Last time I watched RotJ, I walked away with the impression that all the bits with Luke, Vader and Palpatine in RotJ were pretty fantastic, while everything on Endor was pretty...not.
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A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy: The Star Wars Thread
Although it absolutely nails the most important scene in the franchise, Return of the Jedi is nevertheless the weakest film in the original Star Wars hexalogy, and it's all because of the second act's loss of energy.
But it's still better than the best Disney Star War (Rogue One).
But it's still better than the best Disney Star War (Rogue One).
The countless TIEs swarming over the Rebel fighter squads, nod nod.
R1 has the second best space battle in the franchise, nod nod.
(I kid, I kid.)
Phantoon
I cuss you bad
One day I hope to love something as much as Palpy loves being eeeeevil
No lies detected, I'd agree with this. RotS is probably more spectacular than both but RotJ and Rogue One the battles have a story with ebb and flow beyond "Obi-wan and Anakin's wacky adventures on the way to The Invisible Hand".
And the fact the ship is called "The Invisible Hand" tells you everything you need to know about Grievous.
Edit: I forgot about Rise of Skywalker entirely, which tells you everything you need to know about that space battle too
Say what you will about the rest of the movie, but you can’t really take away the are do reinforcements coming out of nowhere to save the day when all seemed bleakest at the end of RoS.
You especially couldn’t if Endgame didn’t have an even better version of the same scene.
You especially couldn’t if Endgame didn’t have an even better version of the same scene.
Phantoon
I cuss you bad
It's so unearned though
The Last Jedi: Leia sends out a desperate call for help. Nobody so much as responds
Rise of Skywalker: Lando does it, entire galaxy shows up
Dude, he's a persuasive man
Anyway, the best reinforcements scene is the Ride of the Rohirrim. That's actual science.
The Last Jedi: Leia sends out a desperate call for help. Nobody so much as responds
Rise of Skywalker: Lando does it, entire galaxy shows up
Dude, he's a persuasive man
Anyway, the best reinforcements scene is the Ride of the Rohirrim. That's actual science.
As much as I’d like to credit Billy Dee, narratively that’s more because everyone collectively finally had enough of the Orders malarkey, and realized there would be no coming back otherwise.
I DID convince my dad to watch Endgame because I specifically compared the finale to that, so you may be right.
I DID convince my dad to watch Endgame because I specifically compared the finale to that, so you may be right.
And that’s where the comparison to Endgame also falls flat. Because the entirety of Endgame was an elaborate setup to enable that scene, so it felt like the proper culmination of the film. (Nevermind the entirety of the MCU.) In RoS it was an afterthought.
Phantoon
I cuss you bad
Yeah, you can put aside any and all grievances to wards Skywalker and the Rise Thereof, but MY major peeve is that the "space battle" had all the gumption of a whoopie cushion. There's no structure, the motivations are ridiculous (these ships can't fly UP! Somehow!) the cavalry moment is set up very badly and ends up with just a mass Copy-Paste of nameless nobodies that's just there for Wookiepedia to pick apart for references, and it doesn't even have the impetus to show the space battle that, presumably, ensued. It's just a couple of minor characters (one, introduced in this movie; the other, a seconds-long legacy cameo) blowing up a Star Destroyer or two.
Even the Star Wars fanfare when they revealed the copy-paste fleet felt tacked on and weird.
Even the Star Wars fanfare when they revealed the copy-paste fleet felt tacked on and weird.
I can conclude only that the meaning of this part of The Rise of Skywalker is that the people of the galaxy love Snoke and hate Palpatine.
Completely sincere not sarcastic statement: I would LOVE to see the Star Wars movie where that is effectively conveyed. Maybe a "prequel" animated series in 20 years? An entire galaxy of people going through something that makes them all simultaneously realize they want change sounds goddamn amazing and uplifting.
R.R. Bigman
Coolest Guy
The Last Jedi really painted the new trilogy into a corner. The only way to authentically follow up that movie would be a huge time skip of a decade or more, with Rey and Finn training a new generation of both force and non force users to take on Kylo and his band of new acolytes in a radically different First Order. Granted, that would be hard to do with real live actors, but it could have worked. I wish Rian Johnson would have had to follow up on all his ideas instead of going off to make Woke Clue while JJ farted out Return of the Jedi 2.
The key difference is It was public knowledge that the FO's superweapon went boom in TFA. So the FO was, for most of the galaxy, a threat yes, but still a bit abstract. Without the New Republic's central authority everyone was kinda trying to keep their own backyard safe.
Whereas in RoS, the FO demonstrated with Kijimi's destruction, that instead of one Death Star/Planet/Pokeball, they now had that tech on ALL their ships. It was made clear this was literally their last best chance to keep a fleet of planet killers from infesting the galaxy.
Egarwaen
(He/Him)
Hard disagree. I've just started rewatching the sequel trilogy, but there's a ton of stuff in TFA that TLJ builds on and is clearly setting up a third movie to slam dunk. A running theme through both movies is that there's no-one else to fight this fight for you; if you run away, that's it, the dark side wins. If you waste your life in a pointless sacrifice... That's it, the dark side wins. So then, both films ask, the enemy has you outnumbered and outgunned. How do you win?
And both films start to sketch out an answer. You win when common, ordinary people, even those ground down and under the thumb of evil - Stormtroopers, scavengers, maintenance techs, stableboys - when they awaken to their inherent power and sense of right. You win by making your enemy waste his strength fighting phantoms. You win by looking for an opening and taking advantage of opportunites. You win because your opponent is all about order and control and those are inherently inflexible, and struggle to respond to the novel and unexpected. You win by working together, through mutual support and assistance. At the end of TLJ, the protagonists are perfectly placed to put these lessons into practice. Rey has the original Jedi texts and a series of mystical experiences, and is poised to return to first principles and take an entirely new approach to the Force. Finn and Rose have seen the gilded rot at the roots of the First Order, and are equipped with a rallying cry to foment insurrection and tear out their enemy's heart. And Poe has learned his allies don't need a shining hero, they need a friend.
Drafts of the original episode 9 script have leaked. We know that Finn was going to be leading a Stormtrooper uprising, for example. And then Disney panicked and pulled the plug on all their plans and instead we got ... THAT.
Purple
(She/Her)
Could we seriously please not?
Also honestly, the whole sudden instant out-of-nowhere now-apparently-literally-named Star Destroyers popping up and starting a countdown clock before they all shoot at once and blow up every planet there is at once concept is such bad writing that there's no point in quibbling over inconsistencies.
Like, I GUESS if we're going to let that be a problem we can suddenly introduce, then sure, having literally everyone with any means to fight back show up to try to stop that makes sense no matter how reluctant anyone might otherwise have been, especially when it turns out all you have to do is wait for someone to hit the big weak point activator and then just shoot them a lot and everything is fine. But if you're really making your big action climax THAT childishly simple you really can't tell any stories around it.
If I were given the grim task of writing a new movie as a sequel to that, I think I legitimately would have to straight up play the card that we all just watched an extra long version of Rey going into that haunted tree on Dagobah, and state that the whole galaxy-destroying super fleet was just a metaphor. Because that's... really the only way that can even function. And while I was at it, the whole Grandpa Emperor thing works better as anxieties made manifest than an actual (actively contradictory) plot point.
I will never accept this so long as AOTC exists, which is a movie that feels like ~40% Naboo/Geonosis slog and "buy the tie-in novels, kids!" dangling plot threads to ROTJ's perhaps ~20% loss of momentum on Endor and neat wrap-up of everything.
There is no scene from the prequels I would rather watch than any scene from Return of the Jedi
Phantoon
I cuss you bad
Aw hell naw, not when "picnic on Naboo" happened. I love the prequels, but RotJ is a masterpiece of passing compared to AotC. And The Phantom Menace for that matter.
First up, Knives Out is a fantastic film, clever and funny with a ton of heart, a hell of a cast and I can't wait for the sequel.
Second, The Last Jedi actually set up something exciting; for the first time the sequel trilogy had been set up to tell an actually new story, something that hasn't been seen in Star Wars before. Somehow it got panel beaten into Crap Return of the Jedi.
Thanks J J!
That's a good explanation in the abstract, and I can see it happening within the story, but JJ's Time Kompressed narrative, and the unknown state of the galaxy prior to the film, blow it up. For the latter, we don't really know what the state of things is with the First Order, Now Under New Management. We know at LEAST a few months have passed, enough for the Resistance to go from "How many Kenner dolls can we fit on the Falcon" to "We have a few fighters and a cruiser and Merry from Lord of the Rings," and the FO is still scouring worlds to kidnap children, but it had been doing that even before TFA so its dominance over the galaxy at large is ambiguous at best.
Then, it's what, a day or so? Maybe? From Sheev's Fortnite Twitch stream (don't forget to hit the bell icon to get Notifications!) to his Sith All-Stars Arena blowing up in his face. The Resistance itself confirms it about 16 hours before the climax, and the galaxy itself is threatened only a few hours ahead of said climax. Is the galaxy really quivering in fear from either him or the FO? And assuming it was, in order to get the record-shattering fleet we got at the end, everyone participating in it must have already had some kind of combat readiness--especially the cruisers-- in order to mobilize and coordinate so quickly. Hell, since Lando left on this errand just before the Resistance went to find Palpy, and joined up with them about 20, 30 minutes later, then that massive fleet must have already been assembled somewhere and all it needed was someone to give them a destination.
The film assumes that Lando reached out to, convinced, gathered, and led the entire galactic fleet through the nebula, in just half an hour, without showing us what changed between TLJ and now beyond actions JJ had already described in TFA. (And then it does precisely zip with that fleet, which is my central peeve, but that's a different story.)
Honestly, TLJ blew open the field so wide that it would have taken some real effort to wrench it back onto the tried-and-true Star Wars, and unfortunately JJA was up for that specific task if not any other.
Egarwaen
(He/Him)
After tearing through all the Star Wars movies in continuity order, I'm developing the opinion that TLJ is actually well within the mold of the series even as it challenged a lot of assumptions about what the shape of that mold actually was.
Or, as @Büge put it, TLJ is directly and specifically calling back to Leia's (very nearly?) first line.
Phantoon
I cuss you bad
I agree completely. It's absolutely true to the spirit of Star Wars, it just puts the same old pieces together in new and interesting ways.
I don't mean that it overturns the whole thing. I think Rian Johnson fundamentally understands more about why Star Wars is neat and what makes it work than Abrams does. There are all sorts of places the story COULD have gone after TLJ and they just didn't take it there.