The only Disney-era film which has really drawn violent criticism has been TLJ.

But then, the stakes were much higher with TFA and TLJ. They were continuations of the series featuring the whole cast of beloved characters. Solo was never pitched as anything other than a spin-off not integral to the main story.

I'd also say that, as a fan, Solo merely bored me while TLJ actually offended me. That creates a different reaction.

[yovargas]

Whelp, I just got back from seeing it and.... I have thoughts. I would summarize my feelings as such - on a pure moment to moment basis, the movie is a blast, lots of fun and never boring for a second, but those moments are strung together into a long thread of meaningless, incoherent nothing. The movie is just so very, very filled with stuff, jumping from one chase scene to the next before we're off to this new planet and now on to this rescue mission but we have to go find that new thing and on and on in this breathless, relentless way like if it's terrified that if it stops for a moment you might get bored or, worse, stop and wonder for a moment that, wait, what the hell is this story about again?

Looking back on it, it feels like almost nothing of consequence happens for at least the first half of the movie, like it's killing time with lots of flashy stuff to pad this out until we can get to the only couple scenes towards the end that sorta feel like they're relevant to a story of any sort. But the flashy stuff is flashy, and it's fun enough in it's own pointless way.

I will say as a big overall view, my biggest criticism is that frankly, I don't think a single one of the original cast needed to be here at all and the movie would have been better leaving all of them out and focusing on our new cast. Way, way too much time spent on old characters when at this point the torch should have been fully passed on to the new (and frankly more interesting imo) generation.

And my one spoilerish comment though it's barely a spoiler since it's about literally the first thing you see in the movie:

Hidden text.

Bringing back Palpatine was a shockingly terrible decision. Absolutely nothing about it works, none of it makes sense or is remotely plausible, and it ends up being this massive distraction dragging us to old conflicts instead of the new Rey/Ren conflict which is what should really matters.

At one point Rey and Ren have both decided that they should go kill Palpatine and then they start a big light saber fight. Why are they fighting if they want the same thing? Because it's Star Wars so there has to be at least one big light saber fight, I guess.

I actually hope there's a JJ Abram's directors cut of Last Jedi someday to fix this howler of a mess.

Funny, I literally said after watching this that I wish we had gotten Rian Johnson's version of the finale instead of the JJ film we got.

[yovargas]

A minor, but telling little moment that happened in my theater:

Hidden text.

When Rey and Ben kissed at the end, my entire theater loudly groaned, then laughed, then laughed again when he died. Oops, probably not the reaction they were hoping for.

[yovargas]

(Wow, this post ended up being much, much longer than I expected....)

And now, some thoughts from yov on why ultimately the new trilogy, while fun, we're not particularly satisfying and in my view never stood much of a chance on being a very satisfying.

You all likely remember that I've never been a Star Wars guy. I only watched the original trilogy in full of a couple of years ago and my impression was that they were reasonably fun but kind of lame. It surprised me that these movies were able to develop such a passionate and enduring fanbase. My fundamental problem with series is something that I don't think I've ever seen anyone address (surprising considering how endlessly discussed these movies are) but that I think more essential to the failures of the new trilogy.

This entire series, from the very first release to this brand new finale, has been laser focused on two core ideas - the Force is very important and the Empire is it very bad.

The Force: We have nine movies now that go on and on and on and on about how important the force is and how important the people who can use the force are. And yet during that massive stretch of stories, nobody at any point that I can recall ever asks the basic and (to me) obvious question - hey guys, why does this Force stuff matter so much? We're fighting a massive interplanetary space war here, is somebody at some point I'm going to explain why, in the middle of this vast conflict, it is so damn important who a handful of space wizards are? Here's an idea - instead of spending 9 movies relentlessly telling me how important the force is, can you show me an instance, literally any instance, where the force had some significant impact on this giant war that we are fighting?

Maybe I am forgetting something - obviously I'm not a super fan who will remember every detail - but I can't think of a single instance. Okay, sure, I guess Luke uses the force to blow up the death Star at the end of a new hope. That's cool and all, but surely we can all agree that him being able to do that wasn't because the force is so important and powerful, but because the writers decided to give the death star are a big and silly weakness, like a video game boss where their weak points will glow red so that you know where to shoot. Regardless, the ability to make really difficult tricky shots in a giant space battle doesn't suddenly make you the most important individual in the universe.

You know who is more important then any Skywalker in this war? The scientists and engineers who created weapons capable of destroying entire planets. They certainly seem far more significant then a handful of guys who can lift pretty big objects with their mind. Can we get a movie about them instead? I said that half-jokingly but as I typed it, it occurred to me that Rogue One kind of already did that and when I watched that movie I genuinely thought "this movie was not perfect but it certainly has the most interesting story and the franchise". So maybe the series would have been more interesting if it had been about those of scientists instead of about a handful of insignificant space wizards who can do a few really neat magic tricks.

The Empire: The empire as a concept suffers from much of the same problem that the force does. On a basic level these stories are about a group of rebels fighting against a vast Empire. But, much like we are constantly but unconvincingly told that the force is sovery, very important, these movies spend so very, very much time telling us that the rebels are good and the Empire is bad without ever bothering to give us a sense of why it is that we should hate the Empire so much. The entire series seems to think that simply dressing up the bad guys in black costumes is enough explanation for why we should be invested in the fight. I suppose the empire was willing to blow up entire planets that resisted them, and surely that is very bad! But surely the Empire doesn't blow up planets just because it's fun to blow up planets, right? The Empire is fighting for something, right? Can we, at any point during this vast series, please get a sense of what that something is so that we can get a real sense of what our heroes are supposed to be fighting for?

Nope. They're bad because they are bad is about the extent of it. It's fine for a story to have some broad and simple outlines and I'm not bothered necessarily by a story with simple black-and-white morality. But you still need these characters, both good and bad, to stand for something if you want me to see them as actual characters and if not some simple cardboard cutouts. How much more interesting could these stories have been if the empire - both the original trilogy Empire and the new trilogy Empire - represented an actual ideology that was believably compelling (why do so many people fight for them?) yet reprehensible. It would allow our heroes to be truly fighting for something tangible unlike the vague purpose of all of these endless wars in the stars.

I bring all of this up here, what I see as the two fundamental flaws with this whole series, because I suspect and that the prospects of trying to build a new trilogy built on the rickety, hollow bones of the original trilogy was always doomed to be unsatisfying. The original trilogy managed to work well enough for people during a much simpler time because it was so spectacularly unlike anything that had been ever seen before. It presented these are very basic and simple ideas like they were grandly mythic and that worked well enough at the time. But 30+ years later, when spectacular blockbusters are a dime a dozen and audiences are much more sophisticated, simply creating some grandiose images and some cool characters was never likely to be enough to feel like something really special and necessary. It needed a sturdier story and more meaningful ideas than the core premise of the Star Wars trilogy - always so focused the ultimately meaningless ideas of the force and an evil empire - was ever really going to allow.

[Túrin Turambar]

You actually hit on an interesting point which is the tension at the heart of the Star Wars. When Lucas started working on the treatment, he envisioned it as a very simple Saturday morning cartoon-type story with over-the-top villains and plucky heroes. He actually tried to get the film rights to Flash Gordon but failed, and created Star Wars as something of an alternative. You can still see this in A New Hope where there are a series of episodes of danger the heroes need to overcome, some of which seem completely incongruous (why is there a monster in the garbage compactor in the Death Star?).

Once other people became involved, though, the tale grew in the telling (to use Tolkien’s expression). This was particular true of The Empire Strikes Back, where Irving Kershner envisioned a much bigger and grander universe. And in the Prequels, Lucas himself filled out his universe with a rich history and current political drama.

But the tension remained. Is Star Wars high fantasy with a massive, rich and internally-consistent world, intended for people who love to immerse themselves in sub-creation, or is it a fun adventure story about a small group of heroes aimed at children or the children at heart? Sometimes it manages to do both, but it falls through the gap at others.

(Seeing the film tonight btw)

[yovargas]

Funny you say that because after I wrote that overly long post I realized that there was a much quicker way of saying the same thing - Lucas made The Hobbit, his fans treated it like it was LOTR.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

We recently watched Joseph Campbell's PBS series The Power of Myth, which was a series of conversations with Bill Moyer, mostly at Lucas's Skywalker Ranch. Campbell talks at length about how successful Lucas was (talking, of course, only about the original trilogy, which was all that existed in Campbell's lifetime) at created a modern myth.

Here's one short clip of many.

[media]https://youtu.be/DXjnYL2GncU[/media]

[yovargas]

That idea that Lucas executed this classic mythic narrative and that's a big part of its resonance comes up a lot but I've never really been sold on that idea because that concept of a "archetypal character" and "the hero's journey" most of the time results in a forgettable cliche, not in timeless myth-making. I certainly don't think that the massively enduring power of Star Wars is because those archetypes are the most resonant ever or that the hero's journey rings more truly than the million other fantasy writers who love from that exact same well.

IMO What elevates it from a old tropey cliche is almost entirely how good it looked and sounded. It's all about that particular, gorgeous Star Wars aesthetic (maybe half of which belongs to John Williams). It makes a tired, simple story feel so very, very grand! But unfortunately there's a difference between feeling grand and being grand, and I do think the extremely simplistic tale was inevitably going to collapse if you subject it to as much scrutiny and agrandizement as SW has gotten.

[Túrin Turambar]

Just seen it. It wasn’t as bad as I expected! J. J. Abrams style as a director is a bit like an all-terrain SUV. It’s clunky and inelegant, but it grinds away with its four wheels and steadily pulls itself out of the mire. He had an impossible task – there was really no reason for the sequel trilogy to exist in the first place, its premise is contrived and makes no real sense (partly Abrams’ own fault, as he was the director of TFA), and Rian Johnson took a sledgehammer to what little consistency the overall story arc had with TLJ. RoS suffers from flaws aside from its impossible set-up. Its overall narrative is nonsense, it leans heavily on nostalgia and recycling, relies on idiot plot points to get its characters out of trouble in a way that’s excessive even by Star Wars standards, and seems to have been edited by someone high on speed. But I still found more to like than I expected, not only in the sound and visuals but also in the character moments, writing, and acting. There’s some great people involved in this project, it’s a shame they don’t have better material to work with.

I might post some spoiler-related commentary later when more people have seen it. To me, the overall Sequel Trilogy seems to be a classic example of a great deal of talent wasted on a project which suffered from too many limitations at the start and was completely mishandled at a high level. Abrams doesn’t hold back on laying the punches into Rian Johnson, and there’s multiple scenes which seem to exist basically to undo Johnson’s own subverting of Abrams’ original choices. I almost feel the finale should have been a lightsaber battle between Abrams and Johnson – this drama ended up overshadowing the actual plot.

It’s the mirror image of the Prequel trilogy. The Prequels had a great overall story arc and some amazing worldbuilding actually managing to get away from the “heroes fight legions of expendable bad guys” thing, but the execution was so poor all that potential was wasted. To me, as a fan, this remains the great tragedy of Star Wars.

The potential left in Star Wars seems to be in spin-offs. Rogue One was great, and while I haven’t seen The Mandalorian it’s getting great reviews and the fans are loving it. So I’m curious to see what else will come from the Galaxy Far, Far Away. I don’t have any desire to revisit Episodes VII to IX, though.

[yovargas]

I almost feel the finale should have been a lightsaber battle between Abrams and Johnson – this drama ended up overshadowing the actual plot.

The true battle of good versus evil!

[kzer_za]

I honestly hated it and right now it might be my least favorite Star Wars movie (but we'll see where it settles). A themepark ride of fanservice pandering, unearned and empty emotional payoffs, and the new elements were just dumped in without development.

It’s the mirror image of the Prequel trilogy. The Prequels had a great overall story arc and some amazing worldbuilding actually managing to get away from the “heroes fight legions of expendable bad guys” thing, but the execution was so poor all that potential was wasted. To me, as a fan, this remains the great tragedy of Star Wars.

Yep, agreed.

The original trilogy managed to work well enough for people during a much simpler time because it was so spectacularly unlike anything that had been ever seen before. It presented these are very basic and simple ideas like they were grandly mythic and that worked well enough at the time. But 30+ years later, when spectacular blockbusters are a dime a dozen and audiences are much more sophisticated, simply creating some grandiose images and some cool characters was never likely to be enough to feel like something really special and necessary.

Maybe you could say it about the next two movies in the 80s (and even then, Empire is only May 1980 - Reagan wasn't even the official Republican nominee yet), but I would dispute that 1977 was necessarily a "simpler time" with less sophisticated movie audiences. Bad economy and spiking oil prices, country was reeling from Watergate and Vietnam, race relations were still volatile with much resistance to school integration, crime on the rise, a precarious world situation with the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis coming only a couple years later. Sure you had a geopolitical situation with two clearly defined powers, but the 70s were a rough decade in many ways.

As for movies, the 70s are often regarded as one of the golden ages of cinema, certainly not less sophisticated than today. Films like The Godfather and The Deer Hunter were mainstream, and other early blockbusters around the time include Jaws and Alien which I would take over almost any equivalents in the last two decades. Nowadays SW's biggest competitor is Marvel. Not to say people have gotten dumber, but mainstream film has.

It's true that the OT is somewhat simple and archetypal as a whole. However, it's quite original in its aesthetics and worldbuilding even if not its story and characters. And it has likable characters and a basically coherent storyline, so it just works (though Jedi does have its share of issues, more than just Ewoks).

[yovargas]

Maybe you could say it about the next two movies in the 80s (and even then, Empire is only May 1980 - Reagan wasn't even the official Republican nominee yet), but I would dispute that 1977 was necessarily a "simpler time" with less sophisticated movie audiences. Bad economy and spiking oil prices, country was reeling from Watergate and Vietnam, race relations were still volatile with much resistance to school integration, crime on the rise, a precarious world situation with the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis coming only a couple years later. Sure you had a geopolitical situation with two clearly defined powers, but the 70s were a rough decade in many ways.

As for movies, the 70s are often regarded as one of the golden ages of cinema, certainly not less sophisticated than today. Films like The Godfather and The Deer Hunter were mainstream, and other early blockbusters around the time include Jaws and Alien which I would take over almost any equivalents in the last two decades.

Yeah but....have you tried watching 70s TV today? Or an average 80s action movie? Of course there were masterpieces along the way even amongst the big blockbuster movies, but that is true for any decade including the current one. (The last Mad Max movie is making a ton of the "Best movies of the decade" critic lists for example.) Audiences back then were much more willing to allow for very silly, simplistic, and frankly stupid storytelling than audiences do today.

[Frelga]

Hey! An average 80s action movie was a masterpiece.

[kzer_za]

Yeah but....have you tried watching 70s TV today? Or an average 80s action movie? Of course there were masterpieces along the way even amongst the big blockbuster movies, but that is true for any decade including the current one. (The last Mad Max moie is making a ton of the "Best movies of the decade" critic lists for example.) Audiences back then were much more willing to allow for very silly, simplistic, and frankly stupid storytelling than audiences do today.

Well, I was talking about movies - TV is a different thing that has evolved in a different trajectory.

I notice you're focusing on action movies (and I agree Mad Max: Fury Road is excellent). But that's the problem: action movies now completely dominate Hollywood where they used to be one genre among many. It's much harder now to make slower character-driven movies or even an "action-light" film (eg, The Deer Hunter or Once Upon a Time in the West) on a medium-to-high budget especially without a previous IP. Or they're harder to screen if they get made - like I live in a fairly large metro and I can't even see Terrence Malick's new movie A Hidden Life anywhere.

We're getting off topic now, but this is the real substance of Scorcese's beef with Marvel I think, not simply that he dislikes the movies but that Hollywood has become so completely centralized around them to the point of pushing other things out. Some would blame Star Wars for getting the ball rolling on this, by the way!

As for "silly simplistic, and frankly stupid storytelling", the Transformers franchise is a perennial hit! Not saying that dumb stuff didn't exist before, but it certainly hasn't gone away...

[Túrin Turambar]

There’s a pretty common view that the success of Star Wars was a reaction to the dreary zeitgeist of the late 70s and the cynicism which came from the decline of the counterculture, the oil crisis, Watergate, and the fall of South Vietnam. This is one of those nebulous things I think you’d actually need to have been around at the time to really comment on, so I can’t say one way or the other.

That said, and in defence of Star Wars, the opening of A New Hope is a textbook example of good film-making (quite literally, as I’ve seen it used as an example in books and videos). It starts in the middle of the action and quickly creates a clear central conflict, sympathetic viewpoint characters (the droids), a genuinely-intimidating villain, and a sense of urgency and danger, all in the space of about five minutes. There are better or worse ways to tell a simple story, and it demonstrates one of the better ways – much better than Lucas’ first couple of scripts and the original cut of the film. The rest doesn’t always hold up, and I find the movie weak through the middle, but its strengths can be broken down and explained.

[kzer_za]

Yeah the section aboard the Death Star does drag a bit, and the garbage compactor scene especially is basically filler. The franchise's reputation really is built mostly on Empire Strikes Back. Sometimes I wrestle with whether A New Hope should actually be considered a great movie or merely a good one. That Death Star run is still spectacular though, and the characters and setpieces work. Tarkin is a good secondary villain too.

[yovargas]

I notice you're focusing on action movies (and I agree Mad Max: Fury Road is excellent).

That was mostly in response to you bringing up the excellent Jaws and Alien.

Like I live in a fairly large metro and I can't even see Terrence Malick's new movie A Hidden Life anywhere.

Out of curiosity, I went and checked to see how his very highly acclaimed first film Badlands (1973) did commercially. According to boxofficemojo, it made $54K at the time which (*googles an inflation calculator*) is apparently about $310K in today's money. A Hidden Life has already made $319K in the US and has yet to fully expand its release. His Tree of Life on the other hand made $13M in 2011.
My point being, I am pretty darn sure you will have an easier time seeing a new Terrence Malick movie in an actual theater in this decade then you would have in the 70s.

[elengil]

I've never understood why people care about ticket sale prices strictly in terms of how much a movie made compared to past movies (i.e. Highest Grossing Movie Evar!). That only works if the ticket price remains stable (or at least, stable relative to inflation). But I highly doubt that ticket prices are a useful comparison of how popular a movie really is/was - I'd think ticket sales would be far more useful in terms of how many people saw a movie. But then, what with populations growing, of course you're more likely to have higher ticket sales if you have a larger broader audience.

But even then, if more people are choosing to watch movies after they're released to DVD, then even that would not necessarily reflect how popular a movie was just going by ticket sales. Back in the day you had to see a movie in the theatre if you wanted to see it at all. Now you have so many options...

I dunno, gross sales just seems a silly comparison, and ticket sales seems flawed. Maybe ticket sales as a percentage of the population? Sort of like the people version of inflation.

[yovargas]

It's definitely a rough comparison but I did try to look up the inflation so it is hopefully at least in the same ballpark. Not that picking one movie from one director to compare is going to be super useful. Still thought it was interesting though, since kzer_za brought up Malick..