Star Wars: Episode IX - Spoilers Welcome, Beware

Well I don't agree. I regret seeing it. But I am walking away from Star Wars. It has been a life long trek for me but there is nothing there for me anymore.

 

I heard they wanted to split it into two movies, but we're under pressure to keep it a trilogy of trilogies.

 

I tried walking away after Rogue One, but my family bought tickets for Last Jedi without asking me. I managed to get out of seeing the others in time.
I'm very happy with my pre-1999 Star Wars as it is. That stuff is fantastic and timeless.

 

This video explains my feelings on this:



This movie had potential, but either TLJ shouldn't have been what it was, or they shouldn't have run away screaming from TLJ.

But I don't blame the movie makers for this one. I blame Star Wars fans. They are...the worst.

 

I finally went and watched this show today. First trip to the theater in months.

First, I did enjoy the movie. The characterization was good, as were the special effects and the discussions of the more mystical aspects of the Force.

I liked the bits about the dead Jedi Hunter (though it's a bit surprising scavengers didn't make off with his ship), the former storm troopers on Endor, and the alien festival. Finn developing a bit of the Force was also good.

The Death Star wreckage was a bit more problematic, but that craft was immense, and the fragment, while large in it's own right was tiny compared to the whole and badly damaged to boot.

Likewise, so was the whole quest for the Sith Navigation thingy. A bit of thought on anybodies part should have revealed the devices location: Palpatine was the top Sith, with the resources of the Empire at his disposal; therefore he would have kept such a relic close at hand. Luke should have found it decades prior to the story.

I can accept - barely - that the First Order was never anything more than a front for the Final Order, and that many of the children kidnapped by the former ended up in the ranks of the later. However, getting those draftees to the Sith world and keeping them supplied would have been a major enterprise in its own right, one that would have left tracks - meaning there must have been quite a few people in possession of the route to that planet. Kylo Ren not knowing about the Final Order all along is a major issue. Makes me wonder if the imperial spy was on Palpatine's payroll.

Other major issues include the massive Rebel fleet appearing from nowhere and the planet killing weapons on the star destroyers. If the Emperor had such, why allow his puppet front - the First Order - to build Starkiller base?

 

Late to the thread, but hey.
I enjoyed it; plot-wise there were a few things I wasn't keen on, and I think the whole trilogy could have been tighter written with a bit more pre-planning, but I do consider it one of the better films.
I liked how they handled a lot of the characters, for example giving Lando a great reappearance, finally giving C3PO a role in the plot again, and the new characters gave a fresh perspective from communities on the outskirts of the war. I was also grateful to have Leia (specifically Carrie Fisher) in it, as it would not have been the same to finish without her.
I had a few small complaints. Rise of Skywalker and The Last Jedi pulled quite a few dead/not-really-dead stunts with the protagonists which I find a little tiring after a while. I was also disappointed that they didn't bring back DJ from the last film (one of the most convincing villains), and Wedge's return was blink and you'll miss it. But personally I thought they did a lot of things right.

 

I agree with Aiden, the "Oh their dead... Nevermind their not" got considerably annoying because they did it with so many characters. (C3PO, Rey, Kylo Ren, Palpatine, etc.) That and the "Strike me down and become a Sith" to me just sounded like a last-minute throw-in for more conflict and intensity. I was definitely disappointed but it could have been worse.

 

Well, I haven't had a chance to express my thoughts on these movies elsewhere, so I guess I'll do it here.

Speaking as one of the few people who actually likes The Last Jedi, I thought Rise of the Skywalker was a poorly executed directionless mess.

With movies movies I've found that I'm willing to wade through a sewer's worth of bad story in order to find something good. I was raised on bargain bin knockoff movies, so I've trained myself to tune out the bad so long as I also get something good from time to time. In The Last Jedi, there were things that I enjoyed. The Holdo Maneuver was, backstory issues aside, visually stunning. I liked how Luke and Rey interacted on the island together. As far as I'm concerned the "fight" between Kylo Ren and Luke at the end was one of the most epic scenes in all of Star Wars. There was good to be had, in spite of the problems. The Force Awakens didn't have a lot of high scenes, but it also lacked low points as well, so it gets a "meh" from me.

The Last Skywalker, though... It certainly had its low points, but it also lacks highs as well. Too many plot holes, too many unsatisfactorily resolved character arcs. Every time there was a scene that I thought looked good, it was ultimately ruined by the lackluster plot underlying it.

C3PO losing his memory was a non-plot point. What starts out as as a serious character moment is rapidly undercut by a number of ill-conceived attempts at jokes. And even then, it ultimately doesn't matter since R2D2 fixes him at the end in about 3 seconds anyways.

There was one point when Finn thought he was going to die and shouts out that he needs to tell Rey something, but later says it wasn't important. Yeah, that was never resolved.

A lot of people seem to take issue with the new force powers introduced in this movie since nothing like it was seen in the others. I don't really think this argument holds water. It's always kind of been implied in the movies that the Force can do a lot more that than what the Jedi or Sith are usually shown doing. The force is also implied to be connected to the nature of life itself, so the idea of transferring life force doesn't seem too far-fetched to me. I do think that the new powers are poorly presented, though. Force healing came totally out of nowhere with no lead-in. If Rey learned the skill from the Jedi books, why did the Jedi forget it? It seems too useful.

There was one thing I liked with implications about the backstory of the Sith, though. If Palpatine could reincarnate in another person's body by allowing them to strike him down in hatred, and Palpatine is the leader of the Sith, is this literally all that the Sith are? This one power-hungry spirit body-hopping across the millennia, spreading his message of giving into hate so that he had plenty of host bodies to choose from? It's such a clever idea that casts the scene between Luke and the Palpatine in Return of the Jedi in a new light that I'm thoroughly convinced the writers did it by accident.

In fact, there's an idea that could have made the movie better. Combine the Force Healing and the idea of Palpatine's body hopping: Rey reads the books from the Jedi temple save one, since it begins with a warning that goes something to the extent of "Reader beware. This book contains skills that can lead one down the path of the Dark Side." Rey is already established to be terrified of turning to the Dark Side, so she avoids reading it. However, the rebellion is desperate, and she eventually decides that they need every edge they can get. So she reads it and discovers Force Healing. At first she is confused since the power seems utterly benevolent. She remains confused until she sees Palpatine and his legions of deformed constructs, revealing exactly why knowledge of life force manipulation was forgotten.

There. I've written a better plot than the movie actually had.

If I had to rank the sequel movies from best to worst, I'd do it as follows:

The Last Jedi: 7/10 (If you don't like it, go get your own opinion.)
The Force Awakens: 5/10 (It's a movie that exists)
The Rise of the Skywalker: 4/10 (If you gave a monkey a can of spray sealant and let him shoot it around the room at random he'd plug more plot holes than the writers did.)

While I enjoyed Last Jedi the most, I can also see that it's where the cracks really started to form. I don't think it was unrecoverable. If the studio had seen the writing on the walls and given the last movie to a talented, passionate director and then not meddled with their decisions, I think that it could have been saved. But alas, it was not to be.