TestingOutTheTest said:
Way for that point to go over your head. I’m saying that set-up doesn’t matter. AT ALL. The lack of a set-up makes the actual reveal more surprising and impactful (+ Palpatine being established as a mastermind and having an interest in immortality and willing to do whatever it takes to take over the galaxy). Palps’ return is SUPPOSED to be a surprise.
Set-up matters depending on context. Would Avengers: Infinity Work have worked so well if the Infinity Stones or Thanos hadn’t been established in prior movies?
TROS was meant to be a climax for both the sequel trilogy and the overall Skywalker saga. It has over 40 years of established lore and audience appeal behind it. It should have been a satisfying payoff for the storylines set in motion by TFA and TLJ, but instead it
SparkySywer has a really good point on how the Darth Vader twist works because in retrospective it makes sense. When you rewatch ESB one begins to notice the nuances and clues that originally flew over one’s head. But in the sequel trilogy, looking back at TFA and TLJ, you don’t find many elements that tease or contextualise Palpatine’s return. Their storylines, particularly TLJ’s, don’t seem to be building towards this particular premise. A very diferent situation would have happened if TLJ or both TFA/TLJ had been made with Palps’s comeback in mind.
I perfectly understood as to what was going on. You just didn’t pay attention to the movie.
No need to speak for me. I’m an avid fan, who has rewatched the movies dozens of times, and of course keeping up with the story was not a big issue for me, after all the script is not very nuanced. I never said the first series of scenes were incomprehensible or that they didn’t have relevance to the plot. But the movie has pacing issues. I can follow the story and its details yet at the same time feel overwhelmed as a viewer because way too much is happening in a short span of runtime.
Even if each scene fulfills its objective it leaves a sensation of being really short; before the audience can let the mood sink in, the movie frantically cuts to another sequence, contributing to it feeling overstuffed (of course, it being the last film, there are a lot of dangling threads to resolve, but they easily could have added an extra 20 minutes to devote enough time to all of them). Again, comparing it to TFA and TLJ. We don’t get a long, extended sequence at the beginning like the First Order’s assault on Jakku. Even the space battle over D’Qar, being an action prologue, has a well-developed setting and stakes, and sets the mood for the rest of the film. Instead the first scene of TROS lasts less than a minute (somewhere around ten if you consider the Mustafar and Exegol scenees a single sequence). And then in the span of the following 15 minutes we have another two action moments.
I do believe, though, that the second half of TROS does improve in regards to pacing.
I’ll concede to you that the transmission itself is not really important, which is why I don’t understand what was the point of having it in the first place. The time they deciphered the intel should have been the moment where anyone (save for Kylo) first heard of Palpatine’s comeback instead of muddying the waters with an offscreen broadcast.