Rise of Skywalker: The Seen It/Spoilers Thread

[Zardnaar]

While that is true now, I’m sure it wasn’t the original plan.

Nope Lucas was clear the story was Anakins.

They recycled Palps because they needed a villain ASAP

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Nope Lucas was clear the story was Anakins.

They recycled Palps because they needed a villain ASAP

Hah. Double tapped.

 

[Zardnaar]

Box office is also down a lot. Came right near the bottom estimates.

Well know more week two looking at the drop off. 30% or less drop is good, 70% is had. Speculation is it might not break a billion.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I will say the movie was better than it had a any right to be. It creates some good character arcs, and nice character interaction, even the humour works better. Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley were working really well together again, I really hope we'll see them worth together in some other scenario again.
The movie however really needed to cramp a lot of stuff in a very short time. Almost as if there would have needed to be another movie in between.

But it still doesn't feel to me like the "real" continuation of Star Wars story (though obviously it is).

Palpatine's return invalidates the triumphs of the original trilogy. Which is kinda the entire theme of the sequel trilogy. "Han and Leia confessing their love to each other" => "Han and Leia don't work out, and their kid turns evil". "Rebels triumph over the Empire" => "Nah, it's still there, and even more powerful with Starkiller bases and Death Star Destroyers". "Luke's victory signals the return of the Jedi" => "Nope, he screws up majorly and gives up". "Anakin Skywalker redeems himself and sacrifices himself to defeat the Emperor" "=> "The Emperor got better". It's not like some new Sith Lord or Dark Side User or Upstart politicians came along to put a wrench in the Rebel/Republic restoration process. No, it are really the same guys that you already thought you defeated at the end of the original trilogy.

And of course, too much doesn't really make sense if you somehow have the time to think about (but the movie is so fast you don't get the time). 40 years from now, we'll probably get a Rogue Two movie that explains how putting a bunch of Star Destroyer into a very hostile planetary environment on a remote, unknown location with only two gizmos that could guide them safely out there seemed a good idea. (Oh, and it was only possible to transfer that control from one gizmo to teh other, but not the other way around, and that gizmo couldn't just be bombarded from orbit).
Or maybe something that explains how these giant fleet was assembled in complete secrecy from a dead Emperor on a remote, unknow location that could only be found by a very specific gizmo. It was apparently completely unfathomable that other intel gathering methods could be used to reveal how resources, ships or trooops were funneled toward that system to build these ships.

What was it: "Jam their Speeders!" "We can't, they don't have any" cue space horse riders running across space ship hull. Seriously? How often have we seen speeders being jammed before in the movies? I think it was never? Did the original draft have a combat that actually used that tech and this was the only scene that survived? Quite possible.

It wasn't really explained, IMHO. At some point, a hobbit suggested they did exactly that, but Poe dismissed the idea saying something like "the Holdo maneuver is a one in a million event". No more explanation given, but it's apparently non-replicable (so they don't have to explain why all the generals didn't think of it during the thousands of year of the Republic).

I guess they realized that having the heroes behaving like the Japanese Imperial Army and mass-training pilots to do suicide runs into star destroyers wasn't the vibe they wanted for the Rebellion, as well.

Sure, but it just makes the whole story of TLJ rely even more on coincidences than any sense of "planning". I guess people will say "The Force works in mysterious ways", but that will always feel like a cop-out to me. Especially when the characters aren't force-sensitives. Why even have Jedi or Sith if the force creates miracles all the time to engineer things to happen. It means the characters lack real agency, and the only reason anything you do works or fails is because The Force decided it does, not because it might make sense and you have a good idea.

I guess I am a nitpicker, maybe you can claim that my nostalgia makes it impossible to see all the flaws in the original trilogy and not realize that the new ones are achieving exactly the same standards in terms of story-telling, cohesiveness or consistency... But it just does not feel like it does.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

To be honest, the whole "There's a huge fleet, but they are only vulnerable right now because of the atmospheric disturbances make the sensors unable to tell which way is up so we just need to destroy one signal emitter, but wait, now it's on the main ship and so we need to destroy another one" thing struck me as just a way for them to have a chance against such an unstoppable force. I liked the fleet itself, especially with each one being able to destroy a planet. That seems like something Palpatine would have devised during his 25 years being mostly dead.

But the way they defeated them just seemed like the writers had written themselves in a corner. They gave the bad guys something so overwhelmingly powerful that there is just no way anyone could actually hope to fight it. So instead of giving the good guys something equally powerful, they, like A New Hope, put an exhaust pipe in it that leads to the reactor to blow the whole thing up. They just gave it a really, really easy to get to weakness.

Yeah, they explained that in Rogue One, but that was an attempt to explain a plot hole. This is really just lazy writing. They wanted the good guys to be able to win, so they gave them an easy way to win.

I never really considered it a plot hole. One could even argue the weakness wasn't that big, because the Rebels almost failed. Rogue One actually (depsite how much I enjoyed the movie) might have made the hole bigger, actually, because Erso's flaw is so specific that in a typical Rebel attack run without any would-be-Jedi, the chances are good that no one can succesfully exploit the flaw. And it's not like there are many second chances to try it again in some other fight. Once the Empire realizes what the attackers were trying to do, they probably can figure out the flaw themselves. I guess it's plausible that putting in such a flaw deliberatly without being found out immediately by some other engineers involved in the project is really hard and that is all he could accomplish, but still. We don't really need the explanation.

With the Final Order (or Last Order? Sorry, watched it on german this time) Star Destroyers, their entire location flying across a planet in a star system that basically know one knew the location of was nonsense already. Why even bother with putting Star Destroyers on the planet? The could be in orbit, or anywhere in the system. No one was going to come around and see them. And if someone was going to come, at least the Star Destroyers would not be vulnerable. We don't just have a construction flaw in this whole thing, we have a strategic and tactical errors along with serious construction flaws that cannot even be explained with hybris. Maybe dead Sith don't think as clearly? (Not that dissimilar from The Last Jedi, really, where the First Order launches Fighter way too late - which the officer on the dreadnought actually explicitely remarks on - and start targeting the ground base first instead of the ships that can hyperspace away first.). We have to assume that First and Last/Final order are simply incompetent at their job, and that feels a bit lame.


It would really be more plausible if the fleet wasn't that big, and the people that Lando can rally (within 8 hours, but the days,weeks or months since The Last Jedi no one could muster up that many?) simply a larger fleet that has a chance to beat these (undermanned) ships. Or if at least the Resistance had lured these ships into the situation we find them in.

I guess it's having read Timothy Zahn Star Wars (and some others, actually) novels... There it's usually competent protagonists and competent antagonists having to rely on imperfect information to divine their opponent's moves, and them using desinformation and trickery to lure their opponent into a trap.
If I cared for people bumbling around incompetently outside of comedies, I guess I'd watch more reality TV.

 

[Zardnaar]

I never really considered it a plot hole. One could even argue the weakness wasn't that big, because the Rebels almost failed. Rogue One actually (depsite how much I enjoyed the movie) might have made the hole bigger, actually, because Erso's flaw is so specific that in a typical Rebel attack run without any would-be-Jedi, the chances are good that no one can succesfully exploit the flaw. And it's not like there are many second chances to try it again in some other fight. Once the Empire realizes what the attackers were trying to do, they probably can figure out the flaw themselves. I guess it's plausible that putting in such a flaw deliberatly without being found out immediately by some other engineers involved in the project is really hard and that is all he could accomplish, but still. We don't really need the explanation.

With the Final Order (or Last Order? Sorry, watched it on german this time) Star Destroyers, their entire location flying across a planet in a star system that basically know one knew the location of was nonsense already. Why even bother with putting Star Destroyers on the planet? The could be in orbit, or anywhere in the system. No one was going to come around and see them. And if someone was going to come, at least the Star Destroyers would not be vulnerable. We don't just have a construction flaw in this whole thing, we have a strategic and tactical errors along with serious construction flaws that cannot even be explained with hybris. Maybe dead Sith don't think as clearly? (Not that dissimilar from The Last Jedi, really, where the First Order launches Fighter way too late - which the officer on the dreadnought actually explicitely remarks on - and start targeting the ground base first instead of the ships that can hyperspace away first.). We have to assume that First and Last/Final order are simply incompetent at their job, and that feels a bit lame.


It would really be more plausible if the fleet wasn't that big, and the people that Lando can rally (within 8 hours, but the days,weeks or months since The Last Jedi no one could muster up that many?) simply a larger fleet that has a chance to beat these (undermanned) ships. Or if at least the Resistance had lured these ships into the situation we find them in.

I guess it's having read Timothy Zahn Star Wars (and some others, actually) novels... There it's usually competent protagonists and competent antagonists having to rely on imperfect information to divine their opponent's moves, and them using desinformation and trickery to lure their opponent into a trap.
If I cared for people bumbling around incompetently outside of comedies, I guess I'd watch more reality TV.

Thrawn trilogy is number 1 for Star Wars books on Amazon.

But yeah that trilogy was plotted out well with believable and interesting characters.

Thrawns carried over into the new canon as well he's to popular with the fans lol. His new books are apparently good, Thrawns Revenge mod is still a thing, and on occasion he's beaten Vader in polls for best SW villain. He's kind of a hero now though in Disney canon.

Thrawn lives!!!

Movies visual guide to RoS has a Sith legion named after Revan.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Thrawns carried over into the new canon as well he's to popular with the fans lol. His new books are apparently good, Thrawns Revenge mod is still a thing, and on occasion he's beaten Vader in polls for best SW villain. He's kind of a hero now though in Disney canon.

I would have preferred Thrawn as the final villain to Palps.

 

[Zardnaar]

I would have preferred Thrawn as the final villain to Palps.

I kinda wanted him in the First Order. In the new canon they play up how good the new FO stuff is but we never see it.

Just slight tweaks like using Kylos TIE Silencer flanked by TIE defenders or a handful of those new Star Destroyers being used to blow the crap out of a New Republic fleet.

Drive home the point the new villains have learnt and are dangerous. But they went with comic book evil bwa ha ha we're bad.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

In the Mandalorian. (and a ton of video games, but they don't count)



It's continued from TLJ, as you observed. Just dialed up a bit as the two grow in power. Now they teleport small objects not just raindrops.

All force powers are new and made up. They make up a new one in each film. Telekinesis was new in ESB. Lightning was new in RotJ. Stopping blaster bolts midair was new in TFA. Force FaceTime (ForceTime?) was new in TLJ. Healing was new in tRoS.

Inventing new force powers in a Star Wars movie isn't a problem; it's tradition. It's how force powers get introduced. It would be weird if they didn't.

Also Rebels has Force Time Travel and Force Portals, so Force Teleportation ain’t a big deal.

 

[Zardnaar]

Also Rebels has Force Time Travel and Force Portals, so Force Teleportation ain’t a big deal.

Rebels is Disney though. Lucas force was a lot more restrained, Disney force does leans towards magic and superhero type powers.

Teleportation has been done before Disney it's not original. I suspect the force and lightsaber colours are whatever the writer/director feels like. There's pros and cons to that approach.