*SPOILERS* - The Rise of Skywalker - *SPOILERS*

In short, this is not how my Skywalker Saga ends! As expected, Episode VI stands as a much better conclusion to the Skywalker saga.


A couple of quick notes:

• cinematography looked good, very colourful and beautiful
• all the leaked rumors I read turned out to be true
• the film was highly disjointed
• brand new powers are introduced and one taken from
  Spoiler: another Star Wars source, spoiler if you are not fully up to date

  Baby Yoda in the Mandalorian
• the saga ends without a single lightsaber fight on par with the PT
• Rey is a Mary Sue
• the film basically shit on or ignored just about everything Rian Johnson did
• the Reylo creeps (Google it if you are unaware) will be pleased
• the final "fight" is disappointing

That's a good start. Discuss!

 

Here's my opinion of it, relayed from the main Star Wars thread:
I think it was good. Better than VII and VIII, certainly. Not as good as Rogue One or Episodes I-III, but I still enjoyed it a lot.

The opening was amazing, I have to say. Really different to any opening in the others. Kylo discovers what looks like a Holocron (the first time such a device has been seen in the films) that shows him the way to Palpatine’s lair, where he has his first encounter with the man himself. Believing Palpatine to be as much of a threat to his power as Rey, Kylo threatens the Sith Lord:

“I killed Snoke, and I can kill you.”

To which Palpatine replies:

“I made Snoke.”

This was very close to a theory I had been formulating in the last couple of weeks, where I had been thinking that Snoke had simply been a placeholder as Palpatine’s apprentice, like Maul and Dooku has been, until he could get Kylo to join him. The only difference was that I envisioned that Snoke had been recruited from an alien species native to the unknown regions, whereas in actuality Palpatine made him, probably through a cloning facility.

To top it all, this awesome scene then closes with one of Palpatine’s best quotes from Episode III:

“The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities that some consider to be unnatural.”

I also enjoyed watching the search for Palpatine’s lair, with the discovery of the ancient Sith dagger and the translation of the Sith runes, and liked the symbolism of Kylo Ren being killed when Rey stabbed him during the duel on the moon of Endor where the Death Star wreckage crashed, and the act of healing him being used to resurrect Ben Solo, his light side persona - that was really good. Also I love the idea that Rey was Palpatine’s granddaughter rather than something more obvious like Luke’s daughter, as it further heightens Sheev’s evilness as we find that he had his son and daughter in law murdered in his attempts to find Rey and turn her to the Dark Side.

Of course the film does have its flaws as well - there were some purist moments (J.J. couldn’t resist adding yet more planet-killers into the mix, although at least they were Star Destroyers as opposed to a killer planet/star space station) and some woke moments (Rey being the one to kill off Palpatine, Kylo using all his life force to resurrect her e.t.c), but I was largely expecting these given that J.J. was coming back and that the previous two films in the trilogy had been about wokeness being the only weapon that could defeat the Sith once and for all as well.

I have to say Hux was used even less well in this one than in Episode VIII, with the moment where he claims that he was a spy for the Resistance all along just to get Kylo to fail, and then him being shot and replaced by a new First Order character all in the space of about five minutes being a pretty stupid end to his character.

Additionally, the new Sith Troopers that were revealed with so much pomp turned out to be hardly any better than the ordinary First Order Troopers (I was really hoping that they would have been actually very skilled troops and a deadly enemy to face like the Death Troopers had been in Rogue One, and it would have been great to have them press the advance and kill off some of the main characters in the segment where Palpatine used his Force lightning to destroy the Resistance fighters, so that it would really look like they would lose), and the Knights of Ren did very little apart from following Kylo around and then attacking him when he turned to the light, only to die from the Lightsaber Rey gave him.

At the end we then see Rey had a Lightsaber in her quarterstaff after all - why didn’t we have that at the beginning to add a bit more originality to the extremely bland Farce Awakens?

However, I did enjoy the more original parts of it (and Palpatine was great as always) so personally I think this is the best of the Sequel Trilogy (I know this isn’t saying much, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be).

Also I don’t know if any of you noticed that Rose was cut a lot from the film after her escapades in The Last Jedi, and that we see Luke’s Force Spirit raising his X-Wing from the depths as he encourages Rey to avoid making the same mistake he did, which was a bit of redemption to his character.

 

I certainly thought the Sith planet and Palpatine's new lair was fantastically done, with the lightning continually striking across the planet and the abyssal darkness of the Sith temple itself. I also thought the injections of Palpatine's theme across the score made it really dark and brooding, actually darker than the film itself given that there was no hero mortality.

I didn't read or watch any rumours, so I can't say anything about this.

In what way (or ways)?

Yes, I was disappointed by this too - because J.J. came back, we have to sit through the lazy OT-style fights all over again in this one. Surely given that both she and Kylo were now well-trained, J.J. could have picked up the pace a bit in the fight scenes? Even Rian Johnson gave us a more visually dynamic fight scene than the ones in Episodes VII and IX (I'm not saying the throne room fight was good, but it was faster and more dynamic).

We gathered that after seeing the previous two films

I was wondering if you had noticed the absence of Rose

That's what I was thinking when the final kiss happened.

I enjoyed seeing Palpatine unleash his Sith powers of stealing life-force from enemies and his heightened Force lightning decimating the Resistance starfighters in the sky, but I was hoping that he'd bring on some Lightsaber-wielding Sith cultists, or that the Knights of Ren would have their own Lightsabers (when they were just thugs with quarterstaffs).

I personally thought they did well in completely closing off the First Order arc introduced in VII in this one, i.e. that this was a good conclusion to the Sequel Trilogy, but the whole problem with the Sequel Trilogy in the first place was that by bringing back Dark Side users and an Empire remake, Anakin's sacrifice became null and void and he was no longer the Chosen One as Qui-Gon predicted. If they had done something really different such as threatening the galaxy with an external alien race (like the Yuuzhan Vong war in the EU) or something similar that avoided Dark Side users, you could say that Anakin did still destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force, but J.J. chose the cheapest, easiest route which arguably messed it up before it even got to the second Episode in the trilogy.

 

Understand that Palpatine was only added into the DT last minute, and only because Rian Johnson killed off Snoke. I do believe that Jar Jar Abrams intended Snoke to be the primary villain.

Patchwork storytelling. See statement above.

That whole Rey-Kylo force link never worked for me. I didn't like it in TLJ and it is even worse here. It just seems like a sloppy and lazy way to instantaneously transfer information and objects across space. It's too convenient and creates a jarring experience in the flow of the film.

This is how Luke should have been from the start, but it doesn't seem fitting coming off of TLJ. His character arc is all over the place. His character has zero stability throughout the DT [wants to strike down Kylo because he sensed the dark side in him, becomes a hermit that gives up on everything that he believed in the OT, does a 180 degree turn in TRS].

Also in the flashback training scene, he is defeated by Leia. Is there anybody this guy can out-duel?
Overall, Luke was a huge disappointment in the DT. Not at all what he deserved.

• too much exposition trying to bridge the gap from TLJ to TRS
• the characters just seem to randomly bounce from place to place
• the whole Rey-Kylo force link

On a different note, Palpatine's final order...
How did he manage to create such a large fleet? The first order seemed to spring out of nowhere when the Empire fell, and now this fleet seems to do the exact same. It is a bit convenient that all those ships could not activate their shields or maneuver at all. Also, where are their tie fighters? Each of those Star Destroyers should have had its own contingent of Tie Fighters, yet in the giant space battle there are only a few flying about. Also, if they staggered their elevation a bit, they could have decimated that tightly clustered group of resistance fighters. That whole sequence felt quite forced and fell flat.

 

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."


Ultimately if one person is to be blamed it is Kathleen Kennedy. She oversaw the whole thing and it was up to her to ensure that a cohesive story was developed. She failed as a leader and the DT suffered greatly for it.

 

oh no what a shame shoot what ever will we do without such a masterly crafted character.

 

I do know this, I first formulated the theory I mentioned above around a couple of weeks before the film was released, i.e. at a time when the inclusion of Palpatine as a last-minute replacement for Snoke was common knowledge. I was merely interested in how they would attempt to explain the relationship between Palpatine and Snoke when I came up with the theory. Remember that before the killing of Snoke and the announced return of Palpatine, my main theory was that Snoke was a resurrected Darth Plagueis. Of course this theory has been dispelled by Episode IX.

However...

I thought of another theory yesterday concerning the possibility that although Snoke was merely a creation of Palpatine, could he have been created as a clone of Darth Plagueis? Palpatine was a contributing factor behind the Republic Clone army as it was needed as part of his Great Plan to take over the galaxy, so he would already have contacts on Kamino. Given that Palpatine already possessed a lot of relics and stuff from deceased Sith Lords, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had kept Plagueis’ body preserved somehow after his murder, so collecting the DNA for cloning would be easy. I also think it would appeal to Palpatine’s sense of humour if he created a clone of his old master to become one of his foremost servants...



Perhaps the clone was then either born deformed somehow or suffered an injury at some point, which would have then explained Snoke’s scarred body.

Again, I was just interested to see if they would do anything to alter the stuff about Rey’s parentage after Rian Johnson attempted to dispel all the theories on it, and I was just pleased they chose something more obscure.

Remember that nobody noticed the creation of the Clone army on Kamino after Dooku wiped it from the Jedi archives, even though they had loads of transport ships already built, because it was so far away from the majority of Galactic civilisation. Given that the Sith planet was in the Unknown Regions somewhere (I think), and given that the First Order also formed in the Unknown Regions (for definite), I’ve applied the same logic here - because the location is so far away from any other settled planets, it would be much less likely that even a huge Fleet would be discovered by anyone.

Concerning the lack of TIE Fighters, I’m thinking that because each of the Star Destroyers had a planet-killing cannon attached to the underside of its hull, either the size of its hangars would have been reduced to make space for it, or the number of fighters aboard it reduced to avoid it becoming too heavy to manoeuvre properly.

To be fair though, I didn’t want any more planet-killing stuff, because that whole plot line is so tired now after Episode VI and VII. Blame Jar Jar Abrams for that one

 

What's the point of having Star Destroyers with planet killing cannons if they don't have the means to defend themselves from small attack craft? That seems like a very obvious and easy counter to them.

 

There are definitely a lot of conveniences for the good guys to take advantage of. And why don't the Star Destroyers use their planet killing super laser to fire upon the very tightly compacted formation of resistance ships? Like shooting fish in a barrel.

 

You’d think that they would have small laser cannons mounted on the sides to take care of those, like the Imperial ones supposedly had, and I’m pretty sure that would work, but given that we had the stupid moment where Poe takes out all of the anti-fighter cannons on the Dreadnought in Episode VIII, Jar Jar Abrams probably just assumed the same thing would happen with the Sith Destroyers in IX. Which is just lazy.

I don’t fully know why they did that, but to be honest, both of them know very little about Star Wars anyway. Abrams just thinks Star Wars is about repeating the ‘nostalgia’ of the Original Trilogy (which it is NOT) and Johnson doesn’t have a clue about how Star Wars technology and physics works. Any of us could probably have made a better Sequel Trilogy than those goons, but none of us have the renown, the money or the friends in high places to get it done.

Now you’re starting to see how I feel when I rant about the Original Trilogy

 

You keep knocking the OT, but it remains the most beloved trilogy of the franchise. The PT and the DT don't even come close, despite how you feel about either of them.

The success of the Mandalorian seems to cut against this point.