star wars 9 spoilers and postmortem shit talk

glad they finally worked an appearance from Darth Icky into the series given this was the last chance

You know Vader and Plagueis and Oppress
Sidious, Bane, Booger, Barf, Farts and Hopeless
But do you recall
A Darth even ickier than Maul?

Dammit, fucked up the meter of my stupid nerd joke song, shoot me now.

*blasts Sith lightning*

There were bits I liked in this but even with lowered expectations, it was a resounding meh. Better than TFA is a staggeringly low bar.

even the more positive takes I've seen generally allege that at least the first hour is a total mess (though a few say it recovers)

Also I saw this at the same cinema I watched TLJ, on the second opening night like I did for TLJ. Almost identical crowd - healthy proportion of dudes carrying lightsabers and wearing Vader helmets. The difference: loud applause for TLJ, dead silence this time around. Theatre full of SW nerds seemed genuinely confused.

I always thought the hate for TLJ among “fans” was overblown, this confirmed it for me.

Yeah, it's almost as if a certain kind of person cynically draped themselves in the finery of fandom as cover to express a certain kind of sentiment. No, I'm not a sewer-dwelling creep who helped drive Kelly Marie Tran off of twitter, I'm just an ardent faaaaaaan! It's just what we fans do.

this fuckin ruled

poe's "inspirational" half-time speech before the big assault the only serious misstep imo - stunk out the joint

for what it's worth I enjoyed this plenty, appreciated that TLJ hit a few unusually interesting notes but ultimately for Ep 9 of 9 I was happy enough to sit and have my star war feelings gently massaged for 2.5 hrs. watching it with kids definitely helps I think, they subject it to the level of critical scrutiny it deserves (ie not much). Daisy Ridley seemed to have remembered how to take this shit seriously (enough), wasn't really feeling her feeling it last time. new cast largely charming, old guys were fine. falcon return with "rag-tag fleet" pretty cool, "it's just... People" - very good! was pretty bored by the prospect of the emperor coming back but it worked fine I thought. Is this a baked-in problem with resurrected sf franchises, that they are unable to surpass the mythic potency of their original villains? Eg new doctor who still very reliant on daleks & other old monsters...

anyway I must write down my thoughts and ferlings now because I know I won't be able to remember a thing about it in one month's time.

even the more positive takes I've seen generally allege that at least the first hour is a total mess (though a few say it recovers)

I actually felt the opposite! The first half was great fun, second half was deflating.

Fuck it imma spoil away, there just didn’t feel like there was any stakes involved - I never felt for one moment like the heroes were ever going to be in real trouble or that Rey was going to go to the dark side or Kylo was going to die a villain. it was just so pleasantly safe.

Also, like Gwen Christie and Captain Phasma... I cant believe they cast an actress like Keri Russell and kept her under a helmet the entire time.

#justiceforgeneralhugs btw

yeah the first half of the final assault felt oddly underpowered and clunky

apart from that there were a zillion great moments

"friendship" theme firmly back in play

refreshing lack of suicides

extremely cool new ways for the force to work. lightsabre duel occurring in two different places simultaneously was amazing

CHEWIE GETS HIS MEDAL!! Right?? isn't that what that was??

girl on girl kissing after the victory! in your face fanbros!!

refreshing lack of suicides

One of the rebels (might even have been Poe, I can’t remember) making a snarky remark about Holdo’s heroic death in TLJ was unnecessarily petty though. I hated that too - the nagging feeling that this movie just wanted to shit on everything that was supposedly wrong with Ep 8.

girl on girl kissing after the victory! in your face fanbros!!

I keep hearing this is like 1.5 seconds and in the background

Loved the completely batshit quicksand > conveniently fall into cave they needed to be at >> giant hurt snake sequence. The movie is full of so much goofy "wait! what the ?" space opera shit I dig it even more as I think back.

^^^hi dere, I live in a conservative Muslim country and the gay scene was cut entirely and nothing was missed. Having actually well developed queer characters would just be way too much for this franchise.

xpost

Oscar Isaac has complained about their unwillingness to "go there" pretty openly.

Knights Of Ren... pop up for no conceivable reason and...do less than a few stormtroopers lol

“Loved the completely batshit quicksand > conveniently fall into cave they needed to be at >> giant hurt snake sequence. The movie is full of so much goofy "wait! what the ?" space opera shit I dig it even more as I think back.”

This scene was good though I agree. Loved that whole planet pretty much. And the water planet too.

Heard some folks groan loudly at the kiss. And I'm in Amsterdam!!

And I flashed back to seeing TLJ in Stamford, CT and some folks harrumphing at Finn and Rose's kiss then. People suck.

tbh it surprises me that fanboy nerd scum have difficulty appreciating images of girl-on-girl sexuality

Cloud City conveniently floating near giant battle scene

Little droid hacker modeled after Mako in "Blade Runner"?

Cloud City conveniently floating near giant battle scene

― SQUIRREL MEAT!! (Capitaine Jay Vee), 19. december 2019 20:56 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

please tell me this is a joke

surprises me that fanboy nerd scum have difficulty appreciating images of girl-on-girl sexuality

girls are sjws

favourite character: babu lek or whoever, the black market droid tech. an actual puppet rather than cgi i think?? irresistible

after rey's last line my 11-y-o goes "wait - why are you lying??"

o yeah and while not a big fan of esoteric fan service, loved seeing Wedge at the end (albeit I had forgotten his name and had to look it up)

thought Han's last line of dialogue was both clever and moving

lol

xpost to Tracer

Wonder if Ford agreed to come back for this cameo or if it was repurposed TFA takes

This was not as fun as TFA nor as interesting as TLJ. A lot of boxes got checked but nothing really stood out for me as a good story beat or in terms of brilliant visual shots as in TLJ.

I really hoped the last shot would not be what it was either but it sums up the imagination bypass and overcautious approach many have criticised.

(three stars)

hard disagree, thought this was v v fun

last shot pretty cornball but it’s the closing chapter of a retro sci fi family thrills epic. felt v suitable

Is this a baked-in problem with resurrected sf franchises, that they are unable to surpass the mythic potency of their original villains? Eg new doctor who still very reliant on daleks & other old monsters...

^ Star Trek apparently had a half-arsed bet each way by including Khan but repeatedly lying in publicity that it wasn't Khan? Battlestar Galactica did something more intersting with the series' central conflict than the monster whose name they reused, from what I saw of it.


absolutely not to Captain Save-a-who, just thread reference for non-watchers:

in the last ten years of nu-Who, stories that rely on old monsters (so cameos aside) breaks down across 97 episodes to

5 Dalek * stories, including a 2-parter with Davros in, plus a one-off fight scene in another one
4 Cybermen ** stories, inc 2x 2-parters
(one of the 1-parters is about returning-from-the-previous-year monster James Corden, with about 3 minutes of Cyber-appearances)

1 two-ep story with a new monster from the same time period as one monster from 1970 and another from 1972, who had both returned once in 1984. neither of the old monsters are in the 2011 story but it completely nicks the premise of the 1970 story.

and the 50th Anniversary year brought back 1 old monster for the first time in 39 years, and 1 that had only appeared once, 37 years before. Each of these has reappeared once since, the latter in a two-parter.

(Three of the Cybermen stories set out to dig into previously unexamined aspects or ideas of medical malpractice, or long-term illness, or the removal of free will & agency, or collective consciousness, or individuals' control over their right to die with dignity, rather than just relying on mythic potency of the scary robot soldier design from 2006's reboot of the previous cyborg concept. Not as effectively as Last Jedi's interrogation of tradition and ritual, though.)

* regulars from 1964-67, 4 appearances in the 1970s, 3 in the '80s
** regulars from 1966-68, 1 appearance in 1975, 3 in the '80s

I think every reboot eventually gets back to the original villain, but Star Wars was kinda supposed to be different. It was supposed to be a continuation of a grand saga, but yeah, Abrams apparently was more into rebooting stuff than people understood.

this review pretty much jives with my feelings

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/18/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-in-depth-fan-review-the-thrill-is-tangible

Guardian has a separate 3 star review which I guess is where I sit.

Weird bringing back both bits of Death Star AND Palps yet neither were connected like it seems we were duped to think they would be.

there was an eerie shot of his old blasted chair in the death star wreckage iirc

i still can't get over how badass the various reality-melding force moments between rey and kylo were.

oh and.. what did finn want to say to rey? is it what I'm thinking??

Yeah that can't have been intentionally left hanging.

I groaned when Rey and Kylo kissed but his immediate death just about saved it.

The transfer of various items between them was probably the best trick.

it's like when you wake up from a dream where you've just grabbed a rare coin and for a second you're hoping you've still got it in your hand. So awesome

(sic re who stats, sure but I would also include the Master/Missy, and really my argument is not overuse of old foes but the fact that no new ones have really managed to displace or even equal the iconic status of the old nasties - with possible exception of weeping angels?) (to wrench thread back to SW, I think Snoke is easily the shittest part of the new trilogy) (Snoke! even the name sucks, sounds like some sort of twee cuddle)

“I MADE SNOKE...no, for real! I grew him in a vat!” This reveal happening in the first ten minutes...lol

Anyway this often felt more like a Star Wars loaf than an actual movie, but I had a good time.

“Loved the completely batshit quicksand > conveniently fall into cave they needed to be at >> giant hurt snake sequence. The movie is full of so much goofy "wait! what the ?" space opera shit I dig it even more as I think back.”

OTM, the lean into outright “...and then this crazy thing happened!” pulpiness kinda made the shoddy construction of the whole thing less irritating. Life’s too short to get mad about this shit.

Also Driver and Ridley deserve credit for anchoring it with a semblance of emotional weight that wasn’t rooted in nostalgia.

(I wasn't trying to prove anything in any direction, either over- or under-use, with the stats! However the Weeping Angels have topped multiple Radio Times polls as the most popular monster, getting 49% of the vote in 2012 to the Daleks 17%, with the Silence (another new-series monster) at third on 12%. Again, the vast majority of IRL audiences watch Dr Who when it's on and they're home, or watch a Star War when one's in the cinema and the kids are off school. Porgs = gr8t imo.)

(But the original series never displaced the old nasties either: the Dalek design stuck with Raymond Cusick's original from 1963, the Cybermen were redesigned for their February 1967 return after the October 1966 debut. Across 26 years, the only other monster to return more than once was the Ice Warriors, who weren't a baddie the third time, and the Sontarans, who turned up as a surprise near-the-end twist for their third appearance, and on their fourth were were an Ian Levine*-led addition to an existing story that already had TWO other baddies AND two Doctors, without any of the conceptual characteristics or design or "being physically short" or "having the masks fit into the collars" of their previous appearances.)

((John Simm's Master is a different character in terms of iconography and performance and backstory from Geoffrey Beevers' or Roger Delgado's Master imo. Michelle Gomez' is the best version since Delgado but her extreme popularity is entirely down to Moffatt's writing and her performance, not because 19-year-olds have been waiting since 1973 for another funny evil mastermind in a cuffed collar, or since 1996 for the equivalent of Julia Roberts' brother to wear sunglasses so you can't see his eyes reading cue cards.))

*(superfan who pimped teenagers to the 1980s producer and his boyfriend to go "two up" on, in exchange for getting to attend tapings and offer his suggestions for old baddies to use. now boycotting the show because Dr Who is a lady)

Feel like the first half of this movie outshined the second. It got overstuffed. But i enjoyed it. It was never gonna beat Last Jedi for me but it was fun.

Some beats rang false towards the end. Hux was really stupid.

But hey...Reypatine strangely worked for me!

It was a mess but a mostly satisfying one for me. Seeing again tomorrow

https://media1.giphy.com/media/LHrY3Xv2fKaKQ/giphy.gif

watched this for first time. the ghost of luke is semi transparent, you can see the background through him. he crosses in front of rey and you can *still* see the background through him...