The Rise of Skywalker: Discussion

I don't like the cliche of "you've become what you hate" (a PT fan bashing the ST), which was said a few times to me on TFN -- even though there's some truth in it. It is a shaming tactic and it is wrong. However, I think it's also fair to say (as MIDI wisely put it on an earlier page) that there's an element of the oppressed turning into the oppressors. The prequels were bashed hard, and prequel fans were bashed hard for liking them, so let's gang up on the ST movies, which are blatantly a load of rubbish, and everyone knows it (this should sound familiar). It's too easy for prequel fans to fall into that trap. Many of the things being said about the sequels were being said all the time about the prequels ten years ago. Rubbish acting, horrible writing, dismal romance, Anakin's a creep, awful storytelling, bad directing, etc. That's why I'm not so eager to buy it all a second time. Not now there's this tide of animosity against the Disney movies. It's like it's now a given that people are meant to agree they're terrible. In just three years, it went from being unpopular to bash the new movies when TFA and "Rogue One" came out (back then, criticism was about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit), to being the default position after TLJ, TROS, and sneering over the box office failure of "Solo" turned into the new norm.

Perhaps I just have this compulsion within me to come to the aid of the underdog. I've always hated bullying and any whiff of mob rule or annoying groupthink. Go on YouTube, right now, and it's easy to conclude people are just feeding each other the same memes and pre-bottled emotional responses. It's like droids repeating "roger, roger" every five seconds; and the more of them there are, the more often you hear it being uttered. Ugh! Why can't Star Wars receive a more rounded response? Why is everything either really great or fundamentally flawed and shouldn't-have-been-made unfortunate? What happened to middle grounds? Why are fans content to be stormtroopers past a certain point?

I wish people were able to find and adopt more imaginative, personal, and exotic interpretative frameworks. Instead of the same-old, same-old. You see the same stuff being said, and it gets hideously boring, you know? Star Wars calls for a bit of lateral thinking. Every lightsaber duel has its own set of parries and blows. You're your best when you're going within and locating your authentic self. Not repeating what others say. Beware, as Alec Guinness once said, of a world of second-hand, childish banalities.




I might say Indy in the 1950s frozen-in-time Middle American town, hastily bundling his full person into a lead-lined fridge, and surviving a nuclear bomb blast with nary a scratch, and still emerging in time to see the mushroom cloud, without it burning his eyeballs or letting himself be cooked like a shrimp on a barbecue. That's hardcore spoiler protection, alright.

In any case...

Never, ever change.

Oh, and when someone says D.A.R.Y.L., I assume they mean Darryl Hannah's name in lights. Yes, I do. And yes, thank you.

Obscure sci-fi flicks for the win!




I also love the collisional dialectic that a message board offers. There ain't nothin' else quite lyyyke it. Look at this one. Plenty of sparks. Maybe too many of the same colour. Let's see kaleidoscopic sparks, people. More tension, more animosity, more disagreement, more argument, more hate. Let the hate flow through you.

*checks his background to see if his past doesn't make him a Palpatine*



Probably the wrong word. It just introduces certain impurities and isn't quite cricket. People being negative in advance. 



The contents of the movie lie predominantly in the specific assembly of plot elements, and the aural-visual execution. The thrill of cinema is in the "go" of it. It's not that plot elements can't be discussed. They often are. Almost invariably so. But every movie has a life, has a spirit, has a name. They can't necessarily be determined in advance.  



Then I guess I should have posted earlier. But I was avoiding spoilers. I just think an artistic property should be seen first and then ranked. The artistry of film doesn't rest solely in plot details. 



They should have been addressed. It was a little unfair they were ignored; especially with slander taking the place of any true critical response to aforesaid remarks. Humans can be oppressive and negligent, and that's when they're behaving well!

Just to clarify, I don't necessarily find any non-Lucas material to be blasphemous (I don't count it as canon, but that's another issue). I find material that goes directly against Lucas' Star Wars as flawed or even insulting, sometimes to the point of blasphemy, yes. And I believe this Disney trilogy is that, on many levels.

It's something that I held against a lot of Expanded Universe material too, the difference is that no EU work was done at the expense of existing Lucas material nor did any of it get as much visibility or prominence as a theatrical release. There's a responsibility there as well.

Ah! Ingram! Let me count the ways I love thee...

Thank you for being the voice of reason, wit, and wisdom here, as per usual.

Your middle sentence ("It's a rabbit hole...") is especially cogent. People are always trying to play victim and seize the "high ground", aren't they? 

And oooh... 

"Cocktail of the continuing franchise"! I like that!!!

You're right that there's no "Theory Of Everything" (Felicity Jones/Jyn Erso excluded) when it comes to The 'Wars. There are only individual preferences operating in individual spaces.

Wait...

*Plinkett voice*

That don't make no sense.

With prequel hatred, it's hard not to see a hivemind mentality at work. Person A says they hate (or dislike) the films, then Person B says it, then Person C, etc. I've massively oversimplified, but you get my point. Machines making machines.

And in this case, there was also the ever-growing machine of the geek-media, constantly generating clickbait, continually reminding people how "awful" and "terrible" those prequels were, with an incessant conveyor belt of articles, videos, tweets, water-cooler memes (before PrequelMemes fought back)... you name it. 

Yet to deny someone their own opinion is, in effect, to deny them their personhood. Which is a stupid and quite a dangerous thing to do. That's what happened at TFN. Group politics. You couldn't have valid issues against the Rey character. To even insinuate she might be a "Mary Sue" meant you were painting yourself as a deadbeat misogynist and alt-right sympathiser, and therefore, you were simply asking to be punished. Remember how the prequels received equivalent protection when they came out? Yeah, I don't, either.

On a side-note, I don't think I quite understand the "timeless" argument (in defence of the "Lucas Saga") raised earlier. Mythology may aspire to a kind of timelessness, but it's always embedded in a cultural context, temporally and spatially. That's not to say the focus and concerns of a given mythological work are confined to any particular space or time. But mythologies do grow out of particular conditions and tend to repeat certain patterns (the Campbellian hypothesis). So they are both local and global in different ways.

Anyway, thanks for emphasising the individual nature of the artistic/mythological experience, and for sounding a warning against collectivist thinking. Yes, us prequel fans may loosely form a sort of tribe or alliance, but we're still individuals -- coloured dots in a painting -- with our own particular frequency/point-of-view. It's easy to become a little overbearing and obstreperous in a heated conversation and lose sight of both the similarities and the differences. The ties that both individuate and that bind.    

You know, one thing that seems a bit unsatisfying about Ben's redemption is that Kylo never really achieves the kind of evil he aspired to be in the first place. Most fans, I think, would point to him killing his own father as his single irredemable act, but he never comes across as cold, the way Vader did.
Within context of the saga, this makes sense, as Anakin never truly comes across as cold until the next trilogy where he is Vader incarnate. Young Anakin gradually turn toward evil, but Kylo starts evil when we meet him, and he succumbs to his true nature over the course of the trilogy. The call to the light.
Just thinking out loud.

He's more overtly conflicted. We often get to see his face. He alternates between wearing the mask, his face, smashing the mask, his face, repairing the mask, his face, wearing the mask, and again, his face. He's like Anakin in the PT. Anakin usually has a face covering of some kind. Except in Episode II. Unless you count the vines over his face during his nightmare on Naboo. It's almost like the rhyming scheme of Star Wars gone wrong. A "real" person, full of fragile fracture lines, emerges as a result. Kylo is like some Venn Diagram superpositioning of the PT and OT. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.  



Uh-huh. What grates here is that they seem to be saying woe-is-them for attempting a "diverse" cast and that being rejected by wider audiences. In other words, they appear to be passive-aggressively blaming the audience, rather than acknowledging grievous flaws of story, structure, and conceptual worldbuilding on their own part. That said, they seem to be giving into handwringing way too early in the game, as if many of those rumours are likely true: i.e., Abrams and Co. are personally unhappy with the way TROS turned out because they were creatively overruled numerous times by Disney, and they also weren't given nearly enough time to make a coherent film that they could be proud of.  

To be honest:

This is actually quite sad to read. Stand by your product. At least until it's out of theaters. 

Why not take a leaf out of Rian Johnson's book? He acknowledged the split in the fanbase, but never backed down and threw his own movie under the bus.

That's why I suspect there really was a lot of heartache and tears -- and probably a bit of swearing and coffee-cup hurling -- behind the scenes. Abrams is so quick to apologise to:

a) Save his own neck, and
b) Signal his disdain for what happened during production.

It's, well...

Disappointing. 

Also:

What happened to fans/critics being ignorant manbabies? They're not going with that, now, are they?

Nice! I like fresh interpretations. 

Exactly, in fact!

After all, Lucas later says:

"It's stylistically designed to be that way" -- with respect to the film's boldness, or its visual/kinetic/thematic density.

Seems he was a little amused at what the creative, unruly part of his conscience did under the nose of his rational, business-oriented mind.

Wait! Nose... of his mind? Eh, go with it.

Gungans vs. Naboobians.

Naboobians? Eh, go with that, too.

You know, I was just thinking yesterday about the name Naboo. How it sounds like baby talk or motherese, and it's a nipply, breasty name in itself. Its core is made of water. Everything there is soft... and smooth...

Thus concludes my trilogy of "You know..." posts, for now.

I'll never get over the ballsy-ness of Lucas saying "if they don't like [TPM] they can go back and watch The Matrix."

As opposed to the public sentiment that if you don't like the ST you must be a racist, sexist troglodyte. Or Abrams' excuses.

I don't know, Lucas' statement is just not something I could see Disney saying. For them, it's the viewers fault.