Disney Star Wars Is It Actually That Bad?

[Mercurius]

Because of the requirements of the next assignment, introduce James Bond to Agent 004, who happens to be female and is able to get into places "a British businessman" would not blend in.

And/or Agent 001 whose family hails from a former British Empire nation (which conveniently is the exotic locale du jour) and also can blend into crowds where Bond will stick out like a sore thumb.

There are presumably nine Agents 00x, but we don't see the others in the movies. Introduce one and tell an interesting story.

Expand the worldbuilding, don't over-write what was written before.

Yes, exactly!

 

[Zardnaar]

Because of the requirements of the next assignment, introduce James Bond to Agent 004, who happens to be female and is able to get into places "a British businessman" would not blend in.

And/or Agent 001 whose family hails from a former British Empire nation (which conveniently is the exotic locale du jour) and also can blend into crowds where Bond will stick out like a sore thumb.

There are presumably nine Agents 00x, but we don't see the others in the movies. Introduce one and tell an interesting story.

Expand the worldbuilding, don't over-write what was written before.

This is how I would do it. I don't want to see a Jane Bond but a female double 00 sure.

An obvious Jane Bond would be his daughter that's about the only way it would work imho.

Why Rey gets called a Mary Sue was she was busting out powers in TFA Luke didn't use until his third movie after being trained twice. It's not consistent with established SW lore from the OT, PT and even Rebels.

Rian's idea anyway me can be a Jedi has merit. You don't have to be a Skywalker or a Palpatine or whatever. He just chose the wrong time and place to do it in a movie marketed as the Sky Walker Saga which implies Skywalkers.

Personally I would have just made Rey a Jedi Knight. She doesn't need a bloodlines me but she did need a relationship with Luke going down that path.

Jedi Knight, Luke's star pupil boom dine and it kinda makes Luke a success post RotJ. Kylo can still exist he's just a student if Luke that's gone dark.

The other big mistake with Rey was essentially repeating Lukes arc. They didn't need to do that and I think it undermines her character development.

Each of the ST movies was a potential trilogy by itself imho. To many cooks in kitchen to many ideas no cohesive plot.

 

[Argyle King]

Rey isn't the hero. She's the villain.

She successfully completed Palpatine's mission of corrupting/destroying the Skywalker bloodline, and she does so while being heralded as a hero and filling a power vacuum which she helped to create.

 

[Rabulias]

Rey isn't the hero. She's the villain.

She successfully completed Palpatine's mission of corrupting/destroying the Skywalker bloodline, and she does so while being heralded as a hero and filling a power vacuum which she helped to create.

Interesting take. But wouldn't she be more lucky than the villain in that case? Like the low-level gangster who ends up the sole survivor of a gang war (that they did not start)?

 

[Stalker0]

TFA and TLJ I found okay-ish, and didn't watch the last one, although I've seen enough people trashing it to know mostly what happened.

It's mostly a lot of very strange decisions, that only get worse when you get more info from the other movies (e.g. Leia sends muggle Han to talk to Kylo, when she's a trained Jedi, Luke goes to sulk on an island while his friends are being murdered, Finn is hyped as a possible Jedi then becomes a sidekick, Rey and Kylo romance at all, etc).

Yeah, its a good start that kind of goes in very weird places due to some very questionable (and don't right idiotic) decisions.

TFA
TFA starts off really strong. Some great character energy, some interesting setup, a lot of interesting mystery boxes (which Abrams is famous for....however, he is often terrible at opening them). TFA struggles from three main things:

• No connective tissue with the previous movies. We learn literally nothing about what's happened between RTJ and now, where did this first order come from? Why are their "rebels" when the rebels work with teh New Republic, doesn't that make them just "the republic army?" I feel like this is the result of our modern era of prequels, I'm sure disney has plans to plug those gaps in the timeline with various other properties, but it makes your current movies more hallow.
• The New Hope Redux. Having watched the movie again, its actually not quite as bad a retread as it initially appears. But especially the last 25% is really just a remake, and it's not necessary. We don't need an even bigger death star.
• Rey vs Kylo lightsaber fight: This is really the beginning of the "Mary Sue" criticism, simply put....the idea that a completely untrained force user could actually get in a hit against a master lightsaber fighter is LUDICROUS. What I think they were going for was the idea that Kylo was so hurt that he couldn't put up a good fight....he just wasn't hurt enough to make it believable. If he was barely able to stand and barely able to swing a lightsaber, then ok I'll buy that Rey could get in a swing or two.

TLJ
While some fans dislike certain directions that the movie decided to take, for me the fundamental problem with the movie is....its just an incredibly stupid movie.

• The main plot is ridiculous. Ok we are just going to travel while being constantly blasting on by the empire force....for the entire movie.
• The gambling planet is silly, stupid, and boring.
• Rose could have been interesting and does have some moments when she is first introduced, but then quickly becomes unimportant. Her acts at the end to save Finn are incredibly stupid, and their conversation in the middle of a firefight even more so.
• I could work with you on Luke becoming a hermit....except you established in the first movie he left a map for people to come find him. You don't do that if you don't want to be found. So that inconsistency is never explained.
• People are tired of seeing their heroes trampled on, so doing Luke dirty like that was just sad to see. And again, there are just better ways to handle it. For example, maybe Luke had a few brushes with the dark side, as the galaxy needed him more, he relied more on his power, and he felt the dark side begin to overtake him. So he cut himself off from the force, and came to this planet to heal and to cleanse himself. So when Rey comes, he wants to help....but he knows that a fallen Luke is too dangerous a risk to take. Same stakes, same fundamental plot, but now Luke has an understanding rationale, and there is still that element of hope that he will beat this and rise again.
• Luke's hologram thing at the end was super cool, the best part of the movie....if he hadn't just died right afterward. That was just another insult in a string of insults against the character.
• Rey enters full Mary Sue at this point. She needs barely any training to go toe to toe with everyone, and she never really loses. That's the key point, Rey has flaws but she never really pays for them, she never really struggles, she never has to pick herself back up again. Hell what I really wanted from the movie, I wanted rey to join Kylo. Now THAT would have subverted my expectations, and made perfect sense for her character. Rey wants to be loved, is desperate for connection, that's her weakness. Kylo exploited that, and it would have made great sense for Rey to join him, to finally find a place she belonged. But....nope...sigh.
• Snoke died like an absolute chump. That could have been fine except he has literally been built up as this "new emperor" super powerful dark side user, he's full of mystery, and then he's just dead. Its the Night King from GOT all over again!
• Holdo is incredibly, rage inducingly, stupid. She keeps her entire team in the dark, for no good reason! Half of the plot of the movie could have been avoided if she had a lick of sense as a leader. Or hell...all they had to do, was throw in a couple of lines about how their is a suspected spy on board, and so Holdo can't reveal her plans out in the open. boom....done, now you have justification, and she's doesn't look like a total idiot.
• The Holdo maneuver....super cool looking....super hard to explain why no one has ever done that before.

RoS
For good or ill, TLJ happened, and it set a direction for the franchise. Now while I noted a lot of stupidity in the movie, there are some solid interesting choices. Rey being from crappy parents....cool idea. Rey and Kylo connected by some force connection, ok new force thing, neat idea. There are narrative elements in TLJ that are interesting and worth exploring further. But no.... we had to bring back JJ to "turn the ship". And when the ship turns its REALLY noticeable. There are a lot of things in RoS that directly counter TLJ, and it always feels like two parents fighting in front of their kids.

Beyond that, bringing back the Emperor is such lazy writing. There has to be 10000 pieces of fan fiction out there, I'm sure somebody has a neat idea for a villain that would be better than just bringing back the Emperor. Also, he just happens to have generated a brand new fleet, and every ship has a death star cannon on it.....dude seriously?

RoS has a blistering pace that does create a lot of excitement when you first watch the movie (I felt it as well), but like eating a whole chocolate bar, you don't feel so great later on. There are dozens of narrative holes in the movie. But the bigger sin, is foregoing the characters. Finn and Poe barely have any time in the movie anymore and their characters have flatlined. We keep getting introduced to all of these new toy products....ehem...I mean new characters, instead of giving us more of our core Trio.

The movie is just hallow, basically the worst kind of Marvel movie, with crazy big plots and tons of effects but no soul. The ending is boring and uninteresting, the epilogue is uninteresting, and there are a dozen dangling little plot threads throughout the trilogy that are never addressed.

Oh and last but not least, THE KNIFE MAP IS THE DUMBEST MCGUFFIN IN THE HISTORY OF MCGUFFINS!!!!!!!!!!!!



and I'm spent.

 

[Celebrim]

[*]Rey vs Kylo lightsaber fight: This is really the beginning of the "Mary Sue" criticism...

While Rey is not in the top 5 problems with either TFA or the trilogy as a whole, her problems are much more serious than this and start earlier.

This really should be obvious to anyone that plays RPGs. Indeed, I'll go so far as to say I wouldn't enjoy playing an RPG with anyone that thinks Rey is an interesting character.

The original Star Wars had a viable and interesting party dynamic. While Luke was the lead, he was initially by no means the best member of the party at really anything but flying an X-Wing. C-3P0 was a surprisingly effective face man who passed a rather large number of social tests over the course of the 3 films, and was familiar with "six million forms of communication". R2-D2 was the technical expert - hacker and mechanic. Leia was a competent leader and able to hold her own in a fight. Han was obviously older and better than Luke at just about everything initially. Chewbacca was the muscle without being as one dimensional as that suggests. But in any event, this was a legitimate party dynamic and it continued through the whole of the movies.

By contrast, Jar Jar Binks was a terrible character because he contributed nothing valuable to the party dynamics. He was useless. If he'd at least been competent, I don't think he'd have been hated so much.

Rey was as bad of a character as Jar Jar, but in the other direction. She was so competent that she didn't need a party. She was built as a solo protagonist, but they tried to write her into a party dynamic movie "because that's how Star Wars works", and it was disastrous - more disastrous even than Jar Jar Binks because they couldn't write her out of the story. When we first meet Rey she's actually pretty cool. She is a well introduced character. She's a rogue. She's a scrounger. And we can accept easily that she's a good rogue and a good scrounger having had to survive on her own. Character established and all well and good. The trouble is, that she's made into a Luke analogue (beyond just the force sensitive orphan that comes from a desert planet and wears his clothes) in as much as the writers try to send her on a coming of age story, and the character they present is not suited to that. Rey then exhibits the talent of immediately mastering every skill she encounters. When we first meet Luke, he's whiny, he gets outsmarted by a droid, gets brained by Tusken Raiders, nearly gets killed in the Cantina and gets a lesson in astrogation from a put upon Han Solo that puts him back in his place. When we first meet Rey, she not only is a competent rogue, she immediately outflies professional pilots despite not having the background, tells Han Solo how to fix his own ship, and she's already fluent in Wookie... because why not. Then she teaches herself the Jedi mind trick and finishes the movie by defeating a master of the Dark Side. The problem isn't merely that she's heroically good at something - that would have been fine. The problem is she's heroically good at everything to the extent that she doesn't need anyone. The party is superfluous. Mentors are superfluous. She wants to belong, but she only needs to in an emotional sense.

Then to finish off her arc, they give her in the next movie that most stereotypical of female hero tropes: she doesn't need to mature or grow. She doesn't need discipline or training. She just needs to allow her inner power to flow and to get everything else out of the way that is holding her back. Luke has to learn things and "grow up". Rey only has to get rid of things holding her back and unleash herself. Rey grows up by getting less mature.

But here's the thing, while that's enough to turn a good movie or series into a mediocre one, that's not even remotely the worst story telling sins of TFA. TFA is a terrible movie that was held afloat by good cinematography and the expectation that the story that was dropping all these foretells had somewhere it was going. TLJ gets blamed for ruining the series because it went in stupid directions, but the real trouble is that the writer of TFA had no plan to begin with and was expecting someone else to fill in all the gaps. But given how internally incoherent TFA was, that was never going to happen.

 

[MGibster]

Rey vs Kylo lightsaber fight: This is really the beginning of the "Mary Sue" criticism, simply put....the idea that a completely untrained force user could actually get in a hit against a master lightsaber fighter is LUDICROUS. What I think they were going for was the idea that Kylo was so hurt that he couldn't put up a good fight....he just wasn't hurt enough to make it believable. If he was barely able to stand and barely able to swing a lightsaber, then ok I'll buy that Rey could get in a swing or two.

I vehemently defended Rey beating Ren on account of the latter having taken a hit from Chewbacca's bowcaster. A bowcaster which was established earlier in the movie to be particularly potent. Not only was Ren wounded, but he had just fought Finn and no doubt was a bit tuckered out.

People are tired of seeing their heroes trampled on, so doing Luke dirty like that was just sad to see. And again, there are just better ways to handle it.

I certainly didn't expect nor want Luke to be the hero of this story, I expected the elder statesman in playing the mentor like Yoda and Obi-Wan in the previous trilogy. Instead, they just crapped all over the the efforts of our heroes from the main triology. Lol! The Jedi are gone again and the New Republic has been destroyed! To see Han, Leia, and Luke beaten down so much was just not fun to watch.

Holdo is incredibly, rage inducingly, stupid. She keeps her entire team in the dark, for no good reason! Half of the plot of the movie could have been avoided if she had a lick of sense as a leader.

I really liked Poe in the first movie, Holdo and how it was handled really made me dislike Poe. Which is too bad, I liked all the actors and their characters in the first movie.

 

[BrokenTwin]

All of the (many, many) flaws of the sequel trilogy accounted for, in my mind the biggest flaw will forever be how dirty they did John Boyega with his character of Finn. Even in the first movie he's barely more than a joke sidekick despite being promised being a core protagonist. Also how the chemistry between Finn and Poe was so noticable that they refused to let them interact on screen together for more than ten seconds at a time the entire trilogy to avoid fueling the "make them a couple" fire that even the actors involved were fanning.

 

[GreyLord]

So, NOT a Star Wars Fan, at least definitely NOT a Disney Star Wars fan. My opinion may not count because of that?

So...onto this pointless opinion.

Revenge of the Sith wasn't highly regarded when it came out by many, but today it is many people's favorite Prequel movie.

I think Rise of Skywalker will be like that. Though I feel technically, as a singular movie, The Last Jedi is perhaps the BEST of the sequel movies (that said, I personally hate the illogical story plots...a 2d space chase...really. I just...that get's me every time. And then someone get's out and away from the ships...and no one else thinks to do the same thing in the same way??? Because no one followed Rose and Finn when they left for that extra planet from what we saw...all the Rebels could have simply done that and be good...). The Last Jedi didn't FEEL like a Star Wars movie though.

Rise of Skywalker I think captured the Star Wars feel the best in the long run. In that, I think it will be far more popular in the end than some of the other Disney Star Wars movies.

 

[Older Beholder]

I don't think Disney Star Wars is that bad at all. In fact I've really enjoyed it so far.

The Sequel trilogy: There's too much to mention so I'll just say that my favourite part: Adam Driver as Kylo Ren was sublime. A screen presence unmatched in the franchise. Kylo and Rey as star crossed lovers connected through the force was compelling as the central dynamic.
The cinematography and visuals are jaw dropping from start to finish. An overall fantastic example of the Space Opera genre. A brief note on each episode:

The Force Awakens.
Still the highest grossing movie of all time at the American box office. (I know that this isn't an indication of it being good, just something worth noting) The reboot that was needed after all the abuse the prequels got.

The Last Jedi.
Probably the most interesting and thematic movie in the series. A deconstruction of Star Wars and myths in general.

Rise of Skywalker.
The movie plays like a greatest hits version of Star Wars. My only complaint was too much strobe effects.

---

Rogue One.
I thought the first half of the film was a bit of a mess but Ben Mendelsohn as Orson Krennic - enough said.
Also, I really respect the downer ending. (Andor looks great too, pretty excited for that)

Solo.
Heaps of fun. Sad it didn't do well, I thought they were setting up some interesting stuff for the future.
Shout out to Donald Glover as Lando.

---
Mando/Fett.
Proof that for all the talk, people just wanted a baby Yoda.

Kenobi.
Started slow for me, but improved as it went along. Loved the final battle between Vader and Kenobi.

Visions.
Some of the best Star Wars content to date. Can't wait for season 2.