Xixax Film Forum

It made me laugh out loud.

I must admit, I teared up a bit at "The Saga Comes To An End" because the ten-year-old within me refuses to die.

Even if I'm not a fan of Jedi (euphemism, I know...) but Disney is obviously listening to the fanboys, reversing what Johnson tried to do. Even if he basically burned the ground, making a sequel very difficult.

I'd say there's an fairly equal amount of people on either side of the debate. Yeah, Abrams probably had a heck of a time trying to do some course correction/trying to realise some of his original ideas. Hard to tell if it was the senior production team's poor planning or RJ's ego which stunted these movies.
It's a shame that this is the sequel trilogy we're getting. I would like to enjoy this franchise again at some point; fingers crossed that this one captures the magic. I was going to write 'at least Colin Trevorrow isn't involved in this one' but unfortunately IMDB has told me he currently has a writing credit.

I love Ian McDiarmid to bits, so he will be fun to watch.

This could go either way.

Personally I loved what Rian Johnson did with his instalment so backtracking on the ideas seeded in that film feels forced and goes against the grain with me.

For context I'm not the biggest Star Wars fan. My favourites are Rogue One, Empire, and Last Jedi - not necessarily (but maybe) in that order.

I think JJ appreciates what Johnson gave him and won't screw with it. If anything Last Jedi will just help JJ Baby make the best possible SW film he can.

My first reaction to this yesterday was... very negative.

The swinging camerawork in that desert scene is super questionable, right?

If Palpatine has been pulling the strings this whole time, I will be extremely disappointed. Some argue that his presence could end up being an effective bookend for the whole saga, but I am supremely skeptical.

If Rey turns out to be just another hero in the Skywalker bloodline, I will be CRUSHED. The random serendipity of her ascent is literally the best thing about this trilogy. I don't think I could forgive JJ. That said, I am less and less worried that this will happen. Such a reveal would probably not be in the title of the film.

And without having seen the movie, it's an extremely bad title. We can only guess how the actual content transforms its meaning, but... I am also skeptical on this.

There are some reasons for hope. I'm very excited for more Rey content, and it's coming from the guy who created this character, rather than Colin freaking Trevorrow, which, yikes, who knows how that could have gone. This is going to be empowered Rey, too, presumably with echoes of empowered Luke in RoJ, which yielded some of the best scenes of that trilogy.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7LZxlDW4AAWK7M.jpg)

The Force Awakens or the new one?

The new photos in Vanity Fair are stunning, but they're not stills from the movie and may not even be scenes in the movie. They were staged and shot by Annie Leibovitz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qn_spdM5Zg

if Abrams was dumber it'd make not liking this easier. me i'm kind of time spent on this, i'm tapped out. but it feels so human, which is, you know, the best feeling

It's as human as an insurance ad.

Poe Dameron. My friend. I...know you...You are a character, yes. You're a pilot and...nice. You...fight with us. People online want you to be gay and create free advertisment for out product.

Quote from: Drenk on October 22, 2019, 04:31:58 AM
It's as human as an insurance ad.

At least as human as a cartoon, come on, Drenk, have a heart :p
I'm excited.

We're all friends with Poe Dameron. He has a jacket and fly in space! We'll miss Poe. The legend is ending. :(
I don't even remember the name of his buddy, the one who's just running while people shoot at him. He has a girlfriend. With a name. She's nice.

This trilogy is a narrative disaster with awful place-holders characters. It's in the process of reverse enginerring his already thin mystery box promise.

But Abrams is good at bringing the concept art to life.

This is a waste of money.

Quote from: Drenk on October 22, 2019, 11:23:18 AM
We're all friends with Poe Dameron. He has a jacket and fly in space! We'll miss Poe. The legend is ending. :(
I don't even remember the name of his buddy, the one who's just running while people shoot at him. He has a girlfriend. With a name. She's nice.

This trilogy is a narrative disaster with awful place-holders characters. It's in the process of reverse enginerring his already thin mystery box promise.

But Abrams is good at bringing the concept art to life.

This is a waste of money.

Can't say I disagree, yet I'm still excited, and yes I already snagged IMAX tix. I contain multitudes.

I get it. I got shivers watching the trailer. Visually, it looks way better than the MCU even if they share the same content philosophy, and that fits the trailer format although they've been doing the same one over and over again.

i'm catching up with this conversation. comparing this to MCU means being familiar with MCU. comparing this to other SW trailers means being familiar with other SW trailers. i confess that that's a bit ahead of me. it's not an invalid perspective by any means, in fact it's rather advanced. but ain't nobody say that escapism is about advancement. this will be a moving movie that i'll never see

the ending:

I'd love to watch a documentary about Disney freaking out post Episode VIII.

This is now the second lowest rated (on RT) live action Star Wars film. Phantom Menace being the lowest.

I've finally made this stupid video.

Quote from: Drenk on December 18, 2019, 04:13:56 PM
I'd love to watch a documentary about Disney freaking out post Episode VIII.

Paging Armando Iannucci

This sucked.
They should have just called it Fuck You Rian Johnson.

It just pummels you with course-corrective plot, no sense of pace, ADD editing, nothing breathes, the actors barely make a dent, and it so slavishly lays on the fan service that you can't help but walk out with a slight taste of puke in your mouth. The first one where I felt absolutely nothing throughout, even in scenes that, on paper, should be loaded with resonance. It is entirely a corporate product.

Spoiler-free review:

I'm still letting it sink in, but this is definitely one where I can see both sides. There are plenty of reasons to hate it and plenty of reasons to love it. This is a deeply silly movie, definitely the weakest of the trilogy, but it's hard to deny it has some great moments.

The visuals are spectacular. The writing is pretty bad throughout. Oscar Isaac disappoints, and Jon Boyega underwhelms. Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver are amazing and carry the film, to the extent that it can be carried.

That's about all I can say without spoilers.


SPOILERS

The first half hour is awful! I felt like I was watching "previously on Star Wars." They tried for propulsiveness, but what they got was suffocating. It's all perfunctory and chopped to pieces. Nothing has room to breathe. I just wanted a scene with a character talking to someone and having an emotion for a minute. Serious failure of vision. I think the film recovers, but yikes.

I'm not a fan of the numerous fakeout deaths. How do you explain the one with Chewy? "He must have gotten on a different ship." Really?

The film does not have a whole lot to say. I guess there's a message of resistance—"there are more of us," don't be tricked into feeling unempowered, etc. The one that I did like was the unspoken (but clearly demonstrated) message of compassion. Rey heals Ben, in a purely selfless act, which opens him to the light and the spirits of his parents, and he is then fully turned. Which allows him to return the favor. This 100% worked for me.

Rey's big moment discovering her lightning powers honestly took my breath away. The ensuing revelation—well, I'm still not sure how to feel about that. Certainly flirts with an actual serious retcon. ("They chose to be nobodies" is a streeeetch.) Arguably it's consistent, but I think it violates the spirit of The Last Jedi. That's fine, I guess; this is not Rian Johnson's movie. There are plenty of other things that JJ actually picks up from TLJ and rolls with in a very compelling way. He definitely picked up the Reylo baton. And I loved the way their force interactivity expands here.

As dumb and cheesy and telegraphed as it was, I actually really liked the ending. I would have preferred Rey being an actual nobody who randomly gets force powers. But this is honestly not a bad second option. She has to overcome her problematic heritage, choosing her own identity (Skywalker) and forging her own destiny. Does feel properly Star Wars.

There's one moment - ONE - and it's fan service to the Nth degree, that should have flipped me out given my childhood, but instead yielded only a slight raise of the brows, and a muted "Oh." That's the most it got out of me.

It's a numbing experience.

C3P0 has the best bits, I'll give it that, but it ain't saying much at all.

Biggest yikes of the year.

SPOILERS

Star Wars isn't a sacred object, but this felt, like, disrespectful to its own tropes. At best, it misunderstands what makes these movies thrilling. Chewy's fake out death reminds us stakes are only present when they're convenient for Disney. Then you get a memory fake-out with C3PO (unless I misunderstood that upload bit with R2)... Rey's "heritage" undermines so much of her essence, and, again, feels like it exists for plot convenience. Then, Kylo's death/exit goes without remark or a proper beat.

This movie removes any creative progression from the trilogy. Baffled that within their sandbox of cowboys, samurai, fairy-magic space-creatures these boardrooms refuse to get playful.

Having more issues with this the morning after. Realizing that the scenes I love comprise about 10 minutes of the movie. The rest is meh. It's frustrating, because you have scenes with writing and story completely devoid of imagination, in a setting with incredible visual imagination.


SPOILERS

Apparently what JJ is most proud of is bringing our main 3 characters together so they can bond and have meaningful adventures together. But he doesn't really allow that to happen. No bonding occurs in those scenes, because they're just rushing from one thing to another. When Poe joins the group hug with Rey and Finn, I was like, wait, what is Poe doing in there? Clearly not the response they were going for.

Also increasingly disappointed by the middle fingers given to The Last Jedi. JJ currently describes the trilogy this way: "a story that I think needed a pendulum swing in one direction in order to swing in the other." That's a perspective, I guess. But the things he discards from TLJ are character-centric things, so much that it feels like progress erased. Even the little things. Finn's lesson about not being suicidally heroic is not only discarded, it's reversed. And now Rose is like, okay, good luck! Bye! JJ did a complete personality-otomy on her, by the way. When he thought he'd removed all of her personality, he reached in there to scrape out any remaining bits. Rose appears as such a hollowed-out human that it would be better for her not to appear at all.

The Last Jedi feels more and more admirable to me, if not entirely successful, especially now that we have this shit fest to compare it to. At least Johnson fucking tried.

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on December 20, 2019, 01:49:51 AM
Spoiler-free review:

...it has some great moments.

SPOILERS

Spoiler: ShowHide

They tried for propulsiveness, but what they got was suffocating. It's all perfunctory and chopped to pieces. Nothing has room to breathe. I just wanted a scene with a character talking to someone and having an emotion for a minute.

I'm not a fan of the numerous fakeout deaths. How do you explain the one with Chewy? "He must have gotten on a different ship." Really?

The one that I did like was the unspoken (but clearly demonstrated) message of compassion. Rey heals Ben, in a purely selfless act, which opens him to the light and the spirits of his parents, and he is then fully turned. Which allows him to return the favor. This 100% worked for me.

As dumb and cheesy and telegraphed as it was, I actually really liked the ending. She has to overcome her problematic heritage, choosing her own identity (Skywalker) and forging her own destiny. Does feel properly Star Wars.

Yup. 

Sadly underwhelming after investing 42 YEARS (2 1/2 hours at a time) following this saga.  Unless they can somehow reclaim the magic of the original trilogy, I don't see myself spending any more time (or money) in this galaxy far, far away.  Perhaps I can take solace in the fact that I'm not nearly as disappointed as George must be.

Quote from: wilberfan on December 20, 2019, 06:13:33 PM
Perhaps I can take solace in the fact that I'm not nearly as disappointed as George must be.

That's hysterical.  That can't possibly really be George, but fuck does it look like him.  They shot it in front of my local AMC, too.   :bravo:

[edit] ( Ah.  Darth Deepfake strikes again...  *shakes fist*  )

That's a deepfake, wilberfan. The person impersonating Lucas probably doesn't even look remotely like Lucas. A proof that the next decade is gonna be bonkers.

But we're in 2019. And I had a great laugh watching this video.  :yabbse-grin:

(Mild spoilers)

I keep thinking about the breathtaking moments that I absolutely love in this film, and I desperately wish they made any gosh darned sense. Most of the big moments (especially the big character moments) do not hold up to the mildest scrutiny, or they have some self-sabotaging complication or reversal. There are a few very good ones that survive the film, but ultimately that's not much to hold on to.

This is also arguably the most poorly-edited Star Wars film. Say what you will about Attack of the Clones, for example—and it's an objectively terrible movie—but at least it allows its characters to stop and have a conversation on more than two occasions. Rise of Skywalker fails its characters in ways I didn't even imagine were possible.

Also, this is cute:

I cannot get enough of these. His laugh cracks me up.

I guess this is a twitter roundup post.

Post-TROS release, Rian Johnson has only tweeted about Star Wars once:

https://twitter.com/rianjohnson/status/1208493658334486528

Getting ready for next week:

https://twitter.com/cevangelista413/status/1208609162969731072


SPOILERS


Lindsey Romain, who I tend to agree with a lot, wrote a searing article about the choices made with Rey's heritage (here (https://nerdist.com/article/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-rey-reveal/)). My favorite part:

QuoteAnd let's go back and examine what Kylo says for a moment: "They were filthy junk traders. Sold you off for drinking money. They're dead in a pauper's grave in the Jakku desert. You come from nothing." In the text of the film, we realize that he's reading her mind, saying aloud what she fears and assumes. But in The Rise of Skywalker, he tells her he never lied to her and that everything he said was true. So what about the drinking money thing? That part was objectively a lie, and one the film never references or contends with.

What an absolute dishonor it is to the story to present something that profound and neglect it right away. There's a beautiful message to make of something like that. That children from broken homes and troubled families who never felt loved can still have strength and be heroes. That you can come from nowhere and still be important. That the Force chooses the most worthy, not the person with the most genetic relevancy.

What's worse, the decision seems to have been made simply to "up the ante":

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMVMJGGXUAE9XH_?format=png&name=small)

WTF. Did they both completely misunderstand The Last Jedi? The point of that revelation in TLJ was not solely to devastate Rey. It's cathartic, too, because it allows her to forge her own way. The fact that they return to that theme of Rey forging her own way after undermining the revelation that enabled that... is just a poor storytelling choice.

Seriously though, why did they hire the failed DC cinematic universe writer for this film? Chris Terrio is just awful with big character choices like this. I know people are blaming JJ, and he deserves some blame, but I have no doubt he's responsible for the cooler stuff. Such as:

https://twitter.com/lindseyromain/status/1208598880805367808

Objectively a horrible story/trilogy... that said...

This movie was mindless fun that went to hypernormalisation levels to give shine to nearly every big aspect of the past movies. Just a surreal thing to watch and wonder afterwards: What was the point of this trilogy, and is there any hope for the future?

I did like this visually way more than TLJ. It simply felt more Star Warsy, and not the Hunger Games... Narratively, it's technically worse, but I disliked so many places TLJ took the story, this was more comic disbelief than dislike.

It's comically senseless, yes. I was laughing. My brain was hurting, because of the "story" and the nauseating editing. But I can imagine being 7 and finding all of it cool. Unfortunately, I'm not 7.

Given it was a JJ Abrams joint, were there lens flares and if so how flarey were they? 

Quote from: ©brad on December 24, 2019, 08:22:13 AM
Given it was a JJ Abrams joint, were there lens flares and if so how flarey were they?

I actually do not remember a single lens flare. So perhaps nothing egregious.

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on December 21, 2019, 11:11:54 PM
SPOILERS

Lindsey Romain, who I tend to agree with a lot, wrote a searing article about the choices made with Rey's heritage (here (https://nerdist.com/article/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-rey-reveal/)). My favorite part:

QuoteAnd let's go back and examine what Kylo says for a moment: "They were filthy junk traders. Sold you off for drinking money. They're dead in a pauper's grave in the Jakku desert. You come from nothing." In the text of the film, we realize that he's reading her mind, saying aloud what she fears and assumes. But in The Rise of Skywalker, he tells her he never lied to her and that everything he said was true. So what about the drinking money thing? That part was objectively a lie, and one the film never references or contends with.

What an absolute dishonor it is to the story to present something that profound and neglect it right away. There's a beautiful message to make of something like that. That children from broken homes and troubled families who never felt loved can still have strength and be heroes. That you can come from nowhere and still be important. That the Force chooses the most worthy, not the person with the most genetic relevancy.

I wish I could find where I read it, but someone wrote that the lineage twist (I haven't seen the film yet, and probably won't for a long time, but I've read all the spoilers) makes the whole trilogy a story about "the Kennedys and Bushes" of the Star Wars universe. For a series that's ostensibly about a revolution against elite rule, it's leaned hard into the theme that being born into special circumstances is what makes you special.

Spoils:

Today I learned that Poe has a completely different and arguably conflicting backstory in his comics, which are canon. Not a "spice runner" at all.

Such a lazy choice attempting to make him a Han Solo clone in this. They even attempt a Han/Leia banter with him and Rey. It doesn't work, because they quite literally met at the end of TLJ, and they get zero meaningful scenes in this film.

Spoilers

My TLJ rewatch reminded me of this, the biggest plot hole in ROS, which is in fact a big crumbling and ever-growing plot hole at its already crumbly core:

In The Last Jedi, Luke absolutely and very sincerely has no idea who Rey is. His first turn, in fact, is all about curiosity. Who is she? Why is she drawn to Jedi things? Remember we see that puzzlement from his exclusive POV; he's not putting on a show for Rey. And there's a darkness? Whoa, how can that be? This doesn't make sense, and it frightens me!

What's done in ROS is a full-blown retcon. Luke is like, nah girl, we always knew you were a Palpatine. I mean, I very convincingly pretended to be puzzled by you, sure. And Leia weirdly encouraged you to go on a journey of self-discovery, even though that would lead you straight to the Emperor. We all knew, literally all of us, but we thought it would be rude to warn you.

Forget all the other middle fingers to TLJ, this one is massive.

i think the current star wars temperature is everybody is ready for Avatar 2 (2021 btw)

here is my belated theory:
everyone said The Force Awakens was a re-tread of A New Hope, which actually would've been fine - but unfortunately it was a re-tread of the entire trilogy, where all the characters already hit low points and developed and sacrificed and changed and blew up a death star within the two hour run time, thereby leaving the other two movies with absolutely nowhere to go. I didn't love the last jedi but it had very little in common with the reason those dorks attacked it; the last jedi to me just felt like wheelspinning and turned out that was because there was nothing for the movie to do, and the latest one absolutely proved it. they just did the whole trilogy again, in 150 miniutes, again.