Oh god. Here we go again. This seems less an argument about why RoS isn't bad and more. "If we ignore all the context that lead up to its creation we can pretend it's...
Oh god. Here we go again.
This seems less an argument about why RoS isn't bad and more. "If we ignore all the context that lead up to its creation we can pretend it's regular-star-wars-levels-of-nonsensical."
And while I agree that Star Wars has its fair share of plot holes. That particular movie didn't hold up to even the barest scrutiny. Nothing made any sense except when looked at as a nostalgia fueled cash grab. Even trying to analyze themes makes me draw a blank unless I count "merch" as a theme.
there are rumors about how expansive the post-ROTJ era is going to get with these new shows and a possible development of the Thrawn Trilogy into a TV series. We will always have the sequels but...
there are rumors about how expansive the post-ROTJ era is going to get with these new shows and a possible development of the Thrawn Trilogy into a TV series. We will always have the sequels but at least maybe we can just ignore them and enjoy the Thrawn Trilogy when it comes out.
Disney pays rather a lot of money and has for many years for these articles. Revisionist history and 'ten reasons why the phantom menace was actually a good movie'. Constant war drums trying to...
Disney pays rather a lot of money and has for many years for these articles. Revisionist history and 'ten reasons why the phantom menace was actually a good movie'. Constant war drums trying to save a dying franchise.
Is there documentation for the claim that Disney is paying for these articles? I would believe it, not trying to be confrontational, but would also appreciate proof of such.
Is there documentation for the claim that Disney is paying for these articles? I would believe it, not trying to be confrontational, but would also appreciate proof of such.
I've seen articles and blogs tracking it over the years, but nothing I care to go digging for. Disney and a handful of related companies own most of these sites, it's just one more publication...
I've seen articles and blogs tracking it over the years, but nothing I care to go digging for. Disney and a handful of related companies own most of these sites, it's just one more publication racket for manufacturing opinions and consent like the mainstream news networks. That's why they all have the same tired takes on the same tired stories.
I'm having trouble drawing a line between The Guardian and any of the giant media companies. It, along with a handful of other UK newspapers, are owned by Scott Trust Limited. Their only real role...
I'm having trouble drawing a line between The Guardian and any of the giant media companies. It, along with a handful of other UK newspapers, are owned by Scott Trust Limited. Their only real role in the management of these papers is to appoint the Editor in Chief. Their current board is comprised mostly of journalists and academics. The biggest outside connection on that list is probably former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller.
Is it possible this author just genuinely likes Rise of Skywalker?
It could be - except I've had this exact same conversation over this exact same article (just on different sites, and talking about different star wars movies) like a dozen times over the years....
It could be - except I've had this exact same conversation over this exact same article (just on different sites, and talking about different star wars movies) like a dozen times over the years. That makes me a bit skeptical about it. Just google for 'reasons [insert star wars film] was a good movie' and you'll find a curiously high number of results for it. I certainly haven't enjoyed anything Star Wars since Return of the Jedi and neither have any other adults I know, even my scifi geek friends. It's been dead to us since the prequel trilogy, though I do still watch the original trilogy once in a while. Every review channel I see with actual humans talking about scifi pan the hell out of modern star wars, except rogue one. Apparently that one was decent enough.
Disney has even been buying their own tickets to bump up their release numbers - fans reporting from 'sold out theaters' that there were only five people in the place for the premiere, that sort of thing. They won't publish streaming numbers (and we all know why). Luke's brief appearance in The Mandalorian was so popular it broke the internet, but they don't like to talk about that. Can't admit that the old hero is still vastly more popular than the new one will ever be, and needs these hack articles to prop it up.
Something tells me Star Wars is still popular - just not Disney's version of it. George Lucas even disavowed it. If you haven't been following the rather stark decline in cinematic storytelling (star wars, doctor who, star trek - nothing but amateur melodramatic teenage crap) it's a depressing subject. Disney has been circling the drain for a while now but it's not just them, the entire industry is collapsing. Nobody is watching.
The core problem seems to be the firing of any writers of talent or backbone for a new breed of political hacks that have all the talent of a wet mop and no sense of the history of any of the properties they write for. They replace canon with modern politics, and have to turn everyone who is a white male into anything else, because diversity - whatever the hell that means. I guess creating bold new heroes of any/every race/gender is just utterly outside the scope of their talent. Better to gender and race swap the old ones.
I'll content myself with The Expanse and The Orville until this storm of mediocrity passes. There are still some good shows out there - though most of them go just like Wandavision did. Decent couple episodes, and then straight into the boring old gutter. I'm not even checking in on a new series anymore until it's 2-3 seasons in with a solid track record, that's how jaded I've become over the mess. I'd rather not waste my time or money on crummy projects and bad writing. I'd rather be writing myself.
We have a renaissance in comic books to look forward to. That's where the tide will start to turn. We need to be thinking about new franchises now, not old ones.
I’m not going to write an article defending it but I seriously do think TPM is the best prequel film and the only one that holds up at all. Annoying Jar Jar, Anakin, and all.
I’m not going to write an article defending it but I seriously do think TPM is the best prequel film and the only one that holds up at all. Annoying Jar Jar, Anakin, and all.
I completely agree. I liked the themes of TLJ, but the execution was godawful. Then RoS goes and junks the themes (I don't think I've ever seen a movie so thoroughly and explicitly repudiate and...
I completely agree. I liked the themes of TLJ, but the execution was godawful. Then RoS goes and junks the themes (I don't think I've ever seen a movie so thoroughly and explicitly repudiate and retcon its immediate predecessor before), and keeps the garbage execution, with an OT fan service mad lib in place of plot or theme.
TLJ's main issue was that for some reason the guy directing the second part in a trilogy decided that the nostalgia bait from the TFA was bad and it all should be thrown out the window. You know,...
TLJ's main issue was that for some reason the guy directing the second part in a trilogy decided that the nostalgia bait from the TFA was bad and it all should be thrown out the window.
You know, decent idea, just not maybe in the middle of a trilogy.
I’ll say it and I’ll say it again, I hate TLJ less as a movie itself (it’s really gorgeous and has some damn fine directed acting and stuff) and way more as the sequel to TFA. The sequel trilogy...
I’ll say it and I’ll say it again, I hate TLJ less as a movie itself (it’s really gorgeous and has some damn fine directed acting and stuff) and way more as the sequel to TFA. The sequel trilogy sucks because of how incongruous they are and how sloppy the thematic and story arc through lines are with TROS being feeling like the Justice League of Star Wars movies.
Either let JJ make his extremely safe nostalgia driven trilogy or let Rian do something experimental. What we got was just trash.
Maybe Disney can milk the franchise further and give both directors a chance to re-do the other's film. So Rian can redo the Rise of Skywalker and JJ can redo The Last Jedi and we can subscribe to...
Maybe Disney can milk the franchise further and give both directors a chance to re-do the other's film. So Rian can redo the Rise of Skywalker and JJ can redo The Last Jedi and we can subscribe to Disney+ to vote on who made the best trilogy.
I think it might actually have been a decent strategy (in theory) given J.J. Abrams' techniques and shortcomings as a director. Abrams is a big fan of the mystery box storytelling technique, where...
I think it might actually have been a decent strategy (in theory) given J.J. Abrams' techniques and shortcomings as a director. Abrams is a big fan of the mystery box storytelling technique, where you keep an audience engaged by having them ask questions of the movie or show, like with Lost, TFA, or GoT. But this runs into big issues if you didn't prepare satisfying answers in advance, and weave them into the narrative. If you had the audience ask questions that you yourself didn't know the answer to and you have to cobble something together at the last minute, you get the last season(s) of GoT, and people hate it. My guess is that Rian Johnson didn't want to be left holding that hot potato, so he threw all those unopened mystery boxes in the trash compactor and went off in his own direction. I really think it could've worked, but the movie just wasn't very good in its own right, and certainly not enough to overcome the inertia of what people expected a star wars movie to be, and so we got RoS.
They did so well and continue to do well for Marvel I just don’t understand why they did Star Wars so dirty. They turned Marvel characters nobody gave a fuck about into household names but Star...
They did so well and continue to do well for Marvel I just don’t understand why they did Star Wars so dirty.
They turned Marvel characters nobody gave a fuck about into household names but Star Wars? “Ehh I dunno just wing it who cares”.
They gave Tony Stark a decade long arc and a blazing send-off but Luke freaking Skywalker? “Ehh just give him one more movie, make him shitty then kill him off”.
An overabundance of caution was part of it. It's exactly because most of the Marvel characters are so obscure that they have more of a free hand in writing their stories. But because Star Wars is...
An overabundance of caution was part of it. It's exactly because most of the Marvel characters are so obscure that they have more of a free hand in writing their stories. But because Star Wars is this towering cultural behemoth, with a legacy of everything released in the last thirty years being bad, they felt the pressure to play it safe. That's what gave us TFA, an almost offensively inoffensive and safe movie, which was also not much to build off of if you wanted more than a tired OT rehash, giving us its antithesis in TLJ.
Also there were some real bad Marvel movies. I don't think TLJ was particularly worse than, say, Age of Ultron, and RoS was about on par with Thor: The Dark World. It's just that there's like twenty or thirty MCU movies, so the occasional dud doesn't hurt or get remembered as much as one of the three star wars movies of this decade being bad.
What is it with the guardian and dumb Star Wars takes? Is it a series or something? I think this argument is even worse than the one in that article for TPM though. I think the author liked the...
What is it with the guardian and dumb Star Wars takes? Is it a series or something? I think this argument is even worse than the one in that article for TPM though.
I think the author liked the movie because he felt a kindred spirit in its disjointed, incoherent writing style, as it was certainly hard to tell what his point was from the text of his article. Is he saying it's a good movie because it has a lot of spectacle, regardless of its incoherence? That's certainly... an opinion. Is he seriously pretending that Rey being a palpatine was justified because there are a just lot of weird coincidences in Star Wars, never mind the difference between an inciting event and a major piece of character development? And that it doesn't repudiate like, the entire core theme of TLJ of breaking with the past, and how big a part of that was the most powerful force user in a generation being a random person without magic space aristocrat blood? Did he seriously not notice that they basically retconned half of TLJ on screen, just because there were a few continuity nods that said, yes, against all evidence to the contrary, this is in fact a sequel to TLJ, and not to another movie that doesn't exist?
I dunno, I'm baffled by this defense. If he hadn't previously written positive reviews of RoS, I would think it was satire. Instead, I think it might just be someone who can't come to grips with liking a bad movie (Which is fine! We all have our beloved trash!) trying desperately to make it out to be better than it is.
To save anyone else the heart attack: Yes, they release these articles 3 times a week, but it seems like random writers contribute and it isn't the same person writing the series with a 2 day...
To save anyone else the heart attack: Yes, they release these articles 3 times a week, but it seems like random writers contribute and it isn't the same person writing the series with a 2 day turnaround.
Going against the grain generates clicks. But also sometimes it's nice to see a different opinion. I enjoy reading some articles like these even when I disagree with them.
Going against the grain generates clicks.
But also sometimes it's nice to see a different opinion. I enjoy reading some articles like these even when I disagree with them.
The space scenes looked amazing. But that's not enough to make up for a single movie that destroys the entire point of both earlier trilogies. I can only assume he had never bothered to watch the...
The space scenes looked amazing. But that's not enough to make up for a single movie that destroys the entire point of both earlier trilogies. I can only assume he had never bothered to watch the other trilogies or just didn't give a shit. It would be like if there was another Lord of the Rings book or movie and three fourths through it, the One Ring is found at the bottom of a Dwarven shoebox in the land of Elves and needs to be destroyed again in Mount Doom, it doesn't make sense and it doesn't add anything. The director of Manos the Hands of Fate could have handled it better. I was expecting a bad movie, I walked out stating "I guess that's the end of Star Wars." The author is correct in one way, it's not a bad movie... it's fucking godawful!
What was amazing about the space scenes? Of the 2 minutes we saw of this massive battle, probably the most massive ever seen in a Star Wars film, it ironically wasn’t very impressive. It was just...
What was amazing about the space scenes? Of the 2 minutes we saw of this massive battle, probably the most massive ever seen in a Star Wars film, it ironically wasn’t very impressive.
It was just so lazy and obviously a cost saving measure that we saw almost none of it, not to mention the big fleet was just a giant copy paste of previous film’s models (multiple Ghosts from Rogue One ect.). The Xyston being the worst. Our massive new Sith fleet was just a copy pasted Rogue One Imperial I Star Destroyer model scaled up with giant cannons modeled onto the bottom.
Obviously some models are going to be reused and for consistency this makes sense but for this movie it was obviously just a last minute cost saving maneuver.
Oh god. Here we go again.
This seems less an argument about why RoS isn't bad and more. "If we ignore all the context that lead up to its creation we can pretend it's regular-star-wars-levels-of-nonsensical."
And while I agree that Star Wars has its fair share of plot holes. That particular movie didn't hold up to even the barest scrutiny. Nothing made any sense except when looked at as a nostalgia fueled cash grab. Even trying to analyze themes makes me draw a blank unless I count "merch" as a theme.
there are rumors about how expansive the post-ROTJ era is going to get with these new shows and a possible development of the Thrawn Trilogy into a TV series. We will always have the sequels but at least maybe we can just ignore them and enjoy the Thrawn Trilogy when it comes out.
Disney pays rather a lot of money and has for many years for these articles. Revisionist history and 'ten reasons why the phantom menace was actually a good movie'. Constant war drums trying to save a dying franchise.
Is there documentation for the claim that Disney is paying for these articles? I would believe it, not trying to be confrontational, but would also appreciate proof of such.
I've seen articles and blogs tracking it over the years, but nothing I care to go digging for. Disney and a handful of related companies own most of these sites, it's just one more publication racket for manufacturing opinions and consent like the mainstream news networks. That's why they all have the same tired takes on the same tired stories.
I'm having trouble drawing a line between The Guardian and any of the giant media companies. It, along with a handful of other UK newspapers, are owned by Scott Trust Limited. Their only real role in the management of these papers is to appoint the Editor in Chief. Their current board is comprised mostly of journalists and academics. The biggest outside connection on that list is probably former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller.
Is it possible this author just genuinely likes Rise of Skywalker?
It could be - except I've had this exact same conversation over this exact same article (just on different sites, and talking about different star wars movies) like a dozen times over the years. That makes me a bit skeptical about it. Just google for 'reasons [insert star wars film] was a good movie' and you'll find a curiously high number of results for it. I certainly haven't enjoyed anything Star Wars since Return of the Jedi and neither have any other adults I know, even my scifi geek friends. It's been dead to us since the prequel trilogy, though I do still watch the original trilogy once in a while. Every review channel I see with actual humans talking about scifi pan the hell out of modern star wars, except rogue one. Apparently that one was decent enough.
Disney has even been buying their own tickets to bump up their release numbers - fans reporting from 'sold out theaters' that there were only five people in the place for the premiere, that sort of thing. They won't publish streaming numbers (and we all know why). Luke's brief appearance in The Mandalorian was so popular it broke the internet, but they don't like to talk about that. Can't admit that the old hero is still vastly more popular than the new one will ever be, and needs these hack articles to prop it up.
Something tells me Star Wars is still popular - just not Disney's version of it. George Lucas even disavowed it. If you haven't been following the rather stark decline in cinematic storytelling (star wars, doctor who, star trek - nothing but amateur melodramatic teenage crap) it's a depressing subject. Disney has been circling the drain for a while now but it's not just them, the entire industry is collapsing. Nobody is watching.
The core problem seems to be the firing of any writers of talent or backbone for a new breed of political hacks that have all the talent of a wet mop and no sense of the history of any of the properties they write for. They replace canon with modern politics, and have to turn everyone who is a white male into anything else, because diversity - whatever the hell that means. I guess creating bold new heroes of any/every race/gender is just utterly outside the scope of their talent. Better to gender and race swap the old ones.
I'll content myself with The Expanse and The Orville until this storm of mediocrity passes. There are still some good shows out there - though most of them go just like Wandavision did. Decent couple episodes, and then straight into the boring old gutter. I'm not even checking in on a new series anymore until it's 2-3 seasons in with a solid track record, that's how jaded I've become over the mess. I'd rather not waste my time or money on crummy projects and bad writing. I'd rather be writing myself.
We have a renaissance in comic books to look forward to. That's where the tide will start to turn. We need to be thinking about new franchises now, not old ones.
I’m not going to write an article defending it but I seriously do think TPM is the best prequel film and the only one that holds up at all. Annoying Jar Jar, Anakin, and all.
That's a pretty low bar tho.
No...it’s bad. Like really goddamn bad. I hated TLJ but that movie actually made me wistful of Rian Johnson’s “experiment”.
I completely agree. I liked the themes of TLJ, but the execution was godawful. Then RoS goes and junks the themes (I don't think I've ever seen a movie so thoroughly and explicitly repudiate and retcon its immediate predecessor before), and keeps the garbage execution, with an OT fan service mad lib in place of plot or theme.
TLJ's main issue was that for some reason the guy directing the second part in a trilogy decided that the nostalgia bait from the TFA was bad and it all should be thrown out the window.
You know, decent idea, just not maybe in the middle of a trilogy.
I’ll say it and I’ll say it again, I hate TLJ less as a movie itself (it’s really gorgeous and has some damn fine directed acting and stuff) and way more as the sequel to TFA. The sequel trilogy sucks because of how incongruous they are and how sloppy the thematic and story arc through lines are with TROS being feeling like the Justice League of Star Wars movies.
Either let JJ make his extremely safe nostalgia driven trilogy or let Rian do something experimental. What we got was just trash.
Maybe Disney can milk the franchise further and give both directors a chance to re-do the other's film. So Rian can redo the Rise of Skywalker and JJ can redo The Last Jedi and we can subscribe to Disney+ to vote on who made the best trilogy.
I'm not making this better am I?
I think it might actually have been a decent strategy (in theory) given J.J. Abrams' techniques and shortcomings as a director. Abrams is a big fan of the mystery box storytelling technique, where you keep an audience engaged by having them ask questions of the movie or show, like with Lost, TFA, or GoT. But this runs into big issues if you didn't prepare satisfying answers in advance, and weave them into the narrative. If you had the audience ask questions that you yourself didn't know the answer to and you have to cobble something together at the last minute, you get the last season(s) of GoT, and people hate it. My guess is that Rian Johnson didn't want to be left holding that hot potato, so he threw all those unopened mystery boxes in the trash compactor and went off in his own direction. I really think it could've worked, but the movie just wasn't very good in its own right, and certainly not enough to overcome the inertia of what people expected a star wars movie to be, and so we got RoS.
They did so well and continue to do well for Marvel I just don’t understand why they did Star Wars so dirty.
They turned Marvel characters nobody gave a fuck about into household names but Star Wars? “Ehh I dunno just wing it who cares”.
They gave Tony Stark a decade long arc and a blazing send-off but Luke freaking Skywalker? “Ehh just give him one more movie, make him shitty then kill him off”.
An overabundance of caution was part of it. It's exactly because most of the Marvel characters are so obscure that they have more of a free hand in writing their stories. But because Star Wars is this towering cultural behemoth, with a legacy of everything released in the last thirty years being bad, they felt the pressure to play it safe. That's what gave us TFA, an almost offensively inoffensive and safe movie, which was also not much to build off of if you wanted more than a tired OT rehash, giving us its antithesis in TLJ.
Also there were some real bad Marvel movies. I don't think TLJ was particularly worse than, say, Age of Ultron, and RoS was about on par with Thor: The Dark World. It's just that there's like twenty or thirty MCU movies, so the occasional dud doesn't hurt or get remembered as much as one of the three star wars movies of this decade being bad.
What is it with the guardian and dumb Star Wars takes? Is it a series or something? I think this argument is even worse than the one in that article for TPM though.
I think the author liked the movie because he felt a kindred spirit in its disjointed, incoherent writing style, as it was certainly hard to tell what his point was from the text of his article. Is he saying it's a good movie because it has a lot of spectacle, regardless of its incoherence? That's certainly... an opinion. Is he seriously pretending that Rey being a palpatine was justified because there are a just lot of weird coincidences in Star Wars, never mind the difference between an inciting event and a major piece of character development? And that it doesn't repudiate like, the entire core theme of TLJ of breaking with the past, and how big a part of that was the most powerful force user in a generation being a random person without magic space aristocrat blood? Did he seriously not notice that they basically retconned half of TLJ on screen, just because there were a few continuity nods that said, yes, against all evidence to the contrary, this is in fact a sequel to TLJ, and not to another movie that doesn't exist?
I dunno, I'm baffled by this defense. If he hadn't previously written positive reviews of RoS, I would think it was satire. Instead, I think it might just be someone who can't come to grips with liking a bad movie (Which is fine! We all have our beloved trash!) trying desperately to make it out to be better than it is.
Yes.
To save anyone else the heart attack: Yes, they release these articles 3 times a week, but it seems like random writers contribute and it isn't the same person writing the series with a 2 day turnaround.
Going against the grain generates clicks.
But also sometimes it's nice to see a different opinion. I enjoy reading some articles like these even when I disagree with them.
The space scenes looked amazing. But that's not enough to make up for a single movie that destroys the entire point of both earlier trilogies. I can only assume he had never bothered to watch the other trilogies or just didn't give a shit. It would be like if there was another Lord of the Rings book or movie and three fourths through it, the One Ring is found at the bottom of a Dwarven shoebox in the land of Elves and needs to be destroyed again in Mount Doom, it doesn't make sense and it doesn't add anything. The director of Manos the Hands of Fate could have handled it better. I was expecting a bad movie, I walked out stating "I guess that's the end of Star Wars." The author is correct in one way, it's not a bad movie... it's fucking godawful!
What was amazing about the space scenes? Of the 2 minutes we saw of this massive battle, probably the most massive ever seen in a Star Wars film, it ironically wasn’t very impressive.
It was just so lazy and obviously a cost saving measure that we saw almost none of it, not to mention the big fleet was just a giant copy paste of previous film’s models (multiple Ghosts from Rogue One ect.). The Xyston being the worst. Our massive new Sith fleet was just a copy pasted Rogue One Imperial I Star Destroyer model scaled up with giant cannons modeled onto the bottom.
Obviously some models are going to be reused and for consistency this makes sense but for this movie it was obviously just a last minute cost saving maneuver.