Broom Kid

I know why it’s goofy and dumb, I’m not arguing that it isn’t. I’m saying that the tides aren’t really one of those reasons. The tides aren’t going to shift what’s essentially a small city that fell out of the sky and embedded itself in the ocean floor. I hadn’t heard that particular complaint before, is all.

I’m sorry, I will just never agree with this. On a fundamental I believe it would be antithetical to the core heart of the series. I could say more but that is really what it comes down to.

“Always with you it cannot be done… you must UNLEARNNN”

Kylo being bad and staying that way isn’t antithetical to Star Wars at all, I don’t feel. The “core heart” of the series isn’t so inextricably tied up in redeeming its worst villains. In fact, it can be easily argued that pursuing that particular theme has led to 5 of its most disappointing entries.

I don’t think it’s unthinkable at all. And honestly, it’s a good thing for a movie to deal with, in these times specifically.

Also, honestly, “Star Wars’ bones” could do with some breaking and re-setting. The idea that the only path to hope and optimism in a Star Wars story lies in redeeming its villain seems really reductive and narrow, to me. That closes down so many storytelling possibilities that can still be hopeful and optimistic. The trick is not automatically deciding to center so much of your story’s weight and emotional drive on the bad guy at the expense of literally everyone else in the story.

It’s certainly not in Star Wars’ bones to do that. It didn’t happen in the first two films of the series, for example. The two that most people still tend to consider its best entries.

Telling a story about what you do when someone in your family doesn’t want to be saved and won’t let you help is just as powerful, meaningful, and useful to kids as teaching them to have the hope and optimism to try in the first place.

Not every attempt is going to be rewarded. And the lack of reward doesn’t mean everything that came before was in vain.

I still think that was a valid storytelling avenue. They could have gone down that path. If the only reason to close that path is basic dogma, I disagree with it. Star Wars is what it needs to be at the time it’s being made and coming out. It’s a reinterpretation of classic myths. It isn’t one in and of itself. It needs the freedom to riff and vary on different mythological aspects.

Kylo’s redemption shouldn’t have been a fait accompli in the writer’s room, and that it was is probably a big part of why the film is so unsatisfying.

Also, it never occurred to me that anyone would see the entire front half of the Death Star sunk into an ocean and think the tides would somehow be MOVING it. It’s not floating ON the water, and I can’t imagine the tides are so strong that it’s being pushed across the bottom of the sea floor, either.

The dagger is goofy and dumb, but to suggest it’s goofy and dumb because the Death Star would have moved in the meantime doesn’t really make any sense. It’s not like a lightweight piece of detritus. It’s the entire front half of a moon-sized battlestation. It’s not going anywhere because the tides are a little choppy.

I don’t know, I think “Kylo Ren is the big bad of the third movie” was just as valid a road to go down as “Kylo Ren gets redeemed” - keep in mind that the concrete notion of “Star Wars is a story of redemption” was more or less retconned into the meta-myth about its creation by a typically unreliable narrator (George Lucas) and the Prequel Trilogy only really exists to canonize that interpretation and sorta/kinda justify Anakin’s actions - which is not a great choice.

Considering Abrams’ predilections for hewing closest to the OT in terms of tone and storytelling notions - the idea of the story being ABOUT redemption doesn’t really track with what the OT story WAS about. Vader was redeemed (ish) in that trilogy, but the series wasn’t ABOUT his redemption. It was about Luke fulfilling his journey to become a Jedi and save the galaxy from tyrannical evil. Vader turning back to the light was more like his own reward for fulfilling that goal, not the overriding thrust of the story up to that point.

So insisting that Kylo Ren HAS to be redeemed because “that’s Star Wars” rings false, to me. Vader didn’t HAVE to be redeemed until somewhere about the halfway point of the last movie in the OT. And really, that option didn’t even exist until Lucas decided that the best possible cliffhanger to keep his trilogy viable would be to spring “I am your father” on the story out of nowhere, with no setup or prior lead-up to that moment in either movie to that point. Vader’s redemption was never the point, but that it still works is a testament to how good at their jobs everyone was at the time they were figuring out how to un-knot all these story elements for a happy ending.

But with Kylo - I feel like there are absolutely ways to tell a Star Wars story where the bad guy doesn’t get redeemed, where his tragic, misguided actions serve as an object lesson on what not to do and how not to be all by themselves, without the absolution of forgiveness and redemption layered over the top of them.

Granted, they didn’t take that route, and that’s fine. I wish they’d executed the redemption WAY better than they did - but I don’t agree that an ending where he’s the bad guy, and dies the bad guy, is fundamentally anti-Star Wars, or invalid on its face, either.

They’d have to prove it was him!

Did they? If so, then yeah, Mr. Burnett got hornswaggled here.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Trevorrow leaks it eventually.

Considering how quickly Trevorrow appeared to debunk the first time one of his drafts leaked (and then it turned out he was being squirrelly, because the script in question wasn’t his it was Jack Thorne’s, but he WAS supposed to direct it before he left the project) it seems like if this isn’t real, he’ll be piping up pretty soon to say so.

If he doesn’t…

You don’t have to turn your brain off to not think about unimportant things. In fact often the best way TO think is to make sure you’re not distracting yourself unnecessarily by focusing on unimportant/meaningless stuff that doesn’t matter at the expense of putting time and energy into considering other, more important things.

And of course, you have to have your brain on and working in order to even make the decision that something isn’t really worth your time to keep thinking about.

Being discerning is a skill a lot of people don’t really try to learn anymore. Now it’s just a lot of binary solutions being arrived at via external influence. It’s faster that way, and generates more “takes” that result in more responses and that’s the ultimate goal more often than not. Not understanding, not analysis. Content creation and audience reaction.

Put it this way: Thinking MORE, about EVERYTHING, isn’t the same as thinking BETTER, about what MATTERS.

…and that’s why there was probably another garrison on Endor, thanks for coming to my TED talk

I don’t mind tracking when it’s done decently. I think the Burning Homestead needle-drop was actually very well executed during the Excalibur moment in The Force Awakens.

But my complaint is a quality, not quantity-based complaint. That tracking was not only weirdly out of place (Darth Vader didn’t even DIE in that room, he died in a hangar) and thematically kind of inappropriate (at least Burning Homestead was also scoring the “call to action” moment in the story, so it fit well there) but the way “Darth Vader’s Death” was cut up was just clumsy from a technical level.

I still don’t understand what the hell the editors were trying to do with that awkward “Darth Vader’s Death” remix.

They could have just left that whole scene completely unscored until Kylo showed up and it would have worked better. Better silence than dragging out the Return of the Jedi 2CD set and chopping it up.

I can hard disagree with the idea this score is mediocre while simultaneously agreeing that the Solo score was good, too. I think the theme Powell wrote for Chewbacca is some of the best Star Wars music ever. Same with Goransson’s theme for The Mandalorian. Powell’s work on Solo is pretty damned amazing, and he was also the MVP of that film. So many moments in that movie only really worked because of his music.

Hoping that Williams gets one last win for Star Wars when the Oscars come around. It’d be a nice gesture, at the very least. And since the Oscars are more about gestures than any real appraisal of talent, even if you DO think it’s a “mediocre” score I’d love to see the nod.

But yeah, there’s so much good stuff going on in Rise of Skywalker’s score.

Hard disagree. Williams came through on the score to a level I didn’t actually expect. I thought it was going to be more of a hit-parade considering that whole “end of a saga” push we were given in the last couple months of pre-release, and what he delivered has a lot of recognizable themes, but he still came up with something like five prominent new themes, which are just as important to the score as the classic motifs, and a lot of his action underscore feels very alive in a way it hasn’t since Revenge of the Sith.

If Rise of Skywalker has an MVP it’s gotta be the Maestro. He put so much heart into that movie.

Rodney-2187 said:

I find reviews and box office numbers fascinating. It’s like a sports fan following scores and statistics. In the end, I still like what I like regardless.

This is 100-percent the best way to look at it, I agree. Numbers are fun and it’s the closest thing to the feeling I used to get back when I was a kid collecting baseball cards and comparing the stats. Box-Office is basically fantasy sports for people who aren’t into actual sports that much, haha.

DrDre said:
Additionally, not everyone’s expectations for this film’s quality, or its reception were very high.

Again, I’m not saying expectations for quality needed to be “very high.” High 70’s/low 80’s isn’t “very high.” But there’s a big gulf between even low 70s and where it is (53)

That gulf is a big reason why it’s earnings are where they are. Expectations didn’t need to be “very high” for the reality to be jarring, and for that jarring reality to negatively affect the box-office somewhat significantly.

Sidebar: Adjusting for Inflation is a pretty terrible metric, not only because the math is pretty clunky and imprecise, but because it also doesn’t account for a large number of competitive factors that contribute to attendance levels fluctuating yearly. It’s a big problem with box-office analysis/discussion in general - the decision to not measure by tickets sold is a built-in failing, but also completely unavoidable at this point due to how marketing-friendly the dollars-earned number was and still is.

Adjusting for Inflation doesn’t level a playing field so much as it just redistributes the lumps according to an overly simplistic formula.

A more accurate way to acknowledge historical context would probably be to measure the distance between how much each movie made compared to how much the average film in its release year made. That way you’re effectively comparing how much more popular each Star Wars film was than the other films that came out in that release year.

I don’t know how you can disagree that people feel it’s bad. People obviously feel that it’s bad. Bad movies still make money (Michael Bay’s very existence is proof of this phenomenon) - but that’s a different argument than the one I’m making, which is that this movie would have made MORE money had it not been bad. TFA was well-regarded! But it was well-regarded because of it’s safeness. That reputation came immediately, and further, was considered a very smart move. The studio CEO basically admitted as much in his recent biography. Had this movie been “safe” along the same lines, it likely would have gotten a better reception and avoided the word of mouth that is obviously hurting it at the box-office. Movies with good word of mouth don’t have the Friday-to-Saturday drops this film had early in its run. Movies with good word of mouth don’t get those drops AT ALL, really.

The general audience can like it more than the critical reception and the movie can still be overall poorly recieved if the critical reception is low enough. Batman v. Superman (or similarly, Suicide Squad) is the example I keep coming back to here, and I think it’s very much applicable.

Again, this isn’t to say that had the movie been good that the predictions around 700mil DOM and 1.5bil WW would have won out. Its ceiling probably would have been +/- 20mil of The Last Jedi’s numbers. But I don’t think the numbers we’re seeing now could have happened without the film coming in THIS far under anyone’s expectations, quality-wise.

DrDre said:
but given the recent history, and Abrams’ reputation, I don’t think many people expected a masterpiece. Hence, this outcome was not all that suprising to some of us.

The quality of the film being this poor was pretty surprising to a large number, which is why the word of mouth hit the film’s legs as hard as it did. There’s a pretty big gulf between masterpiece and The Rise of Skywalker, and it wasn’t an either/or proposition - Masterpiece vs. Stinker, record-breaker vs giant disappointment, etc. I’m not saying people were expecting a masterpiece - just that pretty much nobody expected it to be THIS bad. And being this bad is obviously, absolutely having a big effect on its box-office. Which is why I’m saying I don’t think those early projections would look accurate now had the film not done its damndest to turn off the general audience, which was a factor I don’t think anyone making those projections was accounting for.

If it were a masterpiece obviously its box-office would be better. But even if it was barely as well-regarded a film as The Force Awakens (i.e. safely serviceable), the numbers wouldn’t be where they are now.

DrDre said:
Good reviews might have boosted the numbers somewhat, but even the opening weekend indicated a final BO of around the 1 billion mark. Also, let’s not forget TPM’s inflation adjusted BO is $1.8 billion, the third most financially successful film in the franchise, so evidently the financial success of a Star Wars film is not strongly correlated with its reviews.

Good reviews would have definitely boosted the numbers, as the interest in the film began declining markedly as the early word began coming in that the film was not only possibly the worst of the sequel trilogy, but maybe the worst film since Phantom Menace, whose repuatation has only declined since its 1999 premiere. The film’s opening weekend was definitely stunted by its word of mouth, which points to how big a factor it’s quality was in damaging its own box-office. Essentially - post-premiere, the film’s legs started shrinking IMMEDIATELY. It was a Batman v. Superman situation more than anything. Social media’s speed and prominence makes a much bigger difference in how quickly word of mouth gets digested and disseminated now compared to the late 90s.

TPM was also the first Star Wars film since 1983, which is good to keep in mind. Word of mouth during that summer was better (and slower-moving) than Rise of Skywalker’s word of mouth is this winter. I don’t think anyone early-estimating the numbers it wound up at was doing so under the assumption the movie was going to be what it ended up being.

(anecdotally: I remember much discussion on the early internets about how Titanic’s record WOULD have been broken in 1999 had The Phantom Menace actually been good. Not to say such analysis had merit - hell not to say mine does either, obviously! But there were definitely conversations as to how Phantom Menace’s quality did hinder it at the box-office somewhat)

It wasn’t the waning interest that led to these totals though. It was the quality of the film. Again, I don’t think any of those predictions were being made under the assumption the film in question would be the most poorly reviewed Star Wars since The Phantom Menace. Had the film been at the quality level of even Solo, those numbers wouldn’t have borne out.

A writer like Hossein Amini having all the context of what “Jar Jar” has come to mean, culturally, plus knowing what the meta-story is behind not just the character, but the actor who played him? I don’t think we’re going to get a redux of what Jar Jar was (and what he meant) in Phantom Menace or The Clone Wars.

This is probably going to be a show about atonement (it can’t not be, really) and seeing this creature, this hated, pitiable thing, trying its best to be better and make up for its mistakes - I think there’s a lot of potential there, especially considering the writer and the director bringing Kenobi to life.

I would not be surprised if they use the “dirty trick” of reminding us, as viewers, of our part in demonizing both the character and the actor who portrayed him.

They could mess it up, absolutely - Star Wars gets messed up all the time, it’s certainly not special in that regard - but I think there’s a good opportunity here for Jar Jar to be reintroduced decades later, and somewhat redeemed. I think Deborah Chow has the chops, I know Hossein Amini’s got the ability - The Mandalorian just made an assassin droid LOVABLE, I think Jar Jar isn’t beyond a transformation in Kenobi.

Rodney-2187 said:

The sound on Disney+ is considerably lower than any other streaming service I use, and I stream a lot. I have to turn the volume up a lot higher whenever I watch anything on Disney+.

I find that HBO Now is also about as quiet as Disney+

Also, lately Disney’s blu-rays have had quieter audio mixes, too. I need to turn their discs up in my home theater about 4 or 5 clicks louder than normal.

It’s not rambling at all! And I’m honestly glad it connected with you on an emotional level. I have my problems with it but I absolutely don’t want it to seem like I’m trying to argue you OUT of having those feelings. Even if that was a thing I wanted to do (and I don’t) it would be an exercise in futility. I’m glad it worked for you, and I don’t think you’re insane (or anywhere near it) for enjoying it on a level I didn’t.

Again, the big problem with devoting so much time and energy to a lot of these little fiddly details in the plotting is that even if those questions were answered satisfactorily within the narrative - it still wouldn’t be a good movie, would it?

If I put together a 1000 piece puzzle perfectly, but the picture I assemble with no missing pieces is of a broken mirror reflecting a junk-strewn yard… does it matter that all these fiddly details are there and accounted for?

the only notion I want to push back a little on in this ongoing discussion is that there are somehow ironclad “Star Wars Specific” rules that got broken here, and there aren’t, really. There are plenty of storytelling and filmmaking mistakes, and the normal sorts of things that happen to make ANY movie mediocre and uninteresting to sit through, but I don’t think most of The Rise of Skywalkers’ sins are specifically Star Wars related, and I don’t think if many of these grievances had been fixed prior to release, the reception would have been markedly different.

Star Wars tends to break its own “rules” with every movie anyway, and that’s good, honestly. They’re completely made up in the first place. So long as you can cleverly break them, with satisfactorily emotional results (even if the result is as surface level as “whoa, cool!”) then breaking “Star Wars” rules isn’t a big problem at all. Nobody’s going to Star Wars movies to see its rules upheld. They’re going to Star Wars to be emotionally engaged by the story being told. And that’s not really happening with Rise of Skywalker for a fair amount of its viewers.

Hal 9000 said:
Here, jumping in and out of light speed would be expected to look like skipping a stone on a pond. It might be in a straight line, or perhaps alternating a number of directions, but this scene implies they are more or less teleporting. This is baffling when placed alongside any and everything else we’ve ever gotten about hyperspace.

It made visual sense to me. I don’t understand why you expected it to look like a stone skipping across water.

If you’re rapidly going to lightspeed and rapidly dropping out of it - I don’t know how else it could look except for teleporting. There’s no real way to show how the ship is “skipping” like a stone on a pond because the pond in this case isn’t stationary, and it’s not very easy to set up a scene where the four locations he’s skipping into and out of are all on screen at the same time as he bounces across them.

You could do it in a comic pretty easily (with the falcon breaking the gutters between panels) but I don’t know how you’d do it in the movie. The camera has to change locations with each jump, and at this point, from the POV we’re looking through IN those locations - the ship IS teleporting in and out, basically. Every exit and entry in Star Wars also looks like that.

I don’t know - it made sense to me, visually. I thought it was cool.

lightspeed skipping would have worked just fine from a storytelling perspective if there’d been a few seconds of setup as to what it was before he did it, especially since Rey and Poe get in a fight over his even trying it. So obviously it was a “known” thing to those characters - we just needed to have it hinted it was even a thing before he pulled it off. It wouldn’t have taken a lot, and it wouldn’t need to be tied into the plot any more than it already is (which is not at all).

But I do agree with Dom that I thought it was pretty cool. But I’m a sucker for that bucket of bolts doing things it has no reason to be doing. You show me the space equivalent of a hot-rod Datsun doing sweet jumps, I’m going to react positively, if only for a few seconds.