star wars 9 spoilers and postmortem shit talk

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

I think they handled Leia's death perfectly

One of the few non-bloaty things that Abrams did right was explain Palpatine's return in a puece of throwaway dialogue. Just accept it and move on!

I was surprised at how well Leia was handled, considering the circumstances. Was dreading a Livia Soprano situation.

I half expected them to give her a Tommy Boy death where she's at someone's wedding dancing, collapses and dies

I will let people shit on this movie tho if it pisses off the lil fanfic fuckholes that shat on TLJ

nah everyone hates this one too, the only fan opinions now are all 3 suck or tlj is okay and the jj ones suck

lol the Slate comments wonder WHY WHY COULDN'T A FAN HAVE REVIEWED IT

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, December 18, 2019 10:52 AM bookmarkflaglink

Like i feel like there are many subsets.

I have friends who hate the new movies and not for stupid incel reasons, just felt too fan servicey. But some of the TLJ haters were also those that considered TFA a masterpiece. Or at least that it was "good".

Otherwise, not sure why their letdown woulda been so bad

extremely cool that Ian McDiarmid got to return to the Star Wars franchise in 2019!!!

thank goodness they brought J.J. back to steer this in the right direction

i haven't seen this but i don't like it

Thought this did the business! (Which can be a pun if you want it to be.) Not perfect of course, there are bits and beats and (non)-character development that I have plenty of issues with. I'm kinda extremely irritated that Rose Tico wasn't much more than a spear carrier this time around, for instance. One too many 'yeah that callback is a BIT much' moments but they stood out rather than being a calvacade. Yet above all else, as I was muttering on Twitter and what folks like Jay Vee are saying, as a full on space opera thrill ride that actually feels like a real tribute to the true source material of the whole thing -- 1930s serial SF films -- this was really effective. As James Blount put it over on my FB page, "the reviews seem to be part shouting at disney, part reaction against last jedi blowback, and part extremely fair (there were parts where the leads were really spinning gold from dross)." (Good example being what Tracer was saying about Poe's Henry V Crispin's Day speech; wouldn't call it gold but he did his best to sell it.) Ultimately when the film ended up my girlfriend and I looked at each other and almost simultaneously said "What the hell was with the huge negativity this week?"

Sounds terrible, thumbs down.

tbf Ned have you hated any of the post-prequel SW things

Am I supposed to have done? None have been anywhere close to perfect -- even (maybe especially, given its general rep) TLJ.

killer AO Scott close to his NYT review: not a great Star Wars film cuz there is no such thing; that's how we like it

(close paraphrase)

Context is informative! xp

a movie by cowards for cowards