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The Rise of Skywalker wasn’t that bad

When I watched this movie in theatres several years ago, I had actually fallen asleep for most of it (various work related reasons unrelated to the movie). I did catch the last bit of it and did think at the time it was quite bad - Kylo dying for no reason, Rey becoming a Skywalker.

I decided to finally rewatch it today and honestly it wasn’t that bad, I was thoroughly entertained. You have to go into the move discounting the plot, from which there is no recovery after The Last Jedi anyways. If you ignore plot - the movie itself is pretty grand with some amazing locales, multiple worlds, cool fight scenes, a lot more people (it didn’t feel as isolated/claustrophobic as The Last Jedi). I just appreciated the scale of the movie, it’s what I’ve been wanting in these sequel movies. Even the emotional scenes sort of hit for me when Leia reached out to Ben with her last bit of energy. And I finally appreciated Kylo/Ben Solo and understood his struggle in this movie. All the characters in the sequels are awful, but Kylo/Ben in TRoS was great and he had by far the best carachter arc through the 3 movies.

Overall, The Last Jedi is firmly in last place for me and it definitively ruined Star Wars beyond recovery. But at least The Rise of Skywalker did everything else that makes Star Wars great right - scale, settings, fights, etc.
 
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Stuart360

Member
I think after The Last Jedi debacle, JJ was in a no win situation and he did what he could. Its not a terible film but its a sorry way for the mainline SW films to end.

One thing good about the Disney trilogy though is that it made the prequel trilogy feel a whole lot better than they seemed pre Disney. And for all the hate Lucas gets, i think he would of done a better sequel trilogy than what we ended up with from Disney (yes i know about the weird Lucas sequel rumours, but they were just that, rumours)
 
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Madflavor

Member
I feel like the controversy of The Last Jedi still has a tad bit of life left it in that continues to spark some debate to this day. But TRoS? I was under the impression that pretty much most people agreed it was bad, and then moved on from it.
 

Stuart360

Member
Nothing in the sequel trilogy makes me want to rewatch it again. Rey Skywalker is still funny to me every time I remember this movie.
I am/was a huge SW fan, but i honestly dont have the interest in watching any of the Disney trilogy films again, even Force Awakens. I can happily watrch the prequels and still do, and obviously the orig trilogy is just perfection to me.
 

Catphish

Member
The entire ST was garbage, but it did at least feel that TRoS tried to right some of the wrongs of the first two and give fans the best send-off possible given the circumstances.

I don't feel like it was a very good movie, but its heart was in the right place, which is more than the previous two films could say.

I don't think I'll ever come to terms with how badly Disney fucked this trilogy up. And Rian Johnson deserves a fucking dark alley asskicking for the outright contempt he showed for the source material.

Bah. Now I'm mad. :messenger_pouting:
 

Kilau

Gold Member
Somehow, this movie thread has returned.
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Sorry OP, movie is just awful from start to finish. Sure it looks nice but it’s flaws aren’t just the foundation it’s built on and JJ is absolutely responsible for that as well.
 

AJUMP23

Member
When I first saw the movie I liked it, but my comment wasn’t I liked it it was it was better than the last Jedi. I don’t know that the movie is good though. They are scenes I like, the return of Wedge. The rebel fleet at the end. Ben being redeemed. But it missed on many levels. Palpatine returning is dumb and creatively bankrupt. Faking Chewbacca’s death is dumb. A dagger that matches a 20 year old ship wreck is dumb. A fleet of ships on a hidden planet and all those ships are fully staffed is dumb. Not having all the Jedi appear as force ghost in the end (which they filmed) was a huge miss.

They didn’t pay off setups and in the end nothing mattered. They had a lot of hope going into the new trilogy and they blew it all.
 

TheUsual

Gold Member
The worst thing about the movie was that it was forgettable. It was touted as the ending of the Skywalker Saga and it they closed it with a wet fart. What a waste of a sequel trilogy. Episodes 7-9 had cool set pieces, but that was it.
 

pramod

Banned
With hindsight i think Last Jedi was an ok movie. Except for the horrible Rose/Finn stuff, i was ok with how the whole Rey Kylo Luke Snoke thing played out. The problem was that the movie set things up in such a way that it was impossible to continue the series..imho if they just ended it all at TLJ it would have been a fitting end for the series. Then TROS came along and retroactively made everything worse. Thats why in my book its the worst movie ever made. Because not only was it a bad movie, it retroactively destroyed an entire 9 movie epic series of films. I cant think of any other movie that has done anything close to that.
 

HoodWinked

Member
The main problem with Rise of Skywalker was that it was the sequel to The Last Jedi. It left the final film nothing to build on and had to make something out of nothing.

where as The Force Awakens was an adequate movie but gave the subsequent movie lots of things to build on or expand on. But instead of having a long term goal it burned all the plot threads and set nothing up going into the final film.
 

BadBurger

Is 'That Pure Potato'
I think it was a poor film that could have been largely(*) fixed with just a handful of changes to the plot and how certain events unfolded on-screen. More than anything it was attempting to overcome the insurmountable task of fixing everything that TLJ broke within the confines of a single film. I think many people underestimate or just do not understand how catastrophically terrible TLJ was in regards to the overall story of a trilogy, how it dashed so much against the wall and left so few crumbs left to work with.

* The theoretical changes would have made for something acceptable, but fixing the mess left in the wake of TLJ, IMO, just couldn't be done with one film
 

RCU005

Member
Star Wars needs a reboot. The original trilogy, while classic, they were very limited. Darth Vader has since been portrayed as this badass villain, but it wasn't like that at all at first. Then, they could even add stuff from newer cannon.

Disney should not be afraid of starting over with the franchise.

The worst thing that happened to Star Wars was Kennedy. She has ruined it so much. They need to remove her ASAP. Let Jon Favreau take over, or someone as capable and passionate as him.
 
nope, it's a trash movie. So many plot holes, inconsistencies, and the forced mary sue nonsense.

This and TLJ is prove that Disney doesn't understand the SW franchise. And they still don't. Sure, mando was good, but that's an anomaly. Book of Boba Fett and Obiwan are both awful shows that has rare nice moments sprinkled in just to feed that nostalgia kick.
 
I will maintain that The Last Jedi is a clever subversion of Star Wars tropes and a refreshing call for an end to the rigid nostalgia. I will never get over the fact that Johnson got to make his own personal vision of Star Wars with seemingly no oversight. It's was a financial and fan angering mistake of course, for Kathleen Kennedy to let a free spirited artist with his own vision to slip into the middle of a franchise film with a very specific direction they needed only for him to derail it. I never saw Star Wars as sacred tho so it was no sweat off my back.

Rise of the Skywalker though? Just JJ trying to right to ship back to where he was trying to go from movie one, but it was too far off course and he spent the whole movie trying to patch holes instead of taking the ship anywhere exciting. Being a capable journeyman who knows how to make execs and fans happy only when handed a clean slate from a dormant franchise to modernize in flashy but cookie cutter fashion, he had no idea what to do with the very creative liberties Johnson had taken with his once faithful New Hope remake.
 

sol_bad

Member
I honestly haven't watched this since the theatrical release. I want to watch it again but I want to buy the 4k blu ray and I've been too lazy.

I don't understand why there was outrage over Rey Skywalker to be honest. It's the first time she felt like she belonged to a family in a long time, it makes sense for her to adopt the last name.
 

Rockondevil

Gold Member
I dislike the sequel trilogy as many do and it's just because of TLJ.

TFA, while not amazing, at least attempted to start a new trilogy.
TLJ and Johnson came along and took a dump all over that idea and anything it was setting up.
TRoS just felt like JJ was trying to fix what wrongs he could from TLJ and finish the trilogy, which obviously didn't end greatly.

Always loved the OT and PT and I love a good rewatch of them all, but I often skip the ST due to lack of interest in them.
 
I agree OP.

Also, Adolf Hitler did a lot of good and by God the trains sure did run on time. Like yeah in hindsight everyone missed the Kaiser but when you look at it did the Kaiser really do anything that much better? I don't think so. Also 0-1 in World Wars.

explicit /s to avoid any potential lynching by the humorless
 
It's one of the worst examples of writing a "cool" scene and then trying to cram it into the movie. "-I want Rey to hold a knife-thing up to the horizon and it matching the ruined Death Star. I don't care how you do it, just do it!". The movie is full of those.

TLJ at least tried something new and I liked some concepts, like the mystical force elements. Although that had it's fair share of forced plot points as well (that stupid casino planet for example, which was supposedly Rian Johnsons favourite contribution to the script lol)
 

DGrayson

Mod Team and Bat Team
Staff Member
The best part was the lightsaber fight with the ocean backdrop.

The rest was super average. I wasnt a huge fan of the Last Jedi but Disney definitely swung to far back around based on some of the criticsims of the Last Jedi.

- How is Rey so powerful? She is a no one? NO now she is teh grand daughter of the emperor!
- Snoke was a BS villain? Bring back the Emperor!
 

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
it could've been better for sure but it wasn't as bad as people made it out to be. i've watched a lot of films that were much worse. i actually quite enjoyed the overall sequel trilogy.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
When I watched this movie in theatres several years ago, I had actually fallen asleep for most of it (various work related reasons unrelated to the movie). I did catch the last bit of it and did think at the time it was quite bad - Kylo dying for no reason, Rey becoming a Skywalker.

I decided to finally rewatch it today and honestly it wasn’t that bad, I was thoroughly entertained. You have to go into the move discounting the plot, from which there is no recovery after The Last Jedi anyways. If you ignore plot - the movie itself is pretty grand with some amazing locales, multiple worlds, cool fight scenes, a lot more people (it didn’t feel as isolated/claustrophobic as The Last Jedi). I just appreciated the scale of the movie, it’s what I’ve been wanting in these sequel movies. Even the emotional scenes sort of hit for me when Leia reached out to Ben with her last bit of energy. And I finally appreciated Kylo/Ben Solo and understood his struggle in this movie. All the characters in the sequels are awful, but Kylo/Ben in TRoS was great and he had by far the best carachter arc through the 3 movies.

Overall, The Last Jedi is firmly in last place for me and it definitively ruined Star Wars beyond recovery. But at least The Rise of Skywalker did everything else that makes Star Wars great right - scale, settings, fights, etc.
Amongst the many crimes of this movie they changed Palpatine look from RotJ to this weird makeup and dark lipstick like an emo Emperor which they just reused in the Kenobi series so it was not just failed cloned shit but Lucasfilm trying to sell the new canon look. Not being as bad as TLJ does not win awards, what an overall horrible sequel trilogy, makes me appreciate the prequels trilogy more.
 

BadBurger

Is 'That Pure Potato'
The best part was the lightsaber fight with the ocean backdrop.

The rest was super average. I wasnt a huge fan of the Last Jedi but Disney definitely swung to far back around based on some of the criticsims of the Last Jedi.

- How is Rey so powerful? She is a no one? NO now she is teh grand daughter of the emperor!
- Snoke was a BS villain? Bring back the Emperor!

IMO the biggest mistake was bringing back Palpatine. At the conclusion of TLJ you had a First Order with its competent leadership essentially decapitated. In Snoke's place was a highly dysfunctional and confused young man taking over. That right there is the story. Kylo Ren was a walking plot device at that point. The First Order now had a weakness that could be exploited - like the shaft in the original Death Star. The story could have went many directions from there.

Will Rey redeem him so they can team up and either liquidate the First Order or transform it? Will she be forced to kill him, causing what was left of the First Order to be sent into even further disarray so the resistance could deliver the death blow? I mean the possibilities were endless. But the foundation of a good story existed.

Ah well. At least we'll finally get to move on from the Skywalker Trilogy (edit: Saga) now. It can now be toyed with in hindsight by the writers of The Mandalorian, Ashoka, etc.
 
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Gifmaker

Member
I think this is the best of the sequels actually. I genuiely don't know why everybody was offended by it. If Palpatine's return caught you off guard that much, you have not been paying attention to Star Wars lore from the early 90s until around 2014 (ie, before the canon reset, Dark Empire was a thing and Palpatine had canonically survived Endor for almost two decades already).

It reconciled me with the sequels after TLJ had soured me on them, a task I had considered impossible. So I don't know what all the fuzz was about. It's fun and entertaining and sentimental at the right times, and has all the epicness it needed. Plus, Babu Frik.
 

NahaNago

Member
It was pretty bad. They should have just moved on from the trilogy idea after the last jedi since that killed off what seemed like the main villain and simply continued the story of kylo and ren drama until they somehow made sense that palpatine was still alive.
 

Ionian

Member
TLJ was such a waste of time, I watched the last one at home. Death scene of Snoke was awesome though.

The fact they advertised the Emperor being back in Fortnite says it all.

Enjoy the mini series though. Although Boba Fett was a mistake, best episodes were with Mando.
 

The Skull

Member
Yeah it really was. From the "somehow Palpatine has returned" to "I am all the Jedi" and everything in-between, it was an absolute shit show. Unsurprising considering what mess they were left with after the last Jedi was shat out.
 

Kev Kev

Member
I like all the SW movies.

TLJ is top tier for me, but RoS was probably my least favorite. In general the ST felt a little messy, but I genuinely love TFA and TLJ, and if RoS had been handled better I think it really could have saved the trilogy.

That being said, the first 30 minutes or so of RoS with Kylo being all angry and hunting down the Emperor was fucking great. Loved all that.

Now I’m just looking forward to them getting away from the OT and anything Skywalker related. I honestly feel they should have done that with the ST to begin with.
 
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TrueLegend

Member
Yes a lot of people worked hard on vfx and audio and thier work shines and thats it, their work shines. But once you have thrown the writing out of window you can say that about many films.
 
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