star wars 9 spoilers and postmortem shit talk

it's really no more jarring to me than Darth Vader becoming Luke's father in Ep 5 when it was very clear this was not the plan in Ep 4, and that Lucas originally planned to make Anakin SKywalker and Darth Vader two diff people.

obv this wasn't planned either but...lol, whatcha gonna do.

oh shit sorry spoilers I know not everybody here has seen Ep 5

“I guess he must have been on a different transport!” pic.twitter.com/ZxVq8ENUFJ

— david ehrlich (@davidehrlich) December 21, 2019

entire twitter thread of jokes about that line

I'm not really talking about betraying the "facts" of the scene, I'm talking about the emotion, the being totally untethered from the existing narrative and the gut-punch that generates

idk I probably care about this too much cause I thought it was the most effective moment in either movie

it was, for sure. it was one of my favorite parts of TLJ

and a big part of me is sad that it got abandoned, but I pretty much knew Abrams was going to fuck with it from the jump so I had time to mentally prepare.

I’m still trying to figure out why Rey’s actual parents had to be the junk traders. We get an entire setup in TFA where Rey is scavenging junk and then trading or selling it to scrape by, but decides to keep a droid. What if someone like her found, idk, a baby in a tube in the imperial wreckage and decided to raise it, but couldn’t quite make it work?

xpost i was actually afraid he was going to say she was Darth Plagueis but that midichlorians cleansed her soul or some shit so I guess I was relieved he went more conventional

So we get genetic parents of unknown origin, and the people who raised her being filthy junk traders

at one point doesn’t someone say of rey’s parents that they deliberately DECIDED to become “nobodies” in order to protect her? so they’re both right

yeah, Kylo does. I guess they went off the grid, papa probably adopted a new surname (See Obi-Wan - that's how you hide someone!). I mean obviously it's a bit of a cop-out but really the only one Abrams left himself when he made that decision.

xpost yeah mh that could have worked better for sure.

insane to me that in this 9-film saga about the galactic impact of thse families who have incredible existential reality-bending force powers, the plot requires the son of the most evil being in the history of the galaxy to just be some fuckin random dude who we've never heard of before or since

the franchise is full of people who we never knew existed "until now".

apparently there are some books/comics (which are now not canon, LEGENDS lol) where Palpatine refused to get married but had a concubine that he , y'know, boinked. he was afraid of having spawn but we know how that works. also there was apparently an abandoned Lucas-fronted Star Wars tv show where Palpatine was going to have an actual girlfriend, lol

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Roganda_Ismaren

tbh though i guess my baisc problem is i just dont give a shit abt who is related to who and find it by far the least interesting thing about star wars imho, and am pretty bored that the entire series basically became about that, untangling this ridiculous web of sci fi family ties. imagining 6 year old me seeing star wars for the first time, being told "you're going to love this, you'll have so much fun gradually figuring out this family tree!"

is Sidious nude in this

alright, who is going to make the Nude Sheev sock account

Funniest moment: the stoned-sounding Stormtrooper, when Rey uses the Jedi Mind Trick (“Welcome, guys!”)

I loved the continuing aspect of our heroes making things objectively worse by going to rescue Chewbacca since Hux, being the spy, would probably have contrived to get him out of there.

the plot requires the son of the most evil being in the history of the galaxy to just be some fuckin random dude who we've never heard of before or since

Darth Vader’s son was a nobody; and probably would’ve remained a nobody, if Obi-Wan hadn’t lived nearby to keep an eye on him. Anyway, if they had made a trilogy before this one about Palpatine’s kids, we’d have the opposite complaint...

the entire star destroyer raid felt like they were replaying Luke/Han/Obi Wan rescuing Leia (Chewie is Leia)

Palpatine rolling open the ceiling to show Rey how her friends were losing had dialogue that was nearly a verbatim copy of him showing his friends losing in ROTJ

I have no idea why, or how I even feel about that!

xp what about Darth Vader’s daughter, though

hah yes I definitely felt the same way. "look at your friends dying".

only this time around, less of them were dying, as I only saw Snap get blown up

Luke tongued his sister

Sure, Vader’s daughter was a boss

(that was an xpost, btw — LOL)

I am glad Snap died, because Abrams casting Grunberg in every damn thing in a bit role is tiring and he seemingly only appears in the movie when JJ is directing

We got about five seconds of Wedge Antilles, that was nice

that's true! (re only appearing when JJ directs)

how's Oscar Isaac

I wonder if someone in casting told Abrams they were tired of seeing all these faces from his TV shows and that’s why Keri Russell was stuck in a helmet

Oscar Isaac does ok, although I regret to inform you he remains clothed and his character flirts badly

xp Oh, that was her?

yeah did i miss something? how come helmet girl gives poe the brush-off at the end? i thought she wanted to run away w him? i have to admit i was moved by that little subplot, god knows why.

wanted to run away with a friend, she wouldn't let him kiss her before he left in that scene tho

This movie and Frozen II had interestingly similar “heroine vs. stormy sea” scenes... must be something in the water here in Burbank.

Btw, I didn’t get how the wreckage of the Death Star ended up on a different moon of Endor, when it was orbiting the Forest Moon... maybe the Rebels gave it a “push” or something.

Endor is the moon the planet is... whatever... also it did blowed up real good in Jedi so

she wouldn't let him kiss her before he left

incredible willpower imo

the mask does not come off

*composes reply*

*deletes reply*

maybe the helmet is her face and it just...does that

Ah, fsr I thought Endor was the main planet (tho even blowed-up wreckage should remain in orbit)

Come to think of it, this movie had several plot similarities w/Frozen II.

the forest moon of Endor. the forest moon is Endor. it’s all true, nobody bothered to address any of that in the original movie! it’s fine.

apparently the planet at the beginning of this one, where Kylo Ren is taking down a bunch of locals before finding the wayfinder? that’s mustafar, and the macguffin was in his grandpa’s stash. this was completely opaque in the movie

we were talking about that at a party last night. none of us knew it was supposed to be Mustafar.

what else was in his stache? do Sith ahve good doobage?

Yavin IV, eg

That’s funny, I fleetingly thought it looked like Mustafar, but promptly forgot about that whole scene.

apparently the visual dictionary for the movie has an entry for those locals

those books are pretty cool imo and have some cool story crafting when it comes to aliens planets

Ugh, now I sort of want to rewatch all 9 movies (not a productive feeling)

/Darth Vader’s son was a nobody; and probably would’ve remained a nobody, if Obi-Wan hadn’t lived nearby to keep an eye on him.

I ended up re-watching Revenge Of The Sith last night and if you could just mute 90% of Anakin, Padme and Obi-Wan's lines it's not horrendous.

Can I just in general say I find it insane to think that a ninth film in a nine-film series necessarily must repeat the structure of the sixth film, and should include lots of callbacks to films four through six in general. That really does not make narrative sense to me. In general, it was always nonsense that the saga should consist of three films about the fall of the republic, three films about rebels fighting an empire, and then three films that tells the exact same story as the earlier three films, but with one side called the resistance, and the other side called the first order. In hindsight, that was never going to feel like anything else than three extra films awkwardly grafted onto an already finished tale.