The changing of opinions for Star Wars: How the New Trilogy stack up

[Izanagi009]

so i decided to read both the Last Jedi/Rise of Skywalker response forum on this escapist and an old forum from the original escapist on Last Jedi:
old escapist forum topic
new escapist forum topic

I find it amusing that the tide has turned as Last Jedi is now being more well received at least from what i've seen compared to Rise of Skywalker.

This makes me question something though: did the deconstruction of Last Jedi become more valid after Rise of Skywalker so people look more fond on Last Jedi or was Rise of Skywalker so bad that it makes Last Jedi look decent by comparison.

As for my opinions on the new trilogy
-Force Awakens was bland and over reliant on it's nostalgia
-Last Jedi tried to do new stuff and failed hard at points
-Rise of Skywalker was just a fanfiction in film form

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I didn't bother going out to see Rise of Skywalker, but Force Awakens was basically a rehashing of the original trilogy compressed into one film, and The Last Jedi felt like the director was trying to deconstruct the "Hero's Journey" but severely ham-handed it.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

or was Rise of Skywalker so bad that it makes Last Jedi look decent by comparison.

I'm willing to bet it's this one. Last Jedi got thrashed by a lot of people at first. Then again, people are suddenly loving the prequels again after the sequels happened, so I'd say it's the same case there.
Either way, I think the new trilogy was shit. I really liked Rogue One, so at least Disney did something ok in my eyes. But the sequel trilogy was just... Oof. All 3 films had their cool moments, but overall I'm highly mediocre on them

 

[faeyr]

I remember walking out of Last Jedi convinced that it was going to be well-received and that it was my 2nd favorite after Empire. I wasn't as into Star Wars at the time, and was surprised to run into a fan base more intense then what I was used to with comics and games. It didn't hold up as well on a second viewing, and Rogue One has climbed up quite a lot in my estimation after re-watching, but I'd still put it in my personal top three.
Rise of Skywalker being such a mess definitely makes it look better by comparison. I suppose it's almost inevitable that it would.
The opening sequence with Rey spelunking into the Star Destroyer in TFA is the only sequence that I can ever remember from the first one.

 

[Trunkage]

The Force Awakens creates a whole heap of problems that neither sequel fixed. You can whinge about Luke throwing away the lightsaber all you want, but TFA set up that Luke ran away from his problems and let millions die. That hero’s journey was destroyed by JJ, Not Rian. But then, so did Obi-wan. It makes you realise how disgraceful Kenobi is in the original. Too weak to fight himself, too willing to send a young and inexperienced person to do his dirty work.

 

[Hawki]

I wouldn't be surprised if opinion changed. The prequels went down in public appreciation over time, but since the sequels, have had a resurgence in popularity. The sequels have gone from "oh, cool" to "what the hell?" to "bleh." That said, I could see that consensus changing over time.

That said, if you want my views on the individual films, it can be summed up as:

-Force Awakens: Competently written and directed, but it's a rehash of A New Hope, and I'm afraid that at least on the personal level, I can't separate it from the wider context.

-The Last Jedi: One third an excellent film (Rey and Luke), one third an average film (the chase), one third a tedious film (Finn and Rose), culminating solidly. A very flawed film, but the most interesting and ambitious film in the trilogy, with some of the highest highs in the entire series.

-The Rise of Skywalker: What happens when a film exists for the sake of fan service, fan service, and more fan service. It's even less original than TFA, and shoots Last Jedi in the foot in the process. I feel nothing to this film.

 

[faeyr]

The Force Awakens creates a whole heap of problems that neither sequel fixed. You can whinge about Luke throwing away the lightsaber all you want, but TFA set up that Luke ran away from his problems and let millions die. That hero’s journey was destroyed by JJ, Not Rian. But then, so did Obi-wan. It makes you realise how disgraceful Kenobi is in the original. Too weak to fight himself, too willing to send a young and inexperienced person to do his dirty work.

I can't remember: did they establish how much Luke knew about the rise of the First Order during his exile? I know that he could have had the power to sense it, but did he need to actively try, or was his connection to Kylo and Leia enough to know what was going on? Sorry if it's obvious and I'm just not remembering, but figuring out exactly what Jedi characters can and can't know and how their powers work in these films is a bit confusing, especially if I forget a line or two of exposition.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I gave up after Force Awakens. I was just very bored watching it in the theater. The pacing was bad and the writing was just awful.

 

[ObsidianJones]

The Force Awakens creates a whole heap of problems that neither sequel fixed. You can whinge about Luke throwing away the lightsaber all you want, but TFA set up that Luke ran away from his problems and let millions die. That hero’s journey was destroyed by JJ, Not Rian. But then, so did Obi-wan. It makes you realise how disgraceful Kenobi is in the original. Too weak to fight himself, too willing to send a young and inexperienced person to do his dirty work.

I semi disagree.

There's a threshold between Hero and Messiah. I hate that I'm speaking about him so much, but this is perfectly encapsulated with the Superman movies of old and the current ones. Where at the old movies, everyone is just happy to have a hero around. And the latter movies, people are literally grabbing at Superman like a touch from him will cure all of their ills.

Luke was a farm boy. Hell, he wanted to fly for the empire when the first movie came out. His whole life was one big rug pull. The empire he wanted to join killed his only family. The mentor he had lied to him about his heritage. His love interest turned out to be his sister. His worst enemy is his father. His vast powers didn't solve everything. His whole struggle was simply a tool to finish Anakin's destiny to bring balance to the Force. His fame disillusioned him even more as everyone started to look to him as a messiah, as the leader to bring back the Jedi of old... a Jedi order he barely knew anything about.

He followed Yoda's dying wish to restart the Jedi order, after his sister didn't want to join him in learning about the Force. At that time, depending on who you asked, he felt like he was carrying the burden of all of the Force users on his shoulders alone. But he reluctantly started the order again with his nephew at his side. And he saw the Galaxy in flames because of his own blood. And that he trained him to harness the power that will set the Galaxy ablaze.

Straight out, Luke is a hero. But everything in the Galaxy pushed him to be a leader.

I agree that Luke should have tried harder. Or tried. But I feel that people should not have mistaken his vast power as being enough to be a leader, the center of everything. There's a reason the Jedis had a council. Luke, as powerful as he is, had no one. And he crumbled under that.

It keeps him human. It doesn't forgive his inaction with Ben, but any one of those would have had us running for the bottle, trying to forget our troubles. It just took a little more for him to finally cave.

 

[BrawlMan]

Loved Rouge One and Last Jedi. Though I hated the part with the casino and making it pointless in hindsight. Fuck Vice Admiral Holdo! One of the most annoying, unsympathetic characters in SW history. Even with her heroic sacrifice, I almost felt nothing, or felt that moment should have belonged to a better character.

TFA is regular good, but should have done more to stand out. Rise of Skywalker was just okay, but was marred down by retcons, back peddling to please loud butt-fucks, and has the problems of execs butting where they do not belong. That said, I am done with Star Wars at this point. Once I bother to finish the final season of Clone Wars, no more for me. If I need any sci-fi space action, there is plenty for me to choose.

Never cared for Solo and have no interests.

 

[Kae]

Well my opinions haven't changed much since I saw them but in general I wasn't a fan of the newer movies with the caveat that I haven't seen the non-numbered ones that is to say Rogue-One & Han Solo.

The Force Awakens, I never liked this movie, I won't deny that it's competently made but it's a re-tread of the original film that pretends to have a surprise at every corner just to make the most obvious & safe choice, the definition of boring if you ask me, also I will add that I was heavily biased against this film because I've never liked anything J.J. Abrams has ever done and I was kinda expecting it to annoy me, so it's likely my view was coloured as negative since exactly what I expected to be wrong with it was, so I was hyper aware of those problems, but yeah safe, repetitive and bland that's how I'd describe it not bad but the oatmeal of Star Wars movies.

The Last Jedi, I'm mixed on this movie, again I'll admit that I was biased in favour of this movie because I really like Rian Johnson's previous work and I think that his talent as a director really shine in parts of the movie, I think the Rey, Luke & Kylo was both very well written, performed & directed, I also think the angle that he took with the philosophy of the Force was intriguing and by far the best thing someone has done with the Force since Knights of the Old Republic 2, but there's no getting around it, ethe other 2 plot-lines are kind off a mess, in particular Poe & Holdo's story which yes I get it, I've read the explanations but it's just not communicated well in the film & the performances of both Laura Dern & Oscar Isaac in this movie lack any sort of charisma, which is weird because I love Oscar Isaac he's super charming and great in almost everything he's in but here he really sucks, I honestly don't know how this subplot turned out that bad, as for Finn & Rose's story, it's too slow & meandering, I get the point Rian was trying to make & I appreciate his efforts to add more moral ambiguity to the Star Wars saga, but again it doesn't really work, it's not as bad though because I think the performances in this subplot are overall good, with Benicio del Toro as DJ being particularly fun to watch & I won't deny that I really liked that he doesn't change by the end of the movie, I honestly think that was a nice surprise.

Rise of Skywalker, absolutely terrible, it's only upsides are that it moves so fast that you might not notice how poorly written & thematically hollow the whole thing is & that it has a few genuinely excellent jokes, but other than that it's absolute trash, the non-stop action gets old real fast, the puzzle to find the key is absolute nonsense, the fact that the Emperor's alive and apparently has a massive army that could have easily conquered the galaxy just laying there... doing nothing, the fact that Poe & Finn aren't gay for each other(That was a joke, but they did have great chemistry & it would have been better than the random lesbian kiss at the end), so many things wrong with this movie, what else can I say, I really don't like it.
One more thing that really bothers me about this movie, when Finn is in his suicide mission about to die with his out-of-nowhere new love interest & Poe realises he needs to save him, it feels really cheap & pandering that Lando saves him in the Millenium Falcon, also it's obvious that Wedge the ACE Pilot is only there for fan pandering because he's manning a turret? Rather than piloting a ship, even though he is The Ace Pilot, but in addition of this obvious pandering, wouldn't it have had more thematic resonance if Poe saved Finn in this scene?
Like Lando has no emotional connection to Finn & get that it's predictable but it's predicable for a reason, it makes emotional sense, maybe not logical but emotionally it makes for a better story, even if it is predictable.

So anyway overall, I think the best one was The Last Jedi, just by virtue of at least being interesting, it's definitely flawed, no doubt about it but at least it had original ideas and interesting stuff going on, also the parts that are good in that movie are genuinely excellent, unfortunately I'd still have to say it's not good but at least it was worth watching, like the conversation around the movie can be really interesting, I think that with more polished writing and a bit more time it could have been a fantastic movie, but alas that's not really what we got.

 

[Trunkage]

Which was the better JJ Star trilogy? Star Trek or Star Wars?

 

[Breakdown]

TFA - for me it started off well enough, but then I began to lose interest when Han Solo appeared and he was portrayed as a total failure, followed by Kylo Ren's navel gazing, and then the Super Death Star reveal, and then the final realisation that this was just a rehash of A New Hope. The end of the film was a real struggle to get through.

TLJ - by the time I went to see this I was aware that the movie seemed to be pretty divisive, so I was curious to see how I'd feel about it. And then the film opens with Poe's prank call to the First Order, one of the worst moments in Star Wars history... To be fair I liked the main plot with Luke and Rey, and I thought the decisions to kill off Snoke and ignore Rey's parents were sound enough. The other two subplots fell totally flat though, and the ending was pretty weak. The message about killing the past was annoying in a film that owed so much to the Empire Strikes Back. Should've been cannibalise the past instead. As the middle film of the trilogy I felt TLJ was a failure. Rian Johnson shut down a lot of the plot elements set up in TFA, without introducing anything new to replace them, and the trilogy lost most of the narrative momentum as a response.

ROS - shite.

 

[Neuromancer]

It is endlessly amusing to me that the people behind the trilogy, in their boundless wisdom, decided to create a new trilogy without a plan. The lack of plan maybe would have worked if each individual movie had its own complete story, but TFA is nothing but foreshadowing. And you don't foreshadow things you don't have plans for.

TFA was a mediocre retelling of A New Hope. It doesn't suck, but it has no actual merits as a movie. It's worse than the movie it copies everything from. Rather than tell a complete story, it fills the plot with endless foreshadowing. and ultimately all that foreshadowing is the wound that festers and kills the trilogy. It was made to instill nostalgia for the manchildren than largely compromise the Star Wars fanbase. In that regard it seemingly succeeded.

TLJ is garbage. It attempts to be subversive and sucks at it. Half the movie is a pointless attempt to instill some sort of greyness in a setting of childish black & white morality, and it does so in such an insultingly basic manner I wonder if it was written by a teenager. The other half is riddled with contrived drama and characters acting so stupidly it's a wonder there is a resistance at all, with leaders that have the intelligence of neolithic cavemen. It also retroactively makes TFA worse than it already was by throwing all the foreshadowed things out of the window. TLJ looked at the wound that was TFA's foreshadowing, and decided to tear it open.

ROS is trash. A third of the movie is damage control on what TLJ did with JJ's precious foreshadowing. It moves in such a frantic pace, jumping from one planet to the other as it attempts to at the same time stay true to the revelations of TLJ and retcon them. If TLJ tore the wound open, ROS attempts to close it with a stapler. The plot is so bad it's almost enjoyable. This movie is the best unintentional comedy I've seen in years, its great revelations making it look more like a parody than anything else. Ultimately I am more lukewarm at ROS than TLJ, for while TLJ attempts to be all serious and morose with its ultimately amateurish plot contrivances and laughable subversions, ROS just kind of doesn't give a shit and keeps ramping one contrivance on top of the other. And that''s more fun to me.

Rogue One is atrocious. For a movie where the plot largely revolves around the characters, the characters are all wooden and one-dimensional caricatures. I never felt a tinge of sympathy or connection for them, and was actually glad they ended up biting the bullet because that meant I didn't have to further suffer their presence. The movie is so boring and lacking in any sort of edge to distinguish it that the second time that I watched it I was on the verge of sleep. And of course, the Vader scene is there to redeem it in the eyes of Star Wars fans. Revolting.

Solo was serviceable. It has some fine character moments. It works well as a space western. It's nothing remarkable, but it does have a few things that it does pretty well. It's the best of the trash heap that is the modern Star Wars movies.

Also, as a stinger, none of these movies is as bad in my eyes as Attack of the Clones.

 

[09philj]

I thought The Force Awakens was mediocre and didn't bother to see the rest. The Star Wars prequels are mostly terrible as films, but actually contain a lot of interesting things that have have been put to better use in other media. The prequels also had a story that was worthwhile to tell and the plot was fundamentally pretty good, despite how bad the screenplay turned out. The sequels don't really have any of that. It's just cinematic faffing about.

 

[Izanagi009]

I thought The Force Awakens was mediocre and didn't bother to see the rest. The Star Wars prequels are mostly terrible as films, but actually contain a lot of interesting things that have have been put to better use in other media. The prequels also had a story that was worthwhile to tell and the plot was fundamentally pretty good, despite how bad the screenplay turned out. The sequels don't really have any of that. It's just cinematic faffing about.

I can agree with the sentament. While i'm not going to say the star wars fandom is entirely comprised of people stuck in the past, it does feel very odd that they cling to the obsolescent simplicity and characters of the original trilogy.

Granted, i'm not the best person to talk as i believe that nothing is sacred and all is subject to being torn into. But I also feel that Star Wars in theory is such a massive universe that having the moral ambiguity and complexity of other works would be interesting. Regardless, JJ's interest with the past and Rian's want to deconstruct came to a head here and the results to me show a fundamental dissonance within fandoms in general.

They want new stuff but not new stuff that breaks the mold or goes outside the bounds of the metanarrative, just stuff within the metanarrative.

 

[Secondhand Revenant]

Force Awakens was unoriginal, but entertaining enough to watch. Feels like they just couldn't be bothered to think up a new story with the new situation of the galaxy so they just reverted it. It's like they wanted to stick to Star Wars and make it Star Wars so they decided to just rehash a Star Wars plot instead of trying to find something new to inject to Star Wars. Recycling instead of innovating. That said, I still found it entertaining to watch. People can be critical about the plot and how stale it all feels, and I'll agree, but I did at least enjoy watching it.

TLJ... I liked it overall, but my god I dislike the chase side plot. It all felt so pointless. Like it sure taught a lesson to Poe I guess, but it felt like it did nothing story-wise except sort of try to give him some reason for a bit of character growth. Casino world was eh, Finn and Rose romance was zzzzzz. Rey stuff and hitting the climax of the movie was more fine. Phasma was wasted entirely. The one part I found downright incomprehensibly stupid was Finn and Rose's fight over who gets to sacrifice their life. Like is the message that sacrificing your life to cause damage to the enemy is somehow worse than sacrificing your life to... stop your friend from sacrificing theirs to cause damage to the enemy??? Like I'm sorry, perhaps I might be a bit too calculating in these kinds of things at times, but this one is so far out there I cannot even figure out the intended moral of the story. Hmmm. Compared to the first, I think I have more specific criticisms of it, but also I did like the parts I like more even tho it might sound otherwise.

As for Rise... I could be entertained enough by flashy shit, but my god that plot was terrible. I think it is the absolute culmination of the criticism Neuromancer had for the trilogy, they had no plan. And it shows so much in this final movie that is supposed to wrap things together. Palpatine is just there out of the blue, there's this force dyad thing that like, okay I can see there's some connection there but what is that supposed to *mean*? It's not really explored at all. This all felt like stuff pulled out of nowhere that could have been far better explained prior to this if they had a plan to do so from the start.

 

[XsjadoBlayde]

Thought force awakens was alright. It only needed to prove it was competent and watchable.
Last Jedi was better...especially after being bored to tears by the woeful lack of characters in Rogue One they felt were somehow good enough to go for an emotional pull by killing them off. Biggest waste of potential with that "morally grey" setup. And just fan wank.
Have yet to see Han Solo.
No interest in ever seeing Rise of Skywalker anymore. Not without much drink and drugs at least.
Star wars kinda sucks. Nothing really to chew on. Aside the particular couple of Kotor games I guess.

 

[Hades]

Of the three I'd say The Force Awakens is the worst of the bunch, the one that introduced the most problems and the movie I respect the least.

Not only is it a scene for scene reboot of A New Hope, but its also set a very flawed foundation for the other movies. Making the setting return to rebels vs stormtroopers despite the new Republic being a thing and the Heroes not being rebels by definition originated from this movie and ensured the galaxy felt stale and lifeless. It was an inherently cynical move that sabotaged any notion that the galaxy could grow over time. This movie also introduced the First Order as the villains without giving them any traits beyond being really evil and being the remnants of the empire. The officers among them that we are introduced to are Kylo, Hux and Phasma who are all depicted as joke characters.

This already does lasting damage. The setting is dull and nonsensical because fanservice took precedence over world building and the villains are boring and inept. The movie then goes on to establish that despite their complete incompetence this bunch of clowns actually managed to defeat the old Heroes and destroyed all they held dear which isn't exactly respectful towards Luke and company. This approach also hinders any future media that tries to depict this era. The Clone wars have the Separatist commanders and the Rebels era have the inquisitors as the villains. Vader and Dooku are such powerful characters that it makes sense for them to employ a dangerous set of minions to serve as secondary villains, but with the First Order there is no room for this. Hux and Kylo are already joke characters so if you create a First Order villain less dangerous then them they won't be able to pose any threat to the Heroes, but if you make a competent villain then it needs some serious explanation why he's taking orders from clowns such as Hux and Kylo.

 

[Worgen]

The Last Jedi is the most fun I've had with a starwars movie in a very long time. I kinda liked the second prequel but I despised the third one to the point where it made me just stop giving a fuck about starwars. I still don't give a fuck about starwars but I did have fun with TLJ and with how many weird things it tried to do. The Force Awakens was just ok at best, Rogue one was garbage with literally only 2 good scenes and one of those kind of hurts established cannon, didn't see the other new ones.