star wars 9 grim resignation thread

i dont love the casino part but tbh i dont think ppl would be talking about it today without the cgi beast riding

I'm on record as loving the diminutive drunk guy who thinks BB-8 is a slot machine

After Dexter Jettster, no creature in the SW universe has ever approached that level of awful again

having enjoyed Star Wars and Return Of The Jedi as a child I can only endorse a scene in a star war where the heroes go to some kind of bar/party environment filled with amusing-looking alien monsters

slot machine dude is lols and takes up about 4 seconds of movie

he was apparently voiced by Mark Hammill, lol

I was looking forward to the 'bar/party environment filled with amusing-looking monsters' more than anything going into TLJ (probably TFA also) and just had expectations too high.

If you haven't seen the deleted scenes from the ownable release there's an awful/funny/both bit during the Fathier chase with a pink cyclops in a bath house...wow these sure are some words I have just typed.

But also a good music montage showing more of the freaky looking characters in the casino just wandering around (not part of the film just from dailies I guess).

Yikes.1,5 stars. 'The Rise of Skywalker is what happens when a franchise gives up': https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/18/21021188/star-wars-rise-of-skywalker-review-no-spoilers

the Slant review is very similar, though it's one of those bad reviews that makes the movie sound inadvertently interesting

Yeah, I'm honestly beginning to think I might like this one the most of the new films, lol. But it sounds like it's going to be a disaster on a franchise-level.

for the record, the two things on Kathleen Kennedy's slate with a date attached are Untitled Indiana Jones Project (2021) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit 2 (2022)

on the plus side maybe we'll all be dead by then

Is this what audiences demand from franchise movies? Films that cater to what’s comfortable and capitulates to the most unimaginative fans?

Tbf, they're talking about the 9th film in the series packed with familiar characters and places. This rhetorical question has an answer.

Some of the pull quotes in metacritic seem to sum it up pretty well.

"Rise of the Skywalker isn’t an ending, a sequel, a reboot, or a remix. It’s a zombie."

"The more accurate way to describe it, I think, is as an epic failure of nerve."

"The Rise of Skywalker — Episode IX, in case you’ve lost count — is one of the best. Also one of the worst. Perfectly middling. It all amounts to the same thing."

I like the Time Out NY take on Abrams as droid, sent in to dutifully and without emotion tidy things up.

Droids' lack of lack of emotion has been generally a good thing about Star Wars!

give David Fincher the next trilogy imo

A trilogy about a serial killer whose crimes follow a curious pattern: he only murders death stars.

It's perhaps instructive to look over the Walt Disney Pictures slate from the past several years to get a clear sense of where the corporation's priorities lie these days.

Domestically-released original films and properties newly-adapted by Disney, 2016-present:

The Finest Hours
Zootopia
The BFG
Queen of Katwe
Moana
Coco
A Wrinkle in Time
The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

Sequels/remakes/sequels of remakes of previous Disney films:

The Jungle Book
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Finding Dory
Pete's Dragon
Beauty and the Beast
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
Cars 3
Incredibles 2
Christopher Robin
Ralph Breaks the Internet
Mary Poppins Returns
Dumbo
Aladdin
Toy Story 4
The Lion King
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
Frozen II

They seem to be trending in a particular direction but I can't quite put a name to it...

Like I would not be the slightest bit surprised if they announced that the next SW project is a remake of the OG trilogy.

I don't yet think they're that stupid, but they would clearly love to do it.

But this is beginning to feel like a Justice League sized debacle.

This clearly can't be what they hoped would happen when they paid 4 billion for the franchise.

I wouldn't have thought they'd spend half a decade dragging their vaunted animated classics through the uncanny valley, either, but here we are.

I'm reserving judgment until I see the thing, but if the impression left by the blurbs is sound, I'd argue that pandering directly to one aging and increasingly-conservative segment of the audience isn't really the best growth strategy. Like I can't imagine the kids of today are going to harbor much real affection for this trilogy. Because it's only sorta incidentally for them.

this ended up being one of ILE's more prophetic thread titles huh

xp I don't know about that - Rey / Finn / Kylo / Poe are pretty popular.

The bit where they stop making the new Trilogy and launch off into "maybe our filler films have hit gold-dirt" was always going to be a little risky, and I'd be amazed if anyone high-up said "No, this will definitely work, the 'Star Wars Stories will have eclipsed the number films by then".

This clearly can't be what they hoped would happen when they paid 4 billion for the franchise.

Dude, it's Star Wars - they weren't paying purely to make money off the films (also they have already made a lot of money off the films)

xp stopped clock

I know that, Andrew, clearly they are making money off of this. But they're Disney! They're making so much money off of remaking everything they already own, so why would they spend 4 billion on a franchise that might just be as good a moneymaker as the stuff they already have! They needed this to work on a whole other level. They paid almost as much for Star Wars as they did for Marvel, and with Marvel they make three billion making films a year, without annoying too many people, other than Scorsese fans.

I haven't seen any reviews mention the Keri Russell role so I guess the one aspect I was kinda curious about must be a teensy one

maybe Star Wars was a mistake, guys

Box office isn't really Disney's sole concern though. I bet the SW theme park thing pays off (also: toys). Plus the Mandalorian is the only thing I've heard anyone talk about re: Disney+; hard to quantify that sort of thing, but I doubt they're in despair over there. That said, maybe they'll retreat back into the Lucasfilm approach and just make cheaper, ancillary non-movies

Disney is lucky as hell that Marvel already had Feige at the movie helm when they bought the company. In a Feige-less world, their Marvel movies would have been plenty successful, I'm sure, but nowhere near as successful as they have been. Unfortunately, SW did not and does not have a similarly steady hand at the wheel so the franchise is kinda beholden to the whims of focus groups and dudes in suits.

rob otm

I mean, what's the damage here - do you reckon that in another universe they'd have a Star Wars X due out in 2021?

they'll wait an extra 2-3 years to roll out another trilogy. maybe.

removing bookmark, see y'all late friday

I think it was always a stupid gamble. But in a better world, they'd have a Solo trilogy going, a succesfull trilogy from Abrams, Johnson and Trevorrow, with probably both Abrams and Johnson being told to build on that succes in their own little corners of the galaxy. And then some sort of big big story on the horizon, where Poe and Finn and Rey were going to team up again.

No that's wrong, that's a far worse world, sorry.

Seeing this tomorrow afternoon - will try to hold off spoilers until the weekend tho

We should go ahead and start a separate thread for spoilers and postmortem shit talk

it is probably true that without the history of star wars as a "trilogy" series, and the living legacy actors to further reinforce that sense of history, they PROBABLY would have come out the gate with more of an MCU-type structure in mind, and maybe the payoffs would have been bigger. but they didn't and so now IX is freighted with having to be the biggest super-payoff ever, which always seemed unlikely to deliver since they took Johnson off of it.

star wars 9 spoilers and postmortem shit talk

good idea:

In the four years since the sequel trilogy began, I don't think I've read a single article focused on how the new films are being recieved by children.

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) December 18, 2019

I kinda wrote one back in 2016, lol

Wow, I'd completely forgotten that article. I wrote that the antagonists were too young, and that the films therefore wouldn't be as alluring for children. Then I wrote a political allegory where The First Order was ISIS and the Resistance was Blackwater.

K. Harris:

Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi (which, like all pop culture anyone notices these days, was both overrated and over-hated) floated the heretical notion that the past could be left behind. What if a hero could rise who was free of the familial psychodrama of the Lucas era, a true nobody (yes, one with immense mystical powers, but stay with me here) who could make her own way in the galaxy? What stories could be told if Star Wars finally said to hell with Joseph Campbell and this damn quasi-aristocratic cadre of genetically blessed superhumans trapped in their never-ending cycle of betrayal and redemption?

We’ll never know. Abrams backtracks shamelessly (imagine if we’d learned in Return of the Jedi that Darth Vader had lied and wasn’t really Luke’s father) and reasserts that there is but one Star Wars story. By resurrecting Palpatine, the movie acknowledges that the past is a source of elemental evil, but primarily as a means for us to discover that tradition can bestow wonderfully redemptive powers as well. The system works.

What The Rise of Skywalker really celebrates is itself, as well as Abrams’ completion of his difficult mission in a way that will satisfy true Star Wars believers and his bosses. When the film closes with Rey choosing to name herself after the heroes who preceded her, the film’s capitulation to Star Wars tradition feels so craven yet smug that I’m surprised Abrams didn’t list himself in the credits as J.J. Lucas.

http://citypages.com/movies/well-star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-is-one-way-to-end-this-mess/566298061

they PROBABLY would have come out the gate with more of an MCU-type structure

thank Obi-Wan for small mercies

oh so we have spoilers here now anyway

"grim resignation" is in the thread title but i didn't imagine it'd describe the end of the movie

yeah thx Alfred, not paying to see this now.

Mission accomplished *Palpatine cackle*

c'monnn alfred, man, i'm deliberately not bookmarking the spoilers thread

imagine if we’d learned in Return of the Jedi that Darth Vader had lied and wasn’t really Luke’s father