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

I don't have a problem with Luke getting beat in a sparring or training session. If a black belt is training a yellow belt in karate, he's going to hold back.

The other two, yerch.

It's the very fact that he wanted to kill his nephew that bothers me given the great lengths he went to redeem Anakin Skywalker.

In terms of kinship, people are closer to their father than their nephew usually, but Ben Solo would have grown up with Luke and Luke barely new Darth Vader/Anakin.

Also, that he gave up. In the original trilogy, Luke had a lot of flaws, but a tendency to give up was not one of his flaws. Okay, he gave up on levitating the X-wing in Empire Strikes Back, but that's about it.

 

I just saw the movie, and while I didn't like a few things about it I was pleasantly surprised.

It was an entertaining movie, and the rest of the audience seemed to agree.

 

I think the main reason why it was so hard for them to defend themselves is that they were stuck down there in the planet's atmosphere, with the resistance coming from above and their shields down.

 

He does it from multiple systems away. That is highly impressive. It also has the added throw back to Obi Wan sacrificing himself to buy time for the old crew to escape.

 

I can not see a way that creating a convincing force projection from multiple systems away isn't impressive. Jedi and even Palatine rely on holograms for long range projection and communications. Yet luke, from systems away, not only projects himself, but does such a convincing job that he able to actually fight an opponent and speak with Leah. This means he could hear and see through his projection....

 

Making less and costing more. It looks like Disney is being hush hush about the true cost of Ruse of Skywalker, but I predict the financials will end up leaking by March.

My general belief is that it's very hard to keep a secret that requires more than ten people to keep their mouth shut, let alone hundreds. That's actually my main argument against almost all conspiracy theories.

I do not believe Episode 9 will break even. I think it will end up losing money, but I do not believe it will lose lots of money.

I am curious if Bob Iger will have to deploy his golden parachute or not. This is not limited to Disney. It bothers me that across many mega-corporations that CEOs are never really financially punished for running successful companies into the ground. I believe capitalism is best "ism" (or more accurately the least crappy ism), but it still has many failings.

 

This video concerns Vader being beaten by a non-Force sensitive human.

It happened outside of canon by accident.

Long ago, BEFORE Phantom Menace, my friends and I played the Star Wars Roleplaying game almost every day in the 1990s. We didn't know or care about the Sith's Rule of Two.

We operated on the assumption that Vader was the Emperor's best Dark Side wielding minion that Palpatine commands, but not the only one. We figured since the canon states the Empire controlled a billion worlds at its peak that it seemed reasonable that Palpatine had a least a hundred Dark Jedi or Sith minions.

Anyway I ran on a one-on-one game for a friend. He wanted to play a Dark Side user who defected from Palpatine's service when he grew sympathetic to the Rebel Alliance. Not because he agreed with their ideology, but because Palpatine kind of sort tried to genocide his home planet. He wanted vengeance, and he shared a common enemy with the Rebels.

This was 10+ years before the Battle of Yavin so Vader and Palpatine's other servants were still mopping up the last of the Jedi (we guessed, the prequels weren't out yet), but my friend's Dark Side character was inflicting considerable damage on the Empire. His best strategy so far was to use his Dark Side powers to sneak into space stations and sabotage capital ships in dry dock.

I decided to send Darth Vader after him since I figured a Dark Side user brutally attacking the Empire was far more dangerous to the emperor's plans than a Jedi hiding in a cave. I was not going to have Darth Vader kill him, that'd be too ganky. I just wanted to force my friend to have his character run away. Then maybe be a little bit less blatant using the Dark Side to tear up the Imperial Fleet. At the time, my friend's character was slumming with space pirates. I figured if Darth Vader started whooping up, the PC, (who was very Dark Side after all) would have not problem letting all his pirate allies die to cover his mistake.

The thing about the West End Star Wars Roleplaying game, is that absurd swings in luck are relatively common. And it just so happened that despite Darth Vader's massive piloting skills, his star fighter king of sort got shot down by nobody space pirates. Because we played a lot of X-wing and TIE Fighter we sort of assumed that ejection seats had 99.999% accuracy. So Vader was technically unharmed.

I didn't feel like changing canon to let Vader die early, so I bent the rules a bit and let Vader use the obscure Force Scream power to telepathically blast a bunch of pirates. This forced them to withdraw. Anyway, the player character tried to explain to his friends that they shot down Darth Vader, but the pirates did not believe him.

That game was full of absurd David versus Goliath moments like that. It goes both way. Every once in a while a lowly storm trooper or Compforce soldier gets on a dice hot streak and utterly humiliates a powerful PC who just mowed down eleven storm troopers without breaking a sweat.

 

Right, except their projections were 170mil open weekend domestic. Because the movie released closer to Christmas than the other two. So they expect to make less open weekend and more on Christmas day. The bulk of movie ticket revenue is expect to occur next week. Sure, the movie might do more poorly than VII and VIII. It can hardly be called a flop at the 12th largest domestic opening sales of all time.