Rise of Skywalkers reviews (Spoilers in this thread)

[ray245]

I think mostly they just wanted an excuse for cavalry in the first place. It might have made more sense if the Emperor's secret lair was the same planet as the cavalry and the ships were just being uncovered but under a dome shield or something.

That's my issues with the new directors. They wanted scenes because it would look cool, but it's done in such a contrived manner.

[MKSheppard]

C3PO is forbidden to translate a language he can apparently read. Why would you even do this in the programming, as opposed to programming him not to read the language in the first place?

Actually, it made sense as a (failsafe). The Sith language is pretty much what all the "lost tomes" of Sithdom and the dark side of the force, and unnatural acts and instructions on how to do them are in.

I can see the Jedi, at the founding of the Old Republic carefully designing the basic translation matrix so that droids can't translate Sith, but leaving a loophole in the translation matrix so that in the future (maybe thousands of years hence) a Jedi can still translate ancient Sith...but at a cost.

The CONCEPT is sound, but the execution needed some work; now that I think about it. Basically, as it is, any basic data slicer can hack a protocol droid to get the Sith translation via triggering a mind-wipe.

Not everyone is pro-droid rights, so...

A better refinement of the concept would be that you have to find the decryption key in the ancient Jedi archives in the ruined temple on Coruscant.

EDIT: But that's another fetch quest. It may be better to drop the whole "hidden Sith translation matrix" thing in Protocol droids as an idea.

[MKSheppard]

Redesigning it further:

Have R2D2 there as well.

C3PO is all "how do I even know how to translate ancient sith? that's not in the 11 million forms of communication standard to my model."

R2D2: *whistle-beep*

C3PO: "Master Kenobi installed it? [around AOTC/ROTS] I would think I would remember such a thing."

R2D2: *whistle-beep*

C3PO: "Oh." (he finds out that he's been memory wiped before)

And with R2D2 there, there's more emotional impact when C3PO is mindwiped (and it should STICK, damn it)

[ray245]

I think mostly they just wanted an excuse for cavalry in the first place. It might have made more sense if the Emperor's secret lair was the same planet as the cavalry and the ships were just being uncovered but under a dome shield or something.

It's just so lazy. SW already give you an excuse to do ground assault with Endor having a shield generator. But JJ Abrams is too lazy to even make use of that.

[Omeganian]

They started the new trilogy by ripping off a Star Trek movie. They ended it by ripping off a Star Wars game.

[Galvatron]

Well, I'm not interested in defending this movie. All I can say is that it worked for me. Maybe it's because I was able to mentally fill in the blanks or ignore what didn't make sense because I was actually enjoying the ride. My expectations going in were very low, so I'm sure that helped too.

Could it have been better in a million ways? Sure, but that hardly matters now.

[Gandalf]

They started the new trilogy by ripping off a Star Trek movie. They ended it by ripping off a Star Wars game.

And the Original Trilogy started by ripping off Kurosawa and Flash Gordon.

[Anacronian]

I do like this movie a little more than The Last Jedi, They are both incredible stupid movies in my opinion, But the Rise of Skywalker is the kind of stupid you can laugh at(like the ROOM) where The last Jedi is depressing nihilistic stupid that doesn't entice much laughter.

[Galvatron]

Am I the only one who liked Hux's arc? Also, General Pryde was a refreshing (albeit too late) addition to the cast.

[Gandalf]

Am I the only one who liked Hux's arc? Also, General Pryde was a refreshing (albeit too late) addition to the cast.

I liked it, but I liked Hux from the start.

[Galvatron]

I never liked Hux. Maybe that's why I liked his arc.

What I want to know more about is Sheev Jr. and his wife. Did Luke and Leia know them? Could they have been Jedi? Did they live on Jakku in hiding before the Emperor sent Ochi to find Rey? Why "sell" her to a scumbag like Unkar Plutt? Did they really intend to return as she believed? Did they use the Force on her so she would stay put?

I think that could be A Star Wars Story by itself.

[LadyTevar]

Now that would have been a moment on par with if they'd just smash cut to 'The End' with the first blaster bolt turning Luke into chunky salsa in TLJ.

It's also completely dumb why they didn't just use the fighters to blow up the antenna on the Stardestroyer.

I think it was because they already had the troopship there to take out the antenna, and it was easier to re-direct the troopship than a flight of fighters to take it out?
There's also the fact that when the Commander heard a troopship landed, he ordered "Jam their speeders!" So, there were electronic countermeasures up that would have definitely stopped speederbikes. Would that have affected fighters? Unknown.

[LadyTevar]

I never liked Hux. Maybe that's why I liked his arc.

What I want to know more about is Sheev Jr. and his wife. Did Luke and Leia know them? Could they have been Jedi? Did they live on Jakku in hiding before the Emperor sent Ochi to find Rey? Why "sell" her to a scumbag like Unkar Plutt? Did they really intend to return as she believed? Did they use the Force on her so she would stay put?

I think that could be A Star Wars Story by itself.

This is why I think she should have been his GREAT-grand-daughter.
I doubt anyone knew Palpatine had any living relations. First, he'd have had them in hiding "for their own protection" (as future incarnations), and second, this one went into hiding either out of fear of his dad's cult, or because simply being a Palpatine was a dangerous thing in the New Republic. Probably some of both columns.

[Galvatron]

I wonder if Sheev Jr. was ever Palpatine's heir in an official capacity or just some bastard of his. Who was his mother? Did she abscond with him after being knocked up and simply lay low during the Imperial Era? Did he grow up not knowing about his parentage too?

[Ralin]

I can see the Jedi, at the founding of the Old Republic carefully designing the basic translation matrix so that droids can't translate Sith, but leaving a loophole in the translation matrix so that in the future (maybe thousands of years hence) a Jedi can still translate ancient Sith...but at a cost.

The CONCEPT is sound, but the execution needed some work; now that I think about it. Basically, as it is, any basic data slicer can hack a protocol droid to get the Sith translation via triggering a mind-wipe.

Not everyone is pro-droid rights, so...

Or maybe during the course of a thousand generations some bright jackass figured out a way to subvert would should have been an unbreakable limitation.

C-3PO was able to talk to the Ewoks, so he along with having access to a staggering number of languages he must be able to figure out new languages on the fly. Even if that's partially him extrapolating from known languages, there are presumably historical records about the Sith he could use for that.

Hell, he was put together by an eight year old. Maybe it only worked on him because some of his firmware or whatever is bugged.

[ray245]

I think it was because they already had the troopship there to take out the antenna, and it was easier to re-direct the troopship than a flight of fighters to take it out?
There's also the fact that when the Commander heard a troopship landed, he ordered "Jam their speeders!" So, there were electronic countermeasures up that would have definitely stopped speederbikes. Would that have affected fighters? Unknown.

A starship would reach the antenna faster than the space-horses can run. And if there were electronic counter-measures, they could have use it to as a weapon against the fighters flying around the stardestroyers anyway, but they somehow didn't.

[ray245]

Regarding the Holdo manoeuvre , despite JJ Abrams saying it is a 1 in a million shot, he showed a Stardestroyer destroyed by the very same tactic in the final scene over Endor.

[The Romulan Republic]

It is worth the money.

Hmm.

To be honest, I've been so worn out with the fandom infighting and seesaw direction of the franchise, and so afraid of another Game of Thrones season eight, that I've barely been following it lately, but even still I've seen a deluge of bad reviews.

On the plus side, this is probably the least-spoiled I've ever been for a new Star Wars film in my lifetime. I might give it a go post-Christmas.

I completely disagree. I think if you like TLJ and what RJ did, you will hate ROS.

Anyone who thinks those that love TLJ will like ROS do not understand why people liked TLJ.

Rose role has been reduced to a minor background character.

Note: I haven't seen the film yet, so I am going off the presumption that what ray just said is an honest and accurate reflection of the film. The following statement is made in response to the marginalization of Rose, and is not meant to be a comprehensive statement on all aspects of the film. That said, this seems a fair opportunity to address some larger trends in the Star Wars franchise, and media and culture overall, so here goes.


If it is true that Rose has been minimalized (and that was already the case in the promotional material for the film), then they are not only pandering to the OT purists, but pandering to the Alt. Reich, exactly as I feared they were when I saw how they cut Rose nearly entirely from the promotional material.

Those fucking scum viciously harrassed Kelly Tran off Twitter with racist and misogynist trolling, and instead of standing by their actor, Disney and Abrams decided to reward the trolls by heavily cutting her role. I feel so, so sorry for Kelly Tran (for whom a breakout role has now been turned into renewed marginalization and a likely lifetime of harrasment and denigration from the nastier elements of the fandom), for all of the actors, and for Rian Johnson, who is already being scapegoated for ROS's failings (the argument I've seen goes that the film was ruined because Abrams "had" to spend half of it "fixing" what Johnson did**). And I feel sorry for the entire Asian community who are already among the most marginalized and under-represented in Western media, despite representing, between the various different Asian nationalities and ethnicities, the majority of the human race.

This is not only morally repulsive, it is a huge betrayal on Disney's part of their actors and the company's obligation to their safety. Because the message the Reich will take from this is that its harassment worked, and that means there will be more of it. They know they can ruin any actor or director's career by being scum on social media, because companies will cater to whichever portion of the fandom whines loudly.

You do not appease these people with weakness and concessions. That emboldens them, because fascists and bullies smell weakness like a shark smells blood in the water, and they respond in the same way. I haven't been this disgusted at a company's cravenness since Comedy Central censored South Park in response to threats from Islamic extremists (note: I am not defending South Park's content here, but you do not give into threats from terrorists, because that only encourages more threats). And it doesn't even really matter if that was the reason, if their motives were bigoted or political, or if they just thought Rose was a bad character or that she didn't have a role in the film Abrams envisioned or whatever. Marginalizing her like this, in this context, will send that message.

Between this, Endgame,and "Game of Thrones", though, its increasingly and depressingly clear to me that the surge in female protagonists in genre films over the last few years was just a fad, that the Powers That Be (who are still overwhelmingly white men) have basically decided "Okay female majority of the human race, we gave you your moment in the spotlight, now we're gonna go back to making nice safe films with white male protagonists that don't make insecure conservative white men feel threatened." Or maybe: "Okay women, we'll let you have your strong female protagonist, as long as they turn evil, die, or get marginalized at the end."

Millennia of persecution ranging from marginalization to second-class citizenship to outright sexual slavery, a few years of female-lead movies, and now its time to go back to the status quo. Fuckers.

Honestly, this makes me inclined to boycott the film on principle. The only reason I won't is because a boycott would be cutting into the female and minority actors' paycheques, and there's no reason why they should be punished because Mickey and Abrams decided to knife them in the back to appease fucking Twitter trolls.

I've been criticized for claiming that anyone who criticizes the ST is a fascist, but that is not and has never been my argument. What I believe is that the Alt. Reich coopted criticism of the films, coopted the Star Wars fandom, in the same way that they coopted free speech advocacy (to the point that many regard "being a free speech activist" as simply code for "being a neo-Nazi/white supremacist"), or the way they coopted Patriotism, or they way the coopted a part of the Bernie Sanders campaign (the Bernie-or-Busters) or the way they coopted the fucking Swastika (which was an Eastern religious symbol long before the Nazis got their filthy paws on it and made it synonymous with them to the point that its still illegal in multiple countries to display it). Because they're a God Damn cultural cancer, and this is what they do. They take over any system they enter and make it part of them and their hate machine. And we fell for it again. We, the fandom, let them do it. We let them use our nostalgia and sense of ownership of the fandom, and our resultant anger and resentment, to dictate what Star Wars can be.

Even leaving the politics aside for a moment, pandering to the most exclusionary portions of the fandom will not be good for the franchise in the long-run. What director or actor will want to work on a franchise where creativity or originality is met with vicious hatred and abuse from the fandom, and the company will then throw you under the bus and expunge your work as much as possible in order to appease them? This does not honour Star Wars, and it does not honour the OT. What it does do is ensure creative sterility, ensuring that the franchise will never be permitted to become bigger or better than it was- only smaller. Contrast to, say, Doctor Who, which thrives on change, has embraced it from almost the beginning, and continues to adapt to transitions that would cripple or kill another franchise. And which, probably not coincidentally, has probably the nicest and most tolerant fandom I've ever encountered- the Right tried to flood Who internet pages with rage over Jodie Whittaker, and it mostly just fell on deaf ears.

The OT succeeded, in part, because it dared to have an original vision, to do something new. But Star Wars isn't allowed to be bigger or better now. In trying to preserve the spirit of the OT, the ugliest portions of the fandom have ensured that Star Wars will never grow beyond it. This is, of course, a fundamentally conservative sentiment- that the priority should be always and only preserving and honouring a glorified past, not building a better future. No wonder, then, that the Alt. Reich found such fertile ground for their resentments in the Star Wars fan community. Indeed, one can see the process here as a very microcosm of the one which put Donald Trump in the White House.

Again, this is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of the film, its plot, or its characters. I don't yet have sufficient information to speak to that yet. What it is is a response to the specific issue of Rose's minimalization, the context in which it happened, and its implications to the larger political issues of our time, and it should be read in that light. When I've seen the film, I will perhaps offer a fuller analysis of it, though I frankly cannot image any other qualities that could redeem it in my eyes from this single, shameful action.

I'm not going to boycott, for the reasons stated above. But there does need to be a fan backlash, one even louder and more persistent than the one the Reich unleashed. Because these One Percenter shits running Disney and HBO and so many other companies only really care about profit and PR, and the only way that they will keep making movies with female and minority leads who are treated with a modicum of respect is if they fucking hurt when they don't. Their idea of building a franchise is to just pander to whoever whined loudest about the last film? Then we better be damn sure that we're the ones whining louder.

But I forgot, that's "woke cancel culture" and President Obama tells us we shouldn't do that- because trying to be nice and "bipartisan" to the people who hated him simply for existing worked out so well for him and his agenda and legacy.




*Which means that the assurances from Abrams about how much he liked Rose were likely so much cynically-calculated bullshit, just like all the times they built Daenerys up as a hero while planning all along to turn her into a Mad Queen stereotype and have Jon put her down like a rabid dog.

**Read: daring to do something new.

[Tribble]

I see Rise of Skywalker as another "popcorn movie" - turn off your brain, eat your popcorn, and sit back and enjoy the ride. In that respect I enjoyed the movie a lot more than The Last Jedi.

I've gotta admit that TLJ has grown on me though. Flawed execution aside, it at least had a story to tell and was willing to take risks and shake things up to do it. It may not always worked the way it was intended, and I may not have agreed with all of it... but at least it was something new, and different.

One thing I was really hoping for in Rise of Skywalker was that Kylo Ren was going to be the main villain after all... but not in the same vein as the Emperor, Snoke or even Vader. He was different. He made mistakes. He got emotional and lost his cool. He wasn't some brilliant strategist with masterful schemes for everything. He wasn't a Sith… ya he may have started out as a Vader wannabe, but by the end of TLJ he was just as disgusted with the Sith as he was of the Jedi. He really didn't do evil things simply for the evilz, or even for purely personal gain (his whole agenda being to wipe the slate clean and start fresh). He was conflicted, and felt guilt for some of his actions. Perhaps most importantly, he could do the right thing... which is what made the bad things he did seem even worse. And his relationship with Rey makes it difficult for her to finish the job because she knows he's capable of doing better.

Yet they decided to just re-use the Evil Emperor who does Evilz while pulling all the strings rather than let Kylo Ren flourish. Yes, the Emperor is always fun to watch, but he's been done already... twice, if you count Snoke. It would have been more interesting to see something different.

[Lord Revan]

I wouldn't say Rose's role was marginalized so much as her role was different from what some people wished it to be, it certainly didn't seem like "please don't notice she's still in the movie" role but rather a strong if not as prominent support role and she did have the main spotlight in several scenes.

There was even some implication of a possible romance between her and Finn even if that ultimately didn't go anywhere and she survived to the end.

[ray245]

*Which means that the assurances from Abrams about how much he liked Rose were likely so much cynically-calculated bullshit, just like all the times they built Daenerys up as a hero while planning all along to turn her into a Mad Queen stereotype and have Jon put her down like a rabid dog.

**Read: daring to do something new.

Don't tell me. I've always disliked the sequels because I see Disney and more specifically JJ Abrams not having a creative backbone of any kind. JJ Abrams recently tried to appease those who didn't like the Kylo/Rey shippers that their relationship can be one of sibling love, while at the same time giving in to those that do want the Kylo/Rey ship to happen.

JJ Abrams is a used-car salesman, he will literally say anything you want to hear to make you buy his product.

[The Romulan Republic]

*Which means that the assurances from Abrams about how much he liked Rose were likely so much cynically-calculated bullshit, just like all the times they built Daenerys up as a hero while planning all along to turn her into a Mad Queen stereotype and have Jon put her down like a rabid dog.

**Read: daring to do something new.

Don't tell me. I've always disliked the sequels because I see Disney and more specifically JJ Abrams not having a creative backbone of any kind. JJ Abrams recently tried to appease those who didn't like the Kylo/Rey shippers that their relationship can be one of sibling love, while at the same time giving in to those that do want the Kylo/Rey ship to happen.

Well that one was a spoiler to me, but I don't really care now.

So, they also decided to send women and girls the message that the guy who abuses you is your Tru Wuv and can be saved if you keep giving them second chances, eh?

I'm sure that's a very gratifying message to a lot of men in Hollywood, but personally I think there are too many self-blaming domestic abuse victims as it is.

JJ Abrams is a used-car salesman, he will literally say anything you want to hear to make you buy his product.

Yeah. If half of the things I'm seeing about this movie turn out to be true, I think I'll have to retract my previous support for him as a director.

[Galvatron]

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Rose was actually not annoying in this movie. Then again, I could say the same about the rest of the cast as well.

Rian Johnson seems to have a gift for making otherwise perfectly tolerable characters come off as obnoxious as possible.

[ray245]

Yeah. If half of the things I'm seeing about this movie turn out to be true, I think I'll have to retract my previous support for him as a director.

I told you so since he was announced as the director for Ep 7. All the issues were there to see in his Star Trek movies and in Ep 7. People were just too hyped up about Star Wars coming back and JJ Abrams pacing that they've overlooked his issues.

I was laughing when he decide to come back to Ep 9, because I believe he might have to face fan backlash for the first time in his career. I thought he was smart enough to not come back to the Star Wars franchise and be found out by the fans. But he just couldn't resist coming back for a pissing contest with Rian Johnson ( who despite my issues with TLJ, is still a much better director than JJ Abrams).

[loomer]

The best way I've found to describe RoS is basically as TFA but without that initial excitement of Star Wars Is Back! Same hollow retread but spectacular visuals.