Dear Escapist friends,
I've been meaning to post my impressions of the new Star Wars movie into the Last Movie You Watched thread but then I realized there wasn't a thread on the conclusion of the new Star Wars trilogy yet and I thought I'm gonna get more attention this way.
Anyway, I just saw Episode 9 and I want to make clear that I went into it with pretty low expectations. And I take no pleasure in saying that, unlike many people I've so far been relatively positive on the new Star Wars movies and felt that Episode 8, flawed and awkward as it surely was in a number of places, was a subtle indication of the series finally finding a new voice in something that's not simply a repetition of the old Star Wars movies. Rise of Skywalker served as a grim reminder that, despite the best efforts of individual creators like Rian Johnson, the series is now owned by people who have great interest in adding to Star Wars as a brand but are neither interested, nor for the most part capable, of adding to it as a story and any good movie that's gonna come out of it needs to be regarded as an accident.
While I need to think it over for a bit, Rise of Skywalker as of now has a decent chance of dethroning Attack of the Clones as my least favourite Star Wars movie. And that's no small feat, let me tell you.
When it was announced that Colin Trevorrow, originally considered to direct Episode 9, was let go over creative differences and JJ. Abrams, director of Episode 7, was brought back in to direct Episode 9 most of my excitement for it went away. Episode 7, coincidentally, sits comfortably as my second least favourite movie in the series. And it had Phantom Menace to compete with. Of all the directors who had been directing Star Wars movies so far I don't think any one deserved another chance less than Abrams and yes, that includes George Lucas. Still, I make it a point of approaching every movie I watch with all the good will in the world so while I didn't expect Rise of Skywalker to be very good I surely wanted it to be. The reviews, of course, did very little to raise my confidence but then, critics have been wrong before.
The movie was an absolute trainwreck, though. And I'm not putting this lightly. I hated almost every single thing about its story, starting with the opening crawl and this is not an exaggeration. I'm gonna spoil the movie here. If you don't want to be spoiled on it, feel free to stop reading but if you want my semi professional opinion as a semi professional film critic, life's too short to watch Rise of Skywalker.
One of the first thing establishes is the fact that Emperor Palpatine is still alive, which is one of numerous absurd asspulls the movie employs to justify its own existence. If you wonder how he survived, then rest assured that so do I because the movie never explains it. He's around because the movie needed a villain who's not Kylo Ren, though talking about him, one of the movies few redeeming qualities is Adam Drivers visible disgust at the material he's been given. Either way, Palpatine is still alive and had a fleet of dormant Star Destroyers equipped with planet destroying weapons... just lying around, I guess, which he offers to the First Order. Rey and her friends in the Resistance, meanwhile, go on a number of pointless fetchquests to destroy them.
The first half of the movie is an absolutely baffling affair in both structure and pacing. It's a rushed, hectic mess that feels like it's skipping entire scenes in a desperate attempt to get to the equally incoherent action sequences quicker. There is a chase scene in a desert relatively early on that, I think, was trying to remind me of Mad Max Fury Road yet serves as an example of doing wrong everything Fury Road did right in framing a vehicle based chase through a desert in a way that the viewer can actually tell what's going on. The plot settles into a steady rythm of disjointed filler, mostly defined by small nuggets of bad taste like the lifeless corpse of Carrie Fisher being puppeted around Weekend at Bernies style to serve as a supporting character.
Eventually the movie reveals to us, and I'm not making this up, that Rey is the grand daughter of Emperor Palpatine. The daughter of his son, that he had, apparently, and that some poor soul writing Expanded Universe novels has to come up with a backstory for. This was the point where I was all but ready leave the theater, if I weren't a professional, of course. Last Jedi establishing that Rey was, indeed, not related to anyone important served as an important step for the series away from its rigid focus on exceptional bloodlines to a more grounded and more humanist view of importance not as something inherited but as something acquired. Rey being a normal girl with no special background was Last Jedi's best idea and Abrams, bitter and hateful little man that he is, couldn't just leave it. You can almost feel his frustration about not being able to make a movie remotely as good as Johnson's, even on his second attempt.
Rise of Skywalker is a movie about tearing down everything that was accomplished since the ending of the original trilogy. Literally, in a sense. The Empire is back, the Emperor is back, the Original Trilogy and the triumph on which it ended might as well not have happened at all. But even narratively all Star Wars has done to evolve, even under Disney, has been discarded in favour of... well, what exactly? My first impulse was to call it fanservice but that's not exactly right.
Rise of Skywalker is a cynical attempt to pander to a deeply reactionary portion of the Star Wars fanbase, the very same portion that threw a fit over Last Jedi's more playful attitude towards the series narrative conventions. A portion of the fanbase who's ideal Science-Fiction movie is Starship Troopers, but unironically, and who, most likely, are gonna dismiss Rise of Sywalker anyway, simply for being directed by a Jew. You think that's a cynical view of the movie and its target audience? So did I, until a specific plotthread involving Finn.
Finn, you see, was built up as love interest for Rey in the first movie. So far so good. The second movie gave him a new love interest in an Asian character called Rose, who this movie mostly ignores. The cynic in me already assumed at that point that this was a studio mandated decision because the suits felt that pairing a black man with a white woman was somehow too risky so they felt the need to hook him up with an appropriately ethnic love interest in the sequel. Rise of Skywalker feels the need to give him yet another love interest, a black character named Jannah played by gorgeous Naomi Ackie. And this was where the movie genuinely started to gross me out. Well, you know, that and the Carrie Fisher thing. This felt like a downright capitulation to complaints about big Hollywood studios promoting miscegenation or "racemixing" and an apology for ever pairing a black man up with a woman of a different ethnicity. So now Finn finally has a black love interest and me and my fellow Caucasians can sleep easy, knowing that white genocide has once again been averted. Great fucking job, Mickey.
And that's the movie in a nutshell. It's this weird, nonsensical, kinda gross thing that I hope I'll never have to see again. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It gets somewhat better in its second half and there are aspects of the climax that I might have actually appreciated, had the pacing not been as rushed as it was. Some of the visuals around Palpatine were unusually dark and sinister for the series standards, which would have actually been cool, in a better movie but in this one it just stands as somewhat neat iconography that lacks any greater context. Kylo gets an entirely unearned redemption, Rey is being tempted by the Dark Side at a point where everyone knew that of course she wasn't gonna give into it, Hux gets... not quite a redemption, because even Abrams knew that making the fanatical space nazi sympathetic would be a step too far but a weird plotline that reveals he was feeding information to the Resistance, not because he had a change of heart but out of spite towards Kylo.
Basically, it's some stupid ass shit. I don't know what the future of the Star Wars series is gonna be but god knows I hope it's not more of... this. There's been a back and forth about wether Rian Johnson will actually get to direct his own trilogy and I hope it's actually gonna work out for him because Rise of Skywalker makes Last Jedi look like a masterpiece. There have also been rumors about Marvel Studios Kevin Feige working on Star Wars and while I dread to see him force the Marvel Cinematic Universes weird conservative subtext into Star Wars Disney has proven that they don't need Feige to do so, so how much worse can it be?
I don't know. This whole rant was probably mighty tiresome and excessively neckbeardy but venting about it afterwards is the only catharsis I'm gonna get out of Rise of Skywalker. So, in summary: Fuck J.J. Abrams, fuck Disney and fuck capitalism. Good night.
I've been meaning to post my impressions of the new Star Wars movie into the Last Movie You Watched thread but then I realized there wasn't a thread on the conclusion of the new Star Wars trilogy yet and I thought I'm gonna get more attention this way.
Anyway, I just saw Episode 9 and I want to make clear that I went into it with pretty low expectations. And I take no pleasure in saying that, unlike many people I've so far been relatively positive on the new Star Wars movies and felt that Episode 8, flawed and awkward as it surely was in a number of places, was a subtle indication of the series finally finding a new voice in something that's not simply a repetition of the old Star Wars movies. Rise of Skywalker served as a grim reminder that, despite the best efforts of individual creators like Rian Johnson, the series is now owned by people who have great interest in adding to Star Wars as a brand but are neither interested, nor for the most part capable, of adding to it as a story and any good movie that's gonna come out of it needs to be regarded as an accident.
While I need to think it over for a bit, Rise of Skywalker as of now has a decent chance of dethroning Attack of the Clones as my least favourite Star Wars movie. And that's no small feat, let me tell you.
When it was announced that Colin Trevorrow, originally considered to direct Episode 9, was let go over creative differences and JJ. Abrams, director of Episode 7, was brought back in to direct Episode 9 most of my excitement for it went away. Episode 7, coincidentally, sits comfortably as my second least favourite movie in the series. And it had Phantom Menace to compete with. Of all the directors who had been directing Star Wars movies so far I don't think any one deserved another chance less than Abrams and yes, that includes George Lucas. Still, I make it a point of approaching every movie I watch with all the good will in the world so while I didn't expect Rise of Skywalker to be very good I surely wanted it to be. The reviews, of course, did very little to raise my confidence but then, critics have been wrong before.
The movie was an absolute trainwreck, though. And I'm not putting this lightly. I hated almost every single thing about its story, starting with the opening crawl and this is not an exaggeration. I'm gonna spoil the movie here. If you don't want to be spoiled on it, feel free to stop reading but if you want my semi professional opinion as a semi professional film critic, life's too short to watch Rise of Skywalker.
One of the first thing establishes is the fact that Emperor Palpatine is still alive, which is one of numerous absurd asspulls the movie employs to justify its own existence. If you wonder how he survived, then rest assured that so do I because the movie never explains it. He's around because the movie needed a villain who's not Kylo Ren, though talking about him, one of the movies few redeeming qualities is Adam Drivers visible disgust at the material he's been given. Either way, Palpatine is still alive and had a fleet of dormant Star Destroyers equipped with planet destroying weapons... just lying around, I guess, which he offers to the First Order. Rey and her friends in the Resistance, meanwhile, go on a number of pointless fetchquests to destroy them.
The first half of the movie is an absolutely baffling affair in both structure and pacing. It's a rushed, hectic mess that feels like it's skipping entire scenes in a desperate attempt to get to the equally incoherent action sequences quicker. There is a chase scene in a desert relatively early on that, I think, was trying to remind me of Mad Max Fury Road yet serves as an example of doing wrong everything Fury Road did right in framing a vehicle based chase through a desert in a way that the viewer can actually tell what's going on. The plot settles into a steady rythm of disjointed filler, mostly defined by small nuggets of bad taste like the lifeless corpse of Carrie Fisher being puppeted around Weekend at Bernies style to serve as a supporting character.
Eventually the movie reveals to us, and I'm not making this up, that Rey is the grand daughter of Emperor Palpatine. The daughter of his son, that he had, apparently, and that some poor soul writing Expanded Universe novels has to come up with a backstory for. This was the point where I was all but ready leave the theater, if I weren't a professional, of course. Last Jedi establishing that Rey was, indeed, not related to anyone important served as an important step for the series away from its rigid focus on exceptional bloodlines to a more grounded and more humanist view of importance not as something inherited but as something acquired. Rey being a normal girl with no special background was Last Jedi's best idea and Abrams, bitter and hateful little man that he is, couldn't just leave it. You can almost feel his frustration about not being able to make a movie remotely as good as Johnson's, even on his second attempt.
Rise of Skywalker is a movie about tearing down everything that was accomplished since the ending of the original trilogy. Literally, in a sense. The Empire is back, the Emperor is back, the Original Trilogy and the triumph on which it ended might as well not have happened at all. But even narratively all Star Wars has done to evolve, even under Disney, has been discarded in favour of... well, what exactly? My first impulse was to call it fanservice but that's not exactly right.
Rise of Skywalker is a cynical attempt to pander to a deeply reactionary portion of the Star Wars fanbase, the very same portion that threw a fit over Last Jedi's more playful attitude towards the series narrative conventions. A portion of the fanbase who's ideal Science-Fiction movie is Starship Troopers, but unironically, and who, most likely, are gonna dismiss Rise of Sywalker anyway, simply for being directed by a Jew. You think that's a cynical view of the movie and its target audience? So did I, until a specific plotthread involving Finn.
Finn, you see, was built up as love interest for Rey in the first movie. So far so good. The second movie gave him a new love interest in an Asian character called Rose, who this movie mostly ignores. The cynic in me already assumed at that point that this was a studio mandated decision because the suits felt that pairing a black man with a white woman was somehow too risky so they felt the need to hook him up with an appropriately ethnic love interest in the sequel. Rise of Skywalker feels the need to give him yet another love interest, a black character named Jannah played by gorgeous Naomi Ackie. And this was where the movie genuinely started to gross me out. Well, you know, that and the Carrie Fisher thing. This felt like a downright capitulation to complaints about big Hollywood studios promoting miscegenation or "racemixing" and an apology for ever pairing a black man up with a woman of a different ethnicity. So now Finn finally has a black love interest and me and my fellow Caucasians can sleep easy, knowing that white genocide has once again been averted. Great fucking job, Mickey.
And that's the movie in a nutshell. It's this weird, nonsensical, kinda gross thing that I hope I'll never have to see again. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It gets somewhat better in its second half and there are aspects of the climax that I might have actually appreciated, had the pacing not been as rushed as it was. Some of the visuals around Palpatine were unusually dark and sinister for the series standards, which would have actually been cool, in a better movie but in this one it just stands as somewhat neat iconography that lacks any greater context. Kylo gets an entirely unearned redemption, Rey is being tempted by the Dark Side at a point where everyone knew that of course she wasn't gonna give into it, Hux gets... not quite a redemption, because even Abrams knew that making the fanatical space nazi sympathetic would be a step too far but a weird plotline that reveals he was feeding information to the Resistance, not because he had a change of heart but out of spite towards Kylo.
Basically, it's some stupid ass shit. I don't know what the future of the Star Wars series is gonna be but god knows I hope it's not more of... this. There's been a back and forth about wether Rian Johnson will actually get to direct his own trilogy and I hope it's actually gonna work out for him because Rise of Skywalker makes Last Jedi look like a masterpiece. There have also been rumors about Marvel Studios Kevin Feige working on Star Wars and while I dread to see him force the Marvel Cinematic Universes weird conservative subtext into Star Wars Disney has proven that they don't need Feige to do so, so how much worse can it be?
I don't know. This whole rant was probably mighty tiresome and excessively neckbeardy but venting about it afterwards is the only catharsis I'm gonna get out of Rise of Skywalker. So, in summary: Fuck J.J. Abrams, fuck Disney and fuck capitalism. Good night.
