Fuck Disney.
Nobody hates Star Wars more than Star Wars fans.
As an idea, it’s fantastic with limitless potential. As a finished product, it’s two and a half good movies, and two good series.
Narcos cast members unironically did more for Star Wars than the Skywalker family ever did.
The first one of the new set was ok. Slightly darker overtones.
Backing up a bit - the second trilogy had an all-star cast, yet a wooden log had more writing skill, acting ability, and charisma than the people on the screen. It was like people in a classroom being told to take turns reading out loud from the assigned book. The lack of acting and directorial skill was made up for by the abuse and overuse of CGI. Awful. I have never watched the second set since release. Lump the Boba Fett series in with this set, it was so wooden and poorly written they had to bring in the Mandalorian to rescue it.
Han Solo? Throwaway movie. Really didn’t do the character justice. Turned him into an Errol Flynn “Robin Hood”. I think everyone’s forgotten about it even existing.
The new set? Love the practical effects. Way less CGI. Awesome. But now the acting was ridiculous and over the top as were the characters. I know she gets some hate, but I think Ridley did a decent job of it with what she was given. The rest? Meh. Just written crazy with shameless bad writing, merch placement, and trite lines.
We’ll have to see about the new Mando movie.
Best Star Wars? ANH, ESB, R1, Andor. Some of the Mandalorian series. Probably some of the animated ones, but I haven’t watched them.
Eh, turned into more of a critique than I wanted, but I guess I’ll leave it.
What do you think of the original trilogy?
Kinda covered that, but ANH (which wasn’t ANH on release…) gets full marks for being first even if it is kinda silly at times. ESB is great. Darker, more serious, the cast and writers hit their stride. ROTJ is pretty much of the same vein as TLJ or TROS. A rehash or retread of already done themes with fluffy happy critters perfect for toy sales. Not great, but not awful. I liked it as a way to say goodbye to characters I never thought I’d see again. Man, was I wrong.
Ok, sorry, I’m not much of a star wars fan and I didn’t recognize the abbrevations.
No worries.
Every time I consider watching them I remember how they butchered logic and character development. Or plotlines that could be removed with no impact whatsoever.
The only thing I can say is that the dialogs are at least not as shallow as in the prequel trilogy.
I trid to re-watch those a few weeks ago and… No. I couldn’t stand the moments they opened their mouths to speak their lines, sorry to say.
As soon as it was evident the new movie was just the old movie, but with an even bigger no moon that could blow up 7 planets at once with red lasers instead of green, I was over it. Seeing the fucking laser arches in a space chase in the other movie just killed any desire to watch more.
They should have had Jon Favreau write and direct all three of them.
The last two of the new trilogy are borderline unwatchable. Just abysmal, b-movie level storytelling.
I think people have forgotten how to write good movies since it’s been such a long period of remakes and franchise garbage.
Plus corporate greed and algorithms have resulted in cookie cutter scripts that “should please the largest amount of people” or some shit like that.
Everything is made to me inoffensive to anyone and appeal to the widest variety of people.
There’s no movies that tailor to a specific audience anymore, where 20-30% of people will think it’s amazing, instead 40-60% of people might think “meh, might as well watch it”
I think people have forgotten how to write good movies
No, they still write good movies. The problem is that the money-men will not fund good movies because all they want is a big return on their investment. That means that they only fund sequels and spinoffs of previously successful properties. Only on rare occasions does anything new get funded and even then the decision is based on something other than the quality of the story.
There are lots of good stories out there that will never get turned into movies or shows simple because the people who make the decisions are trying to make money rather than art.
I have absolutely no desire to see any of the three again, sadly
I gave Disney the benefit of the doubt when they shelved the EU and JJ talked about doing something completely new. I was impressed by the lengths they went to to get the look right (even hunting down the original lenses). I went to quite some lengths avoiding spoilers.
It didn’t take long in cinema to realise I was watching a soft reboot trying to dismantle the original trilogy. I felt betrayed and disgusted. Since then I haven’t touched anything Star Wars and completely started to boycott everything Disney.
Well, Andor seems to be worth the watch. But I’m not subbing to Disney for that and generally share your sentiment. One of these days I’ll find Andor in Discs…
Andor is the best piece of Art to come out of Star Wars. It transcends the IP as a piece that I would recommend to anyone, while only enriching the original material/world for those that have seen at least some of the original (6) movies.
I hope you find it and watch it any way you can 🦜🏴☠️
I just realised that TFA might have done more than just killing my interest in Star Wars. I think that was the last time I actually went and watched a movie in cinema.
Edit: Holy macaroni! It really has been more than 10 years since I went to the cinema…
Same here. After Rogue One, I got really excited about the new movies. Thought TFA was a fluke, but the next one was far worse. Stopped going to the cinema after that. Then I had kids, and now I’m going again, to see Spongebob and Super Mario. How the mighty have fallen…
People absolutely hated the prequels when they came out. They were a joke with badly written dialogue and cartoon characters, at least for the adults of that era. But when the children of that era grew up, these children looked at the prequels with fondness and the bad dialogue became modern viral memes.
So maybe the same will happen with the sequels. The only issue is that social media have ruined the brains of children. I feel all conventional media will soon become irrelevant.
No one has the attention needed to watch a movie anymore, not even in the background while surfing the internet. People just have youtube or twitch or tiktok in the background.
The Prequel memes work because everyone has seen those movies, not because the Prequel movies themselves were good.
I really loved The Last Jedi and how Rian tried to take it in a new direction. But the sequel series was honestly all over the place.
The Force Awakens was good but essentially a copy & paste of A New Hope. While Rise of Skywalker just did a 360 to change what The Last Jedi built upon and threw in Palpatine out of nowhere.
The original trilogy is the only one where all of them were good.
TLJ has 2 major issues IMO.
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Rian severely overdid subversion of expectation. It just doesn’t really work if you do it like 8 times in the same movie, viewers will just stop expecting anything.
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Those giraffe-horses should have been podracers.
Agree on the other points though. RoS was just complete garbage from start to finish.
In regards to 1, eh… I actually kinda wish he’d fully committed to the subversion and had Kylo turn to the Light Side as a kind of “poetic” bookend to Anakin (making the third film one about his redemption; this would also allow us either to learn more about Snoke OR turn Hux into the villain, which I would prefer over what Abrams did to him).
As for 2, when Rose goes “are those…?” I was on the edge of my seat, tapping my friend’s shoulder thinking we were about to see podracers (which is funny because I still really hated The Phantom Menace at that time) and was definitely disappointed when it turned out to be giant cats.
The Last Jedi is my favorite Star Wars film. I also happen to think it’s the best of the entire series. But I dare not speak of this much on the interwebz because Star Wars fans are, as we all know, tame and not given to strong opinions.
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Rise of Skywalker stands as maybe the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It’s the rare big-budget blockbuster where you can actually watch the thing fall apart right in front of your eyes. I swear they filmed the first draft of that script. It also feels like Abrams tried to cram his ideas for Episode VIII in there too. Just an awful, awful film that makes Attack of the Clones look like a Kurosawa film in comparison. And that’s really saying something because Attack of the Clones is a bloated mess of a film that is only saved because the casting director is a genius (and, though “fans” hate it, few things match the absolute delight of seeing a little kid’s reaction to Yoda rave-dance fighting after growing accustomed to him as a feeble old muppet–this effect is highlighted if you watch the films in either release or Machete order)
I have never seen any Star Wars movie.
They have their flaws like many movies that are space operas. Suspension of disbelief and all that is required. That said there are some just generally good gems that you might like. Rogue One was a good heist movie, The Empire Strikes Back was good because people still told George to stuff it with some of his ideas.
With Disney just ramming so much Star Wars down our throats and much of it mediocre at best, I look at the older works more critically. I think there’s some fun to be had still but I wouldn’t consider them required watching anymore.
You will be incredibly disappointed if you do. It’s like Boomers ramming The Beatles down your throat. It’s religious fantasy.
That explains the down votes.
Kathleen Kennedy shit all over that franchise. What a waste.
in 2015 it was revealed Lucas’s sequel outline had been discarded.[78][79] The sequel trilogy also meant the end of the Star Wars Expanded Universe stories, which were discarded from canon to give “maximum creative freedom to the filmmakers and also preserve an element of surprise and discovery for the audience.”
Yeah, cause collectively they were mid asf.
Force Awakens was reheated “A New Hope” leftovers, but I guess if you had to start with something memorable for a reintroduction to the Star Wars universe, you can’t go wrong with a soft remake of the one that started it all.
I actually found The Last Jedi to be an interesting story, if not a decent movie with interesting ideas that could be capitalized on in the sequel.
Unfortunately that was not the case, and Rose of Skywalker, along with Obi-Wan and Mando season 3 torpedoed any interest I had as a relative newcomer to the Star Wars franchise. Side projects like Visions have kept my interest only because the anthology format allows for unique narratives and perspectives. It’s why I loved Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars.
I keep hearing amazing things about Andor and Maul: Shadow Lord, and I believe the hype wholeheartedly, but damn, after being inundated with Disney Star Wars year after year after year, I’m sick and tired of (modern) Star Wars.
Andor is by a large distance the most fully-realized and profound Star Wars anything and they manage to do it in all directions: the action is good and in the spirit of the original Star Wars trilology, the characters are believable and not cardboard deep (unlike the original triology), the context of the store is fully realized believable societies
The story is mainly consistent and believable, with various threads that criss-cross in a natural and coherent way and are eventually brought all the way to a conclusion and no further - the latter a rarity for TV Series, which tend to end not at a natural conclusion of a story but instead past the end of the story and after “just one more” (sometimes two) seasons are forced in, which are shit. In Andor, maybe only a few things in the last few episodes of the last season felt like they’ve been forcefully wrapped up to reach a conclusion but mainly the whole thing just naturally reached an ending.
Shit, even the architecture and wardrobe design are consistent and memorable in those things which weren’t “inherited” from previous Movies and Series in the Star Wars universe - Ghorman especially is visually a fully believable and realized environment nicelly entwinned and consistent with traditional Star Wars universe elements.
Andor is, however, not the pure roller coaster of action that the original triology is.
I would recommend the Original Triology and Rogue Squadron as exciting roller coasters of action in a fully realized futuristic sci-fi environment and Andor as a good long-form story, with depth, well written, fully realized, well acted and with great production values that happens to take place in the Star Wars universe (so it also ticks the pleasant memories of those who grew up with the Triology) and does have plenty of Action, whilst being a lot more than just that.
Ok but for real Andor is only a Star Wars show because of setting. The story, dialogue, etc are all a cut above anything else. Most of the things you think of with Star Wars (light sabers, the Force, etc) are really not part of the story. I hope you’ll give it a chance because I’m not a huge fan of Star Wars (OT is good but that’s about it for me) but Andor is fantastic.
Star Wars doesn’t need lightsabers or the Force any more than Marvel needs Iron Man or Captain America. They’re both good, and they’re a couple of the most iconic parts of the franchise, but both Star Wars and Marvel are big universes, and they can both tell stories totally separate from those popular touchstones.
Just finished episode 8 of the second season of Andor and it is really something special.
Taking a break for a day or two to process what happened. The thinly veiled analogy strikes hard.
Whatever it is that is missing does this: me, I fall aslee mid movie. My kids don’t give one flying Fuch about the plot or anything. There’s no action and a ton of not much.
They forgot it’s a space opera. Nobody watches star wars for the character development or plot.
I know it’s been beaten to death but I just finished re-watching all 9 + rogue one, and can confirm there’s no reason for anyone to go back to the sequel trilogy. TFA gets some credit as a solid popcorn flick but doesn’t change the fact it’s retreading ANH, just to have every original story beat crushed by TLJ. By the time I got to Rise of Skywalker I was totally checked out, it’s just noise and explosions with a plot that is borderline incomprehensible.
Rogue One is the only one of these new movies that I really enjoy and re-watch. I really didn’t expect Disney to allow that ending for the rebels sent Scarif but I’m glad they did. I also kinda love how they blend it into Episode IV.
Disney pitch room:
“Okay, hear me out. What if: … a bigger Death Star!”
“Excellent! What will we call it?”
“Hmm… how about Star Killer!”
“GENIUS.”
TLJ is what I think gave the sequel trilogy… hope.
TFA is very much a nostalgia grab re-tread of ANH. Which is the point. Evil has come back and something something it rhymes.
TLJ is all about breaking the cycle. The hero? She isn’t a chosen one. She is a random unhoused garbage goblin. The reluctant hero? He isn’t coming back for selfish reasons (wanting to bang Leia) and is instead realizing that he is part of something bigger than him. The confident scoundrel? He got told quite definitively that he is a childish moron who gets people killed and to do better.
And Luke? if he was really The Chosen One… why did everything repeat? The stories of our parents aren’t gonna solve things so let’s try something new. Let’s democratize force powers. Let’s ACTUALLY fight against tyranny.
And then China allegedly got pissed and Disney had JJ come back to undo everything in the first 30 minutes of ROS. And only really succeeded in making a movie that EVERYBODY hates.
That said? Rogue One and Andor were somehow snuck in there and those are very much a Star Wars made for people who grew up watching the prequels. And it is amazing for it.
Luke was never the Chosen One, I think you’ve misinterpreted. It was Anakin who defeated the Sith. Luke just scored an assist.
Luke was possibly a second try for the Force (which assumes some type of agency, but any of these theories do). Anakin met all the Chosen One criteria, except he turned (thanks to the Jedi Council and Palpatine’s manipulations of them all). Luke was both a redemption for Anakin, a removal of the breaker of the prophecy (Palpatine), and a hope for the future. A second Chosen One, one who might be as or more powerful than Anakin in his prime, since he has the blood and gift but not Anakin’s personal trauma that haunts and detracts him.
I think the biggest flaw of the sequels was the vagueness of why Luke couldn’t renew or reimagine the Jedi again in a better form. It’s glossed over to give a minimal backstory for Kylo, Snope is even more unclear and ended up being nothing, and why it drove Luke into isolation still isn’t really told.
I liked TFA. I didn’t like the start of TLJ. I expected a better thing that Luke just “meh” with the saber and the apathy towards everything. I wanted something deep and dramatic, tragic even. I was okay with Rey being no one special, that actually was the best part of TLJ (the end with the kid and broom). That seemed very interesting to follow.
Then it lost me fully.
Technically Anakin brought balance to the force. There used to be a bunch of Jedi and a few Sith. Because of Anakin, now there are a few Jedi and a few Sith.
Shoot, what was that comic where Yoda demonstrated his concerns about Anakin using salt and pepper? He dumped them both out, stuck his finger in the middle, and blew all the rest off the table. He lifted his finger, showing only a few grains of each left, and said “balanced, it is”
I hadn’t heard that China might have pressured Disney about the democratization of heroism, but… I could see it. I agree TLJ felt like a bit of a downer – especially coming from the abandoned Expanded Universe novels where Luke hadn’t done the best job but at least had set a direction for Jedi to come back into the galaxy. I still don’t love Rey’s encounter with the dark side.
But the disruption of every story beat, the possibility of being a hero because YOU choose to step forward, that was a great twist. The broom scene should have set the direction of the terribly named Episode 9…
Maybe I’ll slip Rogue One in and drop Episode 9. Still 9 movies, and only really regret the first one.
I loved young Jedi knights!
Luke was the son of the evil warlord who single handedly changed the fate of not just The Rebellion but also The Galaxy (and yes, I know the EU expanded on that to make it less the case). Was he the one in the prophecy? No. But from a narrative/trope perspective, he was 100% The Chosen One.
This comment really perfectly sums up how I feel … TLJ ends with SO MUCH POTENTIAL in my eyes.
Harumph.
The best part about the whole modern star wars franchise is the endless parodies mocking them.
Jedi Party, by Auralnauts, is my preferred way of watching the Prequels.
I will give Rise of Skywalker one thing and one thing only: Babu Frik. I know he was probably designed by committee to be cute and endearing, but man I love that little dude.
As a fan of the Dark Empire comics, I had already accepted that Palpatine returning was a possibility. The lack of any real storyline hinting at that in the two movies leading up- I expected disappointment. And I got what I expected, though visually Exegol/life support Sheev was cool. The idea that he had an entire fleet of Death Star Destroyers fully staffed and just chilling was implausible. That they were dependent on one transmitter was ludicrous. That the attack run on them was a cavalry charge of space horses was one of the stupidest fucking thing I’ve seen on film.
What pisses me off about that movie is that they spend a fair bit of time building out that Rey has super powerful force healing. So, like, what if she healed Palpatine? What if the ending to this saga of endless galactic war was not more death, but an act of healing? Maybe Palpatine still dies, but he’s at least made aware of what he’s done or something.
Nope. Rey use two lightsaber. Rey block real good. Palpatine go dust dust.
HEY-HEY!
Same, I started rise of Skywalker, and only after the ridiculous opening sequence I was already done with the whole thing. And I love Star Wars.
I still can’t believe some writer penned “some how, palpatine returned” into the script and didn’t light the whole draft on fire right there. I guess between the hamfisted bloodline reveal and the magical sith dagger guiding the way to the star destroyer parking lot - who cares at that point. Fuck it, send it.
Oscar Isaac did an interview recently where he revealed that line was added in reshoots. So that line was written in an attempt to fix whatever catastrophic wreck the script was in before then.
I’m imagining some writer going “wait a minute, did we ever explain why Palpatine was back?” And then writing that and leaning back with a smug “whew. Nailed it.”
As bad as it is, that line and “they fly now” are Lucas level shit dialogue and the only two memorable lines from the trilogy. Compare that to the atrocious dialogue of the prequels that have become such beloved memes you don’t even have to add the words.
That palps line represents so much more than the dialog quality to me though. It’s all about the context, TRoS built up nothing around this and suddenly jumps sideways into a plot that neccessated invalidating a significant moment of the original trilogy. It’s jarring as a viewer and there’s no explaination for why it’s happening. THEN the film has the audacity to imply through dialog, actually the audience should not worry about the details - this is what we’re doing. Almost feels insulting in some ways.
I agree. It’s just a snippet of Lucas level dialogue in a trilogy that otherwise isn’t Lucas grade throughout. SW fans may have shat on the Prequels when they came out but have more or less forgiven and embraced them for what they were because the hardcore fans know George is a great visionary, terrible execution. The actors did the best they could and there’s a charm to what the director wanted to convey but the clunkiness of the words. The shift from Hayden and Ahmed hate to fan love shows that realization. SW now operates in two realities. The realistic grimdark of Andor, or the classic good vs evil camp of Lucas. The sequels delivered neither.
Sure hut fans where demanding it. I thought they where going anyone can have the force. They shown it with little kid and broom. But all fans where like she has to be somebody there is no way she can’t be a nobody. Has to be blah blah blah. And the SIMPs Disney are now they are like let’s give it to them.
