The weird thing about the sequels is the weird amount of people coping and saying they're not that bad. It's literally bad fanfiction written by people who couldn't care less about the franchise.
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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I was a kid when the prequels came out and loved them despite how they were poorly recieved by old fans.
Maybe these people who like the sequels are kids/teens.
I actually really liked Last Jedi on its own and consider it in the top half of my ranking of the franchise. I think Luke's characterization could've been handled better (and the whole Canto Bight subplot could've been cut wholesale) but looking at myself at 23 (how old Luke was in RotJ) and my experiences since, I found the lapse of judgement and faded optimism quite relatable. Adam Driver is one of my favorite actors and his portrayal of an abusive yet charismatic antagonist turned love interest was spot-on. There's also the comparisons you could make between the First Order and the rise of fascism in America today. That one's a bit of a stretch but it's important to recognize World War II's influence on the original trilogy and the Iraq War's on the prequels.
That said, Rise of Skywalker is not only the worst Star Wars film- I consider it the worst film I've ever watched. It's not a poorly-made film, the cinematography is great, but the plot is nonsensical. It redacts everything they set up in the Last Jedi, retroactively making that one worse than it is standalone. What seals it though is this will always be the ending of the saga- they can't go back and fix it. I've probably seen worse movies, but the disappointment will never reach the level that this one gives me.
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I was 20 when TPM released and not a single person I knew liked it. It is still the most disappointing part of the franchise for me with ep2 being a close second. Ep3 was an improvement but still just ok.
Now I see people in their 20s and early 30s that live the prequels and it's just strange to me. They're no better than the sequels (and worse in some ways) so I really don't understand people that enjoy them while crapping all over the newer films.
The prequels had a good story told incredibly poorly while the sequels have a bad story but at least it is told well (or at least better) and neither of those are recipes for a good film.
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To be fair, if you look at the original movies, most of the universe info is not contained therein.
There are books. You can, for example, pluck a trilogy on Han Solo’s backstory off the shelf at Barnes & Noble. You could do that 15-20 years ago. The books are all written by an array of different authors though they all take place within the Star Wars universe. What is that if not professionally written fan fiction?
FF isn’t my thing, I’m not endorsing it, just stating what I encountered when I tried to read a book or two engaging the Star Wars universe in the past.
They all had a stamp of approval from George Lucas though. Once Disney bought the franchise they said fuck all that and made it "not cannon".
More importantly, they had someone dedicated to maintaining the canon and keeping the various authors from contradicting each other too much
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I feel this about Futurama, and nobody else around me seems to care
I care. New Futurama seems different. I've seen all episodes and movies prior to 2023 at least 20 times a piece. At very least. The pre-2023 episodes are definitely all over the place in terms of quality too, don't get me wrong. I really tried to keep an open mind but the new Hulu stuff seems different.
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Episode 7: Derivative but fun
Episode 8: Pure trash
Episode 9: Desperately trying to piece together the plot
Episode 7: derivative boredom
Episode 8: I like thi---WHAT THE HECK IS HAPPENING? WHY??
Episode 9: JJ desperately trying to piece together a plot
"Poe commits mutiny for the 12th time; learns nothing."
9 was a reaction to the challenge of actually having to tell a story. The challenge was not accepted.
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How anyone thinks 9 is better than 8 is beyond me.
I've always said that the worst thing that 9 did was completely destroy any excitement for Star Wars in an instant.
Prior to 9 releasing, people didn't like 8 and were already souring on 7, but there was still discourse, people caught up on Star Wars news, people were excited for the new content.
After 9, the excitement dropped like a brick. It was the closure of a trilogy in one of the most profitable IPs in the world. There was still more content planned to come out soon iirc (the shows, and I think there was talk of more movies), so it's not like people stopped caring due to the lack of content. Nobody I knew was interested in discussing fan theories or analyzing the movies (except to rag on them, I suppose). It was as if millions of voices cried out in terror... And were suddenly silenced.
9 is just generic. It's mediocre. 8 is an active train wreck. God, I remember sitting in the theatre and being baffled by the opening 'conversation' between Hux and Poe. I legit thought it might have been another one of those fan vids that they show in the Alamo Theatre before the actual movie began, despite the opening crawl.
"Somehow", lightspeed skipping, 3PO not being able to translate from sith, the ancient dagger that is also the shape of the crashed death star from a highly specific angle, Palpatine fucks, whatever a diad is, 10,000 star destroyers.
I'm not pretending that 8 is a masterpiece, it isn't, and it's worse than any of the OT, but at least Johnson tried to do something to keep star wars at a galactic scale.
The worst bit of 9 is how small it makes star wars. Everything comes down to a tale of two families - Palpatine and Skywalker - in a way that nullifies everyone else's involvement. For a story that spans a literal galaxy, having it come down to those two families, twice, is terrible writing.
I mean, I agree with all of your criticisms of 9, I just don't agree that they make it worse than 8.
I mean, hell, "Finn immediately wakes up, loses faith in the rebellion"? The slow-motion chase through space? "Union negotiations" ha ha so funny? Carrie Poppins surviving for no real reason except perhaps to 'subvert expectations'? 3000 attempted coups of Poe and the uninspired leadership of Admiral Replacement? "I'm going to let you out of the brig, not because you've learned anything, but because committing mutiny is why I keep you around"? Hyperspace jumps can now be weaponized? Hoth 2 (this time it's salt) after an emergency landing with one ship? Twelve people survive out of the entire fleet so let's celebrate?
The ENTIRE Canto Blight nonsense, top to bottom? Especially the weird shoehorned animal rights bit? Benicio del Toro the arms dealer who exists for ten seconds (waste of a fantastic actor) and leaves on the stunning line "Maybe"? Grand Leader Whoever in a bathrobe talking about how much 'spunk' young Rey has and then dying in his first few minutes seen in person? Whatsherface falling in love with Finn over the space of a day or two and then managing to race her land speeder faster than Finn's, so she can catch up to him as he's going full throttle on a suicide mission and then save his life by... ramming him at full speed and wrecking both of their vehicles right on top of the enemy?
Luke casually throwing away the lightsaber like it was a piece of moldy bread? "The Jedi Scriptures"? Luke drinking blue milk fresh from the teat? Not even acknowledging (or barely acknowledging, I don't remember) Chewie coming back to see him, one of his oldest friends? The Porgs? Fuck. "Reach out and feel the force"? Luke decides to murder his innocent nephew in the middle of the night despite being such an idealist that he thought Darth Vader could come back from his atrocities? Casually brushing off his shoulder after getting his force projection blasted by the not-AT-ATs?
I'm probably missing so goddamn much. I'm not revisiting it. I saw it once, and once was one time too many.
There are only two things that 8 gave us that were good - the force bond on screen (and even that was tormented by the sheer awkwardness of it, especially asking Ben Swolo to put on a towel) and the almost Nietzschean philosophy embraced by Kylo Ren as a more articulate envisioning of the Dark Side. I do wonder if that was connected to KOTOR 2 or just one of those parallel evolution things.
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As someone not interested in star wars I can't wait for in ten 10 years time when suddenly liking the sequel trilogy is cool just like how the prequels were hated then became cool to like.
It's like poetry, it rhymes
I think there's a difference between how they were hated and what parts people liked.
The prequels people hate because Jar-Jar, and some other comic relief characters, were annoying, and also (especially episode 1) how slow they can be. Overall, the stories were liked I think.
The sequels people like for the action and entertainment, but you totally have to ignore the story for them to not fall apart. It constantly contradicts itself (and the existing lessons, like the OP) and only works to weaken the universe.
Basically, their opposites to each other. I think the difference is people can come to enjoy the world of the prequels and get past the bad bits (or skip them), but the analysis and growing recognition of the failures of the sequels will only get larger with time as we spend more time with them.
It's not just Jar-Jar. The amount of CG and green screen was off-putting given how good Lucas was at practical effects, and those more modern techniques have aged much worse in a much shorter time frame. The movies may be slow, but the action sequences are actually quite long, drawn out, and pointless (the third act of Attack of the Clones is especially bad). The fight choreography was also extremely different, with the simple, grounded light saber fights being replaced with silly back-flips and summersaults.
There are also odd story elements that seem to contradict the OT; why did Obi-Wan say Yoda trained him? How did the Jedi go from being a powerful peace-keeping force known throughout the galaxy to a myth in 20 years? Why did Leah claim she could remember her mother? (I'm sure Lucas came up with explanations for these things, but they still stand out.) All in all, they are a huge tone-shift from their predecessors, in both storytelling and filmmaking.
In contrast, the sequel films are able to emulate the original trilogy much more faithfully in terms of practical effects and set design. The real problem was, where Lucas over-developed his prequel trilogy for 30 years, Disney under-developed their sequels, with no plan for where the story should go. Abrahams created a basic retread of the first film, Johnson threw everything out in the second, and the third film was just desperately trying to write itself out of a corner. Those movies had no idea where they wanted to go, so they went nowhere.
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I'd be curious indeed what people in ten years will say about the sequel trilogy. But I have a strong feeling that it will still be disliked, because it did not have a vision and is a jigsaw mess unlike the prequels. The latter has a vision at least (thanks to Lucas still being at the helm), in spite of the cringey parts. The sequels did not have him and Disney just simply wants to milk the Star Wars IP which made sequels such a bore.
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The prequels are bad movies. But they tell an interesting story and have a unique setting. The sequels are also bad movies, but they're a disjointed chaotic mess that just rehashes the original trilogy. There's nothing to redeem.
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Nah, man. The scene people whine about is the equivalent of Luke wailing on Vader, getting that sweet, sweet hand vengeance, and then stopping to think about what it all means. In TLJ it's just compressed into like 3 seconds. In-universe, it's bad luck. In narrative terms, Ben was in a different point on his character arc.
I love The Last Jedi. It twisted ESB just enough not to be a carbon copy, it eliminated a very boring villain in a surprising way, it made the seductive power of the dark side seem almost plausible (one of a smallish number of things The Acolyte actually did pretty well), actually engaged with the prequels in a substantive and respectful way, and left things open ended enough that Episode 9 could have been really interesting. Yoda's appearance and interaction with Luke was amazing. That opening scene with Rose's sister in the bomber was extremely moving for how little we knew, a "tone poem" if you will.
On the negative side, Finn's arc was too subtly different from his Ep7 arc to make much difference. The logistics of the slow speed chase were a bit strained. We as the audience could have been clued into Holdo earlier than Poe was. The "your mom" joke didn't land. The pacing (and I maintain pretty much only the pacing) of Canto Bight was weak. Then, it could have used a line or two of handwavium at various points to keep the Ackshully's at bay: "The Raddus' navicomputer locked onto the hyperdrive tracker." Boom! Two birds with one stone.
It was still by far the best of the sequels and I'll live and die on the hill that they're all (yes, even THAT one) easier to watch than the acting and directing shitshow that was the prequels.
Nah, man. The scene people whine about is the equivalent of Luke wailing on Vader, getting that sweet, sweet hand vengeance, and then stopping to think about what it all means. In TLJ it’s just compressed into like 3 seconds. In-universe, it’s bad luck. In narrative terms, Ben was in a different point on his character arc.
If it worked for you, more power to you, I don't expect to change anyone's mind on this. But I can't help myself when I see the apologetics for the "Luke ignited his light saber over a bad premonition scene".
It's not just "bad luck", it's bad writing. Luke didn't just "wail on Vader" to get that "sweet hand vengeance". He initially turned himself in believing he could convert his father back to the light. He only attacked after extreme emotional manipulation from one of the most powerful Sith Lords ever, during an active battle to determine the fate of all his friends, all they fought for, and the literal freedom of the Galaxy. That is a far reach from a moment of pure safety where he had a bad premonition and the "threat" was sleeping.
The whole explanation of this scene (and by extension the plot point that the core of the ST hinges on) assumes Luke not only learned nothing from successfully turning Vader back to the light, but actively learned the opposite lesson.
I get that people can change over time, and not always for the better, but this is just hands down terrible character writing. Making such drastic changes in such an iconic character, without spending any time developing those changes, having those changes be directly counter to the lessons the character supposedly learned during his primary arc, and then using this unexplained change as the catalyst to the entire ST is awful writing.
And we are not even touching on his new found love of "THE SACRED TEXTS!", or how he completely gives up and goes hermit mode.
I'll give Rian credit for actually trying to innovate when it was his turn at bat, but his handling of Luke was honestly some of the most egregious examples of not understanding the characters you are writing, and having them pick up the idiot stick just to move the plot forward.
The whole explanation of this scene (and by extension the plot point that the core of the ST hinges on) assumes Luke not only learned nothing from successfully turning Vader back to the light, but actively learned the opposite lesson.
This really pisses me off and Disney have to carry that shit.
The jedi of the prequel/originals are wrong about emotions/feelings and Lukes prove then wrong when he saves Anakin. But because of this fuck up writing now Lukes is a dumb removed who got luck in the originals and is doomed to failed like the others jedis. We already saw that in the Boba Fett series when he gives up on Grogu because "too much attachment" come on dude.
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I'm with you 100% on everything you wrote here and I've had this argument with my brother countless times. He blames Rian Johnson for everything bad about the sequels and it's bs.
Personally I think the biggest thing TLJ suffered from was the split focus between Poe and Finn. It made both stories rushed or weak in various places.
And for that I blame Disney. Did you know that Poe wasn't even supposed to be a big character? He was supposed to be in the first scene of Ep7 and that's it. But execs saw his performance and insisted they needed his character to play a bigger role. As such, we get attention split between Poe and Finn and both suffer for it.
I feel awful for John Boyega who was such a massive Star Wars fan, got the role of his dreams, and then effectively got sidelined for a pretty-boy.
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Nah, man. The scene people whine about is the equivalent of Luke wailing on Vader, getting that sweet, sweet hand vengeance, and then stopping to think about what it all means. In TLJ it's just compressed into like 3 seconds. In-universe, it's bad luck. In narrative terms, Ben was in a different point on his character arc.
If they had chosen to show the dreams, Luke struggling with it for ages and that scene as a last resort failure I could agree with you. Like he wake up everyday and each day he go closer to Kylo's bed, the scene could be awesome. In the movie looks like the little shit Luke became a weak mind Jedi.
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I would have rather the first order take the place of the rebellion and committed terrorist attacks in Luke’s paradise
I wish they had kidnapped Kylo and disillusioned him
The rest of 7 could have played out the same
For 8 get rid of Holdo, it’s stupid to bring in a character that out ranks everyone and serves only to delay the plot
You can have silly casino planet in First Order occupied space to show they grew since the last movie. Make Rose more relevant, have them looking for a Jedi temple for Finn. Have her so she previously worked as a librarian in Jedi archives before the first order destroyed it. Now she knows all these locations and things about the force even though she can’t use them. Luke is hiding because he blames himself for the people the First Order killed and he doesn’t want to put anyone else in harm’s way, trains Rey but she still has dark visions and connects to Kylo. Have Rey turn evil, her and Kylo defeat Snoke (can be the same way) then take the first order to fight Luke because she knows where he is, the two of them together are enough to kill Luke
The last movie if you want Palpatine to return do it through Rey’s body and have her be the final boss. You can parallel 6 with the Skywalker turning good and saving Finn, this time have them team up against full Sith Lord Rey in the fight. Or have Finn take them on one by one while Rose stops their doomsday plans and Po deals with a space battle
On top of this, get rid of Snoke and have Thrawn lead the First Order. He forces Imperial holdouts to join him or be destroyed. He's smart enough to use Empire loyalists in the New Republic to dismiss his threat until he's strong enough to go on the attack.
I know they're building to this in Ashoka, but it should have been this way from the start.
On top of this, get rid of Snoke and have Thrawn lead the First Order.
One of the things that made the Thrawn trilogy work was the way it played out the inevitable decay of the old Empire, even with a brilliant strategist at its helm. The rot went too deep and the ideology that drove the Imperial movement couldn't hold it together. Militarism wasn't enough to keep the imperial regions united, while the New Republic offered allure that couldn't be easily rebutted.
The movies couldn't conceptualize this imperial decay or recognize the New Republic as a powerful political force drawing the fractured galactic planets together again. They had to reset the state of the setting to "Bad Guys Strong, because Big Lasers and Ships" while the Republicans were once again weak, scattered, and on the run.
I might say you could salvage Snoke (as a reskin of Joruus C'baoth) and Sloane and Hux and Kylo Ren, cast within this desperate grasping to Retvrn To Tradition. Then rename "The First Order" as "The Last Command", implying they follow the last words of the now-dead Emperor Palpatine. And you can even lean in to the ghost of Palpatine and the echoes of fascism that do provide some lingering cohesiveness to the dying Imperial movement.
But these climactic space battles that are decided by One Brave Starfighter Defeating The Big Imperial Machine aren't able to resonate in the final series, because they don't answer the question of what comes next. At some point, the New Republic needs to be a thing we care about and the conflict needs to move away from "How do we beat the Empire?" and into a "How do we make the New Republic do better than the Old One?"
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I actually liked TLJ as well. Like others said, I liked these Force Connection scenes with Rey and Kylo, I liked how it dispatched Snoke, dismissing the idea of yet another Star Wars conflict being controlled by an evil old wizard and instead gives sets the way for a new story by giving Kylo Ren the reigns of the new empire (which was thrown in the trash by JJ in ep 9, which is the gravest sin for me of that film), and gives a plausible take on the seduction to the dark side and to the light side. I know these ideas were poorly implemented e.g. the proposition Kylo makes to Rey "Hey, look, I've killed the evil emperor! Join me and we can take this whole thing over. Let's start by killing all your friends!". What a great offer, Kylo. But still I liked that this was something new and more than just a rehash.
What I also really loved is that not every character has to be related to the Skywalkers or another character of the other trilogies, again something JJ threw in the trash by ep 9. Why does Rey have to of some ancient magical lineage? I liked the idea that the force was running through people everywhere, even through slave kids on the casino planet. Everybody can be a hero, even if your parents or ancestors weren't. Wait, what's that, JJ? Everything was Palpatine all along? Never mind then.
To be fair to John Jonah, he had to work around the director of TLJ's narcissistic take on the 2nd episode of a trilogy, i.e. not giving a shit how the next director (whoever it was going to be at that time) could possibly come up with a good conclusion to two extremely disjointed prior movies. I mean it's neither director's fault, to be honest, it's Lucasfilm's, marketing this as "The next SW trilogy!!", not just "three more movies from that universe you guys seem to enjoy so much". Also he was too busy running a newspaper at the same time.
"Maybe we should have planned the trilogy" - JJ after RoS
Disney allocated a billion dollars to a trilogy of movies and didn't even ask for outlines of scripts first. I know JJ is "mystery box guy" and all but the amount of hubris to think they could just wing it on the strength of the IP is staggering.
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Funny thing is that with Vader it's not even in an indirect sense.
Mans absolutely could have canonically killed millions with his own two hands,
He got surrounded after crash landing on a dessert planet and the dude looks around and tells the commander calling for his surrender is "All I am surrounded by is fear, and dead men."
IDK how they'd fare against each other in a fight, but Vader is definitely putting in the work to compete on Kharne the Betrayer's million+ kill count, which we can only guess from that being how many people he's killed that he was in control of himself enough to retrieve their skulls to offer to Khorne.
dessert planet
Mmmm… dessert planet… 🤤
"I hate powdered sugar.. it's poofy and hard to clean and it gets everywhere!"
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(credit: pixelatedboat from old Twitter)
The one on the right is Jake Skywalker.
Idk, I'm nostalgic for the prequels because I grew up with them, but if they were released now and I had only seen the original trilogy I would've made the these comments about them too. Wat frustrates me the most about the sequels is that there's just no coherent plot. It's so obvious that everyone was just writing whatever without looking at the bigger picture. They could've went with this and actually gone somewhere. But 8 was just an exercise in doing everything the viewer didn't expect or want until it got way too frustrating without actually going anywhere and 9 was just a clusterfuck because it tried desperately to get an epic conclusion on a completely incoherent trilogy.
7 was already flawed, but if 8 and 9 had further established how the First Order got so large, who Snoke was, etc it could've been acceptable. I totally see the "Luke gets disillusioned and isolates himself" spin even if I'd prefer a "Luke slaps the shit out of everyone" story. It gave the new characters some space. But that space wasn't used.
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