Star Wars Rise of Skywalker
Dec. 21st, 2019 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThis is a long and probably disorganized post, which I will put entirely behind a cut.
To start positive, some things I genuinely liked: Rey in the skimmer, fighting the giant waves; the lightsaber battle set with the giant waves; Rey in the Death Star wreck in general. I'm not convinced it makes any sense to have this giant wreck (didn't it blow up more thoroughly than that) but it was visually cool, and given the narrative choices I thought the ruined throne room was a really effective visual.
Also John Boyega's hair (and face and general existence), the plot with 3PO being forbidden by his software to translate from Sith, the visual of the giant unsupported monolith-mountain thing with just enough space for human-sized people to walk under it, Kylo Ren saying "ow" when he jumps onto the giant chain. Chewbacca mourning Leia - that was the one emotional moment that really got me.
Unfortunately, I left this movie feeling sad that that was the movie we got, and I didn't have a good time watching it, and bleah. That first blast of music is always *so thrilling*, and the start of the crawl, and I know other people had a better time by managing their expectations better but I can't not be excited and want it to be awesome, I've been programmed since the age of like 4 by that music. I want to try to be somewhat distinct here about narrative vs craft - I had problems with both, but I think we can talk about them somewhat separately. And I think for me, as much as I disagreed with lots of their narrative choices, I can accept that they made them, but the failures of craft just really bother me, like, why wouldn't you at least do a good job with what you wanted to do. Of course it's possible that I've just gotten too old for Star Wars and the things that seemed awful to me won't bother younger people with different expectations about pacing or whatever, but ugh.
Anyways. So. We got the opening crawl, and then stuff started happening, and at some point my brain went, "wait, is this movie... bad??" and then I never really got away from that. I found the beginning really jarring and disorienting, and that set me up to never really feel all the way engaged with the rest of the movie. So Kylo Ren is killing a bunch of people, and then he has this thing, and then he's on the horrible strobe light planet of endless painful-to-watch strobe lights (Worst Concept For A Planet Ever), and then Finn and Poe are cutting really fast through random other planets, and then Rey is running around in the jungle getting mad, and then Finn and Poe are having a yelling match with Rey over whether it's possible to cut really fast through random planets? only they've also just gotten an important message that says they have 16 hours to save the galaxy from Palpatine? It was just all so rushed and emotionally jumbled and the rest of the movie just kept feeling like that to me. I felt like nothing in this movie ever had time to breathe, we never stayed in a moment long enough to really land an emotional beat, or built any kind of consistent arc between scenes where earlier parts of the movie lead to later parts in a coherent way. And, like, that's a craft thing, right? Like, they could have taken this same core story, but told it without feeling like it was a roomful of people constantly interrupting each other and not listening? Maybe?
Sadly, I think the "let's use every line of Carrie Fisher's footage" game contributed to this problem. I know this meant a lot to some people, and, I mean, I also have so much grief and anger over losing Fisher and not getting the Leia arc we could have had and I don't want to criticize how the film team chose to cope and how they tried to put together something that the audience would find meaningful. But I was *really, really aware* in her scenes of how artificial the dialogue sounded and how much it sounded like everyone was playing a weird improv game where they had to include a bunch of random lines and then shape plot moments around them. I was also deeply thrown by her last act apparently being sacrificing herself to distract Ren for a minute so Rey can kill him, and then Rey decides not to kill him after all so Leia did that for nothing? I mean, that's a narrative choice, not craft, but it just ended up feeling like a shitty and pointless end for Leia to me. (But I guess if I was into that whole plot, Rey getting to mortally wound and then heal Ren would seem like a key turning point, and maybe Leia's part in it would feel more satisfying, who knows.) (While I'm on Leia-related complaints, why does Rey choose to bury both lightsabers at the Lars homestead back on Tatooine, a place Leia never went? Like, if she was really trying to honor both of them, that just seemed like a weird choice to me. I get that they wanted to end the series there, full circle, blah blah, but Luke already had that amazing dying-with-two-suns moment, so going back to Tatooine didn't feel like it was answering anything I still wanted.)
Some character questions: where the fuck was Rose? how do you introduce a major new character and then just... abandon them without anything interesting to do? Also, if this movie is really supposed to be about The Trio, as has been suggested to me, why do Poe and Finn both get some of their biggest scenes with random new characters? Like, I didn't think we had any questions about Poe's past (he was a Republic pilot and then he defected to the Resistance), so this new thing about "what's Poe's mysterious past" came out of the blue. His interaction with Mask Lady was cute, and I guess she's plot-necessary to give them the key to the star destroyer ("here, Poe, this is the most valuable thing I own and it's necessary to my own life plans but I'll give it to you because you're a main character"), but why does Poe need to get his inspirational speech ideas from this rando, hasn't he already grown enough as a character to be able to do that himself. And Finn... look, Lady Finn was very pretty, and I'm a sucker, but, I don't know, I'm not entirely sure I like what that did to Finn's plot. Like instead of being the special hero who broke away from the storm troopers due to his own inherent goodness, he's just one of many who have done it... I would normally say I'm in favor of that angle! But in a universe that still has other characters who are special and unique, I felt a little uncomfortable with "no, *Finn's* not really that special, but *Rey* still is" (especially given that that looks like "heroic black man isn't really so amazing, white lady still is"). Finn also just felt underutilized to me in general - what's his arc, here? What's his unique contribution to the story? He's such a great character, and all I really remember is some dumb running gag about how he was going to tell Rey something and Poe wants to know what it was but we never find out.
Because I wasn't very emotionally engaged, it was really hard to not be bothered by questions like who was crewing all those zombie Star Destroyers that came up from underground, or who the fuck carefully made that dagger in the shape of a decaying wreck so that if you stood in exactly the right place it would point to a location the maker must have known. Good thing nothing else had collapsed in the intervening 20-30 years? I was also pretty dubious about the thousands of cloak cultists on the strobe light planet, but Chaos fixed that by explaining that they were just some weird Dark Side Force psychological projection of Palpatine and not really there, which made much more sense.
And, so, okay, the big stuff. I don't like that Rey was a Palpatine, but that was very much in keeping with Star Wars information games ("they were just *pretending* to be nobody" is right in line with "when I told you your father was dead, what I really meant was..."). It's so much more interesting if she's not, but whatever. I don't like that they brought back Palpatine as the big bad - now all evil in the galaxy really was this one shitty guy, instead of evil being something that lots of people can fall into - but I can see that if they wanted to redeem Ren and have someone have a big Force showdown with Rey, it couldn't exactly be Hux or something. And I did like the Jar Of Snokes, that was funny. And also Palpatine on the giant canadarm, with the robe and possibly no lower body, that was a neat mix of mechanical and biological horror imagery.
And I don't like the redemption of Ren. Again, it's right in line with the redemption of Anakin, where the love of the Jedi hero is enough to make up for a lifetime of committing atrocities, so I can't really be surprised that Star Wars chose to tell that story again and not a more interesting story. And, hey, I even liked the romance in Uprooted, so maybe I don't get to object. :) But, no, I thought it was great at the end of Last Jedi when Rey shuts the door on Ren and seems to be rejecting him entirely, and I found it unpleasant to watch this young woman character give in to the inevitability of their connection, aka his stalking and unwillingness to leave her alone. Like, she concluded she was wrong to go to him in Last Jedi! Stick with that! I have never chanted "please don't kiss" so hard in my head in a theater in my life... like, I knew they were going to, but, ugh, Finn was *right there in this movie* being gorgeous and not a murderer, and I'm not usually a ship war person but wow, I have newfound sympathy. I did like Ren smiling and then dying, that was a good beat, not because I wanted to see him dead, I mean, but just as the logical end of the life-force transfer to save her life (and maybe even an echo back to Anakin and Padme, that if Anakin had been willing to do that, he could have saved Padme and changed everything). And it was a good smile. But it bugs me that Luke got this amazing big line, "I am a Jedi like my father before me", and saved Anakin through his *character* arc, by making an *emotional* choice, whereas Rey managed to download some clips of dead Jedi saying "you go, girl" and then pull out a second lightsaber and push the energy back the other way, and where was the *story* in that? What's the thing she chooses or realizes that leads to her winning? How is that the triumph of the path she's been on?
I also really wish we'd gotten double-ended-lightsaber Rey beyond that brief scene of Dark Side Rey. That *was* the one thing I thought we were building up to the whole series, and I figured once she had the two lightsabers she was going to figure out how to connect them, but no.
So. Anyways. I'm probably going to see it again with Quentin, who very much wants us to conclude he'll be okay seeing it in the theater... I think he'll find it pretty scary, but he can sit on my lap, and he'll be so excited just to get to go, and maybe I'll even enjoy it more when I hear about the parts he thought were cool. (Maybe I'll even understand why we see those Ewoks at the end and what they're watching??) But I just feel like they wasted their shot at this movie by trying to cram too many random scenes into it, way overusing the nostalgia cues and musical themes without making us wait for them and making the most of them (I remember when they first use the two-suns theme in Force Awakens, *that* was a great moment), and not really having a coherent story they wanted to tell. Alas.
(No, wait, I'm not done. The horse assault on the star destroyer... that could have been so good if it was Finn and Rose, echoing back to the riding scene in Last Jedi, and we really felt both the risk and reward of it, but what we actually saw of it felt so truncated and inconsequential...)
(I'm just going to keep adding stuff. I was really confused about Ren's ship, I thought Rey cut the wing off in the desert and it crashed, but then he's still flying around in it and she steals it later? Did not help with my feeling of confusion and incoherency.)
To start positive, some things I genuinely liked: Rey in the skimmer, fighting the giant waves; the lightsaber battle set with the giant waves; Rey in the Death Star wreck in general. I'm not convinced it makes any sense to have this giant wreck (didn't it blow up more thoroughly than that) but it was visually cool, and given the narrative choices I thought the ruined throne room was a really effective visual.
Also John Boyega's hair (and face and general existence), the plot with 3PO being forbidden by his software to translate from Sith, the visual of the giant unsupported monolith-mountain thing with just enough space for human-sized people to walk under it, Kylo Ren saying "ow" when he jumps onto the giant chain. Chewbacca mourning Leia - that was the one emotional moment that really got me.
Unfortunately, I left this movie feeling sad that that was the movie we got, and I didn't have a good time watching it, and bleah. That first blast of music is always *so thrilling*, and the start of the crawl, and I know other people had a better time by managing their expectations better but I can't not be excited and want it to be awesome, I've been programmed since the age of like 4 by that music. I want to try to be somewhat distinct here about narrative vs craft - I had problems with both, but I think we can talk about them somewhat separately. And I think for me, as much as I disagreed with lots of their narrative choices, I can accept that they made them, but the failures of craft just really bother me, like, why wouldn't you at least do a good job with what you wanted to do. Of course it's possible that I've just gotten too old for Star Wars and the things that seemed awful to me won't bother younger people with different expectations about pacing or whatever, but ugh.
Anyways. So. We got the opening crawl, and then stuff started happening, and at some point my brain went, "wait, is this movie... bad??" and then I never really got away from that. I found the beginning really jarring and disorienting, and that set me up to never really feel all the way engaged with the rest of the movie. So Kylo Ren is killing a bunch of people, and then he has this thing, and then he's on the horrible strobe light planet of endless painful-to-watch strobe lights (Worst Concept For A Planet Ever), and then Finn and Poe are cutting really fast through random other planets, and then Rey is running around in the jungle getting mad, and then Finn and Poe are having a yelling match with Rey over whether it's possible to cut really fast through random planets? only they've also just gotten an important message that says they have 16 hours to save the galaxy from Palpatine? It was just all so rushed and emotionally jumbled and the rest of the movie just kept feeling like that to me. I felt like nothing in this movie ever had time to breathe, we never stayed in a moment long enough to really land an emotional beat, or built any kind of consistent arc between scenes where earlier parts of the movie lead to later parts in a coherent way. And, like, that's a craft thing, right? Like, they could have taken this same core story, but told it without feeling like it was a roomful of people constantly interrupting each other and not listening? Maybe?
Sadly, I think the "let's use every line of Carrie Fisher's footage" game contributed to this problem. I know this meant a lot to some people, and, I mean, I also have so much grief and anger over losing Fisher and not getting the Leia arc we could have had and I don't want to criticize how the film team chose to cope and how they tried to put together something that the audience would find meaningful. But I was *really, really aware* in her scenes of how artificial the dialogue sounded and how much it sounded like everyone was playing a weird improv game where they had to include a bunch of random lines and then shape plot moments around them. I was also deeply thrown by her last act apparently being sacrificing herself to distract Ren for a minute so Rey can kill him, and then Rey decides not to kill him after all so Leia did that for nothing? I mean, that's a narrative choice, not craft, but it just ended up feeling like a shitty and pointless end for Leia to me. (But I guess if I was into that whole plot, Rey getting to mortally wound and then heal Ren would seem like a key turning point, and maybe Leia's part in it would feel more satisfying, who knows.) (While I'm on Leia-related complaints, why does Rey choose to bury both lightsabers at the Lars homestead back on Tatooine, a place Leia never went? Like, if she was really trying to honor both of them, that just seemed like a weird choice to me. I get that they wanted to end the series there, full circle, blah blah, but Luke already had that amazing dying-with-two-suns moment, so going back to Tatooine didn't feel like it was answering anything I still wanted.)
Some character questions: where the fuck was Rose? how do you introduce a major new character and then just... abandon them without anything interesting to do? Also, if this movie is really supposed to be about The Trio, as has been suggested to me, why do Poe and Finn both get some of their biggest scenes with random new characters? Like, I didn't think we had any questions about Poe's past (he was a Republic pilot and then he defected to the Resistance), so this new thing about "what's Poe's mysterious past" came out of the blue. His interaction with Mask Lady was cute, and I guess she's plot-necessary to give them the key to the star destroyer ("here, Poe, this is the most valuable thing I own and it's necessary to my own life plans but I'll give it to you because you're a main character"), but why does Poe need to get his inspirational speech ideas from this rando, hasn't he already grown enough as a character to be able to do that himself. And Finn... look, Lady Finn was very pretty, and I'm a sucker, but, I don't know, I'm not entirely sure I like what that did to Finn's plot. Like instead of being the special hero who broke away from the storm troopers due to his own inherent goodness, he's just one of many who have done it... I would normally say I'm in favor of that angle! But in a universe that still has other characters who are special and unique, I felt a little uncomfortable with "no, *Finn's* not really that special, but *Rey* still is" (especially given that that looks like "heroic black man isn't really so amazing, white lady still is"). Finn also just felt underutilized to me in general - what's his arc, here? What's his unique contribution to the story? He's such a great character, and all I really remember is some dumb running gag about how he was going to tell Rey something and Poe wants to know what it was but we never find out.
Because I wasn't very emotionally engaged, it was really hard to not be bothered by questions like who was crewing all those zombie Star Destroyers that came up from underground, or who the fuck carefully made that dagger in the shape of a decaying wreck so that if you stood in exactly the right place it would point to a location the maker must have known. Good thing nothing else had collapsed in the intervening 20-30 years? I was also pretty dubious about the thousands of cloak cultists on the strobe light planet, but Chaos fixed that by explaining that they were just some weird Dark Side Force psychological projection of Palpatine and not really there, which made much more sense.
And, so, okay, the big stuff. I don't like that Rey was a Palpatine, but that was very much in keeping with Star Wars information games ("they were just *pretending* to be nobody" is right in line with "when I told you your father was dead, what I really meant was..."). It's so much more interesting if she's not, but whatever. I don't like that they brought back Palpatine as the big bad - now all evil in the galaxy really was this one shitty guy, instead of evil being something that lots of people can fall into - but I can see that if they wanted to redeem Ren and have someone have a big Force showdown with Rey, it couldn't exactly be Hux or something. And I did like the Jar Of Snokes, that was funny. And also Palpatine on the giant canadarm, with the robe and possibly no lower body, that was a neat mix of mechanical and biological horror imagery.
And I don't like the redemption of Ren. Again, it's right in line with the redemption of Anakin, where the love of the Jedi hero is enough to make up for a lifetime of committing atrocities, so I can't really be surprised that Star Wars chose to tell that story again and not a more interesting story. And, hey, I even liked the romance in Uprooted, so maybe I don't get to object. :) But, no, I thought it was great at the end of Last Jedi when Rey shuts the door on Ren and seems to be rejecting him entirely, and I found it unpleasant to watch this young woman character give in to the inevitability of their connection, aka his stalking and unwillingness to leave her alone. Like, she concluded she was wrong to go to him in Last Jedi! Stick with that! I have never chanted "please don't kiss" so hard in my head in a theater in my life... like, I knew they were going to, but, ugh, Finn was *right there in this movie* being gorgeous and not a murderer, and I'm not usually a ship war person but wow, I have newfound sympathy. I did like Ren smiling and then dying, that was a good beat, not because I wanted to see him dead, I mean, but just as the logical end of the life-force transfer to save her life (and maybe even an echo back to Anakin and Padme, that if Anakin had been willing to do that, he could have saved Padme and changed everything). And it was a good smile. But it bugs me that Luke got this amazing big line, "I am a Jedi like my father before me", and saved Anakin through his *character* arc, by making an *emotional* choice, whereas Rey managed to download some clips of dead Jedi saying "you go, girl" and then pull out a second lightsaber and push the energy back the other way, and where was the *story* in that? What's the thing she chooses or realizes that leads to her winning? How is that the triumph of the path she's been on?
I also really wish we'd gotten double-ended-lightsaber Rey beyond that brief scene of Dark Side Rey. That *was* the one thing I thought we were building up to the whole series, and I figured once she had the two lightsabers she was going to figure out how to connect them, but no.
So. Anyways. I'm probably going to see it again with Quentin, who very much wants us to conclude he'll be okay seeing it in the theater... I think he'll find it pretty scary, but he can sit on my lap, and he'll be so excited just to get to go, and maybe I'll even enjoy it more when I hear about the parts he thought were cool. (Maybe I'll even understand why we see those Ewoks at the end and what they're watching??) But I just feel like they wasted their shot at this movie by trying to cram too many random scenes into it, way overusing the nostalgia cues and musical themes without making us wait for them and making the most of them (I remember when they first use the two-suns theme in Force Awakens, *that* was a great moment), and not really having a coherent story they wanted to tell. Alas.
(No, wait, I'm not done. The horse assault on the star destroyer... that could have been so good if it was Finn and Rose, echoing back to the riding scene in Last Jedi, and we really felt both the risk and reward of it, but what we actually saw of it felt so truncated and inconsequential...)
(I'm just going to keep adding stuff. I was really confused about Ren's ship, I thought Rey cut the wing off in the desert and it crashed, but then he's still flying around in it and she steals it later? Did not help with my feeling of confusion and incoherency.)
no subject
Date: 2019-12-21 09:59 pm (UTC)As soon as Star Wars has you thinking about logistics, shipyard location, manufacturing capacity, and so forth, it has well and truly lost. My debate is whether the extra heapings of misogyny, Avatar, Dune, and Jiminy Cricket (and/or Magical Negroes? Not sure how to read that scene, but it's not good) is enough to push it into Worst Star Wars movie position, or if flying Artoo and whatnot still takes the cake.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-22 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-22 10:54 pm (UTC)