Yeah, I'm with Haki on this one. Everything that came after the original trilogy lacks consistency in the story telling and it got increasingly worse after George stepped out. "oh, Han shot in self-defense"... "oh, its midicloreans now"... "oh, we completely rewrote Luke's character".... "oh, the empirah is alive and he's your granddaddy"... "oh wait... no he's not". The list goes on. One could argue that "Star Wars is consistent in it's inconsistency". It would be easy to blame corporate influence fucking with the story, but good old George was famous for fiddling with plot points long before the Catheline Kennedy-types started fucking shit up. I think its the biggest thing holding the franchise back from being up there with better written sagas out there. Which makes it extra weird when something great like Rogue One or the Mandalorian comes out; but in both cases we are talking about original characters in settings that hit all the right thematical tones.
Literally, I was still trying hard to be on the boat with Disney after episode 7 but, really... I would not have believed it possible but I've skipped two Star Wars movies at the theaters now. No one said that 1-3 are great or perfect. At the time they were exactly what they were - kinda like fanfic that is a little embarrassing here and there and all but then again it was and felt Star Wars and my take has always been that it's perfectly fine to keep pushing more Star Wars or Indiana Jones movies out, I mean I'm going to watch them and probably going to have a nice evening doing so. They didn't just lose the ball, they went to the wrong park and paid a hobo to give them a blowjob when they were supposed to merely stay within the ballpark. Not just that, while everyone was waiting for them to show up they uploaded a video of the blowjob and said that all the people waiting for them at the ballpark are racist virgins. No, they done fucked it up.
I mean, opinions are opinions of course, but honestly, if you were to go back and reread the complaints threads after 1-3 they're pretty comparable. We've had time to digest and decide whether we can palette them is all. I mean, complaints on 1-3 (at least the ones I still remember/find erroneous); JarJar=May or may not be the actual sith lord. Summon giant fish! (let's take a boat through the core of the planet) Unbelievable transition to the dark side. "Master I'm not sure about this... go kill the younglings! Okay ^.^" I've got the high ground. Noooooooooooo. Major complaints that will likely still be considered 'bad' a few years from now 7-9; Hey look, it's episode 4.2 Captain Phasma Planet Death Star? Really? Considering how 'rare' Khyber Crystals are supposed to be you're going to upscale the Death Star? Casino Planet (only positive to that whole thing was showing the young future resistance/jedi, the rest was completely worthless) Fuel?!? (This was a terrible plot point and honestly could've been written differently to end with the same inevitable chase scene, it makes sense that fuel exists, but this was just bad, also, decloaking scan ) Actually 8 could probably just not exist except for a few choice scenes Wait, now she's Palpatines Grandaughter? After making such a big deal about her coming from nowhere? Make up your damn minds! Giant fleet of Star Destroyers have a difficult time taking out a handful of resistance ships, well now we know why they lost.
But her father was a failed/incomplete clone of palpatine. So more like a niece. (I assume by failed that means the emperor never transferred his conciousness to the clone). So more like a twin brother. This is from the novel for episode 9. Which apparently nthe books are more Canon than the movies.
Opinions are opinions, but as I've said before, some opinions are better than others. Some people think a banana taped to a wall is high art worth $150,000 (yes, that is real). But seriously, there's objective reasons to call those people idiots. Likewise, everyone is entitled to enjoy whatever they want, but there is a mountain of evidence to suggest the recent string of Star Wars movies (with some exceptions) are indeed... dare I say it... "trash". Wait for it! Let me elaborate. It's already been established that Rian Johnson literally didn't care about following established canon. It's already been established that the creative direction of these movies was a BIG hot mess. If the people running Star Wars gave half a shit about writing a good story as much as showing off how "woke" they are, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But here's the thing about trash... trash can be fun too! I'm not saying these new Star Wars movies aren't fun to watch (I still had fun)... but let's be honest with ourselves... they are kind of dumb. More dumb than usual, even. Remember how the first LOTR trilogy was celebrated and the later Hobbit trilogy was largely derided? There's very specific reasons why. Imagine for a moment if Aragorn was surfing on the back of a giant eagle during the battle for Minas Tirith to fight the Witch King 1 vs 1, because the director thought "it would look cool". The nerd armies would have flipped their shit then the same as they are now. I know I bag on them a lot, but I actually liked some of Abram's and Johnsons movies in the past, but ALL of their best movies were not based on established franchises. I know their style and I could have told you ten years ago they were going to fuck this up.
To add to Magnus, I enjoy watching the Abrams Star Trek films. They're fun, and the militarization of Star Fleet makes sense in-universe (the Narrada scared the shit out of them). And if people think the original universe didn't have some war mongering assholes in it they weren't paying attention. That was the main complaint I hear leveled at those films. The actors and characters were completely spot on with their original counterparts, adjusting for some immaturity due to age. They are not masterpieces, but the original films are hit and miss too, so it doesn't bother me. I sat through both The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. There are maybe 15 minutes of the Last Jedi I enjoy (most of Mark Hamill's scenes), and literaly none of the Rise of Skywalker. I was neither interested in nor excited for a single scene in the entire film, and I can't clearly remember much of it now apart from a few images and plot points. I can't quote you a single line of dialogue. Hating it would mean it left an impression on me, but I literally cannot remember enough of it to hate. Failing to leave any impression whatsoever is the mark of a BAD peice of art.
Could everyone else pretty much go "I know what's going to happen" before it happened on screen? Like when Rey was fighting kylo over the dropship using the force and she accidentally blew it up? Did anyone else think "oh. She is about to use force lightning. Meh".
Egh. I don't even wanna think about that scene. As lame as Han's death was, "oh no Chewbacca is dead lol n/m he was on another ship that was totally there the whole time" was a thousand times worse. Shit or get off the pot, Star Wars.
I mean chewie was so awesome the yuuzahn vong had to drop a moon on him. What disney did is pretty lame in comparison.
No bullshit. My head-theory since the first movie as to why we didn't know Rey's history and why she was so powerful was because she was actually the product of a genetic experiment to clone the Emperor. I was damn close. The cloning idea I don't have a problem with. It's the way they executed it in a way that clearly looked like they pulled it out of their ass is more the issue. I consider it a bad case of corporate and directorial meddling. Spoiler: regarding chewie Didn't chewie survive in the end? To be fair, I didn't find "chewie's death" to be among the worst sins of that movie. How 'bout all the unnecessary MacGuffin chasing in the third act; multiple MacGuffins in a single movie... it damn near felt like a Dragon Ball Z episode! And then there was the radio tower they had to blow up... and then not have to blow up? You'd think they would learn after "we need to find the codebreaker".
I'd rather avoid getting too nitpicky here, though. If people want to see all the tropes The Rise of Skywalker achieved (for better or worse), one need only look here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheRiseOfSkywalker Some are pretty hilarious that I had totally forgotten about.
I fall in the camp of the chewie-ship-plot-point not being a terrible sin. Lazy/easy storytelling, sure, but it can be pretty easily overlooked. Geologic rifts occurring at an opportune moment for the storytellers in episode 7, on the other hand, I find really hard to overlook. Rather than an easy/lazy emotional punctuation like in 9 with the ship, in 7 with the rift they really didn't know how to end or separate a main battle and leaned heavily on an improbability to do the work.
Oh, it doesn't ruin the movie by any means. It's just so... dumb. If they wanted a contrived reason for Chewie to get captured and the heroes either being unaware of it or unable to reach him there were plenty of better options than "there was secretly a second ship all along!" E.g: literally anything.
Meh, one opinion isn't much better than another, more rational maybe... That banana gonna rot and some idiot gonna be out 150g for the honor of smelling it. The opinion that this was stupid and someone should've slapped someone else for putting us through this conversation isn't better, it just doesn't end up costing anyone 15o large. In the end there's a sucker born every minute and that particular sucker had more money than sense. I'm not making any kind of comment to support Disney's decision on these films, honestly I think they -should- have given it the same love and attention as the Avengers. They pushed out three abortive bastard children without any real cohesive story or direction that simply happened to contain some of the same characters. That aside there was still some cool shit and honestly my opinion is they weren't significantly worse than 1-3. Bad for very different reasons mind you, but still not significantly worse. But that's my opinion. I loved the Hobbit trilogy and honestly the people who criticized it probably should take a step back and remember that these films were made for people that were -not- balls deep in the Silmarillion. The Hobbit was intentionally not written to the same level as the Lord of the Rings and consequently had more room for growth. That combined with the additions involving the necromancer (which was the one thing I really wanted them to expand upon, because the book pretty much tells us nothing) just left me happy. Sure they didn't need to include Legolas (though odds are he would've been there) and the romance of the dwarves was a bit silly (Morgul shaft? who the hell gives something like that to a random orc bowman? Why was that even necessary? Wouldn't just regular poison have been difficult enough considering none of the 14 are really medics, I mean even just sepsis is terrible, considering?) LoTR got quite a bit of flack at the time too, even though it was quite reasonably true to the original story, most notably due to the absence of one Tom Bombadil, whom I honestly question if they could have reasonably included him in the movie and kept the same tone (considering he's described as wearing a blue jacket and yellow boots ) And honestly while simple appearance might not have prevented him from being considered, his tone and placement would certainly have slowed things down when it was only starting to get moving. Atop that his inexplicable nature and the barrow wights existing almost solely to provide the key to taking down Angmar it kinda seems a stretch to throw into a movie version without the deliberate descriptions of what and why. Hmm, I'm not entirely sure I have a point. Oh well, I kinda liked Ep9 hot mess and all, my favorite part of course being finally and without argument canonizing the yellow saber.
Being completely objective, Zoolander 2 really gets my take on movies and pop culture these days. Objectively I am not a great fun of "oh, man, I just like got this random tattoo, that's like, SO RANDOM" And when "Oh L0Lzers look, it's teh bose battle and I like just turn my back and there all like 'what's he doing' and I'm like 'I don't even know lol' and then suddenly the guy who was dead drives in through the wall with this PINK monster truck that is driven by a penguin and kills the boss and then everyone goes THAT'S SO RANDOM" hits one of my favorite franchises I don't give a shit if someone finds that shit funny, I don't. And I don't appreciate completely racist misandrist super woke press statements such that "oh, fuck them white men, this movie ain't for white men", yea, watch me say that my game is not for black women and how well that would play out. One of the things I love about the old Star Wars is that it's literally in a Galaxy long time ago far away and it has it's own internal logics, silliness, flaws and problems but those are not contemporary issues which I won't even go to but let's just say that the new movies have as much politics as an Irishman has alcohol in his blood - no - if an Irishman had that much alcohol then receiving a transfusion from him would kill you. And being force fed contemporary political wokeness mixed with the kind of humor that doesn't resonate with me one bit doesn't really win me over. It really doesn't. I don't blame anyone for liking it, good for you. Yet I think that the new crowd they went after are not going to see the movies three times in the theater, buy them as they come out and then buy the extended edition and then the collection box and also buy all sorts of crap to fill their work desk with. In fact we can see how the Star Wars merchandise rots in the stores unsold, the movies are sold at discount like a month after release and so on - the ratings are dropping instead of picking up towards the end. If I recall it correctly with franchises like LotR they kept picking up and a common complaint I recall from them was when folks had not seen the previous films (yes, I recall it vividly now) went to see the last one and complained about not understanding what was going on. We had the exact opposite effect with Star Wars - folks dropping out at a rapid rate as they went forward and a lot of people apparently just skipping the last one at theaters entirely. If we're looking at the figures, they bought one of the most iconic franchises to have ever existed and they decided to throw one of the world's most dedicated and loyal fanbases under the bus for ... I don't know why and it doesn't really matter for the outcome, does it? Everything has fans, even an underground band that made purposefully bad songs about "Mummy versus Ropoot (robot)" has a couple of fans who think it was the best. With Star Wars, they killed off a lot of their most loyal fanbase but they didn't manage to build a new fanbase to replace it with. They merely upset longterm fans that were going to want to give them their money and didn't get that money and the people they probably went after just weren't that kind of people and didn't really care. It's the classic triangle drama, really.
TL;DR (I did read it. The TLDR is for anyone else). They pissed off the existing can see and the people they targeted hoping to build a new canvass probably weren't fans in the first place (not interested in seeing it as well)?
Heck that's pretty much the TLDR for most recent Disney films. Like literally nobody wanted a live-action Aladdin.
