The Force Awakens and its follow-ups had so few memorable characters, it’s a wonder Disney – and Oscar Isaac – are still talking about potential spin-offs

    • figjam@midwest.social
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      20 hours ago

      The first one had some good plot hooks to further and grow the franchise beyond what it was. These were immediately dumped by Disney corporate and replaced with slop.

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    I remember enjoying The Force Awakens in the cinema, but I probably enjoyed it about as much as I would have enjoyed rewatching A New Hope, because frankly they’re the same movie.

    I started watching the 2nd one in the new trilogy (don’t even remember the name) and got bored. Never watched the 3rd one.

    And then there was Rogue One, which I also watched in cinema. I did enjoy it, but it was also an absolute nothing burger of a movie with 0 lasting impact or characters worth remembering.

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      Same. But I think a big part of that is I only watched each of them one time. Where as the first 6 I’ve seen more times than I could count.

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    I’m not one to overthink movies, I really enjoy just watching them do their thing without thinking about it, But there were no twists everything felt so linear and so repeated.

    I even liked solo because it was at least different.

    • That Weird Vegan@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      just look at family guy :/. A shell of what it used to be. It was already going downhill, but since disney took over, it’s essentially not even the same show anymore. Much like simpsons, but that was LONG before Disney.

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        Huge Fan of The Simpsons, the first 13 seasons are regular background noise in my home. After that it’s mostly shitty with a half decent episode by lesser standards here and there, but the half decent episodes were becoming more frequent right up until the acquisition. Now the show is a sad desiccated husk of what it once was.

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    Your memory was wiped because you only bought tickets to see the movie, not remember it

  • ALLHAILHYPNOTOAD@lemmy.ml
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    It was straight up nostalgia porn. Nothing but call backs and a cloned bland story line. Absolutely forgettable. Rogue One and Andor are the only good things Disney did with Star Wars (live action wise).

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      Very strange to criticise the sequel trilogy for being “nostalgia porn”, whilst simultaneously praising Rogue One. Not only was that film completely pointless but it was also filled with deepfakes of dead actors and endless fan service.

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        Because rogue one tied into the original movies directly and coherently. The new trilogy felt really forced. Andor was born of Rogue One as well so it definitely felt like a better overall storyline.

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    Nope. Your memory is fine. There were only two and a half good Star Wars movies of the original nine; A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi right up until the Ewoks arrive.

    Beyond that there was some good stuff, like Andor and Rogue one.

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        It was ok. Certainly better than A Phantom Menace. But I think, aside from a cool sword fight scene and a giant fish The Phantom Menace was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.

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        Kids loved the ewoks … I will admit I liked them when I was young. However, they were kind of stupid and pointless. He should have just make them cookies like he planned.

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        That’s a nice opinion. Too bad it’s wrong.

        One question, were you alive and able to watch the first movie in 1977?

        • Crashumbc@lemmy.world
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          Actually, I was, and did! Though I was pretty young. I do fully remember empire and Jedi… I actually kinda of like the Ewoks at the time.

          It wasn’t until the Internet that I found out you’re supposed to “hate” them and they ruined the movie.

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            Your previous comment said the Ewoks were alright “given the time period,” but I think this one hints that it’s less about the calendar year, but more about your age when you first saw the film.

            A lot of Star Wars is aimed at kids, and a lot of adults have trouble grappling with that fact. The Ewoks were fine, just aimed at the younger fans. Episode 6 was a step down from 5, but not because of the Ewoks. My beefs are that it neutered Han’s character and did a poor job of following up on the threads from Episode 5.

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              Yes it did neuter Han as well.

              But you pointed out that a lot of star wars is geared toward children and I find that odd given the number of amputations and Daddy issues in the plot. I guess I just prefer it not be.

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                Eh, the amputations didn’t bother me as a kid.

                Mind you, I was a teenager when the prequels came out, and I find them a lot more uneven. Much more gruesome than the OT towards the end (no one was immolated in the OT, at least), but much more child-oriented at the beginning. But it’s the younger generation that’s been “re-evalutating” those films, so clearly they were watching and enjoying them as they came out. Not really sure what the take away there is - maybe kids just like a little blood n’ guts sometimes.

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            I was 11 years old and I felt when the Ewoks arrived that it felt like a blatant ploy to get young kids involved and like it was leaving behind the fans that by that time were clearly too old for the teddy bears. It probably didn’t hurt the Lucas had all of the merchandising rights. To be honest I want real happy with him showing us Vader’s face either. I think NOT seeing it made him more menacing. Showing him removed all doubt and just,I don’t know, dimished the effect. Just MHO.

          • Professorozone@lemmy.world
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            I was actually joking around but I forgot these days there’s always someone ready to be offended.

            I will now apologize and absolutely not be forgiven.

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          My mom was, and she absolutely hated the ewoks too. Said it ruined the whole trilogy for her.

          Seeing you have that same level of hate reminded me of her.

    • Wilco@lemmy.zip
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      Ahsoka is decent, but it is really just the Star Wars Rebels cartoon live-action version.

  • Pechente@feddit.org
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    Seems like a lot of the entertainment Disney makes tries to be extremely average. Not edgy, not offending anyone. The end result is almost like AI slop before AI slop existed. Entertainment so mediocre that it doesn’t make you feel anything.

    • thedruid@lemmy.world
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      Entertainment doesn’t need to be good anymore.

      As we use more and more electronic distractions, we start to leave streaming on all say while we work, play, etc…

      This means people aren’t really paying attention, so the streams just play and generate cash, with people not noticing that the quality has dropped

      Why why pay top dollar to make programs when they can just dribble out pablum to stream.

      So we get dumb crap with bad writing and childish titles.

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        Disney movies are theatrical length ads for merch and experiences. The animation style for BB-8 was 100% prioritizing driving merch sales.

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          “What if we had tiny droid but ball?”

          And then: “what if we had even tinier droid that does nothing but act like a scared puppy?” for D-0, literally the most useless droid in all of Star Wars history; moreso than the mouse droids from the OT.

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      my old professor called it “Attraction to Mediocrity” - the idea that over time things move towards the most average as you try to please the most people

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      But that’s what modern audiences actually want. They want mediocre slop because it doesn’t distract them while scrolling Instagram or TikTok. Modern audiences don’t watch movies anymore, they only use movies as background noise. So why even bother with memorable characters or a real plot? I’m not trolling here or anything, just saying the truth. If I would make films for a living, I wouldn’t make them more complex either. Because it’s only a waste of time, effort and money.

  • demizerone@lemmy.world
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    One day I sat down to watch the movie after force awakens (can’t even remember the name). About 30 minutes in I had an extreme sense of deja vu. Come to find out I watched that movie in theaters and had completely forgot it. After that I watch ed rise of the Skywalker and definitely will remember that as being the worst stars wars anything I have ever seen… christmas special and babu frik excluded!. I felt bad for the actors on that one.

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    Rogue One was the only decent star wars story in recent history. It was within the star wars universe but wasn’t a total rehash of the same Jedi story.

    If they had done the Solo twins storyline with the Jedi academy they would have had all the YA books to pull ideas from that was original stories instead of the modernized remake.

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      They trashed everything from the extended universe. I’m super sad about the Skywalker family, especially Mara. I also really liked Jeter’s Boba Fett trilogy.

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      Rogue One is absolute trash, watch it again and tell me literally any redeeming quality it has. Just because they tell a “”““dark””“” story about war in a franchise that usually doesn’t deal with that doesn’t make it good, they also need to include things like character development and plot.

      Edit: oh also it is a rehash, just of a single line – “Many Bothans died to bring us this information” – which still managed to convey more pathos and drama than the entire movie. And yes, I know that’s not actually the story being told, but if you don’t think that line inspired the movie you are an idiot.

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        There were no Bothans in Rogue One. They had nothing to do with stealing the original Death Star plans. They were the ones responsible for bringing Intel about the Death Star 2 in RoTJ. Get your facts right.

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          It’s still obviously the inspiration. See the endless articles explaining this exact fact.

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        It’s insane the amount of glazing that film gets despite a) being full of AI deepfake slop of dead actors b) endless nostalgia bait fan service c) no reason to exist (who the fuck wanted an entire film made to explain a tiny plot hole from the original film?) and d) literally every cookie cutter new character they introduce is killed off by the end of the film anyway after zero development. The only one anyone remembers is Andor, and only because he happened to get his own show years later.

      • usernamefactory@lemmy.ca
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        Rogue One is the only Star Wars movie I would actually call forgettable. I can’t tell you what happened other than the most basic premise (that they cribbed from Dark Forces), and that they all blew up at the end.

        Oh, and those absolutely dogshit CGI actor replacements. That parts seared into my brain.

  • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works
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    Between Lost, Star Trek, and Star Wars, I hate J.J. Abrams. The only reason he even has a career is because he sucked up to Spielberg.

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      he f-uped trek for sure, and kurtzman followed in his footsteps. nutrek is so bad compared to even enterprise. LOWER decks and prodigy is more decent then the 3 series, and they are coming out with another 1-2? they should just give up, because a new trek series isnt going to erase the other nutrek series problems.

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        Yeah, I can’t remember which Star Trek it was but they introduced a pretty cool character with a really tragic background and quite a few other people who suffered but the only person who cried in the movie was… the Vulcan. Really?

        Also I think Strange New Worlds is pretty good.

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          Strange new worlds has it’s moments, but some of the dialogue and interactions make me long for a writer with a military background.

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            Yes! I’ve been thinking the exact same thing. Watching TOS and TNG it clearly comes across that they’re military hierarchies inspired in part by the kind of sciency and professional approach of the military / real life space program. The new shows reveal that the creators lack this understanding.

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            i felt the acting is too rigid, they need new actors, that can act better, using leftovers from STD wasnt helping them.

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            I can see that. I feel the same way sometimes but I just have to say, like it or not Discovery just ISN’T Star Trek.

  • xyzzy@lemmy.today
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    I was the world’s biggest Star Wars fan in the '90s. I read all the books and comics, I had the little spaceships. When I left the theater in 1997 after seeing the Star Wars Special Edition, it was like a punch to the gut. So many stupid changes. I hoped for more with Empire, but Luke screamed after his noble sacrifice, which really irritated me. By the time of Jedi, I was already expecting the worst, and boy, they delivered with that awful musical number.

    But somewhere deep in my heart I held out hope for Phantom Menace. And that finally killed Star Wars for me. Later I sold or gave away all that stuff. I only kept the original Timothy Zahn trilogy, because I first read those before I even saw the movies.

    So by the time we got the sequels I had zero investment. Force Awakens was… fine. A rehash with no original ideas. But I get it. Remind people why they like Star Wars.

    I liked Last Jedi a little more than most, despite the clear trilogy pacing screw ups and go-nowhere B plots (casino planet, etc.). I actually really liked Luke’s arc. It was something new and unexpected, but many Star Wars fans want the same warmed-over meal instead of something more dynamic. Same goes for the “anyone can be Force sensitive.” Same goes for “the sacred texts!” And Luke demonstrated total mastery over the Force, holding to his Jedi beliefs, before he died. It was bold, not the typical corporate safe plots with all sharp edges filed down. It could have led in an interesting direction. Killing Snoke was surprising, but I had to imagine there was a plan there. This was a billion dollar franchise. Surely someone had a conversation before they approved the script.

    Well, no. They didn’t. I had assumed it was setting up Kylo Ren as the primary antagonist for the next movie. But Rise of Skywalker ended up being one of the worst movies I’ve seen in my life. Not worst Star Wars movie: worst movie period.

    How do you make a good Star Wars 9 after 8? Well you sure don’t bring Palpatine back in the 9th inning with zero foreshadowing. And you definitely don’t materialize 10 million Star Destroyers out of thin air.

    The original trilogy was great. The prequels were flawed and silly, but at least there was a singular flawed and silly creative force behind them trying to say something. The sequels on the whole just sucked.

    • mineralfellow@lemmy.world
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      They could have made it really interesting if Kylo Ren and Rey had joined forces, either for good or bad, and wound up facing off against Poe and Finn. But no.

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        What I really believed at the time, and thought might be possible with some of the boldness shown in Last Jedi as well as the talk about letting the past die (and the title), was that they were setting up Kylo and Rey to join together and find a “middle way” in the Buddhist sense—not Jedi or Sith, but something new and truly balanced. Like he would become the antagonist, but Rey would bring him back and together they would discover this new approach. That would fulfill the chosen one prophecy more deeply, tying into the prequels, as well as give more meaning to burning “the sacred texts!” It would end the entire series on a hopeful note of breaking the cycle.

        Then they could have all the movies and TV shows they wanted after that by setting them 10,000 years in the past or as side stories or whatever.

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    I legit liked BB-8, Maz Kanata and Babu Frik. Could do with more of them.

    As for the films:

    Force Awakens - Mostly harmless. Gets a lot of hate for “just being Star Wars again” and that’s valid. But they needed to prove they could do Star Wars without Lucas, and they did.

    Last Jedi - Looks great, absolutely shits the bed. Johnson needed an average 8 year old to come in and point out all the plot holes. “Here’s this tracker, you can use it to find us anywhere in the universe.” (Same scene, no cuts, First Order comes out of hyperspace) “HOW DID THEY FIND US! THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!”

    Rise of Skywalker - I feel bad for this one and generally give it a pass. Last Jedi painted them into a corner by killing Snoke, killing Phasma, killing Luke, reducing the size of the Resistance to something that could fit in the Falcon… and then… THEN Carrie Fisher up and dies. I don’t know what else they could have done. It was supposed to be Leia’s movie. 😟

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      Rise of Skywalker is the worst, because they couldn’t decide between ignoring Last Jedi or retconning it.

      Half of the movie is Abrams making a sequel to a middle movie that was never made, and the other half is trying to please upset fans who hated Rose and the idea that Rey could be special without being related to some kind of franchise royalty.

      In the end, they had an aimless film with no story direction that flipped between a confusing mess and some kinda fanfic hate letter to Johnson.

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        RoS was so bad it makes any negatives of episode 8 pale in comparison.

        Oh no, Chewy is dead! Wait he’s alive.

        Can’t access the sith language [for some reason].

        The dagger is a map! But only if you stand in this one exact spot and even then it just kinda points in a general direction to a place on a crashed ship.

        Just nonsense.

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          I legitimately forgot all of those plot points. I saw it in the theatre right after it opened and mostly remember it being really bad and aimless with Palpatine having been resurrected off-screen with no explanation, and the movie working hard to act like 8 didn’t happen.

          I walked away thoroughly unimpressed and don’t even remember much of what happened.

          Like - after your recap there, I still don’t remember anything about Chewie dying OR not dying, and I still don’t know if he made it to the end. I was (and still am) a die-hard Star Wars fan, and I can’t believe that not only do I remember the last film so poorly that not know if one of the OG heroes survived the last film, but I don’t really even care.

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            the movie working hard to act like 8 didn’t happen

            Honestly, that would have been better, and even as a TLJ-stan I would have understood. Instead, it went out of its way to fuck up its own pacing and damn near break the fourth wall to call out how much it didn’t like TLJ.

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            If you want a more comprehensive recap, I recommend either Jenny Nicholson or Red Letter Media, they both have very funny videos on all of the movies but especially RoS.

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        They had an aimless film because Johnson ratfucked them and Fisher died. Like I say, they were in an impossible position.

        It would have helped if they went into the thing with a unified vision 1-2-3, but they didn’t even do that and they still would have been screwed by Fishers death unless they thought ahead and managed to film all her scenes at once.

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        Yeah, because he killed Snoke. He could have expanded Snoke story in 2 leaving the 3rd movie to resolve it, instead he killed him for… reasons… leaving 3 to go “Well, fuck us, right?”

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          I don’t accept that the only conceivable option was to bring Palpatine back. I strongly suspect that 3 10 year olds in a room could generate a superior premise despite the constraints.

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            I kept expecting Phasma to come back with one burned eye to give Finn a close on his arc, but no, Johnson killed her too.

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      TL;DR: Agree on TFA. Disagree on TLJ; it is the best sequel. TRoS is almost unforgiveable.

      I will stick up for The Last Jedi til the end of time. JJ dealt Rian Johnson a bum hand with Luke. The only options are shame-based self-exile, or something that would be concealed by a story of shame-based self-exile. There was also clearly a mandate not to make the legacy heroes the ones who solve the problems of the plots. That’s to say nothing of JJ resetting the political board in the least helpful way possible.

      Given the constraints, I think RJ did a great job making a more character-driven piece that actually tried to play in the sandbox JJ created. It added notes of ambiguity and, yes, subverted certain expectations, but not so many as it’s accused of and still ultimately settled on the legend and the hope being worth fighting for. Poe’s arc was good. Luke’s arc was good. Rey’s arc was a bit confused but ultimately effective. Kylo being set up as the primary antagonist of Ep9 because he was too deeply damaged to (immediately) redeem was probably the single best direction they could have gone. Then, as you say it looked great. It was also the only sequel to directly embrace the prequels at all, and it included two of the most beautiful “Lucasian” tone poems of the entire series with the Luke-Yoda scenes and Rose’s sister.

      Now, could certain things have been better? Yeah, definitely. Finn’s arc was only an incremental move from the one in TFA, and one that might plausibly been implied from it. A bit of a time jump would have given the characters room to breathe and not have rubbed the more resistant fans’ noses in Luke’s resistance to training Rey. The your-mom joke had a narrative purpose, but it simply didn’t land and therefore made the character beat less impactful. Rian should have understood that a non-negligible percentage of Star Wars fans want sci-fi consistency when they can get it and should have tied hyperspace tracking to the Holdo maneuver to make both of them too rare to be common either in the past or going forward. The set piece on Canto Bight could have been a little more Star Wars-y, which I think would have blunted accusations that it was boring.

      For me, TRoS does NOT get a pass because it was such a blunt and heavy-handed reaction. It didn’t need to have Rose specifically refuse the call to action because some fans didn’t like her Leia gave her homework. Even if “Big Bad” wasn’t JJ’s preferred direction, it didn’t need to immediately place Kylo Ren back in a subordinate enforcer role. It didn’t need to half-assedly use outtakes of Carrie Fisher when it could have “Ben Kenobi’d” Luke to have a much more engaging training sequence. It didn’t need to literally lift the conflict from some of the worst Expanded Universe stories or the climax from Avengers Endgame. It definitely didn’t need to put half-baked fan theories about Rey’s origins into a hat and then pick one randomly. Everything about it was petty and lazy and so much worse than it needed to be, even if you chafed at TLJ’s choices.

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        I will die on the hill that while flawed in a lot of ways, TLJ was trying to do something interesting.

        I saw the leaked plot of TRoS and refused to watch it.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Finn’s arc for me is irredeemable. By killing Phasma in the middle part of the trilogy they were left with no place to go in the 3rd one for Finn.

        I really wanted Phasma back with one burned eye to give Finns story a proper send off and we didn’t even get that.

        “Nope! Snoke’s dead! Phasma’s dead! Luke’s dead! Resistance is mostly dead! Good luck with Episode 3 suckers!”

        There was a way they COULD have fixed it in post because Fisher died before the film came out. If the whole idea was to kill one original cast member per film, and Fisher died IRL, here’s what you do:

        1. Kill off Leia in space. Don’t give her the Jedi floating angel bit. Do her scenes in the cave at the end as a force ghost.

        2. Play out the rest of the film as normal.

        3. At the start of 3 (or post credit in 2), run Luke’s death scene backwards. Force Ghost Yoda and Leia appear. “Your time, it is not.” Then give the 3rd film over to Luke. There’s your OG cast member for 3.

        • usernamefactory@lemmy.ca
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          2 days ago

          Killing Phasma was fine. Finn’s arc was never about revenge. It was about finding his path outside of the empire. The obvious conclusions are (a) he fully integrates into the new rebellion, perhaps taking on a leadership role, or (b) he finds that he doesn’t gel there either and chooses a third path. Neither required a showy throw-down with Phasma.

          It’s fully on RoS that they chose neither and did nothing with him.

        • verdigris@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          The third movie had all the opportunities in the world to give Finn an arc. Instead they just had him yell “Rey!” a lot.

      • verdigris@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        Even though I have always classified Star Wars firmly as fantasy and not sci-fi, I find the Holdo maneuver utterly unforgivable. TBH Starkiller Base was almost as bad, take the two of them together and intragalactic combat in the Star Wars universe should be instant and apocalyptic. Why even build spaceships when you can just point hyperdrives at your target from any distance, or just laser them from across the galaxy?

        Of course I don’t expect the movies to follow this train of thought, but that’s frankly why it’s a problem. The people writing this shlock don’t think about the ramifications for two seconds, they just do what sounds cool and let the fans figure it out. But it really shatters any suspension of disbelief, and exposes how grossly uncurious the writing leads are about the universe they’re crafting. All big movies are profit-driven, but it’s nice to see at least some amount of effort to disguise that fact.

        • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          There was no need for Holdo to even do that. They have astromech droids to pilot ships for a reason.

          So much of TLJ just failed to make sense. Mostly because Johnson wrote the script himself and didn’t have anyone else review it.

          I mentioned before the whole bit with the tracking jewel, which Leia tells Rey can be used to find them anywhere immediately followed in the same scene by the First Order jumping in… “THEY TRACKED US?? THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!!”

          Dude, not only did you just explain how it is POSSIBLE, tracking the Falcon was how the Death Star found Yavin in the very first fucking movie. We KNOW it’s possible.

          But beyond that… That whole casino sequence… They are told that in order to get through First Order defenses, they have to find this ONE GUY, a codebreaker at the casino.

          Apparently, no, they didn’t need that one guy, it’s easy enough to do that another guy being held in Casino Jail can also do it.

          Meanwhile, Rey just floats through the defenses in an escape pod, no codebreaking necessary AT ALL.

          Luke shows up at the end, is younger, doesn’t break the salt surface of the planet, and is using a lightsaber previously destroyed, so we know he’s not real…

          But before all that, he hands Leia the dice off the Falcon. How can he do that if he’s an intangible force ghost?

          • garretble@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            Rey also gives Kilo a saber through the force in RoS.

            It’s weird, and those things are some of my least favorite additions of the series.

      • Srh@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Hard disagree on the character arcs. Luke’s arc was terrible. He is completely different than he was at the end of return, and thats ok if you can show how it happened. But it wasn’t really shown just told. The flash back scene with kylo just shows the culmination of this supposed change. We take the guy who would not kill the most evil man when everyone is telling him to because he thinks he can be redeemed, and then go to yeah I had a bad vision I thought we should kill this kid. That’s a jarring change.

        If they wanted to set kylo up as the bad guy, the character arc needed more work.

        I think red letter put it best on the character arcs poes arc was to learn to blindly obey authority. Finns arc was that nothing he did matters at all and that you should not sacrifice yourself in war.

        And I think there is an argument to make that the rRse of Skywalker is in part bad because TLJ was badly written as a middle film. It took payoffs that arguably should be in the final film for itself in an attempt to be different and new. It does not really continue the plot for a third film. The whole movie seemed to jump from moment to moment Rian thought would be cool and did not consider really how to get there. That’s why there are all these consistency issues in lore/suspension of disbelief, theme, tone. If we are building a staircase and in the middle we take the parts for the end of the staircase to try and now make it a spiral staircase I don’t care how pretty it looks or impressive the craftsman ship it does not get me to where I need to go.

        I think Rian swung for the fences and I appreciate the attempt but he struck out.

    • NotForYourStereo@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Imagine continuing the trend of brain dead TLJ bitching, and immediately following it up with “I give RoS a pass.”

      Completely unserious take my dude.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Last Jedi played like the end of a trilogy leaving no room for a 3rd movie, that’s absolutely Johnson’s fault.

    • rock_hand@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Hey thanks for putting thought into the comment. Agree on most of your points. I like Star Wars and will even rewatch these films even though they aren’t the best.

      • ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        The only scenes I remember from the whole trilogy are from Last Jedi. Hyperspace blasting a starship into a star destroyer was a cool concept. And the whole final with Luke force projecting across galaxies was a good sendoff I thought.