joefavs

I saw it again this evening, probably my last viewing before it’s on Blu-ray/streaming. I’ve made peace with it. It’s never going to be my favorite, but I’m willing to stop comparing it unfavorably to TLJ and start comparing it favorably to all the lunatic EU novels I read in the 90s. It’s big and convoluted and kind of dumb and a lot of fun.

With regard to pacing, I think the Pasana and Kijimi stuff could probably be condensed into one segment, which would free up 15 minutes or so that could be better spent restoring the Lando’s kidnapped child subplot and/or showing Rose’s study of the old Star Destroyer plans actually leading to some insight that helps in the battle. Or going into any amount of detail about how the Emperor came back. Or setting up the Force dyad, like, at all. This movie is obsessed with explaining five or six different McGuffins, but it’s completely disinterested in providing any exposition on the (very weird) stuff the story actually hinges on.

I’ve been trying to develop a headcanon to make this movie’s Snoke stuff less ridiculous in the wider continuity. Here’s where I’m at.

First of all, Palpatine’s line, “I made Snoke,” gives the immediate impression that Snoke came fully-formed out of a tank, because the next thing we see is the tank with another Snoke in it. The line itself doesn’t have to be that literal, though; it could just as easily mean “I made Snoke what he was,” i.e. he corrupted an existing individual. My preferred version of events is that Snoke was a dark side adept who went exploring in the Unknown Regions, stumbled across Exogol, and was bent to Palpatine’s will. I don’t hold out much hope for this to be canonized, but it remains plausible at this point.

If Palpatine did literally engineer Snoke, though, I’d prefer if it wasn’t for the explicit purpose of fronting the First Order after the OT, because that either means that Snoke was doing nothing for decades, or that he’s actually roughly the same age as Ben Solo. I prefer to think that Palpatine employed Snoke as an administrator for the Sith Eternal cult in the Unknown Regions, and that Snoke in some capacity oversaw the creation of the Sith fleet. I like this version of events because it leaves the door open for some PT-era Snoke stuff in Zahn’s upcoming trilogy about Thrawn in the Unknown Regions.

What about the new Snokes in the vats in the opening of TROS, though? I think that if Kylo Ren hadn’t found Exogol, Palpatine would have sent another Snoke out into the galaxy to sow doubt about whether he’d truly been killed. Palpatine’s strategy has never been based around a single master plan; he prefers to set up a series of contingencies and failsafes so that he comes out ahead no matter what happens. Those Snokes are on ice just in case they become useful later. That’s why they have the injuries that we know Snoke received relatively recently as of the time of the ST; it’s not to suggest that the original Snoke was designed to look all melted and fucked up, it’s because the new Snokes are meant to replace Snoke prime and need to match him.

I don’t know, it’s all pretty dumb no matter how you look at it, but I’ll feel a lot better if they canonize some degree of agency/significance/history for Snoke. Apart from the few bars of Palpatine’s theme that play when Snoke is interrogating Rey in TLJ, there isn’t a whiff of the “man behind the curtain” trope throughout the rest of the ST, and it feels really sloppy and flippant to say in the third film that the big bad in the first two was a literal puppet and not go into any further detail.

A lot’s been said abut the similarities between this movie and the Dark Empire comics, but today it occurred to me that the whole secret-armada-in-the-Unknown-Regions bit is very Dark Force Rising. And the Death Star guns on Star Destroyers is more than a little Darksaber. I think it might be fun to catalog all the recycled Legends elements in this film.

I’m going to a Star Wars themed New Years Eve party (as a Rebel operative) and I decided to spend the afternoon on this little project. Happy with how it came out, but I’d like to try again with my childhood blaster from the 90s at some point and really take my time.

Between DJ’s “they blow you up today, you blow them up tomorrow” speech and Rose’s bit about saving what we love instead of fighting what we hate, The Last Jedi seemed to suggest that there would need to be some different sort of reckoning in the final film that would bust the galaxy out of this cycle of violence and bring about a new era. Instead, we got another big battle and we re-killed the Emperor with his own lightning or something. I know we’re supposed to feel like he’s dead for real this time, but how is this any different from ROTJ? If he can come back from falling down a pit and then blowing up, surely he can reconstitute himself after melting like a Nazi. I dunno, I’m just left feeling like nothing has changed fundamentally beyond a few pieces being knocked off the board. The grand finale that the film was billed as really ought to have had more far-reaching repercussions.

DominicCobb said:

The fact that people use the term “OP” when referring to a character is just proof of how people are looking at these movies in all the wrong ways.

Yep. On a related note, I get the feeling a lot of the people who couldn’t get their head around Luke failing with Ben in TLJ probably learned narrative structure from video games.

RogueLeader said:

To be honest, despite my criticisms of certain story decisions, I also felt the movie was better on my second viewing. It is still fast but not as jarringly fast as it felt the first time around.

I know what you mean. I found it was a lot less frenetic when I knew where it was going. I also picked up on dialogue that justified a couple things that felt like they came out of nowhere the first time.

Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a wagon.

I just saw it for the second time and liked it a lot more. I still think it’s the weakest of the ST, but it’s not nearly the unmitigated disaster I thought it was on Thursday. I won’t be any more bummed out moving from TLJ to this when I marathon the ST than I am going from ESB to ROTJ when I do the OT.

I think JJ is on the record as not liking the idea of director’s cuts in principle. I wouldn’t hate for him to change his mind, though; I think this film could probably be improved a good deal just by adding some breathing room.

What burns me about the lack of any attempt to explain Palpatine’s return is that Rebels actually laid the groundwork for a perfectly acceptable explanation. The blue explosion when Vader chucks the Emperor down the pit in ROTJ looks almost exactly like the smoke effect when Palpatine accesses the “world between worlds” on the show. They absolutely could have used that without getting in the weeds of the specifics of the cartoon, and just had him say that as he was falling he cast himself into the nether regions of the Force and it took some time to find his way back.

I also think Snoke should have just been an acolyte who stumbled across Palpatine and fell under his spell rather than a literal puppet. Those two changes would make it fit so much more smoothly in the continuity, but instead they opted to do it in the most inelegant and unconnected way possible.

All right, let’s give this a shot.

1. Star Wars
2. The Empire Strikes Back
3. The Last Jedi
4. The Force Awakens
5. Return of the Jedi
6. Rogue One
7. Solo
8. The Phantom Menace
9. The Rise of Skywalker
10. Attack of the Clones
11. Revenge of the Sith

I think JJ might have wanted to set Finn up as being Force-sensitive in TFA (what with him being the first to see the Starkiller beam, great disturbance, etc, etc), and now he’s trying to build on it but it seems weird because TLJ totally sidestepped the idea.

EDIT: that’s exactly what you just said, isn’t it. I just finished my finals for my first semester of grad school and I did a fair amount of celebrating, my reading comp isn’t the best at the moment.

Broom Kid said:

It’s gotta be, but the flat-out refusal to consider an option where she’s not in the movie just… I know retrospect makes geniuses out of the biggest dummies (hi there!) but she shouldn’t have been in this movie. The idea shouldn’t have been pursued, and that maybe would have freed them up to pursue different storytelling avenues.

I also was resistant to the idea that Abrams was actively going out of his way to “retcon” what Johnson did but there are actually two or three moments on the level of “This will begin to make things right” where it’s beyond obvious Abrams is breaking the fourth wall to comment on what came before. The most notable is Luke solemnly talking about “disrespecting” the weapon of a Jedi. And if that was meant to be a self-deprecating joke at Luke’s expense, (like a ha-ha smartass “remember when I did that? LOL what a dummy I was” sort of thing) it wasn’t acted, shot, or cut like that at all, so that interpretation is almost impossible to make. Luke (whose hair was trash! Why did it LOOK like that?) was essentially a platitude machine. The only part of that whole scene that works? The part of the scene that is riffing on the infinitely better scene from Empire Strikes Back.

Again, I know Abrams isn’t the most graceful director, but there is so much that is structurally FUCKED about this movie and its characterization and arcs that I have a hard time believing this was actually what he wanted to make. Just going from TFA to this, it’s such a MESS comparatively - I believe PARTS of what he actually wanted to make are IN here, but they’re stitched and glued together very, very sloppily.

I actually didn’t read the saber catch that way at all; I just took it as an acknowledgement of the fact that Luke wasn’t down on the whole Jedi project anymore. The Force ghost effects were definitely weirdly bad, though. Is it because they were in broad daylight? If so, why didn’t they stage the Luke scene at night?

My main issue was the fact that everything that really needed an explanation just got hand-waved. Palpatine’s back! How, you ask? Sith cultists, don’t worry about it. Why is Lando on Pasana? Doesn’t matter, just roll with it. Why does Kylo turn back to the light this time after we’ve seen him go the other way at least twice? I dunno, the comics will probably fix it. They just kept putting down plot points because they needed to happen, and then never even attempted to provide any amount of context that would make it make sense.

I truly think Carrie Fisher’s death is a major factor here. They were on the record almost from day one about this being Leia’s movie in the way TFA was Han’s and TLJ was Luke’s. I think they got caught completely flat-footed when Carrie died and just absolutely failed in the attempt to pivot to something else.

I don’t know what to do with TROS. The story is worse than the PT but the cast makes it so much more engaging to watch.

DominicCobb said:

My review:

We’ll always have The Last Jedi.

joefavs “likes” this post.

With a few hours of hindsight, I think my TROS review is: I can’t wait for Dune.

Woof.

I’m really curious to see what the fan editors can do with it.

I have no idea how to talk about this movie because it was absolutely, without a doubt the worst one in the series in terms of story, but I had more fun watching it than I ever even approached with the PT. It’s preposterous and bad and so bizarrely enjoyable.

This is a good summation of where I’m at with my expectations.

http://eleven-thirtyeight.com/2019/12/a-short-history-of-disappointment-or-why-im-going-to-like-the-rise-of-skywalker/

THAT’S TOO MUCH MONEY FOR THAT

EDIT: did the math and it works out to ~$36/movie. Absolutely insane. Short of the OOT, i can’t begin to conceive what kind of special features it would need to have to justify that price.

I received the SE tapes, the 2004 dvd set, the individual PT dvds, and the OT blu-ray set as gifts at various points. The only things I bought on my own were the GOUT discs, the PT blu-ray set, and the Disney blu-rays.

Just popping in here real quick to say that I just watched this again, and it still rules, and I could not possibly care less about anyone else’s reasons for thinking otherwise.