Star Wars Episode IX

[radiator]

Really? That's not at all what I'm hearing....

[JOE SOAP]

Everyone's hearing the bits they want to hear – that's the alphabet soup they've made.

[Professor Bear]

Confirmed by a spoilery Tweet: [spoiler]non-clone Palpatine[/spoiler] is indeed in the film.  I just went "for fuck's sake" but I don't know why.

[radiator]

I agree with blackmocco, its shoddy writing.

the line where rey breathlessly 'explains' why she's able to pilot a ship like the falcon comes across as so shoehorned-in and inelegant to me that its almost humourous - a quick script band aid applied over a pretty gaping plot discrepancy.

It ties in to a bigger problem I have with her characterisation in general. ie If she's as capable and self-possessed as we're being told, why on Earth (Jakku?) wouldn't she just hotwire the nearest spaceship and escape this life of drudgery? Or at least take work as a pilot? Its established in earlier films that being a starship pilot is a marketable skill, and yet shes stuck being a lowly scavenger? I know there's this contrivance where they say she's 'waiting for her parents to come back', but that seems totally at odds with who she is. The character they're showing us wouldn't be so passive if she has the means of escape right at her fingertips. She'd go off and FIND the parents, surely? Like, how long's she gonna wait? Again, the explanation we're given seems like a slightly awkward fix that doesn't really ring true or make a lot of sense in context, to me at least.

I have similar issues with Finn. He seems to flip between cowardly comic relief or selfless hero depending and what the script says per given scene, and his overall chipper, cheeky demeanour doesn't square at all with his stated backstory of childhood trauma and forced conscription.

Daisy Ridley and John Boyega are tremendous actors, but they deserved characters that were a bit more fully fleshed out. As it is, the script feels really half baked and they just about get by on charisma.

Oh, and while we're at it; as much as I love Oscar Isaac, Poe should have stayed dead after the tie fighter crash, as per the original script. As a character, he works much better as a misdirect. His resurrection later on in the film makes no sense (again, its hand waved with a really clumsy line of dialogue), he feels extraneous, and his continued presence (imo) detracts from Finn's arc, that of trying to impersonate and take the mantle of a genuine hero who died saving him.

The wishy washy characterisation of the three leads is the sequel trilogies biggest weakness imo.

You know who Han is in the first five minutes of meeting him, whereas two entire films in I still don't feel like I have a handle on any of the new cast, with the exception of Kylo Ren.

Yeah, pretty much all my issues as well. And I guess the disappointing bit is they're easily fixed with a little more patience. Even just a line or two of dialogue can be enough to bridge the gap.

The Finn thing is a bigger problem for me. A deserter Imperial stormtrooper is such a wonderful idea, so ripe with potential for an interesting conflicted character and two movies in, they've done nothing worthwhile with any of it. Mind you, I guess it explains why stormtroopers are so shite at everything they do if it's that simple to just walk away from a lifetime of conditioning.

I think for me, The Force Awakens - even on first watch but more so on each subsequent rewatch - so obviously feels like a film that has been hastily chopped and changed and rewritten and re-edited right down to the wire. It feels, to me at least, like you can still clearly see the remnants of old script drafts and abandoned story threads that have been awkwardly welded together. The wonky characterisation feels like it stems from this.

Rogue One also has this problem, possibly even more than TFA.

The Last Jedi feels a lot more like it's own film, for better or worse.

[blackmocco]

Rogue One also has this problem, possibly even more than TFA.

It's true, but it's a more solid and more cohesive story and the plotholes - although very much there - are somehow less exasperating. Rogue One reshot 40% of the movie, adding the final space battle and Vader going all Vader (all changes suggested by the storyboard teams to muscle up the ending). For me, it holds up better than anything else that's been done since SW came back.

[karlos]

I certainly spoke too soon  - reviews are super mixed, and for all manner of reasons.

I'm sure there'll be plenty of debate in the coming weeks...

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

I'm sure there'll be plenty of debate in the coming weeks...

Marvellous.

[blackmocco]

57% on Rotten Tomatoes. Oof. Probably not what Disney was hoping for.

To recap:
TPM: 53%
AOTC: 65%
ROTS: 80%
ANH: 93%
ESB: 94%
ROTJ: 82%
TFA: 93%
TLJ: 91%
ROS: 57%

[Dandontdare]

Movies with a, shall we say, 'enthusiastic' fanbase, both positive and negative, tend to skew RT votes with concerted voting campaigns.


As for me, I've come to the conclusion that I don't really care any more - I used to absolutely love Star Wars but fans have ruined it. I'll probably go to see it after Christmas when the crowds have died down, but I will be avoiding internet discussions like the plague.

[JOE SOAP]

Movies with a, shall we say, 'enthusiastic' fanbase, both positive and negative, tend to skew RT votes with concerted voting campaigns.

It's only a critic rating at the moment. Fan ratings don't get voted till the film publicly releases.

[JamesC]

As for me, I've come to the conclusion that I don't really care any more - I used to absolutely love Star Wars but fans have ruined it. I'll probably go to see it after Christmas when the crowds have died down, but I will be avoiding internet discussions like the plague.

This is pretty much how I feel about it.
I'll go and see it for the spectacle, in an uncritical mood. I'll probably have a beer in the cinema and get some food afterwards. It'll be a nice evening.
Let's be honest though, on the whole Star Wars just isn't very good.

[radiator]

From the reviews, it sounds like this could be the most Abrams-y movie Abrams has ever made...   

[Tjm86]

Let's be honest though, on the whole Star Wars just isn't very good.

Let's be really honest, Star Wars was amazing when we were 7 (ish) and had only ever seen Disney films at the cinema before.  It was always only ever an amazing spectacle because no one had ever done anything quite like it before.

Now, forty odd years later it has been done to death.  The moment Disney took it over the inevitability of being utterly overdone was upon us.

Me, I'm going to savour the experience of that opening crawl at Watford Odeon, debating favourite bits on the way to school and lusting after the action figures of yesteryear.  What we have now may very well be a different beast but I'll always have Watford!

[radiator]

Rich Evans of RLM may have hit the nail on the head when he said, years ago (I think just after the release of TFA) that he thought that while Star Wars as a property had the illusion of great depth, it actually had very limited scope for future stories, and that Disney would struggle to continue it in a meaningful way, and I think the last few years may have possibly proved him right.

Spin-offs, side stories etc can work, but will inherently be a bit niche in appeal and seem to maybe be better suited to the medium of novels and videogames. To all intents and purposes, the mainline films had a pretty definitive ending in 1983, and it's hard to see how long you can artificially extend it beyond that until you have to start resorting to cheap tricks like just straight up resurrecting old dead characters. In some ways its a bit like Ghostbusters - it was such lightning in a bottle and such a product of its particular time and place that it's impossible to synthesize.

Or not, I'm not sure. Maybe Abrams simply wasn't the right pick for writer/director.

[Jim_Campbell]

Now, forty odd years later it has been done to death.  The moment Disney took it over the inevitability of being utterly overdone was upon us.

TBH, I thought I might have lost interest in the whole Star Wars thing, but I really liked both Rogue One and Solo, I loved Clone Wars and. Rebels, and I love The Mandalorian... I think a) I've just had enough of that whole Skywalker dynasty thing, and b) these new sequels basically Just Aren't Very Good.