Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
May. 20th, 2020 04:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakSeveral months later, I finally watched this last installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. And well, my opinion is similar what I have osmosed by now the mainstream opinion is: Rise of Skywalker cements that Abrams went into this trilogy with no idea other than "the same as the OT, only bigger! With lense flares!" as a concept, didn't coordinate with Rian Johnson for The Last Jedi, and it shows.
I mean, I'm as sure as can be that despite all claims to the contrary, Lucas when releasing Star Wars - A New Hope had no idea that Vater was Luke's father and that Obi-Wan was, in fact, lying, excuse me, speaking the truth from a certain point of view. But the reveal in Empire Strikes Back still worked perfectly, and Return of the Jedi built on that instead of trying to work around/negate it. Similarly, when the prequels were made Ahsoka was not yet a glimmer in Dave Filoni's eyes, but due to the way The Clone Wars took Lucas' "Anakin has a padawan - go with it" suggestion and ran I now can't think of the entire prequel trilogy without the Clone Wars context, the Anakin & Ahsoka relationship and the Clones as individual characters whose tragedy Revenge of the Sith is as much as anyone's.
Whereas I have no problem writing off the entire sequel canon. Not because I hate it. It just did not give me anything that grabbed me the same way, and the few truly interesting things it did, it ended up either not exploring at all, or undoing. When Jannah told Finn that she and all her people, too, were former storm troopers, I was briefly thrilled and thought, was I wrong, are the sequels finally prepared to do something with the premise that Finn was a storm trooper when growing up, not the boy next door, and what that means? That the various guys (and girls) in standard white armor just might be able to go against orders, too, if given a chance, instead of being treated as disposable cannon fodder? But no.
(Incidentally: no complaints about Hux becoming a mole for the Resistance out of sheer pettiness against Kylo Ren, out out of any flickers of decency. That was hilarious.)
Same with Rose, whom I'm really liked in TLJ and whose actress was treated amominably by the worst parts of fandom. It's hard not to read her minimal role in this one as in response to it. The idea that capitalist exploitation is what greatly feeds the dictatorship and is why so many people go along with it, which was the point of the entire casino trip segment? Gone. Instead, resurrected Palpatine somehow managed to built a fleet full of planet killing star destroyers without anyone noticing until he cackles on the holonet. How did he pay for it, I wonder? With all the bitching among prequel haters about Phantom Menace - not a movie that can be accused of hardcore economic realism - opening with a trade dispute, I have to say the prequels - and of course the Clone Wars series - did actually take the trouble to show who Palapatine's financial allies were before he becomes Emperor and thus can command resources.
Even more crucial is the retcon from Rey as the daughter of nobodies, in a movie that ends with showing that force sensitivity can be found in the downtrodden and forgotten and is not tied to a bloodline, to Rey as Palapatine's granddaughter. Mind you, since the entire SW saga is one big fairy tale, I can buy it on that level, but I thought her being someone without any blood connection to the previous generation had been the more powerful narrative choice. Also, the retcon means that Rey has to go through a similar emotional arc for three movies in a row, each time realising it doesn't matter about her biological background and who she chooses to be with the people she makes connections with counts.
Speaking of connections: this movie finally gave us some interactions between Rey, Finn and Poe at the same time and some impression of their dynamic early on, but alas it remained that way, just an impression. And it's hard to feel for them as friends when Rey has only just met Poe at the end of the previous movie and we only see a few minutes of the three of them interacting here. It reminds me of how Abrams in his two Star Trek reboot movies essentially wanted the audience to be invested in the Kirk/Spock relationship because of the history the original Kirk and Spock had and the love fandom had for them and their relationship, not because he bothered to give us enough to ask the same kind of emotional investment on screen. Similarly, here in theory Rey, Finn and Poe are the new trio of main characters. But you know, Luke-Leia-Han worked because we saw Luke with Han, we saw Luke with Leia, we saw Han with Leia, we saw the three of them together at various points through all three original movies. No matter whom you shipped with whom as an original viewer, it was clear there was a connection there between all three.
Whereas The Force Awakens is the only one of the sequel movies which bothers to provide us with on screen emotional scenes showing us the growing friendship between Rey and Finn, and, much briefer but there, Poe's bonding with Finn during their escape. Even in that movie, though, Rey's other big emotional relationship is with Han, and that turns out to be the more foreshadowing, because taking all three movies into account, Rey's main emotional scenes and connections are with the previous generation characters - and with Kylo Ren - rather than with Finn and Poe. It's not that I'm bored by the result, anything but. I liked Rey's scenes with Han in TFA, with Luke in TLJ, and they got all they could out of the footage of Carrie Fisher in RoS to provide us with the impression of a connection between Rey and Leia. (Leia/Poe, otoh, is actually there on screen through the trilogy.) I thought her scenes with Kylo Ren/Ben Solo in TLJ both worked as their own thing and were a clever inversion of Anakin/Vader's arc. And no, I'm not mad that he got to repeat Vader's emotional beats from RoJ in RoS after all, complete with death after life saving and becoming one with the Force, because Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley are good together, and also I loved Star of the Guardians with the Maigrey and Sagan force bond, excuse me, mind link working in a very similar way. But I thought that this final choice, too, meant that the sequels in the end flinched from being anything but a nostalgia fest with more tech.
Speaking of tech. Good lord. As with TFA, the planet killing thing just is not emotionally effective when you do overdo it like that. Alderaan, which we the audience never got to know, being blown to smithereens works because the movie shows us Leia reacting to it and makes us feel how devastating this is to one of our main characters. So a fleet of star destroyers, each of which can do what the original Death Star could, isn't chilling to me, it's just groanworthy in a "good lord, Abrams, must you?" way.
And lastly, good old Palpatine. Look. I love Ian McDiarmid as much as the next fan. And handwavium as to why he's around again after being killed is probably better than technobabble telling us how exactly he got resurrected. But otoh: it's hard to regard this latest death as definite if the previous one wasn't. Once you play the resurrection card for supervillains, their deaths just don't have the same effect. What's more, he really suffers from villain decay in the brains department, too. Prequel Palpatine goes about his manipulation and seduction of Anakin in a clever way and one which until the very last moment, when Mace Windu dies, leaves him plausible deniability. The Emperor in the OT has two decades of absolute power under his belt and is correspondingly more hammy and overt, but still, while he badly miscalculated with his Skywalkers, his trap for the Rebellion was quite effective. This latest Palps incarnation, otoh, tells Rey in a villainous monologue his exact plan of how her killing him in anger will allow him to take over her body instead, you know, of letting her kill him in anger not knowing he'd then bodyswitch. What? And you know, while TLJ acknowledged that there is such a thing as institutional corruption and that one Snoke or one Kylo Ren is not the entire problem, and the prequels did demonstrate the way the Republic and the Jedi Order both contributed to their own doom (which is not the same as excusing the villains, btw), here we're back to "The Emperor is dead, happy ending!". Which, you know, might have worked emotionally for RoJ, but since the sequels went out of their way to show that the galaxy two decades post RoJ was just even more oppressed, and never bothered with depicting a new functioning republic - why should be believe it's better this time?
In conclusion: don't let J.J. Abrams near a franchise he liked as a kid. He's exactly the type of fan who endlessly writes canon rip-offs with ever higher body counts as a consequence. Let him do his own franchises instead.
P.S. Ahsoka as one of the voices Rey hears when finally accessing all the Jedi that came before here was cool, though. #movie canon
I mean, I'm as sure as can be that despite all claims to the contrary, Lucas when releasing Star Wars - A New Hope had no idea that Vater was Luke's father and that Obi-Wan was, in fact, lying, excuse me, speaking the truth from a certain point of view. But the reveal in Empire Strikes Back still worked perfectly, and Return of the Jedi built on that instead of trying to work around/negate it. Similarly, when the prequels were made Ahsoka was not yet a glimmer in Dave Filoni's eyes, but due to the way The Clone Wars took Lucas' "Anakin has a padawan - go with it" suggestion and ran I now can't think of the entire prequel trilogy without the Clone Wars context, the Anakin & Ahsoka relationship and the Clones as individual characters whose tragedy Revenge of the Sith is as much as anyone's.
Whereas I have no problem writing off the entire sequel canon. Not because I hate it. It just did not give me anything that grabbed me the same way, and the few truly interesting things it did, it ended up either not exploring at all, or undoing. When Jannah told Finn that she and all her people, too, were former storm troopers, I was briefly thrilled and thought, was I wrong, are the sequels finally prepared to do something with the premise that Finn was a storm trooper when growing up, not the boy next door, and what that means? That the various guys (and girls) in standard white armor just might be able to go against orders, too, if given a chance, instead of being treated as disposable cannon fodder? But no.
(Incidentally: no complaints about Hux becoming a mole for the Resistance out of sheer pettiness against Kylo Ren, out out of any flickers of decency. That was hilarious.)
Same with Rose, whom I'm really liked in TLJ and whose actress was treated amominably by the worst parts of fandom. It's hard not to read her minimal role in this one as in response to it. The idea that capitalist exploitation is what greatly feeds the dictatorship and is why so many people go along with it, which was the point of the entire casino trip segment? Gone. Instead, resurrected Palpatine somehow managed to built a fleet full of planet killing star destroyers without anyone noticing until he cackles on the holonet. How did he pay for it, I wonder? With all the bitching among prequel haters about Phantom Menace - not a movie that can be accused of hardcore economic realism - opening with a trade dispute, I have to say the prequels - and of course the Clone Wars series - did actually take the trouble to show who Palapatine's financial allies were before he becomes Emperor and thus can command resources.
Even more crucial is the retcon from Rey as the daughter of nobodies, in a movie that ends with showing that force sensitivity can be found in the downtrodden and forgotten and is not tied to a bloodline, to Rey as Palapatine's granddaughter. Mind you, since the entire SW saga is one big fairy tale, I can buy it on that level, but I thought her being someone without any blood connection to the previous generation had been the more powerful narrative choice. Also, the retcon means that Rey has to go through a similar emotional arc for three movies in a row, each time realising it doesn't matter about her biological background and who she chooses to be with the people she makes connections with counts.
Speaking of connections: this movie finally gave us some interactions between Rey, Finn and Poe at the same time and some impression of their dynamic early on, but alas it remained that way, just an impression. And it's hard to feel for them as friends when Rey has only just met Poe at the end of the previous movie and we only see a few minutes of the three of them interacting here. It reminds me of how Abrams in his two Star Trek reboot movies essentially wanted the audience to be invested in the Kirk/Spock relationship because of the history the original Kirk and Spock had and the love fandom had for them and their relationship, not because he bothered to give us enough to ask the same kind of emotional investment on screen. Similarly, here in theory Rey, Finn and Poe are the new trio of main characters. But you know, Luke-Leia-Han worked because we saw Luke with Han, we saw Luke with Leia, we saw Han with Leia, we saw the three of them together at various points through all three original movies. No matter whom you shipped with whom as an original viewer, it was clear there was a connection there between all three.
Whereas The Force Awakens is the only one of the sequel movies which bothers to provide us with on screen emotional scenes showing us the growing friendship between Rey and Finn, and, much briefer but there, Poe's bonding with Finn during their escape. Even in that movie, though, Rey's other big emotional relationship is with Han, and that turns out to be the more foreshadowing, because taking all three movies into account, Rey's main emotional scenes and connections are with the previous generation characters - and with Kylo Ren - rather than with Finn and Poe. It's not that I'm bored by the result, anything but. I liked Rey's scenes with Han in TFA, with Luke in TLJ, and they got all they could out of the footage of Carrie Fisher in RoS to provide us with the impression of a connection between Rey and Leia. (Leia/Poe, otoh, is actually there on screen through the trilogy.) I thought her scenes with Kylo Ren/Ben Solo in TLJ both worked as their own thing and were a clever inversion of Anakin/Vader's arc. And no, I'm not mad that he got to repeat Vader's emotional beats from RoJ in RoS after all, complete with death after life saving and becoming one with the Force, because Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley are good together, and also I loved Star of the Guardians with the Maigrey and Sagan force bond, excuse me, mind link working in a very similar way. But I thought that this final choice, too, meant that the sequels in the end flinched from being anything but a nostalgia fest with more tech.
Speaking of tech. Good lord. As with TFA, the planet killing thing just is not emotionally effective when you do overdo it like that. Alderaan, which we the audience never got to know, being blown to smithereens works because the movie shows us Leia reacting to it and makes us feel how devastating this is to one of our main characters. So a fleet of star destroyers, each of which can do what the original Death Star could, isn't chilling to me, it's just groanworthy in a "good lord, Abrams, must you?" way.
And lastly, good old Palpatine. Look. I love Ian McDiarmid as much as the next fan. And handwavium as to why he's around again after being killed is probably better than technobabble telling us how exactly he got resurrected. But otoh: it's hard to regard this latest death as definite if the previous one wasn't. Once you play the resurrection card for supervillains, their deaths just don't have the same effect. What's more, he really suffers from villain decay in the brains department, too. Prequel Palpatine goes about his manipulation and seduction of Anakin in a clever way and one which until the very last moment, when Mace Windu dies, leaves him plausible deniability. The Emperor in the OT has two decades of absolute power under his belt and is correspondingly more hammy and overt, but still, while he badly miscalculated with his Skywalkers, his trap for the Rebellion was quite effective. This latest Palps incarnation, otoh, tells Rey in a villainous monologue his exact plan of how her killing him in anger will allow him to take over her body instead, you know, of letting her kill him in anger not knowing he'd then bodyswitch. What? And you know, while TLJ acknowledged that there is such a thing as institutional corruption and that one Snoke or one Kylo Ren is not the entire problem, and the prequels did demonstrate the way the Republic and the Jedi Order both contributed to their own doom (which is not the same as excusing the villains, btw), here we're back to "The Emperor is dead, happy ending!". Which, you know, might have worked emotionally for RoJ, but since the sequels went out of their way to show that the galaxy two decades post RoJ was just even more oppressed, and never bothered with depicting a new functioning republic - why should be believe it's better this time?
In conclusion: don't let J.J. Abrams near a franchise he liked as a kid. He's exactly the type of fan who endlessly writes canon rip-offs with ever higher body counts as a consequence. Let him do his own franchises instead.
P.S. Ahsoka as one of the voices Rey hears when finally accessing all the Jedi that came before here was cool, though. #movie canon
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Date: 2020-05-20 03:50 pm (UTC)So yeah. I blame Iger for the fact that, in spite of loving the idea of Rey and Finn, I'm not sure I would trade their existence for the mess that the sequel trilogy brought to the franchise.
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Date: 2020-05-21 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-20 04:50 pm (UTC)And that is such a shame. (But at least it is easy for me to ignore, silver lining.)
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Date: 2020-05-21 06:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-20 05:07 pm (UTC)>>(Incidentally: no complaints about Hux becoming a mole for the Resistance out of sheer pettiness against Kylo Ren, out out of any flickers of decency. That was hilarious.)<< I love that bit, and am mostly confused by the people saying "but no one does things like that out of spite". I feel the urge to introduce them to the history of the world.
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Date: 2020-05-21 03:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-20 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-21 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-20 10:09 pm (UTC)And I agree about the emotional connections. Finn and Poe in this film are just generic sidekicks with hardly any individual characterisation, and I really disliked the way the film relied for emotional connection in the middle section for pointless, too-quickly-resolved death fake-outs for Chewy and Threepio.
My ideal ending is here.
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Date: 2020-05-21 03:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-21 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-21 03:59 am (UTC)Regarding Rey - the really odd thing is that the emotional core of the 'reveal' in TLJ isn't 'Your parents are nobodies', it's 'Your parents abandoned you and aren't coming back'. And, granted, TLJ itself doesn't really emphasis that element properly either, and a thousand editorials on how important that moment is also seemed to miss the point too - but you'd think the guy who created the character of Rey would be able to recognize what part of that scene would affect her more. Instead, we get a retcon emphasizing that she's still from an important family - while keeping the whole 'sold into slavery' part. So now she's got Very Important parents who still aren't coming back for her... and this is treated as a major reversal from the previous film.
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Date: 2020-05-21 06:55 am (UTC)The big difference for me is that I loved TFA, so the disappointment felt worse because I was really invested in Rey and the storyline - and I thought like you that TLJ was setting up some properly interesting ideas, so it was even more frustrating seeing them thrown away for the sake of yet more pointless Palpatine...
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Date: 2020-05-21 06:55 am (UTC)I know people who hated TLJ, but I hated TROS for making Rey speshul, and I feel the same way about what DW did more recently, with the Doctor no longer being a Timelord like any other.
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Date: 2020-05-22 07:19 pm (UTC)From what I hear, Rose was going to have more scenes involving talking with Leia but since the CGI or something didn’t work out, they cut them. Still, yeah, after that horrible harassment, not a great look.
Yeah, with Jannah being another Stormtrooper defector, I think there could have been some moral conflict about fighting their former fellows, or seeing if they could be turned, even if it fails and they still have to defend themselves. But without at least that conflict, there is some dissonance with how Finn and Jannah fight the other Stormtroopers (Though I like Jannah and would keep her in any hypothetical Film 9 AUs).
I admittedly wasn’t a fan of Leia dying, at least wanting to have at least her of the original trio to live on. Palpatine coming back does have its issues, as you said with making him less smart and not guaranteed he’d not come back again. I’d have preferred a new force pushing the First Order instead (Though I’d say that the Sequel Trilogy bringing back Stormtroopers again just as Fascists and the Far Right are really rising in power in rl is…eerily prescient.).
I did like we heard Ahsoka and some of the prequel actors calling for Rey in the climax. It seems there some awareness or self-deprecation of the writing flaws, because in the Star Wars: The High Republic Announcement trailer, they have “an actual ending” on their brainstorming whiteboard for the project.
(Also I also agree with the lulz that Hux turned traitor and informant out of sheer spite).
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Date: 2020-06-07 10:49 pm (UTC)Not to beat an old horse that the entertainment industry already killed months ago in the media, but it really did feel like they were just trying to duplicate some "essence of Star Wars" they thought the original trilogy had in much the same way as they would do for a theme park experience. And the excerpts from Bob Iger's book that were floating around last October made it sound like that was exactly what he wanted of Abrams.
Re: Rey, Finn, and Poe: I never saw any need for them to be a trio, and didn't think the movies did either until now, so can't help reading it as part of the response to complaints about The Last Jedi. I never even felt Anakin, Padmé, and Obi-Wan were really a trio like Luke, Han, and Leia—though they at least had interactions in each movie to give them dynamics—but a significant number of people in fandom seem to and it looks like this is something that got artificially imposed on Rise at the last minute because Star Wars has to have trios.
Also, oof, that comparison of the grouping to the new Star Trek films. I finally got to them after watching the original series last year and the only feelings I had for what they wanted to be the central dynamic of the story were when Nimoy's Spock met the new Kirk and when he wanted new Spock to have the same friendship. I felt sorry for him.
I do like some things about the new movies—more Uhura and paying off the little tidbits there were of her relationship with Spock—but as far as the thing they wanted at the center, it felt like more went into making all of Spock's other relationships feel believable and grounded in-universe than went into making Spock and Kirk work. More than went into making Kirk work with most of the characters and Starfleet in general, too. I loved the original Kirk; this was a real change.
Bringing it back to Star Wars, someone told me they felt Rey would've been happiest if she'd just gotten to fly off with Han as part of his crew, and after seeing how things worked out—or just hearing about it in the case of Rise—I think they have a point.