'Rey Skywalker' (Upcoming live action motion picture) - general discussion thread — Page 3

I agree that Rey in the first movie is kind of a Mary Sue, but she didn’t “immediately beat Kylo Ren.” Yes, Rey does win against Kylo Ren but are we going to just ignore that Kylo Ren was weakened during that fight? He was emotionally unstable cause he murdered his dad and then got freaking shot in the stomach with a blaster. And even then Rey spends 90% of the final fight barely fending off Kylo Ren’s attack and is constantly retreating and running away. She only turns the tables on the final 10% of that fight when she starts using The Force. I mean I do agree that she learns to use the force way too easily and I think the Mary Sue criticism is kind of valid in that first movie. However, anyone who says Rey is a Mary Sue past that first one clearly didn’t watch the other movies.

She spends the entirety of Last Jedi screwing up and getting things incorrect. During the first lesson, she immediately gravitates toward the Dark Side of the force, during the scene where she trains with the lightsaber she screws up and breaks the rock formation. She thinks she can turn Kylo Ren to the light and is dreadfully wrong. She gets completely destroyed by Snoke and Kylo has to save her. Also during the fight with the Pretorian guards after killing one in the opening bit, she spends most of the fight tangling with 2 of them while Ben Solo’s, pun intented, the others. In Rise she continually fails the training course, gets herself cornered on the Star Destroyer, and spends her final fight with Kylo Ren again being slightly outmatched, and she only manages to win because Leia distracts Kylo Ren, without that she would’ve lost. She also spends the entire film trying to connect with other force users and only manages to do it at the end. Also she only barely manages to defeat Palpatine only because Ben is there to help her. So yes she is talented and does win but she’s constantly struggling in those other movies.

I’m not saying the prequel trilogy is perfect, Force Awakens is way too similar to A New Hope, with Last Jedi the Luke stuff is controversial, I liked it but totally understand why others despised it, and the Canto Bight storyline is weak. Also the less said about Rise of Skywalker the better, but I can’t agree with anyone saying that Rey wasn’t well handled. The only things the Sequel Trilogy handled well consistently was Rey and Kylo Ren. I mean Rey’s story, other than the Palpatine stuff, is really the only competent part of that final movie so I think it makes perfect sense to do a Rey Film. Clearly, she was the only character that Disney consistently cared about and wrote well so I think this film could be pretty good.

Also, characters don’t necessarily need to have really strong external conflicts as long as they have an internal one. Rey’s character arc is clearly an internal one, she spends most of the first film trying to go back to Jakku and afraid to lose her last connection with her parents. Last Jedi is about her trying to get Luke to see that he’s needed and finds herself emotionally conflicted during her force chats with Kylo Ren, and she’s also struggling with again the loss of her parents. In Rise of Skywalker, her struggle is with her connection with Palpatine and the dark side. So it’s constantly annoying to me when people keep complaining about how she’s too powerful and skilled when her conflict is clearly supposed to be internal. And if you didn’t like the sequel trilogy that’s fine and you don’t have to like this Rey movie, but they announced 2 other movies specifically to appeal to audiences who didn’t care for the sequel stuff so I don’t know why people are complaining so hard about this.

Unless they do some serious work to change how stupid the ‘I am all the Jedi’ thing was it will never work. What does that even mean? How did Palpy die exactly? How is Rey even alive if her power is from the connection to Kylo and a balance of light rising to meet dark? These things could be examined and developed… but they won’t be. Problems that should have been resolved to make the ST story stronger should have been developed in TROS… but they weren’t. Nobody seems able to write a character study or a basic fantasy plot these days, never mind address these kind of potentially interesting ideas.

I like her too, but I’m concerned any interesting things they can do will be discarded.

If i watch it i’ll probably go in with an open mind and no preconceived notions. To be honest i have seen 8 of the 9 saga films in the theater and haven’t loved any of them since 1983. If i don’t bring in the baggage of 40 years of fandom maybe it will be an enjoyable 2 hours.

Going to do the same for Indiana Jones Dial of Destiny, but that will be tough it is hard to say goodbye to a favorite character and franchise. Star Wars ended twice for me. Once in 83 and again in 2017. I had the EU for some years but i only sort of have nostalgia for things in the 1990s up to the sale to Disney. Went to episode 9 to say goodbye to Luke and to celebrate the memories. That ticket was a gift i didn’t pay for it, probably wouldn’t have gone if it wasn’t.

I just don’t have an attachment to Disney Star Wars to quote Lucas its not my Star Wars. It is great it exists for the young and young at heart who haven’t turned in their fan card.

That would be one way to go. But I think they’ve got two priorities to cover… for themselves rather than the audience I mean. Firstly they’ve got to establish the event movie again after watering it down so much. It has to be Episode X because that gives it legitimacy. It can’t be stand alone for the same reason. People have to be on board with the brand again before that ‘A Star Wars Story’ thing is wheeled back out. Secondly they have to recover from the mistakes of things like side-lining Finn and other characters. Which can’t be done if they cut ties to the previous movies. A lot of good will has to be regained (for commercial reasons) which means going down that road. Or at least that’s what I predict.

At this point I just can’t get excited about anything Disney does with Star Wars. Not having the George Lucas seal of aproval makes me feel like something is amiss.

I mean, the SEs and PT also have the ‘George Lucas Seal of Approval’. This site wouldn’t need to exist if that was actually any meaningful indicator of quality. Sure, as the creator of the franchise, everything he didn’t work on is essentially ‘fan fiction’ (be it the old or new extended continuities) but so are all the excellent fanedits and other projects here.

Re: Rey’s ‘power level’: I think a lot of the disagreement comes from a difference in understanding of how the Force is supposed to work. A lot of Yoda’s teaching in ESB - ‘size matters not’/‘only different in your mind’, ‘do or do not, there is no try’, telling Luke ‘that is why you fail’ in response to his disbelief over the X-wing being lifted out of the water - suggests to me at least it’s more of a binary thing than a linear power scale. Yoda wasn’t entirely just screwing with Luke, right, he really did think it could’ve been possible for him to lift the X-wing himself after what is, in the most generous interpretation of ESB, absolutely no more than a month of training, so long as he truly believed he could do it. After all, that’s how Luke wins in the first movie: he’s had less than an hour or so of training by Yavin, but the whole idea of the climax is that just by truly letting go and putting absolute faith in the Force, he lands the shot. Not because he’s spent six years training in the specific technique of Force-Enhanced Torpedo Accuracy.

I know the prequels jam that all up somewhat with midichlorian counts but that’s lame (and for people who are deeply concerned with how many magic Force bacteria our protagonists have, TROS does go out of its way to cover who Rey inherited her midichlorian-rich blood from, at great expense).

Regarding lightsaber fighting specifically, the movie shows us Rey is already well-practiced defending herself with other melee weapons, and in TCW (which has the ‘George Lucas Seal of Approval’) and also in other new continuity media like Rebels and Mando we see non-Force users wielding lightsabers/the darksaber, so presumably Rey’s ability to hold her own against Kylo (who is injured and not actually trying to kill her yadda yadda yadda) with one in TFA is just transferring over that general skill. If she was accurately deflecting blaster bolts with it or pulling off lighting-fast prequel-style choreography that’d be a stretch, but IIRC she basically just swings it around.

sade1212 said:

Regarding lightsaber fighting specifically, the movie shows us Rey is already well-practiced defending herself with other melee weapons, and in TCW (which has the ‘George Lucas Seal of Approval’) and also in other new continuity media like Rebels and Mando we see non-Force users wielding lightsabers/the darksaber, so presumably Rey’s ability to hold her own against Kylo (who is injured and not actually trying to kill her yadda yadda yadda) with one in TFA is just transferring over that general skill. If she was accurately deflecting blaster bolts with it or pulling off lighting-fast prequel-style choreography that’d be a stretch, but IIRC she basically just swings it around.

I agree Also, to add to this point, she spends most of the fight losing and only turns it around at the last minute of the fight. Force skills are one thing, I can understand people’s complaints about her picking it up too easily, but her fighting skills aren’t. Why do we need to see her learning how to fight before she’s able to fight using a lightsaber? The lightsaber is only special as it is the weapon of the Jedi, and it’s a really powerful light sword, if you’re already skilled in using other weapons I don’t see why a lightsaber should be more difficult to use as it’s essentially a sword. And we don’t need to see Rey learn how to fight with her staff, That’s Literally The Point Of Her Introduction. She’s introduced as a scavenger on Jakku, we see her life of scaling old empire ships to find parts, we see her sell them for food, we see her wall of marks detailing how long she’s been on the planet, we see her fend off someone trying to steal BB8, we hear her say her parents left her there and are coming back for her, and we see her being left in a flashback so we know she’s been doing this since she was a kid, and it’s done to show how she’s picked up on the skills she uses throughout the rest of the movie. So we don’t need to see her learn how to use a lightsaber, we already know she’s skilled with staff and we know why she can fight using a staff, she needed to in order to survive, we don’t need to see her learning the skill cause it’s not necessary to show. This isn’t the case of someone who has no fighting skills besting a character who has tons of skills from years of training. Both Rey and Kylo Ren have years of experience with using weapons, Ben the lightsaber and Rey the bo-staff. It doesn’t surprise me that they could be more equal in skill despite Rey not having formal training because Rey needed to learn these skills to survive on Jakku and not die on the planet and Rey transfers the skills she has with fighting with a staff to fighting with the lightsaber because when you are skilled and capable of using one weapon it’s way easier to use another one even if there are differences between fighting with a staff and fighting with a sword. She’s obviously more skilled at using the staff, but she can use a lightsaber because of this. Also, Kylo Ren is heavily injured due to getting shot by Chewbacca. That’s why she has those skills at the end of the movie and that’s why it’s not really a problem that she’s able to defeat Kylo Ren

And to anyone saying this is mental gymnastics, no it’s not it’s film literacy. All of this stuff is communicated silently in the movie unobtrusively by way of visual shortcuts. The opening of the movie uses deft visual and storytelling shortcuts to establish Rey’s character, her skillset, and why she has these skills. It does it by showing what her life is like on Jakku, the skills she has from living on the planet, and her character motivation all without much exposition. We see Kylo Ren get shot and the film makes sure to remind the audience of this fact by showing the injury and Kylo hitting himself in that injured spot a few times during that sequence. We don’t need someone in the film to say that Kylo Ren is injured as we can see it and the movie makes sure to remind us. We don’t need to have exposition on why Rey has a lot of skills from living on Jakku, and we don’t need to see her learn these skills either, the movie does it by showing the audience via her introduction the implied amount of time she’s been living on there. Sure not everyone is going to notice this stuff. And also most people if they do notice it, notice it subconsciously, and because of this it’s way more difficult to explain how they know it to other people. Do I have my complaints about Rey as a character, sure I do, but I think the movie gets more right with her character than it gets wrong. The movie does establish her own skills and why it’s not such a stretch that she would be able to defeat Kylo Ren at the end of the movie

sade1212 said:

Re: Rey’s ‘power level’: I think a lot of the disagreement comes from a difference in understanding of how the Force is supposed to work. A lot of Yoda’s teaching in ESB - ‘size matters not’/‘only different in your mind’, ‘do or do not, there is no try’, telling Luke ‘that is why you fail’ in response to his disbelief over the X-wing being lifted out of the water - suggests to me at least it’s more of a binary thing than a linear power scale. Yoda wasn’t entirely just screwing with Luke, right, he really did think it could’ve been possible for him to lift the X-wing himself after what is, in the most generous interpretation of ESB, absolutely no more than a month of training, so long as he truly believed he could do it. After all, that’s how Luke wins in the first movie: he’s had less than an hour or so of training by Yavin, but the whole idea of the climax is that just by truly letting go and putting absolute faith in the Force, he lands the shot. Not because he’s spent six years training in the specific technique of Force-Enhanced Torpedo Accuracy.

Yes, but this argumentation ignores the fact there is some four years between ANH and ROTJ. In ANH Obi-Wan teaches Luke some basic stuff about the Force. By TESB Luke appears to have continued honing his skills over the years between the first two films, but it is unclear if Obi-Wan continued guiding Luke as he did in the final act of ANH. In any case three years have passed and Luke is able to grab his lightsaber with the Force with some difficulty under duress. Luke goes to train with Yoda for some undefined period of time, and subsequently gets his *** handed to him by Vader. Another year of honing his skills sees Luke reaching his potential in ROTJ.

Now let’s look at Rey’s journey, which sees her being pretty much on par with Kylo Ren by the end of TLJ, lifting tons of boulders, over a time frame that seems to be just a few days. There’s no guidance or training apart from a few lessons from Luke, who was intent on teaching Rey about the failings of the Jedi. When I see Rey’s development I’m reminded of a scene in My Cousin Vinny:

"Vinny: [Walks over to Jury, as he prepares his next question] So, Mr. Tipton. How could it take you five minutes to cook your grits, when it takes the entire grit-eating world twenty minutes?

Tipton: [nervously] I dunno. I’m a fast cook, I guess.

Vinny: I’m sorry, I was all the way over here. I couldn’t hear you. Did you just say you’re a fast cook? That’s it!? Are we to believe that boiling water soaks into a grit… faster in your kitchen… than on any place on the face of the Earth?
Tipton: [faltering] I don’t know.
Vinny: Well, perhaps the laws of physics cease to exist on your stove! Were these magic grits? I mean, did you buy them from the same guy who sold Jack his beanstalk beans!?"

The ST treated the Force like super powers. Once Rey realized she was Force sensitive, poof! she was an instant Jedi and able to pretty much effortlessly access powers others struggled with for years.

Who says they will stop at 10? 12 is clearly the optimal number.

StarkillerAG said:

I know what you mean, Channel72. Despite me white-knighting hard for the sequels earlier today, I do recognize that they were pretty much completely unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. The exact same things that happened in the OT happened again, just with different people. And as a consequence, the sacrifices of the OT characters seem pointless.

After thinking about it for a while, I’ve come to the realization that the sequel trilogy would be monumentally improved if you made just one change: have Luke be part of the Resistance in TFA. Rather than his entire new Jedi Order being obliterated and him being in exile, have most of Luke’s apprentices survive Kylo’s downfall, with Luke himself still dedicated to defeating the First Order and restoring the Jedi.

In this hypothetical scenario, TFA would be centered around Luke’s efforts to find the first Jedi temple, with pretty much the entire first half of the theatrical movie intact otherwise. Luke would be mentioned throughout, but would only appear in person once the Falcon lands on the Resistance base, with a big fanservicey introduction scene of him training the six-or-seven remaining Jedi. He would stay on the base for the final battle, but the very end of the movie would feature him, Rey, and the other students landing at the first Jedi temple, aiming to establish it as their new home.

TLJ would have the same character arc for Rey, with her being tempted by darkness via her connection with Kylo, but it would be completely reframed in the context of a non-grumpy Luke attempting to train her as the latest addition to his Jedi school. Several scenes on the island would be mostly intact, but others would be almost completely new. Since Luke is on the island for most of the movie, the Resistance plot would play out like it did originally. At the end, Luke still pulls his teleportation trick, but doesn’t die: Luke now does it with the hope that his bravery will inspire Force-sensitives across the galaxy to join his temple.

At the start of TROS, it would be revealed that Luke’s wish came true: dozens of new Jedi are now being trained at Luke’s temple. However, Luke’s health is failing, and he knows that his time is near. Around the end of the first act, he gathers all of his students around his deathbed to hear his final lesson. He tells them that Rey will be the new master of the Jedi academy, and that he’ll always be watching them in the next life. And so, with his mission to restore the Jedi finally complete, Luke dies with a smile on his face.

I know that was a bit wordy, but I was just feeling a little inspired today. If the sequels actually played out like that, I’m sure a lot of their most vocal haters would like them a lot more. Too bad that will never happen.

Yes, your synopsis would have been orders of magnitude better. The main problem with the Sequels is they make the OT redundant, which is sad.

Even new Star Wars stories set in the OT time period, like Andor, (my new favorite show), fall victim to the dramatic consequences of the Sequel Trilogy “reboot” plot. You sort of need to mentally ignore the Sequels when watching Andor, otherwise you’re watching a small band of desperate revolutionaries endure nightmarish prisons, make impossible moral sacrifices for a better future, etc., only to have the Empire rise again around two decades later, and then be destroyed again in a similar but discontinuous way by different people.

The old EU in all honesty wasn’t that great (it went off the rails pretty quickly), but at least it told an overall story that was a progression of the OT events, as the former Rebels of the OT became the political and military leaders of the New Republic. The New Republic was depicted as a flawed institution, but it placed the OT heroes in different roles and exposed them to different challenges, progressing the OT story instead of just resetting back to Rebels vs. Empire.

Channel72 said:

Even new Star Wars stories set in the OT time period, like Andor, (my new favorite show), fall victim to the dramatic consequences of the Sequel Trilogy “reboot” plot. You sort of need to mentally ignore the Sequels when watching Andor, otherwise you’re watching a small band of desperate revolutionaries endure nightmarish prisons, make impossible moral sacrifices for a better future, etc., only to have the Empire rise again around two decades later, and then be destroyed again in a similar but discontinuous way by different people.

The old EU in all honesty wasn’t that great (it went off the rails pretty quickly), but at least it told an overall story that was a progression of the OT events, as the former Rebels of the OT became the political and military leaders of the New Republic. The New Republic was depicted as a flawed institution, but it placed the OT heroes in different roles and exposed them to different challenges, progressing the OT story instead of just resetting back to Rebels vs. Empire.

I feel like a lot of these issues could’ve been alleviated with relatively minor changes. The ST films could have made it clearer that the New Republic wasn’t destroyed, but maybe in disarray after Starkiller Base destroyed the Senate. The TLJ and TROS crawls could have explained that battles were being fought across the galaxy between scattered New Republic forces and the First Order, and they didn’t reunify until TROS.

I’m sure this will be repetitive for those who have seen me say this before, but if you just went a little further, they could have removed Starkiller Base, and just had the events of the Sequel Trilogy take place within First Order space. The New Republic would be mostly offscreen, unable to make the first move until the First Order directly attacked them. Leia, who could even be described as a former Chancellor, would lead a resistance movement that is just within First Order territory. In TFA and TLJ, the New Republic would not be able to help them for geopolitical reasons, but once they informed the Republic about the hidden fleet and their plans to invade the galaxy, the ships that show up at the end could be the New Republic fleet, which would more directly vindicate all of those people who sacrificed their lives to restore the Republic.

You could give similar treatments to Han and Luke. Han, for example, could still be working with the New Republic. His ship that captures the Falcon in TFA could be a New Republic ship. And part of the reason he is estranged from Leia is because he can’t associate with her due to her being the leader of the Resistance, which I could imagine being Leia’s decision.

With Luke, you could have him tell Rey that he sent the surviving Jedi into hiding on another planet, and TROS could end with the implication that Rey is going off to find them. You could even potentially suggest that Luke’s Jedi Order serves the Republic, and thus also can’t get involved with the First Order.

Anyway, I don’t think this would’ve been the best way to tell the story if I were writing it from scratch, because people actually wanted to see the New Republic and see Luke’s new Jedi Order, but I guess I’m trying to illustrate that they could have generally told the same story without totally erasing the character progression and accomplishments of the previous generation.

I feel like there is potential in doing a fan edit that makes these changes, but I feel like it is kind of up in the air until we see what this new movie decides to do.

sade1212 said:

Re: Rey’s ‘power level’: I think a lot of the disagreement comes from a difference in understanding of how the Force is supposed to work. A lot of Yoda’s teaching in ESB - ‘size matters not’/‘only different in your mind’, ‘do or do not, there is no try’, telling Luke ‘that is why you fail’ in response to his disbelief over the X-wing being lifted out of the water - suggests to me at least it’s more of a binary thing than a linear power scale. Yoda wasn’t entirely just screwing with Luke, right, he really did think it could’ve been possible for him to lift the X-wing himself after what is, in the most generous interpretation of ESB, absolutely no more than a month of training, so long as he truly believed he could do it. After all, that’s how Luke wins in the first movie: he’s had less than an hour or so of training by Yavin, but the whole idea of the climax is that just by truly letting go and putting absolute faith in the Force, he lands the shot. Not because he’s spent six years training in the specific technique of Force-Enhanced Torpedo Accuracy.

It’s certainly possible to construct a reasonable argument demonstrating that Rey’s use of the Force isn’t necessarily so different from what we see in the OT. Both the OT and the ST play fast and loose with elapsed time. We don’t know if Luke was training on Dagobah for a few hours, days, or months.

But the problem with Rey is both one of degrees and writing intent: The OT clearly indicates Luke needs a mentor in order to learn new Force abilities, and he seems to acquire new powers incrementally with training. But Rey appears to acquire new Force abilities spontaneously and rapidly, without any mentor or training. Luke needed Kenobi to prod him along to deflect blaster bolts and later blow up the Deathstar. In the cave on Hoth, Luke struggled to perform telekinesis - we don’t know how he knew this Force power was even possible, but the sense of elapsed time that passed between Episode 4 and 5 leaves open many possibilities. Then in Episode 6 Luke seems much more powerful. A few years have elapsed since Episode 5, but it’s unclear how Luke grew in power, since he apparently didn’t return to Yoda.

But these fuzzy ambiguities about Luke’s training likely result from logistical problems with the writing rather than what the films were actually trying to convey about the Force. Episode 5 seems to want to convey that Luke was on Dagobah for a while, and mastery of the Force is a slow, incremental process requiring training, even though it’s hard to understand how Luke could have been on Dagobah for long given the overall plot logistics.

But with Rey, there’s not even an attempt to convey that it takes time and training to learn the Force. There’s a scene in the Force Awakens where Rey is being held prisoner, and she somehow spontaneously discovers the “Jedi mind trick” in order to free herself. Then after she escapes, Kylo Ren says that the longer it takes to find her, the stronger she will become, implying that she’s gaining power by the second! The next day, Rey is able to lift tons of heavy boulders with the Force. Rey’s learning to use the Force is depicted more like “unlocking” a latent superpower, and she requires little or no guidance from a mentor figure to acquire new powers. Luke’s Force abilities required guidance from a mentor, and were of a significantly smaller scale than some of what Rey does (Luke struggles to lift a single medium-sized rock in Episode 5). Some of the discrepancy between Rey and Luke is attributable merely to the normal Hollywood tendency to make everything “bigger and better” as special effects improve over time. But the writing itself also indicates Rey is rapidly “unlocking” new powers in real time, growing in power rapidly with no guidance from a mentor. It’s really at odds with how the Force is portrayed in the OT (and certainly in the PT), despite the way the OT often plays fast and loose with elapsed time leaving open questions about Luke’s training.

And despite Yoda’s “size matters not” statement, the OT certainly portrays learning the Force as an incremental process requiring training, where smaller scale things are easier to do than larger scale things. (And if Yoda’s “size matters not” statement is really to be taken at face value, why didn’t Yoda just fling the Death Star into the nearest Sun and call it a day?)

StarkillerAG said:

WitchDR said:

StarkillerAG said:

But what if you think Rey was already a good character? I certainly did, at least until the whole “you are a Palpatine” fiasco. But I feel like a major goal of this movie is to rationalize and streamline some of the messiness of TROS, bringing the sequels’ reception back to the mostly-positive outlook pre-2019.

Remember, both TFA and TLJ had a more than 90% positive critical reception, and I feel like the audience score would look the same way if sequel hate wasn’t weaponized during the Trump-era culture wars. People liked the sequels before TROS, Disney just needs to figure out how to make people like them again.

For one I wouldn’t take payed critics opinions seriously

You lost me here. Anyone who seriously says to ignore the opinions of professional critics and trust obviously review-bombed audience scores instead is not worth paying attention to.

and second - this “Trump-era” culture war you speak of, I don’t think has anything to do with it. What happened is TLJ came out an completely destroyed Luke Skywalker. And people were pissed. You can try to blame outrage culture channels on Youtube for this. But the whole reason they ever rose to stardom in the first place is BECAUSE people were going to these sites to see if people felt the same way they did after leaving the theater from TLJ.

I know some people were genuinely upset by what happened to Luke (although I personally like it, YMMV), but the culture war grifters were the ones who turned it from individual dissatisfaction into a mass movement of right-wing nerd outrage. And it rubbed off on people of other political persuasions too: if everyone around you is saying “Rian Johnson ruined Star Wars”, you’re inevitably going to start believing it.

The only reason TFA was so positive is because it was a new mainline Star Wars movie after 15 years of none. And once that high wore off and TLJ came out, people looked at it far more critically. And it especially didn’t help that the movie itself was horrible.

One, as I already told you, a lot of people like TLJ. Stop acting like your opinions are objective.

And two, it being a “new mainline Star Wars movie after 15 years of none” didn’t stop people from hating TPM. You can have issues with how weak TFA was as a setup to the sequel trilogy (God knows I do), but the vast majority of people genuinely loved that movie. And it also helps that the “culture war” thing wasn’t anywhere near as big in 2015: I remember grifters trying to make people hate TFA because “How dare they have a female protagonist” or “How dare they have a black stormtrooper”, but no one listened to that stuff back then.

But anyways, I’ve said my piece. If you seriously don’t believe there was at least some political element to TLJ hate, you clearly weren’t paying enough attention back in 2017. Does that 40% Rotten Tomatoes audience score really look genuine to you?

There is a culture war aspect to whether or not people like TLJ but that doesn’t matter. The quality and intent of the story still remains. If the people on one side of the culture war are right about it, then they’re right. There are explanations for certain decisions that Kathleen Kennedy or Disney or Rian Johnson or whoever made about the movies that are absolutely related to culture war stuff, but the fact remains that those decisions exist in the movies on their own, and are still bad decisions either way.

The sequels made lots of money because they were big flashy movies. TFA was good and had a lot of promise. TLJ made money off the back of that, but tanked all the goodwill that the fans had for it, which resulted in Solo bombing or getting boycotted. TROS made the least money of the three.

The average non-Star Wars fan might have liked them in a vague sort of way because they like big budget movies in general. An apt JJ Abrams comparison would be something like Star Trek: Into Darkness. It has 84% on Rotten Tomatoes. It made plenty of money. But most Trek fans could probably tell you why it’s derivative and repetitive, why it really doesn’t understand the point of Star Trek or the characters it’s depicting, or why it doesn’t make any sense, which makes it bad.

For people that actually care about Star Wars, the reception of the sequels is generally negative, for political reasons or not. If anything, this site is an echo chamber for people that don’t hate the sequels, because some of the only people left here are people trying to do fanedits of post-2015 Disney stuff.

Vladius, you nailed it right on the head.

Superweapon VII said:
Well, if you’re willing to inject some hard sci-fi into your space fantasy

Certainly not.

Superweapon VII said:

Channel72 said:

Episode 5 seems to want to convey that Luke was on Dagobah for a while, and mastery of the Force is a slow, incremental process requiring training, even though it’s hard to understand how Luke could have been on Dagobah for long given the overall plot logistics.

Well, if you’re willing to inject some hard sci-fi into your space fantasy, without a hyperdrive, the Falcon would’ve had to travel from Hoth to Bespin in real space at near-light velocity, which would’ve subjected the crew to relativistic time dilation. So everyone aboard the Falcon may’ve only experienced an hours’-long trip while six months elapsed for the rest of the galaxy.

After having watched the Empire Strikes Back probably over 100 times, I just now noticed that the movie does in fact provide at least a minimum required training time duration of 1.5 days for Luke’s training with Yoda.

The first actual training session with Yoda is the scene where Luke is running around with Yoda on his back. Midway through this scene, before Luke enters the vision cave, Yoda says the following: “Nothing more will I teach you today. Clear your mind of questions.”

So Yoda says he won’t teach Luke anything further today. The next time we see Luke training with Yoda is the scene where he’s doing a headstand and lifting a rock. So the earliest this must be happening is the following day, but it could also be any number of days later.

So this sets a minimum time requirement of 1.5 days. Since it is night time on Dagobah when Luke leaves for Cloud City, the absolute shortest time the training could be is 1.5 days, if we assume every single training scene after the first happened on the same day that Luke leaves for Cloud City.

But the fact that, during the first training scene (Luke running around with Yoda on his back), Yoda ends the training by saying essentially “we’ll resume tomorrow”, suggests to me that we’re supposed to see the different training scenes as happening over a longer time period, with Luke living and sleeping on Dagobah each night.

But the longer we try and stretch out the total training time, the more creative we need to be to explain how Han and Leia were either waiting around inside that giant worm doing nothing for like a year, or else invoke General Relativity for the Hoth to Bespin trip.

We all know Irvin Kershner did not have Einstein in mind when working on this movie. But if we explore this just for fun, we still run into difficulty. We also have to account for the perspectives of Boba Fett and Darth Vader. Boba Fett seems to just follow Solo from the asteroid field to Bespin, meaning Boba Fett is also traveling at relativistic speeds in the same reference frame as Han Solo. Or maybe Fett calculated Solo’s most likely destination and jumped ahead via hyperspace. Either way, assuming Bespin is one star system away from Hoth (a weird coincidence that Han’s friend Lando lives next door to the remote Rebel base), the distance would be around 4 light years. This means that for anyone not traveling in the same reference frame as Han Solo, at least 4 years would have passed from the time Han left the asteroid field to the time he arrived at Cloud City. So… did Boba Fett call up Darth Vader and say “Okay I found the Millennium Falcon, and I know where it’s headed based on its current trajectory. Meet me in Cloud City in 4 years.” I guess Vader spent those 4 years thinking about the perfect way to surprise them, settling on an elaborate dinner party and a cool one-liner.