Listened to Shadversity on his review of the movie and.... it's broken. And all the leaks were real...

Disney really dropped the ball. They might have tried to save it, but i am not convinced they did.

To be fair, it's not always a good motivation. Terminator movies after Judgment day and many game series like CoD and AssCreed are prime example what happens with the franchise when corps try to cash on popularity without understanding originals.

Honestly when I read the leaks and not reading and watching about the plot and spoilers I am not surprised. It's basically a JJ movie.

I mean it's nothing new, JJ is good for creating potentially interesting mysteries (and lens flares), but JJ is bad at... nearly everything else, he sucks at finding satisfying resolution for said mysteries, at endings, at keeping any sort of consistencies with either the lore or even with the previous episode (most visible in case of Alias or Lost).

That was true for his Star Trek movies, true for Lost and before already true for Alias, if anything I would say that Fringe was maybe the only time he manage to keep thing relatively in check (mostly because the whole premise of the show was "fringe" , as in MacGuffinesque, technologies ).

When he don't know how to resolve something or move the plot forward he just pull a MacGuffins / plot twists out of his ass and then forget about them five minutes later, in Alias it was the Rambaldi stuff getting more and more ridiculous, in Star Trek it was the magic teleporter / inconsistent warp speed etc..., and in Rise it's the wayfinder, Ray finding new power every five minutes, or Palpy being back from the dead. (And it was already the case with Force with the magic "you can see planets blowup in real time in the sky even though they are lights years away from each others"

So no I am not surprised by Rise at all, maybe it's worse because here he had to try fixing Rian Johnson shit-show so he needed even more MacGuffin that usual, but apart from that it's what you can expect from an average JJ movie.

The main "crime" of this new trilogy IMHO is that it's NOT a trilogy, it's three movies that were made without having a clear plan for a trilogy, Force was just a soft reboot of a new hope to build up hype for Star Wars again, Last Jedi was a mess because Rian Johnson ego just wanted to make a mark in SW history by "subverting expectations" without giving a damn about what came before and what would come after, and Rise is just a desperate attempt to fix this garbage fire and make a semi coherent story our all those disjointed story-lines.

Ok, I‘ll indulge you for a second: From a purely ethical perspective, considering that the money spent on each of these films and how that money could be spent on feeding third world countries, these films are neither good nor bad - they‘re reprehensible.

And that‘s not even taking into account how these films purely exist to line the wallets of a megacorp (don‘t tell me they had the inherent artistic desire to tell a story - if they did, they would have drawn up an overarching story outline for this new trilogy beforehand and it wouldn‘t have ended in such a sorry mess), all the while they cram bogus social justice causes down your throat. Reprehensible. Disgusting.

Postmodernist hogwash. This kind of mind rot is precisely the reason (art in) the West is in terminal decline right about now.

Unless you‘re trying to suggest that lolololol Jerry Springer = the collected works of Ingmar Bergman because lololol both are moving images with a soundtrack attached to them and besides it‘s all subjective anyway lololololol. Playing devil‘s advocate is all fine and dandy, but don‘t take it to the level where your arguments make you come across as a bit of a dip, please!

Commando - for all its flaws - is a perfect thing and these other two films do not even deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence. Shame on you for suggesting that one is "bad", and for drawing an unfavorable comparison to those other two films.

Here‘s an "objective" way to tell if a film is good or bad: People fondly remember it 35 years down the road - like Commando.

I can bet you this: No one is going to look back fondly on those two other films you mentioned in 35 years. The only fondness will be in the way of "Oh well, at least those two didn‘t suck nearly as much as the other three did.“

Yeah, they also keep trying with the Chinese market - to diminishing returns. Episode 7: $50 million opening. Episode 8: $25 million opening. Episode 9: $1.57 million opening. Like I said in another thread, I'm surprised that the state censor still grants licenses to these films and that theatre owners aren't causing a ruckus about this yet, considering they can't be too happy about being forced to show films that are sure to play to an empty screening room. Western audiences aren't quite there yet because of misguided nostalgia, but they're getting there.

Which makes you wonder just how many times they have to upset fans with horribly written films until they start staying away in droves. They're not saving the brand by creating quality products, they're harming the brand by adding to the garbage pile.

fronzelneekburm you're not worth bothering with.


Terminator was never the massive hit franchise the studios have tried treating it as. T2 was a mega-hit, but the ones following have all disappointed expectations. I don't know why they keep making them, it's pretty obvious T2 was a hit because of reasons other than the title, and they just keep bombing. It's not really comparable to Star Wars, which has been a mega-hit for decades and only has one real financial failure on its hands with Solo.


It is funny how the problems with JJ's two installments seem to be similar to the problem with his Trek movies, yeah. I don't know enough about his shows to comment on those, but you nailed it otherwise. I think Force Awakens still would have made a fine start, if it was followed up with better and richer material that felt designed. Unfortunately as you say, they were (baffelingly) winging it and Johnson had his head up his ass and here we are.

They'll keep going until the right the ship though. I think Mandalorian and Rogue One being (mostly) embraced might lead them to just copying their formula for the next big movie and then going from there. Kennedy needs to go though, and probably will if this movie makes much less than the previous, which seems likely.

You will loose the bet. Half at least.

Ho ho ho, so, what does that say about the average American vs the average European/Mideastern/Asian? Hmmm? :P

I remain skeptical either way as it doesn't seem to say who, what and where these data come from. For all we know they asked 200-300 people at a StarWars Con.

That I actually agree with. There are sadly many things we could have done to make it somewhat better for other countries, other than going "war-driving".

Obvious for you, but not for CEOs of the companies that hold the rights to the Terminator franchise. That was exactly my point - if producers will see only "that thing was popular" without understanding why it was popular, you will just get bomb after bomb, crappy funfiction and nothing else.

The reason, why Star Wars were successful for such a long time is because Star War fans were in charge of production. Even Prequel Trilogy, that failed in many things, still had reasonable overarching plot - because Lucas genuienly wanted to tell the story of Anakin falling to the Dark Side and rise of the Emperror. Kennedy didn't know the first thing about SW and wasn't interested in anything beside her ambitions and her ideology.

Yeah that has been the feeling I've gotten from the new trilogy - That there was no underlying thread, goal, plot arc whatever the term is - to hang it all together.

It just feels like one of the very high quality fan films that you see on YouTube that people make but without being linked to anything.


It's almost the complete opposite to the prequel trilogy - I could understand where George was going with it, but the actual execution was abysmal. I don't mean the presentation, the SFX etc. - That was excellent as always - I mean the way it was conveyed, in the awful dialog and dreadful confused acting.

With the new trilogy on the other hand, again the presentation was excellent, and unlike the prequels the acting and dialog were good IMHO - I liked the characters in this more where I didn't give a shit about any of the ones in the prequel trilogies. They are a bit cliched, but this is Star Wars, practically built on cliches, and the thing about cliches is you quickly understand them and their motivations so you can get on with the storytelling.

The problem with the new trilogy vs the prequels is the plot is all over the place - It really feels like the writers could write good characters but didn't know how to tie it all together with an over-arching plot. They introduce things that seem important then they are never mentioned again or critical plot devices suddenly appear out of nowhere with no set up or a setup that just feels shoe-horned in.

As much as I shat on GL for the trilogies, I really felt his absence in the new trilogy; I think a lot of the problems in the new trilogy are due to the loss of his vision in guiding where the film goes.

I think this is why ESB and ROTJ are the strongest of the films - They benefit from GL's overarching vision and direction, but people who could do a much better job with the minutia and implementation than George made it actually happen. That was the magic formula.

There's just no coherent vision behind the new trilogy - It doesn't make sense and isn't even consistent with itself.

It feels like amateur fan fiction. There are YouTube shorts which have better storytelling than what's been delivered here.

(The) Rise of (The) Skywalker will be the first SW film I am not going to see in the cinema. Maybe I'll watch it on TV but I'm not giving any more money to the new franchise - I was a big Star Wars fan of the original universe, where we had incredible EU stores to flesh out the universe from the likes of Stackpole and Zahn, and even the TIE Fighter game had a more well thought-out and compelling plot than the new trilogy, but the way these new films were rushed through show the people behind it don't really give a shit and are just using the Star Wars name to make more money.

I saw the first one but ignored the lazy writing and enjoyed the special effects with the hope that they were just finding their feet. The second one just left me shaking my head

If these films didn't have the name Star Wars attached to them they would have been universally panned and drowned in obscurity by now.

I just don't understand why this has happened - Rogue One was really good - It felt like a proper Star Wars film! Even Solo, while not perfect, I found to be a decent film for the most part. So they've shown can make decent films, so WTF happened to the main canon films?!?! How have they ended up being weaker, so much weaker, than the spinoffs?!

It makes no sense!

Oh, social justice is definitively bogus cause. But so is any other. And while I do agree that from most moral position such actions are highly reprehensible, you'll have to agree that all human societies have been built on moral hypocrisy.

While I might agree with you regarding Disney (and when I say might, I mean definitively), you are aware that Disney has every right to do this? And besides that, what difference does it make to their artistic merit? Star Worse and Count of Monte Cristo were both made with monetary goal in the first place, difference between those two works wasn't in their goal, it was in Dumas being much more competent artist than Disney (in my humble SUBJECTIVE opinion of course).





Depends on do you consider David Hume, Max Stirner, Fredi Nietzsche and Terry Pratchett postmodern authors or not...

Oh, I assure you, I do not enjoy "the fall" of Star Wars (which many would argue happened even before Disney), but I definitively find Disney's incompetence hilarious.

Under Lucas Star Wars always meant something. Although he learned to turn the franchise into an ATM (a point of contention with he and OT Producer Gary Kurtz), he was always steadfastly determined to tell a strong, timeless story with clearly mythic themes -- even in the prequels which suffered from mediocre writing and direction, the razor-focus on the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker is admirable.

Disney, Iger, and Kennedy don't understand the franchise on any level.

Disney sees that Star Wars skews slightly more male than female and Kennedy actively undermines male characters while trying to elevate Rey to god-like status (which BTW even Iger killed Kennedy's "God Rey" cut of TRoS).

Disney feels the Force -- which they wish was just a generic magic system -- is too specific to Skywalker (shouldn't all kids who visit Disney Parks feel like they should be able to use "space magic?") so suddenly Rey is a nobody, little kids sweeping up can use the Force without training, and Skywalker undermined and then killed. Problems... solved... solved... and solved.

Oops.

(Disney still doesn't understand that most audience members see themselves reflected in Luke, Leia, or both -- the Skywalkers! The Skywalkers weren't a shackle... they were the character "avatars" for the audience! Sheesh... filmmaking 101)

Disney wanted Star Wars to be Guardians of the Galaxy 2.0 -- where themes are simple "family themes" -- and had to dismantle the very core of the series to get to what they wanted. Now Star Wars is effectively meaningless... a generic space adventure with laser guns.

But Disney knows it messed up...

Lucas has been actively employed by Disney (Iger) since prior to release of TLJ to try and clean up their mess (and yes, he made a cut of The Rise of Skywalker -- with his own footage -- that tested almost 90% in test screenings that Kennedy refused to release... betting her Lucasfilm career and reputation on Abrams TRoS). Having to clean up Disney's mess, Lucas has stayed out of the spotlight and refused to be at the premiere. Meanwhile, he's prepping Kenobi and is actively involved in The Mandalorian. For Lucas, this is about trying to salvage the legacy of his OT more than Disney's movies.

It's so funny that Disney and Iger thought they wanted nothing to do with the "idiot" who made the prequels and now they are begging him to help them fix their mess. And BTW, Lucas always told Disney he wanted to be actively involved in their Star Wars movies... but they didn't want his help.

As a Star Wars film this situation (and BTW there's much, much, much more I haven't related here) is beyond sad.

Sounds intriguing, though also a bit hard to believe imo...do you have a source?

Stories to that effect been circulated by the usual rumor mills on youtube. Mind you, the rumor mills have been pretty gosh darn accurate about all the other leaks pertaining to Episode 9, so I don't really have a problem believing this to be true.

Maybe Disney could try to salvage this wreck by pulling a Cats by switching the current theatical version of Episode 9 for the George Lucas cut and see what happens. Maybe they could make that switch only in a few select theatres, just to mess with people's heads (if people online were suddenly claiming that they saw a different version of the film where this didn't happen and that didn't happen, it would certainly generate controversy and might turn out to be brilliant guerilla marketing, as people would flock to theatres just to see that elusive, mysterious "different" version).

My guess is that the trilogy is done, but possibly...

... in a few years time Disney will commission a graphic novel series that depicts an adaptation of Lucas' trilogy outlines (which already bordered on screenplays sans dialogue)... much like Dark Horse adapting Lucas first draft The Star Wars into a graphic novel.

That way fans get to see what Lucas planned and feel better while not stepping on the toes of Abrams and co. It also allows all of the OT characters / actors to be "present." But Disney will never call it "canon."

We've spoken in PM. (edit)