It might be the best of the sequels, but that's basically by default because the Force Awakens might as well have been a remake of A New Hope, and the Rise of Skywalker was... I don't even know what to call it, with the blatant cynical pandering to angry fans with just retconning everything the previous movie did, and just nothing in the plot making sense.
But at least it tried something new, even if that thing didn't really work in the end.
Yeah, what is it with star wars fans and harassing the shit out of actors who aren't even at fault for the problems with their character (not that it would justify harassment if they were).
Yeah... between Jar Jar, Nute Gunray, and Watto, the phantom menace had some very weird racial stereotypes.
That script was written by a sentient bag of cocaine and then shot and edited by people too afraid to call out George Lucas for writing a shitty movie.
The Resistance or w/e they are called were literally just flying around the Sith planet not firing at any of the planet killing lasers, just getting absolutely slaughtered, until the armada of cargo ships shows up, at which point they go "Oh that's right, we had a plan to blow up the lasers to destroy the ships" and they blow up the entire fleet. Then after all the ships are destroyed, they just wipe their fucking hands and go "Good job guys" and immediately leave instead of doing search and rescue for all of the people that got shot down and executing every single last fucking sith follower on the planet. That movie makes me want to pull my hair out. The space battle in TLJ was bad enough.
TLJ Is a slow motion chase in space between an evil galactic empire that can't shoot straight and an inept rebel faction that can't keep communication between it's chain of command;
It's also a great concept for a Spaceballs sequel
The Canto Bight casino sequence may actually have been the set of Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money.
Lightspeed kamikaze was the sort of fun and spectacle that makes you feel like an excited 7 year old again - and let's be honest, these aren't Serious Films, and it's ok to have a cool anime moment in your space monk opera. Kylo and Rey do Kurosawa in the throne room was also aces.
Casino planet sucked, salt planet sequence was meh. But all that kill-your-heroes stuff - Snoke being capped, Rey being nobody, sad-sack PTSD Luke, Jedi/Sith fusion dance - these were all good and necessary threads that should have been picked up if this series was going to be anything more than a vehicle for cute alien plushies
The fact that Snoke turned out to be Humansized, and not the size of his hologram was a bummer.
Imagine fighting a 12 story Jedi with a lightsaber the size of a bus and a half!
That'd be rad.
You can't really lay all the squandering at TLJ's feet though, Rise of Skywalker went out of it's way to not just squander the potential of itself, it went back in time to re-squander the stuff TLJ didn't squander in the first place.
I honestly kinda love it just for being a big-budget official Star Wars sequel whose entire thesis boils down to "Man, fuck Star Wars!"
It was a jumbled mess. The whole bizarre and contrived hyperspace chase felt like such a weird idea to structure the entire movie around. The casino planet, along with the hijinx with the hacker guy, and actually just the entirety of the Finn/Rose subplot just felt so pointless to me. Kudos for trying to inject some moral complexity into the Star Wars universe I guess, but I'm not sure we really needed evil alien cartoon capitalist weapons manufacturers.
I found the Luke, Rey and Kylo stuff compelling and as someone who spent a large chunk of playing Kotor arguing with the Jedi characters I really dug the Grey Jedi thing they seemed to be going for until they just threw all of that in the garbage and ended up reaffirming the status quo
I mean I'm with ya up to a point but I will never forgive them for the kamikazi hyperjump. Why did anyone do anything over the last 7 movies when they could have solved all of their problems by ghost riding a star destroyer through Coruscant?
Quiet you...
This is actually a known problem with all space scifi (except I guess Culture maybe?) "Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction. It only matters how long you want to wait for maximum damage."
it was fine, and with some great moments, hindered by two big problems:
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finn's story shoulda been destroying the stormtrooper indoctrination center and liberating all the slaves there
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the jedi and sith shoulda reached a synthesis after killing snooku
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honestly that's the point i've arrived to. if you keep being close to sw fans they all end up screaming about how your fave is a bad movie, to the point i just decided yknow what, no movie is good. the star wars franchise is just bad. fuck it. in other fandoms you see people being like "yeah this season wasnt the best, but it has lots of good points and i can understand why you like it" but in SW it's just "pff you think that episode VI is good? fucking dumbass."
I never laughed as hard in a theater as when Leia uses the force to pull herself back into the ship from the vacuum of space. The rest of the movie was fine I guess, better than the other two of the new trilogy
