The Rise Of Skywalker Is The Most Frustrating JJ Abrams Film

[ray245]

This is one of the most well-argued critique of The Rise of Skywalker in my opinion, and it breaks down nicely why the film didn't resonate as well with that many people.

[Galvatron]

Actually, I thought it was quite good.

[Eternal_Freedom]

If I was watching it as a standalone film, or as part of a different series, I would have felt a lot more satisfied. Watching it as a Star Wars film? It was...disappointing is the closest I can come to describing it.

[Galvatron]

I'm intrigued by the prospect of seeing an extended cut though.

[Batman]

Rise of Skywalker was still a lot more Star Wars than the prequels, but it was easily the weakest of the Sequel Trilogy. TLJ pretty much established Kylo Ren as the big bad of the trilogy. 'Fuck redemption, I LIKE being the bad guy.' Except oh, no, we brought Palpatine back from the dead, didn't we mention that?
Identical to the original looking Star Destroyers every last one of which somehow carries a planetkiller weapon, a massive Death Star wreck when the thing was blown into very tiny pieces in ROTJ and lamest space battle in the franchise despite having more ships on-screen than ever before.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

There was also the way that Palpatine's force-lightning was turned back against him in exactly the same fashion as it was when he fought against Windu, only this time it disintegrated him. Her being Palpatine's daughter was also pretty contrived. And what was the significance of her own lightsaber being yellow at the very end?

The lightsaber battle near the water was also as close as we'll ever get to finding out what would happen if a lightsaber was activated underwater, but the spray seemed to have no effect whatsoever.

[NecronLord]

There's nothing really indicating, within the films themselves, that lightsaber colour is anything but an aesthetic choice. "Rey likes yellow" is reason enough.

[Galvatron]

And the Jedi temple guards had yellow lightsabers in TCW and Rebels. They're hardly unprecedented in canon.

[ray245]

Actually, I thought it was quite good.

I see it as some people enjoying the film, but at the same time, it is not going to be a film that age well because of those flaws that were discussed. JJ Abrams Star Trek films are now dead in the water, with audience demand for his version of Star Trek dropping massively with Star Trek 3.

A film can entertain people without solid foundations, but it is unlikely to last the more people watch it, or make people that much interested in more stuff set in the sequel era. The video talks about why JJ Abrams works for the Mission Impossible movies, as the setting itself matter less than the plot that happens within the individual movies.

For Star Wars, the setting itself matters a great deal. I think the Lucas' Star Wars stories worked because it was more of a sociological story.

In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.

People then fit their internal narrative to align with their incentives, justifying and rationalizing their behavior along the way. (Thus the famous Upton Sinclair quip: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/ob ... f-thrones/

[Vympel]

Rise of Skywalker was still a lot more Star Wars than the prequels, but it was easily the weakest of the Sequel Trilogy. TLJ pretty much established Kylo Ren as the big bad of the trilogy. 'Fuck redemption, I LIKE being the bad guy.' Except oh, no, we brought Palpatine back from the dead, didn't we mention that?

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Frankly, the argument that TLJ blocked off Ben Solo being redeemed is simply flat wrong. Luke didn't say "No one's ever really gone" to Leia to give TROS some stupid trailer-bait line, he's literally talking about Ben. It's the single most important thing he says to Leia in the scene.

And frankly, the idea that it was ever going to be possible that they were going to end this trilogy with Ben dying a villain and not even joining the Force in death is the most mean-spirited downer ending I can imagine - Han and Leia's love was wasted on a piece of shit, who died a scumbag. It's repulsive to me.

Redeeming Ben (even though they killed him, which is an extremely disappointing decision IMO) was one of the only things TROS got right.

[wautd]

Identical to the original looking Star Destroyers every last one of which somehow carries a planetkiller weapon

That was indeed a lazy design, and not even needed considering there already existed in universe designs that would like more believable (like the Eclipse or Souvereign class. Or hell, if they really wanted souped up star destroyer, then why not an Onager class star destroyer, which is basically a bigass cannon with a ship built around it.
Those Sith TIE fighters with the triangle wings also looked boring as hell.

lamest space battle in the franchise

It was pretty lame/disappointed but even compared with the sleep inducing scenes where the Supremacy slowly chases the Raddus while sporadically shooting ballistic green energy balls at it?
Overall I liked the movie though. Maybe my favorite of the 3 (considering the Force Awakenss story felt very similar to A New Hope), certainly enjoyed it way more than the Last Jedi.

[Vendetta]

Rise of Skywalker was still a lot more Star Wars than the prequels,

It had the aesthetics of Star Wars, but not the structure.

The structure was just a macguffin chase, there's a thing and it points to another thing and the other thing points you at a third thing, go and get the things!

What are you going to do when you have all the things? Who cares, run around being excited and earnest!


That was not how Star Wars rolled, macguffins were not to be chased, anything that might have been a macguffin elsewhere were already caught and the adventure was what happened next (because that's interesting, chasing macguffins really isn't).

[EnterpriseSovereign]

And the Jedi temple guards had yellow lightsabers in TCW and Rebels. They're hardly unprecedented in canon.

My bad, I just haven't seen either of those. Speaking of things that are yellow, the creature that attached the wires to C3PO sounded identical to a certain minion. That whole bit around C3PO being unable/unwilling to translate the symbols needed for the location of the holocron wayfinder and needing to completely wipe his memory just to access them was total horseshit- at least R2D2 ignored his objections and immediately restored his memories, his speech saying "The Aki-Aki Festival of the Ancestors! This celebration occurs only once every forty-two years!" was an obvious allusion to the fact that ANH was released that many years ago.

As soon as I saw that part, I too ridiculed the notion that an ISD suddenly has planet-busting firepower. Hell that was even lampshaded by one of the characters. The idea that they'd need a transmitter just to know which way was up was also stretching credibility, and they showed very little of the battle of Exegol once the allied fleet showed up given that there seemed to be several hundred ships in play. Sidious' force lightning that threatened the fleet should at least have taken out a few destroyers as well, it would have been perfectly in character for him not to care about friendly fire.

They really took the whole Disney Death too far, not deciding whether it was Rey or Ren who was going to die until the very end.

[ray245]

Rise of Skywalker was still a lot more Star Wars than the prequels,

It had the aesthetics of Star Wars, but not the structure.

The structure was just a macguffin chase, there's a thing and it points to another thing and the other thing points you at a third thing, go and get the things!

What are you going to do when you have all the things? Who cares, run around being excited and earnest!

That was not how Star Wars rolled, macguffins were not to be chased, anything that might have been a macguffin elsewhere were already caught and the adventure was what happened next (because that's interesting, chasing macguffins really isn't).

Yeah, I think the people who enjoys Star Wars purely for its aesthetics are the people that cause the ST to be in such a mess as it is. Aesthetics alone cannot sustain a franchise in the long run, and people will get bored of a franchise if aesthetics is its only value.

[Darth Yan]

I actually felt Beyond was the best j j trek film

[Vendetta]

I actually felt Beyond was the best j j trek film

You mean the one directed by someone else and written by someone else that he only worked as a Producer on?

A bold opinion, but not necessarily an incorrect one.

[Gunhead]

I don't need a youtube video of any length to tell me that RoS was a mess of ideas, some good some bad and most horribly executed. This is the plague of SW movies now and has been since the prequels.
I dislike the sequels mostly for them being far more of a continuity mess than the prequels, both are crap but at least the prequels kind of connected with the OT eventually, so as a group of movies I'd argue I like the prequels more.
That is to say, I think it is folly to try and lay the blame on either on Abrams or Johnson. I think they both failed and with them their's is the failure of the movies. Both lacked vision and simply tried to push their individual ideas as vision without any comprehensive plan how to tie these three movies together.
The end result being, while all three movies may have individual points of insight, these do not form a comprehensive whole. Thus they fail, at least in my eyes to tell a story.
I'm not a star wars fan, at least not in the traditional sense. I don't like the cartoons, my view of the SW games is mixed at best, I despise the EU both modern and past. I find it odd really. 20 years ago I was a Star Wars fan. Well.. maybe 25 years ago at least.

-Gunhead

[Civil War Man]

The part about Finn and Poe got me thinking about that lesbian kiss at the end, and it reminded me of that whole thing with Le Fou in the Beauty and the Beast remake. Disney hyped both of them up as this major milestone in diversity in their movies, in order to sell tickets for the audience that cares about that, but at the same time it is always with minor characters (practically extras in TROS) and done mostly in subtext or blink-and-you'll-miss-it shots...because that makes it easier to edit out those parts in homophobic markets. Which really amplifies the fact that they don't give a shit about whether or not there is diversity or representation, but only include it if they think it will put butts in seats.

Which made me realize that, in a way, the Disney trilogy is basically the original Star Wars trilogy run through the filter of the Disney Live Action Remake. It really doesn't have much inspiration behind it besides "This thing is cultural treasure that's beloved by millions, let's do it again with some extra polish and try to catch that lightning in a bottle again," and so much of it is tied up in either mining nostalgia for the original for all its worth, or attempting to make some form of meta-commentary on the original.

That also touches on a lot of what I've been seeing regarding the comparisons between the Disney trilogy and the Prequels. Both have their supporters and their detractors, but I see one major difference between the two. For the Prequels, the criticism is mostly centered on its implementation. I haven't seen anyone who argued that the core concepts of the PT, specifically the dual story lines of the falls of Anakin Skywalker and the Galactic Republic, were bad, especially when you consider how they were inspired by Greek tragedies for Anakin or the rise of real life fascism for the Republic. The criticism is focused on the implementation of those ideas, which was somewhere in a spectrum of flawed to bad depending on how charitable the reviewer is being. On the other hand, the root of a lot of criticism of the Sequel Trilogy, ignoring bad faith arguments from loud idiots who unironically use SJW as a derogatory term, is that it's hard to really see a reason why this story needed to be told, beyond "We just bought Star Wars for $4 billion, let's make some Star Wars movies so we can turn a profit on our investment." So in a way the dichotomy between the PT and the ST is whether it's better to have a flawed implementation of a promising premise or a polished implementation of a shaky one.

[Vendetta]

Which made me realize that, in a way, the Disney trilogy is basically the original Star Wars trilogy run through the filter of the Disney Live Action Remake. It really doesn't have much inspiration behind it besides "This thing is cultural treasure that's beloved by millions, let's do it again with some extra polish and try to catch that lightning in a bottle again," and so much of it is tied up in either mining nostalgia for the original for all its worth, or attempting to make some form of meta-commentary on the original.

The sequels have basically been reactive from the start.

The whole principle of The Force Awakens was "let's not be the prequels", so it copied the aesthetic of the originals as hard as it could but didn't have any ideas of its own (because JJ doesn't), and then the deeply sad bits of the internet shat their collective pants about The Last Jedi and so Rise of Skywalker was the super safe "give the sad twats what they want" reaction to that.

[Civil War Man]

Which made me realize that, in a way, the Disney trilogy is basically the original Star Wars trilogy run through the filter of the Disney Live Action Remake. It really doesn't have much inspiration behind it besides "This thing is cultural treasure that's beloved by millions, let's do it again with some extra polish and try to catch that lightning in a bottle again," and so much of it is tied up in either mining nostalgia for the original for all its worth, or attempting to make some form of meta-commentary on the original.

The sequels have basically been reactive from the start.

The whole principle of The Force Awakens was "let's not be the prequels", so it copied the aesthetic of the originals as hard as it could but didn't have any ideas of its own (because JJ doesn't), and then the deeply sad bits of the internet shat their collective pants about The Last Jedi and so Rise of Skywalker was the super safe "give the sad twats what they want" reaction to that.

True, but there is also more to it than that, because The Last Jedi also fits into that idea, along with the idea of it being like the Disney Live Action Remakes, albeit in a slightly different way than TFA and TROS. The Abrams movies were 1000% into the nostalgia mining of the remakes, while TLJ was more into the meta-commentary of the property.

I mentioned the live action Beauty and the Beast regarding gay representation, but the meta-commentary part also fits (Lindsay Ellis has an interesting video about it). It frequently takes time to try to address commentary/criticism regarding the plot of the original animated feature, like why were the servants also punished, whether all objects in the mansion were also people, why the village didn't remember the castle when it's only been a few years since the prince became the Beast, etc, regardless of whether the criticism was accurate or the answers to those questions were at all relevant to the story.

To bring it back to TLJ, take the "Rey's parents are no one" reveal. A perfectly fine development, but I've frequently seen it lauded as "Rian Johnson democratizing the Force instead of making everything about Royal Bloodlines." Except...Star Wars is full of Great People from Humble Origins. Luke started out as some random nobody on a shithole planet before it was revealed that he was Vader's son, but Vader also started out as a random nobody from the same shithole planet, even being literally a slave. Vader, Luke, Leia, and Kylo Ren are the entirety of the so-called Royal Bloodline, and it's not entirely established whether that lineage is even common knowledge in-universe. It's known to the audience, and probably to people in-universe who are close to them, but is there any reason why Luke and Leia would advertise their parentage or the fact that they are siblings to the galaxy at large? On top of that, there is no other Force bloodline in the Lucas trilogies, because the Jedi are an essentially celibate order (EU stuff about people like Ki-Adi Mundi notwithstanding). Since those Force sensitive bloodlines don't exist, a large percentage of Jedi would just by sheer chance be from humble origins. However, since the two main POV protagonists of the Lucas trilogies are father and son, the audience has this expectation of bloodlines. So Rey's parents being nobody special would be a major twist for the audience, but shouldn't really be a major shock to any of the characters, since it would make her just like a vast majority of historical Jedi.

Which brings me to the second part of that. Rey's parents being nobody special should only put Rey into emotional turmoil if she suspected that she was from some Royal Lineage. Except there isn't really the impression that she did. She expected her parents the come back to get her on Jakku, but never really expressed any belief that she was the scion of a grand dynasty. Kylo Ren was the one who held those beliefs (about himself). So, there isn't really anything to suggest that she'd be at all affected by her parents just being some randos. The upsetting part of that reveal would be that her parents didn't love her and were willing to sell their daughter into slavery for beer money. But, since JJ's mystery boxes made audiences suspect that Rey was part of a grand lineage, TLJ's reveal focused on that part, even though she had no reason to have those suspicions herself.

Abrams had something similar in his Star Trek run, playing up the reveal of Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan when that name only had any meaning to the audience. Young Kirk and Young Spock hadn't met Khan before, so that name would not have any special meaning to them whatsoever.

Long story short, TLJ was just as reactive, since it was all about playing with the audience's expectations about the characters, rather than the characters' expectations about themselves.

EDIT: The "Royal Bloodline" bit has a bit more relevance if you go by the original EU instead of the Disney canon, since in that Luke had a kid and Han and Leia had 3. But that again only plays into the part about subverting audience expectations, since the original EU never happened in the Disney canon.

[Vendetta]

Which brings me to the second part of that. Rey's parents being nobody special should only put Rey into emotional turmoil if she suspected that she was from some Royal Lineage. Except there isn't really the impression that she did. She expected her parents the come back to get her on Jakku, but never really expressed any belief that she was the scion of a grand dynasty. Kylo Ren was the one who held those beliefs (about himself). So, there isn't really anything to suggest that she'd be at all affected by her parents just being some randos. The upsetting part of that reveal would be that her parents didn't love her and were willing to sell their daughter into slavery for beer money. But, since JJ's mystery boxes made audiences suspect that Rey was part of a grand lineage, TLJ's reveal focused on that part, even though she had no reason to have those suspicions herself.

I totally agree that The Last Jedi was also responding to audience expectations about especially Rey's parentage. But I do think it did it in a way that was also meaningful to the character.

Rey wants her parents to be "someone" because that means they had a good reason for abandoning her on Jakku and they would come back for her. It's one of her driving motivations for the first half of the trilogy, wanting to go back and wait for them. If they were, as TLJ reveals, just junk scavs who would sell their child for drink money, then they didn't have a reason and they really were never coming back.

Her identity is built around wanting them to come for her, if that would never happen her identity shatters.


By contrast no revelation available by the end of TFA about a lineage from a prior trilogy character could ever actually have been meaningful to her as a character, if it had been one of Luke, Leia, or Han that would have to have been addressed in that movie when Ben was being discussed. And no other character could have, by revealing a link to them, made her change her behaviour in any way. (If information doesn't change a character's behaviour it doesn't matter, as you identify with the STID Khan reveal)

And we see the fruits of that in TRoS. Nothing about Rey's link to Palpatine specifically makes her choose to do anything different than she would have done without it.

[Civil War Man]

I totally agree that The Last Jedi was also responding to audience expectations about especially Rey's parentage. But I do think it did it in a way that was also meaningful to the character.

Rey wants her parents to be "someone" because that means they had a good reason for abandoning her on Jakku and they would come back for her. It's one of her driving motivations for the first half of the trilogy, wanting to go back and wait for them. If they were, as TLJ reveals, just junk scavs who would sell their child for drink money, then they didn't have a reason and they really were never coming back.

Her identity is built around wanting them to come for her, if that would never happen her identity shatters.

That last part is definitely what her identity was built around, but it doesn't follow that it's also built around her parents being important. For instance, if we change the reveal in TLJ to basically just be TROS without Palpatine, where they abandon her on Jakku to protect her from Snoke, but were otherwise no one of any importance, that wouldn't have been any threat to her identity. They would have had a good reason to abandon her there, and presumably would have come back for her if able once the danger had passed.

By contrast, if the reveal had been that were important people, but they left her on Jakku for some horrible reason like they just didn't want a daughter, that would have completely obliterated her identity for the same reason the actual TLJ reveal was a threat to her identity. It would have been a sign that her family never loved her and she had always been alone. The random junk traders part of the TLJ reveal wasn't what would have been devastating to her based on her TFA characterization, it was just the sold her for drinking money part.

The reveal of Vader being Luke's father shattered Luke's identity, because he was invested in the idea of his father being a hero. A hypothetical reveal that Ben was adopted would have shattered his identity, since he was invested in the idea of him being the inheritor to some kind of Skywalker legacy. A hypothetical reveal in GoT where Daenerys turns out to be a bastard would have shattered her identity, since she was heavily invested in the idea of being the last Targaryen and the rightful inheritor to the Iron Throne. Rey's parents being randos is not inherently a threat to her identity, since she is not invested in the idea of who they are, but simply in the idea that they are people who love her. It is just the audience that was invested in the idea of who her parents were.

[Vendetta]

By contrast, if the reveal had been that were important people, but they left her on Jakku for some horrible reason like they just didn't want a daughter, that would have completely obliterated her identity for the same reason the actual TLJ reveal was a threat to her identity. It would have been a sign that her family never loved her and she had always been alone. The random junk traders part of the TLJ reveal wasn't what would have been devastating to her based on her TFA characterization, it was just the sold her for drinking money part.

Except, of course, there's no-one important for them to be. Remember that discovering the identity of Rey's parents needs to change Rey's behaviour in some way. If it's going to be some previously significant character than it needs to be the identity of that character that produces the change.

And there is no character in Star Wars that can do that for Rey that isn't Han, Luke, or Leia and if it were any of them it needed to come up in The Force Awakens.

"Senator Bob" is an important person within the fiction, but isn't important to the narrative and is functionally indistinguishable from nobody as far as his identity would change Rey's path as a character.

And we totally see that in TRoS where learning that she's related to Grampa Sheev doesn't actually make Rey do anything differently than she would have done if she didn't know it.

So "Rey's parents are nobodies" is actually the only dramatically successful answer to that question. Everything else is dead weight.

[Civil War Man]

So "Rey's parents are nobodies" is actually the only dramatically successful answer to that question. Everything else is dead weight.

I agree that Rey's parents not being anyone important is a better story decision. My whole point is that whether Rey's parents were important or nobodies is irrelevant to her sense of identity, but that specific part of the reveal gets emphasized because members of the audience were invested in that, even if Rey was not. It's like how Star Trek Into Darkness plays up the reveal of Benedict Cumberbatch being Khan, even though that name is completely meaningless to the Kirk and Spock of that timeline.

Rey's motivation was about reuniting with her family. Her parents being nobodies wouldn't have mattered to her. Her parents not loving her would have. So when people laud TLJ's reveal for "Democratizing the Force," they are completely missing the point because a) bloodlines are only important from a meta-narrative standpoint, because the primary protagonists of the Lucas trilogies were father and son, b) Force sensitivity has otherwise been treated as more or less completely random, so it was already democratized, and c) the important character-defining part of the reveal was that Rey's parents didn't love her, regardless of their identity, and coming to terms with that gives her a chance to leave the past behind and finding belonging elsewhere.

And yeah, Grandpa Sheev didn't make her do anything differently, because making her part of a "dynasty" only mattered to some members of the audience. It never mattered to her.

[Vendetta]

Rey's motivation was about reuniting with her family. Her parents being nobodies wouldn't have mattered to her. Her parents not loving her would have.

Yeah, but I think there's a fairly strong link between them being nobodies and them not loving her, because that's the underlying reason why they're the sort of people who aren't going to come back for her, they're space trash.

Even from that perspective, there's no alternative that does any narrative work.

It also leaves Rey in a position where she's now primed to move forward to finding her own place in the galaxy, because she's able to let go of her past now. Whereas if the reveal is that they're an identifiable individual, the law of conservation of detail demands that she then has to seek and interact with that character or some other aspect of that character's legacy when she wouldn't have done that before.