The Big Star Wars Thread *SPOILERS ABOUND*

it's a huge mess but it doesnt matter because, as squee said, they've finally given up trying to do anything with star wars except the same thing over and over again. and also btw return of the jedi is also a big mess. and also stupid. but i guess not like this. SOOO many wtf moments but i was kinda drunk and having a good time so i didnt really care. i give the movie a B+.

good things:

• the macguffin adventure with the three main friends and chewie+droids. they have chemistry together and it's believable that they care about each other in slightly nuanced ways (although the my ship vs my droid shit fell flat)
• 3PO was finally used the correct amount since EMPIRE. hard to believe it but it's true. after doing nothing (and sounding really weird) in TFA and TLJ, the absolutely retarded shit in the prequels (being made by ani, head replaced with roger roger droid and shooting at jedi,) and then being a "god" in Jedi, 3PO turns up as a plot device and with the only legitimately funny lines in the movie. and more importantly JUST ENOUGH lines so that it wasn't completely annoying. 
• As everyone said the digital effects and sound are impeccable (although digital young leia was a shock and looked somehow even worse than rogue one.) 
• the gremlin baby droid puppet was actually cute and funny
• Keri Russell was decent
• daisey ridley has A LOT to carry in this film and she does a great job.
• ian mcdiarmid is still a decent actor at being pure evil.
• I feel bad for the actress that plays Rose but she was correctly demoted in this film. There was no reason for her to exist as a character at all and Jar Jar Abrams corrected that.
• the absolutely RETARDED amount of egregious fan service that is crammed into the last 5 minutes. i'm putting this as a good thing because it was so over the top. horseshoe theory proves that extremely stupid is very close to extremely great. finally a new hope medal for chewie, ugly british woman kissing another woman (why? who cares, stupid), ewoks for no reason, going to uncle owen's farm for no reason, burying leia's lightsaber (that we just learned about) on a planet that she's never been to, lando flirting with some young woman (I thought he was pansexual) somehow rey is a skywalker now? didn't quite work even though we all saw it from a mile away. I could go on. It was so wild.
• adam driver's "ow" and his little shrug when he got lukes saber. tonally it didn't really work but it was hilarious.

bad things:

• the rest of the movie
• leia shit was embarrassing. in a movie where they they brought back palpatine for no reason other than plot convenience, they could have just as easily killed off leia in a respectable way. what they SHOULD have done was have leia die in space in last jedi. they were still in post when she passed, movies go into re-writes all the time. Or start the film off with leia's funeral. Kylo and Leia's relationship was seriously undercooked in all three films so the big moment where she does "something" and distracts him didn't really work because on screen we've never seen nor heard anything about the relationship.
• i guess this means palpatine had sex.     "execute order 69"
• the chewie death bait and switch was fucking stupid! I was legitimately sad and my mouth dropped when rey killed chewie. i was like wow maybe this will start getting good. but.. no actually he's still alive. oh. so that was for nothing other than toying with the audience.
• hmm what else.. so, are the sith fleet that palpatine summoned some sort of undead, evil bizarro fleet? or are they just like every other star destroyer? It seemed like once palpatine died they all started disintegrating, even on other planets? we see one on fire over endor and various other places that weren't involved in the big battle.
• death star wreckage - i recall seeing it explode and disintegrate into a million pieces, not a crash landing on a planet. stupid.
• healing the snake. i understand that this was to set up rey healing ben, but ... was weird and felt like harry potter. i guess the force can do ANYTHING now. would have made more sense if she healed it and then the snake dug a way out for them, rather than just revealing the exit. if they shot it they could have found the exit. 
• more harry potter flashbacks with palpatine sucking the "life force" out of rey and ben. looked exactly like the dementors and i felt nothing. why cant they just ....u know.. act. rather than a stupid digital effect. 
• the other rebellious storm trooper subplot, if you can even call it that. garbage. no one cares. no more characters. bad acting, bad writing, get rid of it.

I guess my biggest takeaways from these three movies are that they are almost an inverted prequels. If the prequels suffered from over-reliance on digital effects, poor, flat, lazy direction, bad casting choices, and abhorrent dialog I think these last 3 have corrected those GLARING issues. For the most part. The line by line dialog is nowhere near as clunky as the prequels, the characters' decisions on screen are not as ludicrous, the use of puppets and sets and practical effects is well-balanced with CGI, and JJ's snappy direction keep things moving. I do however think, to george's credit btw, the prequels have an ambitious macro-arc that spans 3 films and that *tries* to at least consider and manage different scales of narrative. (even though I think it fails) These last 3 films have failed in that respect. completely and entirely. and I think the blame is not with JJ or Rian Johnson but with the producers and EPs, specifically KK. She needs to be managing how the films fit together if she's going to change directors all the time and fire people willy nilly. Hard job and there was probably a power vacuum because that role was always filled by lucas. It just didn't seem like they had an arc to begin with. They let JJ make a movie, then they let Rian make a movie. Then they had to committee the shit out the last one because somehow they needed to end things. sloppy and messy. 

whatever. star wars is stupid. still had a good time going to the theater. 

Going to preface this by saying I think one of the major detriments of the modern era is that it is almost impossible to go see a film of any pop culture visibility without having also been inundated with messages about it. There is a trailer everywhere you look, and if not that, then something across your feed with someone's take (even if it's only a headline - and in today's world, that headline is almost never a middle path: "Stay Wars 9! JJ Abrams Ruins Your Childhood!!!"  or "Star Wars!!! It will grow you dick by 10 inches!!!!"), or via the endless number of shitty tie-ins, force burgers, Kylo waifu's, Rey double sided flashlight dildo's or. . . wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, basically, it is almost impossible to go into a movie like this without being nudged or outright shoved to having some expectation before you even put your ass in the seat. It makes you watch a movie always questioning how you feel about a scene, whether or not it lines up with what you've read, with whatever opinion you've heard, or even your own opinion you've formed before you even got there. 

Ok, so, here's the deal. JJ Abrams is about the same age as I am, and clearly Star Wars hit at the same time and in the same way. It's clear that this is a fan made movie for fans of Star Wars and, I'd argue, probably fans of Star Wars that were probably affected by it in the same way at the same time in their lives. I loved it. I laughed and I cried and the more I think about it, the more I want to go back and watch it again. I think about the feeling I got when I watched the original trilogy as a kid, and it so was not about how much the plot made sense as it was about the rush of the experience. It was about how I felt about these characters, who were flawed, and larger than life and who went through the hero's journey over and over (without, I might add, me questioning why the films would do this). I was thinking about ROTJ this AM - in that film, Lei goes to save Han in the middle of Jabbas palace, gets him out of the carbonite, and then pauses to take off her mask and tell him she loves him. Why are you not booking TF out of there? Where was your plan to take weak-ass Han out of there without making a ton of noise? So, after that, Luke rolls up and then.  . . intends to get captured? And, wait, did they also intend for Leia to be captured? Was it all done so that Lando (who is also somehow there) and everyone else on the team (who has been placed into extreme danger by this whole plan by allowing themselves to be captured - what if Jabba was like "oh, hey, maybe you should search that droid for weapons, like a lightsaber" or just straight up wacked them all) can kick some ass and he can do a cool flip off the diving board and grab his lightsaber in mid air and the team can fight off the enter pleasure barge, and we can see that scary pit in the desert with all the teeth, and Han can blind-shoot Bobba, also so Leia can be in a hot bikini?

Yes. That's exactly why that shit happened, because most of the shit in Star Wars doesn't make a ton of sense if you spend more than 2 minutes actually thinking about it. It's a bunch of machinations to allow our heroes to have adventures and look cool AF while also tying in to some archetypes of light/dark and presenting the heroes journey while also giving us characters who we care about (with some side doses of humor periodically to lighten the mood). Also, badass lightsaber battles. And force lightning and shit. 

I've now read a lot of reviews post facto, and the critical ones seemed hell bent on picking out what "doesn't make any sense" and decrying the film as fan service. They also seem to make a big deal of JJ jettisoning Rian Johnson's TLJ wholesale, when, in fact, he does a ton to build off of what is in that film. What they don't seem interesting in is examining the many, many ways that this film does interesting things with the world of Star Wars, how it builds off of everything that came before, providing echoes, interesting bits that actually are fascinating when you take some time to think about them afterwards. I suspect that, when the furor has calmed down, it will be revealing to get people's takes when they watch all the films together, with this as the capstone.  

I guess my feelings on this film come down to this: This is a fan film providing fan service to fans of Star Wars (and particularly, I think, fans that probably had a similar experience as JJ did growing up). If you didn't want that, then you probably won't like this film, and if you don't like Star Wars then you won't like this Star Wars, which Stars Wars'es harder than any Star Wars has ever Star Warred before. If you did want that, then it's here for you in spades - stop worrying about whether or not you are supposed to enjoy it and just let yourself go into it. It'll be a hell of a ride. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and maybe, just maybe, you'll spend a couple of hours free from thinking about what someone else thinks you should be thinking about something (including yourself). 

Jannah was Lando's daughter

Lando's full name is Landonis Balthazar Calrissian

Finn was going to tell Poe that he is Force sensitive

Baby Yoda's Force healing power was the same as Rey & Kylo's

Ahsoka Tano was one of the voices Rey heard from beyond the grave, implying she had died

Darth Revan, from the KOTOR video game is now canon

Luke & Leia are 53 years old in TROS, Rey is 20, Kylo is 30

Kylo retrieved his wayfinder from Vader's abandoned castle on Mustafar

Rey rebuilt Luke's lightsaber using the Jedi texts she stole from Luke's temple

Leia's Force training was 30 years before TROS

The Knights of Ren are named: Vicrul, Cardo, Ushar, Trudgen, Kuruk, and Ap'lek

Dominic Monaghan played Beaumont Kin, a Resistance historian

Kef Bir is the ocean moon of Endor where the Death Star II crashed

Starkiller Base was carved out of Ilum, a kyber crystal rich snow planet first seen all the way back in Genndy Tartakovsky's Clone Wars animated series from 2003

The medal given to Rey was Han's gold medal from the end of A New Hope