Let me see them…. My parents! It was ME, Rey! What!? It was me all along! JJ? Is this a joke? The author of all your pain! ...You really couldn’t come up with anything
better? Remember Star Wars? Most reviewers rush in and cover something
while it’s still relevant, like amateurs. I like to wait for context to build; for all
of the pieces to fall into place, and for everyone to completely stop giving a shit. If you’d prefer to move on with your life
then by all means, watch something else, but if you want to give this dead horse one last
kick in its dead horse balls, may the force be with us. One of the most interesting things about The
Rise of Skywalker is the split between the audience and reviewer scores. It’s almost the exact inverse of The Last
Jedi, with critics now being the ones lambasting the film and fans praising it. Critics called the film "cowardly," "an admission
of defeat," and “a colossal failure of imagination,” and if you're unsure what any of that means,
the movie ends with our jedi hero facing down Palpatine in his throne room; not a Palpatine-esque
character, but the actual Palpatine- the one who died. Why is he back? "Somehow, Palpatine has-" Who gives a shit. This comes after a gratuitous sequence showing
off Palpatine's old throne room with the Return of the Jedi score recycled over it. He beckons Rey to "strike him down" When she
refuses, he opens a window so she can see the giant space battle the rebels are losing
against the empire... the one where "there's too many of them!" and where a ground crew
is tasked with blowing up an antenna. The jedi Palpatine seduced to the dark side
redeems himself by saving our jedi hero. The highest ranking star destroyer gets blown
up and crashes point first into the surface below... and the good guys celebrate on a
forest planet while Luke and Leia's theme plays. And, in a moment that genuinely shocked me
in the theater, the celebration scenes from the special edition of Return of the Jedi
are repeated, just with a star destroyer added in. Think about it- this is the second time in
some 30 years that the people of cloud city have celebrated Palpatine's death. Because this movie could not come up with
anything new. Here's a drinking game for the alcoholics
out there: watch the behind the scenes documentary and take a shot every time someone mentions
tying something back to the originals. I don't know this as a fact, but I assume
most fans would agree that Disney fucked this trilogy up in some way. If it wasn't with The Last Jedi, then maybe
you think it was with The Rise of Skywalker. I say it happened right at the start- with
the Force Awakens. It's a likeable movie that's extremely well
made, but it is just A New Hope again. There's no point in having such a large saga
if it doesn't evolve into new phases; the prequels showed a democracy sliding into facism,
and the originals showed that dictatorship being overthrown by a rebellion. Logically, to bring things full circle this
trilogy should have focused on the growth of a new democracy. And that's exactly what George Lucas was going
to do in his treatments. He was drawing from the struggles of the new
government in Iraq to tell a story about Leia's republic battling against corruption and imperial
remnants, with democracy ultimately prevailing and Leia turning out to be the chosen one. There was also Darth Maul with robot legs
in there, which is… shit. Michael Arndt took too long to write the screenplay,
so Lawrence Kasdan and JJ Abrams tossed those ideas in the trash (“trash compactor?”)
and decided to make a nostalgic homage to Star Wars instead. It was a mad-libs version of A New Hope where
you just change the names. Instead of Tatooine, it's Jakku. Instead of the Death Star, it's Starkiller
base. It’s frustrating to look through all of
the cool concepts that were rejected in favor of 1:1 recreations of what we’ve already
seen. Most people were fine with this fanservice
because the fans hadn't been serviced in a very long time. The Force Awakens was seen as a palate cleanser
for the prequels, and the next films could do something new. But that's the problem- how do you tell a
new story when you've set us up to tell the old one again? Instead of a new phase, we're starting right
from the same position A New Hope did, as if the record is skipping- the original trilogy
may as well have not happened. I don’t want to waste time arguing that
The Last Jedi was good- I already tried- but you have to appreciate that Rian Johnson had
the difficult job of doing all the dirty work that The Force Awakens avoided. Not just in terms of finding a new story,
but in making sense of the one we had just heard. The Force Awakens told us that Luke abandoned
his friends in shame and did not return to save Han's life or to help Leia when she desperately
needed him, even though we know that he should be able to sense these things happening. It shirked any responsibility for showing
us what that Luke was thinking and left his characterization up to the next film. Rian Johnson handled it by extruding from
what JJ Abrams had given him- not by subverting expectations, but by drawing a straight line
out from the previous film in his words. Rian Johnson not only answered the hard questions
about Luke but found a way to tell his own story in the process, stacking layers and
layers of meaning onto the foundation given to him. And as hard as he worked to get a nostalgia-riding
series off of that rail, The Rise of Skywalker works even harder to get back on it. You say it's uninteresting to repeat the master
and apprentice dynamic again? That means we're doing it. We’re going to say we aren’t- even though
we specifically brought Palpatine back for Kylo to have a bigger villain to overthrow
again. Some of the retconning is outright petty-
the moment Rey threw her arm back to toss the saber, I knew- "oh god, they're going
to have Luke catch it to undo that moment from The Last Jedi." And they did. This is the kind of talk you expect to see
on Twitter, not the silver screen. Chris Terrio insisted that this wasn’t a
snub, but why return to this specific moment otherwise? After Luke gave his life to become the symbol
of hope, did we need to bookend the saber toss to prove that he learned something? It’s hard to shake the feeling that Terrio
didn’t understand what The Last Jedi was about. "Fear is what kept me on this island." Nope- Rian Johnson specifically based his
script on the idea that it couldn't be fear keeping Luke there. Rey's parentage was retconned because they
thought fans didn’t want to be told their theories didn’t matter, so they just redid
the answer. Imagine someone pulling this shit with Return
of the Jedi. "Is Darth Vader my father?" "No. Chewbacca, your father is. MacClunkey..." When the mystery of Rey's parentage was introduced
in The Force Awakens, you probably assumed she was related to one of the characters we
know and that she was left there for an important reason, like protecting her from the dark
side- because that's the trope. That our humble heroes are actually important
people predestined for greatness. Rey being no one wasn't about "SUBVERTING
YOUR EXPECTATIONS." The answer challenged her to move forward
as her own person and showed Rey that her future was not dictated by the past. It also tied into the theme that anyone can
be a hero, and that bloodlines and destiny don't decide who is important in the story. It’s no accident that the film mentioned
the Skywalker lineage so often. “...the potential of your bloodline…”
“...that mighty skywalker blood!” It left interesting suggestions about Rey's
power that didn't need to be answered. Maybe the force was balancing itself through
Rey, or maybe she just had the right spirit to wield it. Nope, it's just Palpatine DNA- look at those
midichlorians go! Sheev genes, baby! "Behold... the full power of my midichlorian
count!" This film doubles down hard on the idea that
the force is exclusively genetic- and they must have realized this halfway through
writing because they gave Finn a disposable moment with the force. See! Anyone can still use the force! You just, you know, won't be important. You'll sit on the sidelines and watch the
royal family members do royal person stuff. Whatever drama “Rey Palpatine” was supposed
to generate was based on it being the hardest answer for her, but Rey being hidden to protect
her from evil isn’t the hardest answer; that’s exactly what she wanted to hear all
along- that her parents loved her and left her for a reason. This desperate retcon was apparently decided
after filming began- and demonstrates the absolute refusal of this
script to allow anything interesting from The Last Jedi to stand. Even if we’ve got no better ideas, we're
checking those fanservice boxes. At this point, I have to apologize and make
a retraction. Because just before the movie came out I said
this- and after seeing Rise of Skywalker there's no way either statement is true. It seemed plausible at the time! Even if you take Abrams and Terrio at their
word that they were genuinely trying to embrace what Rian Johnson did, their every attempt
at subverting The Last Jedi led to a less interesting plot than what he left them, and
one that manages to commit a lot of the mistakes fans accused his movie of making. Luke dying for no reason was a common complaint,
but he died because he overexerted himself performing the most extreme use of the force
seen in the series. In this film, Rey actually dies for no reason. I guess Palpatine was supposed to have sapped
her life away, but Ben was doing just fine and even had enough left to totally revive
her. Unless holding up those lightsabers required
the force. “I’m as powerful as infinity!” “I’m as powerful as infinity plus one,
FUCK YOU!” “Macklunkeeyyy!!” People thought The Last Jedi faked them out
with cheap moves like Leia being blasted into space, but Leia's survival didn't render that
scene meaningless- it put Leia in a coma and set Poe off on his arc to become her replacement. Here, Chewie’s non-death is pretty much
meaningless, as is C3P0's minutes long memory loss. I don't know why the film builds this up into
some powerful moment, because it's happened before- (“have the protocol droid’s mind
wiped”) -and they undercut any dramatic weight it might have had by making it clear
that R2 has data backups... which are used minutes later. So fuck it, what are we even doing here we’re
wasting our time! This is already really negative and I don't
want this to just be a tired and abrasive rant, so let's take a positivity break to
talk about the things this movie has going for it. It looks great. The emphasis on practical effects in this
trilogy continues to pay off, and I know when seeing sequences like the Pasana festival
that these would have been CGI back in the prequels. But here, they actually had an army of real
actors out in the real world. The film delivered all the spectacle any fan
could have asked for. The actors are all doing their best in spite
of the material and cement that they were the perfect choices. In fact, I would argue that this trilogy managed
the most consistently good performances in the saga. Richard E. Grant's character is just a marvelous
asshole. We’ve seen space nazis before, but this
guy looks like he LIVES to reich and roll. Leia's scenes always feel like out of context
audio stuck together, but I commend them for finding some kind of conclusion for her. Carrie Fisher's death was a huge blow to the
storyline and it’s nice that they worked around it without writing her out completely. I like that the force bond concept was taken
further and the fusion of different settings was a very cool visual. I also like Kylo's exchange with Han, because
this is a moment that actually feels like it was earned and built towards throughout
the trilogy. Maybe it doesn't make total sense that a memory
of Han is appearing like a force ghost, but it has real emotional weight to see Kylo relive
that moment as Ben this time. ...And then he doesn't speak a word for the
rest of the movie. Adam Driver as Kylo Ren is one of the most
consistently praised parts of this trilogy and they apparently had no idea what to do
with him after his turn; he just ceases to be a character and amounts to little more
than a lightsaber delivery boy. He begins fiercely determined to eliminate
any threat to his power, but he and the movie alike forget that he’s the supreme leader
about halfway through and he seems just fine with random officers supplanting him. There was a lot of gloating about the cast
all being together in this one, that we would have that great chemistry front and center. But it doesn't matter for much when the characters
have next to nothing to do; their scenes mostly amount to hollow banter. “I haven’t seen you this tense since we
fell into that nest of gundarks!” Finn is mostly there to shout other people’s
names, which has been an unfortunate trend from the start. The best he gets is a conversation with other
defecting storm troopers, which highlights how much conflict Finn should have about gunning
these people down at this point- Blaw Blaw Blaw, die mothefuckers! That same raid scene exposes how little Poe
has learned since the last film, where his mission to infiltrate the supreme leader’s
ship failed because of the tiniest mistake and nearly ended the rebellion. They try the same thing again but without
any plan at all this time- they just run into the most heavily guarded ship in the universe
and start blasting. Which is especially dumb because they have
Rey, who can do this- “it’s OK that we’re here.” Why not do that from the start and have what
you need brought to your ship? “We’re looking for a prisoner… and his
belongings.” “OK. I’ve got no problem with that!” Their raid fails, Poe gets shot, and they’re
only spared from execution because of dumb luck. There’s no moment in this film where Poe
demonstrates his growth as a leader; he completely freezes in the final battle and just bears
witness as Lando is the one that saves the universe. Rose has about as much a role in the film
as these 2D storyboard cutouts. Terrio explained that they couldn’t successfully
integrate her into the footage of Leia, but that confirms that they never intended to
give her anything to do other than stand around in the background in the first place. Even if you hate what The Last Jedi did to
Luke it at least gave him depth and an arc to work through. I think it’s Mark Hammil’s best performance,
and you can glean so much about Luke’s mental place just from the way he looks. This time, he stands around looking like he’s
in a bad wig with a few lines of superficial dialog leading up to him becoming a lightsaber
delivery boy. After handling The Last Jedi with such professionalism,
Mark Hammil deserved a better part than this. “You’ll take both sabers to Exogol. You see, that’s Palpatine’s weakness-
two lightsabers. Also, I forgot that I knew you were his granddaughter.” “Who are you?” I made fun of fans for calling everything
they don’t like fan service last time, but some of these scenes literally are fanservice
I read online after The Last Jedi. So many people thought Luke should have raised
his X-wing and flown to Crait in person, because all we want are callbacks to old moments we
like… and this film does it. Hey, did you get the wing back on there? …Because I think you need that. It’s not hard to rhyme with old moments-
Rey wanted to be an X-wing pilot. Now she is one! Chewie didn’t get a medal. Now he has one! -but you could stitch a thousand
of these feel good moments together and they would never amount to a good story. Nostalgia can’t paper over a movie failing
its characters. Rey is the only one with anything substantial
to go through and it’s a rehash of two arcs that we’ve seen before. The idea that the hero is descended from the
villain worked with Luke and Vader because it was clear, even before the prequels explicitly
spelled it out, that Luke’s life had a lot of parallels with his father’s. Rey has nothing in common with Palpatine. Her life as a scavenger bears no resemblance
to anything we saw of his, and her parents- one a direct clone of Palpatine- weren’t
evil. They stretch this faux-drama thinnest when
she gives up on Luke’s island. After coaxing Luke out of exile and witnessing
his story’s resolution, it doesn’t really make sense for a character with her perspective
on those events to arbitrarily decide to do the same thing. After being widely derided as a supernaturally
perfect Mary Sue for two films, she suddenly has to hide because she’s in imminent danger
of turning completely evil. Do you buy it? When you saw this in the trailer, did you
think- even for a moment- that Rey might actually go bad? This is what they staked the finale of Star
Wars on; a laughable pull to the dark side caused by a last minute feigned genetic connection
to a long obsolete character. The other arc that Rey repeats is the one
she just completed; setting aside her past and not letting her parentage define her. Only this time, she won’t forge her own
path… She’s just trading one lineage for the other. “Rey Skywalker.” I think she gave the right answer earlier
in the film. “I’m just Rey.” There’s one other element holding together
the fanservice and Last Jedi retcons, and that is absolute filler. A fetch quest consumes half the film and you
can connect Star Wars to Kevin Bacon in fewer degrees than it takes them to find the magical
crystal they’re after. There’s so much of this junk that the film
balloons to one of the longest runtimes in the series and has to be frantically paced
to get through it all. My boy! I’m here to kill you! Kill Rey instead. Ok. Hi doggie. You’re my favorite sith. Let the Doggie die. An editor named Mike Nichols did a recut of
The Phantom Menace and helped kick off a fan edit movement that continues to this day. For Attack of the Clones, he cut 40 minutes
out of the film using shortcuts like this. (“Kamino system”) That little dubbed in
line allowed the movie to completely skip over the 50’s diner because it was unnecessary
padding. That’s the kind of hatchet work this film
needed. For example, maybe 3P0 doesn’t refuse to
translate the knife. And while we’re at it, maybe Chewie and
the dagger don’t get taken away. Between those cuts a full thirty minutes would
be freed up, which could allow other scenes to actually breathe. And how many things of value would be missed... Babu Frick? Poe was a smuggler? You could stick the Palpatine revelation somewhere
else. Or better yet, don’t relitigate Rey’s
origin and free up even more time. But it works in the film’s service that
things are so rushed, because the writing holding all of this together is so poor that
any time to process it would undo everything. It’s the Three Stooges syndrome, where so
many dumb ideas are crowding their way into your head at once that none can get through. My favorite character in the series is now
Ochi, the sith. If you follow the story the movie gives you,
Ochi was dispatched to find Rey so that Palpatine could use her as a vessel for his spirit. Given that Palpatine was falling apart, one
has to assume this was a high priority job for his very best guy. Ochi finds Rey’s parents and immediately
flies them off the planet without looking for Rey, which I say because she was actually
screaming at him the whole time. How many other five year olds are out in the
open desert of Jakku? He asks where Rey is and they tell him, “not
on Jakku!,” which he believes. “Damn, she could be anywhere!” He then kills them both without doing any
of the mind probing stuff that’s all over the series, because I guess Palpatine didn’t
teach him any of that- he must not have come from a midichlorian rich lineage. He then travels to Pasana- I assume he’s
just searching every Tatooine clone in the galaxy- and gets stuck in quicksand 20 feet
from his ship and then eaten by a snake. Ochi, the jedi hunter! There’s a joke theory about Jar-Jar being
a sith lord, and this is what Darth Jar-Jar would look like. I unironically want a Disney+ spinoff following
Ochi’s bumbling adventures. Fuck Obi-Wan, Fuck Lando, fuck Cassian Andor,
make THIS one happen. The film saves its dumbest for last, with
Palpatine’s return being every bit the disaster it had potential to be. “It’s a story of Skywalkers and Palpatines…” There was only one Palpatine… and he died
meaningfully. We were done with him. Ian McDiarmid is a great actor and he was
one of the few characters to shine in the prequels. The appeal was in watching how precisely he
manipulated the other characters. That part of him didn’t make it through
the cloning process; he instructs Kylo Ren to kill Rey even though his plan requires
her alive. Why? He’s not testing Kylo for any deeper purpose
and seems to have no interest in him beyond getting Rey. Rey arrives determined to kill him- “I’m
going to find Palpatine… and destroy him.” -and he says the one exact thing that will
stop her from doing it. Nice work, Iago. He would have had better luck with this move-
“I’m too weak! Don’t kill me!” When Rey and Kylo team up he realizes they’re
a dyad and decides to level up his clone body with their force power instead. He’s really just kind of winging it until
finally his spell reflects off of Harry’s wand and kills him. With 30 years of time he planned things out
about as well as this trilogy. The only thing he has going for himself is
a massive fleet. And how did the final order build a fleet
so much more powerful when the first order had the advantage of stealing resources from
all over the galaxy? I doubt supply convoys were passing through
those gravity wells, so Exogol must be the most resource rich planet in the universe. And even if you hand wave that question, why
did Palpatine announce his plan for revenge before his ships were ready? Almost every time the rebels have been presented
with one thing they need to blow up, they’ve blown that thing up. Their explosion track record is incredible. How is he not taking them seriously as a threat
by now? Get your ships off the planet, THEN announce
your sinister plans to Fortnite. And even ignoring how dumb all of that is,
victory is explicitly tied to trapping the final order on Exogol. But the first antenna is never destroyed. Couldn’t they have just reactivated that
one and started again without missing a beat? “Ok, fire it back up!” And why does the final order have to use an
antenna to broadcast the way out anyway? “Nav can’t tell which way is up out there.” The antenna can’t literally be for telling
the ships which way is up, because that’s stupid and the crew do that by looking out
the window. I wanted to be fair so I looked up what the
antenna was doing and wookipedia confirms that it was guiding the fleet through the
wormhole stuff... and that raises a thousand questions. Rey uses the wayfinder to leave a trail that
millions of ships can easily follow. Couldn’t a single tie fighter do the same
thing? The final order didn’t have a wayfinder,
but that antenna was broadcasting something; they obviously have some kind of data that
allows passage through. Why does their data have to be streamed in
real time? They can’t put it on a USB stick? Why only two antennas? They built a fleet of a million fully staffed
death stars but couldn’t spring for even four or five Sith routers? Enough that the rebels couldn’t knock them
all out at once? And even ignoring all of that, those million
rebel ships should conceivably have no trouble following those bread crumbs again if they
want to. The first order was everywhere in the galaxy;
couldn’t they capture even a single one of these civilian vessels and have access
to Exogol again? What’s stopping the final order from using
Rey’s breadcrumbs? How did so many random ships manage to tune
into that signal in the first place? If there was a secret access code for it,
it must have been broadcast to the entire galaxy for this many people to show up, and
wouldn’t that be easy for the empire to find and crack? They tracked Rey across the universe using
a necklace, I’m sure they can handle this. The film is very vague about how many star
destroyers were blown up, and maybe they were hoping they could cover these plot holes by
suggesting that every single ship was destroyed. But even in that scenario, what about the
first order? The final order wasn’t even a known factor
until a few days ago. Destroying this new fleet does nothing for
the empire that the rebellion was already losing to. Also, at least one sith destroyer is still
out there and is more mobile and dangerous than either death star was. I guess killing the bad guy again led to all
that stuff blowing up really easily. These are fantasy movies, and you have to
allow for suspension of disbelief. But this film pushes well beyond the threshold
where suspension is possible; it’s not nitpicking to tear the plot apart like this, the writing
is so bad that the critical plot points don’t even function at the surface level. The only way to make sense of it is with the
thought that they wanted Return of the Jedi’s ending again but even they realized that they
couldn’t do another death star. So they fragmented it into a lot of smaller
ships, but still wanted the simplicity of that single exploding thing that would lead
to victory, but they couldn’t find a way to make it work and did it anyway hoping you
were too dumb to notice. That’s a summary of The Rise of Skywalker
as a whole; a movie that gave up halfway through doing something utterly unoriginal. “The end of this saga has to feel surprising
but also inevitable.” It wasn’t surprising that the movie ended
on another callback to A New Hope- the last trilogy ended the same way- but it did feel
inevitable that the ultimate conclusion of the saga would be more nostalgic pandering. The ending of a trilogy can have a powerful
effect on the earlier movies. The prequels aren’t great, but they’re
slightly elevated once you’ve seen Revenge of the Sith and understand the full arc. Knowing that Luke turns father at the end
of that trilogy adds another layer to their scenes together. Rise of Skywalker does almost nothing but
depreciate the films before it. It’s harder to enjoy The Force Awakens knowing
that its mystery boxes were utterly empty and that its ideas crescendoed into just another
nostalgia movie. It goes without saying that The Last Jedi’s
ideas received a retroactive abortion. And for a movie that leans so heavily on Return
of the Jedi, it takes a dump on Vader’s sacrifice by reframing it as basically just
causing Palpatine to prestige. The movie is so bad that, having admonished
Star Wars fans for being so negative, I can’t talk about it without becoming a total hypocrite. I went in hopeful and open minded and tried
to encourage others to do the same, never suspecting that the script would be detestable-
not because it’s poorly written, but because of how wittingly regressive it is. If this movie is so bad, then why do a lot
of people seem to like it? Reading through the positive audience reviews
on rottentomatoes, there’s a lot of “really good,” “great,” “fun,” “Nostalgia,”
“feel good,” “epic,” “fond memories,” “cool stunts good movie,” “it was Star
Wars...” “Tied together,” “ride,” “awesome,”
“awesome,” “awesome,” “action,” “awesome,” “fun elements you expect,”
“awesome,” “having LEAH and Luke,” “best movie,” “special effects,” “loved
it,” “graphics,” “I had a great time at the movies,” “fight scenes,” “APPLAUSE
EMOJIS,” NICE, “perfect,” “fitting,” “I love star wars,” and the expected amount
of Last Jedi bashing. Never before have I seen such a shitload of
nothing. I haven't come across any argument in favor
of this movie that doesn’t hinge on fanservice. I don’t want to shame anyone for liking
Rise of Skywalker, because the one thing it definitely has going for it is that it’s
entertaining. It is enjoyable to watch if you just stop
thinking and let the familiar sights and sounds wash over you. But it’s ironic that the film ended up this
way since that’s exactly what people were afraid of when Colin Trevorrow was put in
charge of 9. Based on the Jurassic World movies people
thought he would end the series with nothing but dumb spectacle. His script actually seems like it was the
more thoughtful one. Want to hear what’s in it? No? Fuck you. Rose, Finn and Poe go on a mission to destroy
a first order shipyard- yes, Kelly Marie Tran was in this one- and their detonators fail
to damage the structure. Rey had been following the mission against
Poe’s orders and saves them, and a few things are demonstrated right from the start- Poe is actually making decisions as a leader
and believed Rey was too important to the rebellion to risk on this job. Rey has fused Luke’s saber with her staff
to symbolically make the hero’s sword into her own weapon, instead of just pointlessly
igniting it after the movie is over. And the effect of Luke’s sacrifice is immediately
visible as the slaves building the ships recognize Rey as a Jedi and unite to help her escape. The script provides a lot of moments like
this to establish how near revolt the universe seems to be. Finn is grabbed by a dying trooper on the
way out and is disturbed to recognize the face he sees in the broken mask, already doing
more with his character than Rise of Skywalker. They board a newly built star destroyer and
Rey mind tricks the skeleton crew into flying them out. Inside they discover an arsenal of weapons
and vehicles that could be used to launch a major strike against the first order. As far as heists go, this beats the shit out
of the one in the actual movie. Luke’s role is far larger with his ghost
continuing to train Rey and haunting Kylo Ren. Rey questions the Jedi’s concept of
balance when it seems to perpetuate a never ending cycle between light and dark. Later, Lando also acknowledges the apparent
futility of everything they did in the originals. I like that the script addresses these things,
as it widens the scope of the final episode to focus on the AEONIAN problems recurring
throughout the trilogies. This is where the second draft splits off
from the publicly leaked one, so this is all secondhand information. Poe is reluctant to fly the very conspicuous
stolen destroyer back to the rebel base but is forced to when it falls under attack from
the first order. They manage to rescue some rebels but Leia
is wounded and dies soon after. BB8 finds maps of all rebel bases in the destroyer’s
system and they realize that their base was just the first in a sweep that will wipe the
rebellion out. They need to warn the others but the first
order has blocked all communication in the galaxy. Rey, Poe and Chewie leave to find an ancient
jedi broadcast system that is immune to the jamming while Finn and Rose try to recruit
fighters. In the first draft, this happens on Coruscant,
while the later ones seem to change it to some random world. I like Coruscant better and that’s what
all the art shows, so let’s pretend it’s there. The knights of Ren have more scenes but still
end up mainly being there for one big fight. At least in this version you get to see Chewie
toss one in the air and blast him, while Rey force pulls one into her saber blade and kills
the leader with an unexpected blast of lightning. This idea seemed to have been repurposed by
Rise of Skywalker. Rose gets captured and tortured for the location
of the stolen destroyer, which is now the main rebel ship, while Finn finds the underground
resistance and has a great moment where he convinces a stormtrooper to defect. He leads the citizens to revolt and a squad
of stormtroopers join them, leading to a giant battle on the streets where the first order’s
own weapons and soldiers are turned against them. The fight turns grim when first order reinforcements
pour in, but Rey gets the signal out at the jedi temple and Lando shows up with thousands
of civilian ships, as in the movie. Hux detaches the capital ship from the city
and attempts to flee, but Rose reprograms its navigation systems before escaping, causing
it to crash into the sun. There were a lot of potential ways for this
final episode to connect all 9 movies together… I think this was a decent one. Star Wars has always been about space nazis,
propaganda, coups, and… war, obviously. No one liked the prequels being so political
at the time, but while the story was not well told it was prescient of George Lucas to lay
out how fascism spreads. A leader doesn’t just take over from the
top. It’s the fear of losing something, the glacial
erasure of norms, forcefully repeated lies, and a loss of faith in democracy and its supporting
institutions that twist the people into welcoming tyrants in as heroes. It seems appropriate then to end the series
with the people rectifying their mistake and fighting from the bottom up to win democracy
back. To be fair Rise of Skywalker tried to carry
this message but it was an aside, buried under the cliche of blowing up a thing again. Its big idea to tie the series together was
bringing back the guy from the old movies and… that was it. Duel of The Fates ends with Rey finally achieving
real balance by accepting her dark side and embracing all of the force. She starts training a new generation of gray
jedi that will hopefully avoid the mistakes of the past. This is the kind of finality that Rise of
Skywalker lacked; not that everything needs to be completely settled forever, but in the
movie there’s nothing stopping the dark side from rising again, or a new republic
from failing again, or even Palpatine from coming back in a third body. But there are major problems with Trevorrow’s
script that make it clear why it was rejected; the fact that I could summarize it without
mentioning Kylo Ren is a red flag. He has nothing compelling to do in this story
and is wasted on a quest to obtain some kind of sith powerup. He still turns good at the last minute and
revives Rey with his life force, but he’s an uncomplicated villain with a weak motivation
up until that point. Rise of Skywalker did more with him, as meager
as it was. This version also needlessly meddles with
Rey’s past to reveal that Kylo Ren killed her parents. I’d still take this over her being Palpatine
junior, but it’s bad. Trevorrow has shamelessly lifted ideas before
and that happens again, with Rey covering her damaged eyes with a blindfold and using
the force to see in the final act. The scene where Rey speaks to all the past
jedi is here but it’s a little more like Harry Potter’s station scene in that she’s
given a choice to stay among them. The important thing is that this story had
good ideas that were too perfect to throw out- it was the connective tissue holding
them together that needed to be redone. Leigh Brackett’s first draft of Empire Strikes
Back wasn’t that great, but all the basic story beats were established there. A rewrite can make all the difference; in
this case, two of them still weren’t enough to get there. Disney lost patience with the process and
in hindsight that may have been a tragic mistake. But I don’t blame JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio
for failing to deliver; who could have? Disney’s rapid pace and overlapping productions
didn’t allow time to react to major setbacks. JJ Abrams ended up with one and a half fewer
years to work than Rian Johnson and was forced to edit on set at basically the same time
as filming. Is it any surprise they grabbed a bunch of
old shit off the shelf and glued it together with chewing gum? In fact, it’s kind of admirable just how
watchable the movie is considering the bad material. That’s not a backhanded insult; JJ Abrams
is a hell of a director for pulling that off. He and Chris Terrio love the series and they
did what they thought was right in the time they had, which is all you can expect. It’s easy to blame the evil multinational
corporation for rushing to squeeze every dollar out of this beloved property, but I ultimately
can’t blame Disney either... I blame YOU. “Look at what you have made!” Because companies go where the money is, and
that’s something that we decide. The reaction to The Last Jedi certainly seems
to have been a factor in how this movie was written, but the bigger problem predates that. “Normal” movies are becoming a thing of
the past… people don’t see them. Even Speilberg had a hard time getting Lincoln
in theaters. “Ask HBO, it was this close to being a TV
movie!” We only seem to respond to nostalgia and spectacle. If you’re a millennial, think of something
from your childhood… is there a movie or show reboot of it? Because I’m hard pressed to find anything
I can answer “no” to. Within 12 years, Marvel has made 24 movies
about CGI superheroes hitting each other. DC has done 20 since the 2000s, with plans
to gear up from here. We’re on the verge of our second Ghostbusters
reboot, the sixth Jurassic Park, and a diarrhea of Avatar. Terminator has been revived four times, and
the last three in a row were failed attempts at new trilogies. If Alien 7 doesn’t get you excited, then
maybe the hip fracturing adventures of Indiana Jones will! Remember those cartoons? They’re real life now! The list gets pretty depressing as you near
the bottom of the barrel. CHiPs, Baywatch, Battleship, GI Joe, Power
Rangers, and a hexalogy of Transformers movies with more to come. If you went back in time and told the world
that 50% of our movies would be based on toys, they would probably just hit the button and
end it. The top ten grossing films of 2019 were either
remakes or entries into established franchises; the same was true for 2018, and 2017 before
it. We wallow in recycled ideas, and when one
gets exhausted, we reboot it and start over again, as if we forgot it ever happened before. Lost in the pandering are a lot of cool new
movies that nobody bothered to see. Or, in the case of Blade Runner 2049, a sequel
that truly deserved to be made. Lucas and Spielberg envisioned a future where
theaters would give up and exclusively play huge franchise movies, with everything else
migrating to streaming. It hasn’t happened yet, but things are still
on that trajectory- although theaters may just die altogether
first. Star Wars has an interesting place in all
this because it was conceived as a serial; by nature, it’s meant to unfold in new chapters
over time. But the concept doesn’t work when we get
reruns instead of new episodes. Fans have demanded that we get nothing but
an endless slideshow of our favorite things, and the only movie that rejected overt pandering
is the most intensely hated thing in the series. It seems Disney has gotten the message.The
Mandalorian had the best chance to explore new territory because it was free to detach
from the Skywalker storylin- oh it’s Luke Deepfaker… After a promising start, the second season
collapsed into a string of fanservice and wookipedia namedrops… “Ahsoka Tano…” “Grand Admiral Thrawn!” Some people got pissed off at me for saying
that fans just wanted easy slop, like Luke kicking ass with his green lightsaber. Well Sooie! Come get yer spot at the trough, you hungry
piggies! If you’re the type to get upset over someone
prodding your fandom like this- I am again not shaming anyone for liking this. I know that 2020 was a shitty year and that
this was a rare spot of joy for a lot of people. But I’d be more inclined to agree with the
people saying this was some profound moment if all the writing leading up to it hadn’t
been a threadbare excuse to wedge in as many fan favorite characters committing massacres
as possible. Star Wars isn’t about Boba Fett almost-but-not-quite
killing enough people to make up for his embarrassing death, or a CGI Mark Hammil slaughtering robots
with all the characterization of a can of raid. It used to tell a story instead of jingling
the things we like in our faces, like keys in front of a baby. There’s nothing wrong with a little fanservice
or a sequel once in a while, but it can’t be all that we live on. If you take anything from this video, I don’t
want it to be that Rise of Skywalker is bad or that JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio aren’t
talented people; they are. Consider it a gentle nudge to ask for more. Stop taking a scorched Earth approach when
an old series does something new that we don’t like. If Star Wars becomes nothing but backward
looking nostalgia, it will die with the current crop of fans. It can’t survive into future generations
without evolving. Try to take more chances and seek out things
that you don’t recognize. If something unfamiliar looks interesting,
go see it. Once theaters aren’t festering with disease,
I mean. And if it turns out to be good, tell people. I can’t count the number of things I only
found out about long after their failures; it’s the “Arrested Development” effect. If we want to avoid a future of fanservice
slop then we have to be willing to support new ideas and all the risks that entails. And that’s “if” we want new things… Because this is how cinema dies… “with
thunderous applause.” “Drop the beat!” It was actually my birthday that day. You know what happened… say it. No one came... I didn’t mind. It didn’t stop me from becoming the birthday
boy I was meant to be.
