re: What the hell happened with Rise of Skywalker?

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Put me down in the camp that thinks RoS isn’t bad, and almost kinda good/enjoyable for having to adjust to the absurdities of TLJ

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Totally agreed. It gets more hate because a lot of people say they didn’t even watch it and refuse to do so because of TLJ

It’s a product of Johnson being a pos.

I kind of liked it except for the whole Rey is a skywalker thing at the end. it’d be more interesting if they just made her evil

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It was JJ Abrams’s effort to undo what Rian Johnson did. Unfortunately it was so fricked there really was no recovery.

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kinda crazy they didn’t have 1 guy do all 3 movies…

I knownpeople blame Kathleen Kennedy but it seems like they let Rian Johnson take it wherever he wanted which was the real frick up

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kinda crazy they didn’t have 1 guy do all 3 movies…

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Who in their right mind spends billions on Star Wars and somehow forgets to come up with a story before launching a sequel trilogy? You had the biggest IP on the planet and didn’t even bother sketching out a basic plot. That’s not just incompetence. That’s legendary stupidity.

Then you start swapping directors annd gave them storytelling control and wonder why everything feels like a train wreck. That’s not a creative choice. That’s a meltdown in slow motion. And the fact that no one at Disney stopped and said, “Hey, maybe we should have a consistent vision before we shovel hundreds of millions into this,” tells me everything I need to know about who’s running the show.

And let’s talk about the biggest slap in the face. You had Luke. You had Leia. You had Han. And you didn’t put them in a single scene together. Not one. That was the emotional payoff fans waited decades for and you tossed it out like it didn’t matter. You had gold in your hands and you threw it in the trash.

Then you turn Luke Skywalker into a bitter coward who gives up on the galaxy because of a vision about a moody kid. The same Luke who stood in front of Vader and the Emperor without flinching suddenly folds like a lawn chair. What were you smoking when you signed off on that?

And don’t even get me started on the tone. Since when is Star Wars supposed to feel like a Marvel gag reel? Crank call jokes. Slapstick. Forced comedy that lands like a brick. It went from mythic space saga to Saturday morning parody in the blink of an eye. Nobody wanted this.

Honestly the most impressive thing about this entire disaster is how they managed to fumble the easiest win in pop culture history. All they had to do was not screw it up. Just give people what they came for. But no. They went full clown show and lit the whole thing on fire. Star Wars should have been an unstoppable money-printing machine for the next fifty years. Instead they pissed off the fanbase, tanked the brand, and made people nostalgic for the prequels. That takes real talent.

The kind of talent only Disney’s movie division seems to have these days.

Disney happened

I agree they never wrote the story of the trilogy. Instead they made up stuff on the spot.

Where they fricked up is they should have hired some real Star Wars nerds to write the story. Instead of throwing a bunch of money at some egomaniacs trying to make it in their shitty vision.

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He still didn't have to bring Palpatine back. Stop being dumb.

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Dumb? The main villain HE CREATED was killed in the second movie. You want him to just bring in some new, random main villain in the third and final film? Stop being a fricking retard. You can thank Rian Johnson for that dumbass decision.

Well-written, well said, cssamerican.

One detail I would add to this--after Han is killed in TFA, they show Chewbacca walking right past Leia, as if nothing had happened, in favor of Leia embracing Rey I think. Kind of encapsulates what you wrote about them not giving fans of the OT any emotional payoff / due / satisfaction.

Like you wrote, they basically decided to improvise a movie trilogy / make a movie trilogy up on the fly. A lot of times writers have the ending in mind and work toward it--instead of this where it's just, hey, maybe this happens, then maybe this happens. Complete incomprehensible chaos.

This is extra stupid when you remember that a very talented writer, Timothy Zahn, had long-ago written an entire sequel trilogy of novels that would have given any writer / director an absolutely amazing jumping off point / starting point to bounce ideas off of. Grand Admiral Thrawn winning with genius instead of just being a dark side of the Force bad guy--they can't think of anything that good / new anymore, just either do an obvious remake of A New Hope or something so awfully amateur-hour bad that it ruins the whole franchise.

Something else I would add--the zeitgeist was peak woke when the ST was made. The all-female Ghostbusters came out during the ST, which even though I've never seen it--it sounds like that movie also makes its main villain a composite of its primary fanbase. The ST was supposed to be for girls what the OT had been for boys. That would have been fine, but the creative and production team behind the ST couldn't hide the fact that they hate the fanbase demographic of the OT.

I bet you any money the girls who the ST was made for--I bet you they forgot about it after leaving the theater. I guarantee you they don't discuss it anymore. It means nothing to them. Whereas here we are so many years later discussing how it all went so wrong, because there was something from our childhood we enjoyed, and these Disney cretins not only s*** all over it, but they did it on purpose and don't even care because they hate our a**es. Somehow it's our fault that the ST sucked. The Force was female all right--irrationally bitter, unexplainably vengeful and cruelly full of unbridled contempt for its largely male fanbase.

I enjoy watching the RedLetterMedia reviews of movies these days more than the movies themselves. An endless ocean of trash--I think Mike of RLM put it this way.

What I would have done for ROS--Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Rey hunts down the Knights of Ren and gets to Kylo at the end. Sounds terrible, but I think it's better on paper than what we ended up with. Bringing back Palpatine... dear God.

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No, ruining Luke was easily the greatest offense

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I want to see the fan reaction to a LOTR where Frodo just says frick it and throws the ring into a urinal.

Non-SW fans have no idea how ridiculous the Luke shite was. Intentionally shitting on the lore and mystique for no other reason than shock and subverting expectations is weak minded behavior.

My theory is that they brought Palpatine back to try to keep old fans interested and buying tickets and minimize how many would skip ROS after how bad TLJ was. If TLJ hadn’t been such an abomination, they’d have had no need bring Palpatine back to appeal to fan nostalgia for OT characters to sell tickets.