Posted on 12/20/2019 5:21:18 PM PST by EdnaMode
[snip]
This brings me to the absolute worst thing about The Rise of Skywalker, which can easily ruin the original movies as well.
Disney chose to go with Palpatine as the villain, without even making the tiniest effort to explain the logic of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m willing to entertain the idea that a powerful dark master of the Force can’t be killed as quickly as you’d think. Well, unless you’re Rey, in which case it’s apparently quite easy. But Palpatine was able to survive in the shadows for years? He wields such immense power that he can enslave billions of people ready to do his bidding? All with no explanation whatsoever?
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No matter how you spin it, Palpatine’s existence and day job make no sense for Star Wars, especially when you consider the 30 years that passed between the second (original) and third Star Wars trilogies. And Palpatine’s presence affects the entire Rise of Skywalker story.
Not being able to explain the villain in a way the audience accepts ruins the whole thing. It even ruins part of the characters’ arcs, since Rey is the only hero we end up caring about. There might have been Finn, Poe, and Rose stories told in this episode, but they all seem like supporting characters who are not really necessary. Furthermore, because Palpatine was the villain we thought we beat back in Return of the Jedi, his surprising revival sort of ruins the original trilogy as well. I can’t rewatch the first movies now and pretend I don’t know that Palpatine’s death has been an absurd ruse all along.
(Excerpt) Read more at bgr.com ...
“The demise began with the ewoks in the second half of sw vi.
The prequels sucked due to incredibly montonic, unemotional and robotic acting. And Jar Jar, or ewoks ii.
The final three sucked because of Mary Sue and how they basically gave the finger to both the fan base that supported them from the beginning, and the original actors characters themselves. Leia gets Mary Sue powers she never had before. Then the finalcvirtue sognal with the lesbian kiss at tge end, the largest FU. they can’t just not pull this libtard virtue signalling shiite.”
I agree completely. The first Star Wars movie was ground breaking but the next 2 were just ok. Episodes 4-6 were complete drek (except for the fight with Darth Maul). That should have killed the franchise. Episodes 7-9 were not just drek but absurd, sjw bs and disrespectful to the series. Only moronic die-hard fanboys could stick with this carp.
That, and a cyborg jedi basically intercepting Palpatine’s soul in order to avoid having him possess Leia and Han’s newborn son. Not to mention a treacherous guard having his clone supply tampered with.
To be fair, 95 lb guys also have the same low changes of actually beating a 225 lb man, yet Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li pull that off loads of times, so I’m pretty sure it’s technically possible for a 95 lb girl to do that if they practice that kind of martial art. That said, however, they’d need to either be superhuman (either a space alien humanoid like Kara Zor-El, a mythological creature like Ariel from The Little Mermaid, or anything like that), or they’d need to extensively train in the art (twice as much as a man, if not three times as much, just to come close to breaking even).
As another person pointed out, they technically did that before with Dark Empire (though I’d argue Dark Empire was FAR better thought out regarding that bit). And even better, Lucas came up with, or at least agreed to, that plot over Vader getting a copycat (the original plotline for Dark Empire).
But I will agree that Palpatine outright brainwashing the galaxy didn’t really make sense, especially when he didn’t even attempt to use that ability back before his first death (heck, it’s implied that unlike the Jedi, the Sith did not brainwash people into following their will). Heck, if he actually had that ability to outright brainwash people to do his bidding while faking his death, he wouldn’t have even NEEDED to pull off the stunt he did in the Prequel Trilogy to gain power. Of course, I also wasn’t impressed with the whole Order 66 chip development in The Clone Wars, especially when that destroyed the entire point of the order being made of the Clones’ free will, even if conditioned to follow orders.
Still... at least they didn’t go with the clone body double from what I heard. That would have ruined Palpatine even WORSE than in the Aftermath trilogy by Chuck Wendig, where he uncharacteristically tried to have the galaxy blown up post-mortem in a temper tantrum over dying (I’m sorry, but if he were truly the type to throw a fit over dying, he wouldn’t have tolerated even his first political loss in the Senate, go all Lenin when he lost the elections and orchestrate a coup against the Republic in other words.).
Saw it, it was awsome. The humor and heart of the orginals was back.
Heck, Hollywood doesn’t even have bean-counters anymore, they have activists, or rather, hacktivists posing as bean-counters. Genuine beancounters would realize that trying to force in homosexuality for even a second, or any SJW messages for that matter, will destroy revenue and NOT go that route, period, while Hollywood’s not only going that route, but doubling down on it.
Got dragged to this morning’s showing, as part of friend’s son’s birthday. Other than our group, the 11am showing was pretty much empty.
Enjoy the Lesbo kiss.
I avoided this article until after I saw the movie, which I did with my grandson yesterday. The only problem I agree with regarding the article is all the star destroyers. But that is a problem I’ve had with the series since the very first movie, regarding the death start. The sheer amount of raw materials to make one death star is staggering, and just getting from your work station on one side to the Starbucks on the other would be a serious road trip.
But that misses the whole point of a movie like this. It’s SCIENCE FICTION. It’s all nonsense - including the force. And the force explains pretty much every other complaint the author has.
Science fiction is all about suspending disbelief, even more than other movie genres. This one did it very well for me. I loved the story, it had all the hooks into the details fans of the series look for, etc. In fact, we watched about ten minutes of the one where we see Luke’s fighter underwater and, when we saw Rey burning the ship on the island, and she needed a way to get off as she talked to Luke’s ghost, I wondered if...and sure enough.
And the taking of the Skywalker name at the end was brilliant in its execution.
I watched the original release of the first movie 27 times in the theater when it was first released. Yes, the series has been damaged a great deal by all sorts of stuff, beginning with the race of teddy bears. The first three in the trilogy were the worst. And breaking hyperspace was inexcusable. I thought I was done with the series until I needed to do something with my grandson while my wife watched Frozen II with my granddaughter. So we watched it.
It was well worth the price of admission and I feel that they fixed a lot more than they broke. And I was able to suspend disbelief while enjoying the most important thing in any good movie - the story. For the first time in decades in a SW movie, I cared about the characters.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. See my post just above this one.
Yep. This sort of thing is very common in science fiction.
The author of this article says that Palpatine came back without any explanation, yet he cast Ben into a pit saying he was doing to Ben the same thing that was done to him. And like him, Ben was not killed, but came back. We don’t need to know every single little detail that allowed someone to escape certain peril in a movie if their character no longer matters in that particular movie.
IOW, regarding the article, “Me thinks the woman doth protest too much.”
I’m no fan of a lot of the Star Wars movies, but this one hit a home run. Even Rey taking on the Skywalker name at the end brought tears to my eyes - and I saw it coming a mile away.
I’ve not “cared about” a character in a star wars movie for a very long time. I forgot what it was like.
...heard there was a lesbian kiss in the movie which puts it on notice for me.
I thought she did a great job. And she looks more like 120 lbs. :)
This movie was not giving us a girl that could beat up boys with her bare hands. This movie was a testimony to the concept that the Gun is the great equalizer. Her strength was in guns and magic (the force), not physical strength.
Otherwise, I could not have watched it. I’m a 65 year old
6’1” man in moderate shape. I believe I would have no problem taking on that Rouse chick with moderate training first. Not physical training. Defensive fighting training. Moderate.
I had read that Abrams had valiantly tried to undo the damage caused by TLJ but it’s too late for me. I’m done with the franchise.
It was worth it. And remember, it’s just a movie, designed for entertainment. Don’t take it too seriously.
(And yes, I know that all movies and TV shows have some sort of political or social messages in them - it started with Shakespeare) :)
I love ruining Star Wars by telling fan boys it the same dam movie over and over again good wins against evil, then evil wins against good and it repeats with a lot of pew pew pew and a freakin dog for a pilot.
It’s a muscle and bone mass thing coupled with training.
A 100 lb man and a 100 lb woman fighting would not be a fair fight any more than me (230lbs) fighting a 230 lb black bear would be a fair fight. I’d almost certainly get my butt whipped, and then eaten. :)
Camel’s nose under the tent. Screw this movie and the perverts who pervert things. Not $1 to them.
Wowsers! That brought the “seriousness” we saw in the second movie to the first. It brought three dimensionality to the fight, and the characters.
I’ll just throw this out though: We have the “extended version” of That Thing You Do. We like the original better because it just gets too real in the extended version. It’s better “fantasy” in the version that made it to the screen.
I think the same thing can be said of this remake of the scene. It makes it more real/heavy than was appropriate for the original movie.
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