The Rise of Skywalker: Discussion

Nicely done! I'm sure that little symbol lured you here by "broadcasting" in the Force. Not a Sith broadcast, mind you -- a positive, life-affirming one, which is congruent with the meaning of the symbol, as just explained (and as originally selected) by Tony. I love it. If you want to link it more specifically to the PT, then it's pseudo-similar in appearance to this archway/alcove pattern when Anakin is doin' his thang and stewin' and brewin' at the lip of Padme's bedroom in ROTS:

 
See the vague similarity? Not consciously chosen for that reason, but I think it's kinda neat.

Neat for a retreat, where we can escape the heat, of a bunch of prequel-bashing, mod-enabling deadbeats. Okay, enough rhyming... seriously.

I really like the fact that the forum, or its name, has that little identifying monogram/imprimatur at the end. Sort of like a coat of arms or something. Or some mystery cult marker.

You did very well to bookend your list of reprobates with ice and fire. That's sort of how the Sequel Trilogy bookmarks itself, isn't it?

Let me also tell you that Pyrogenic spun his name off of mine after the second teaser trailer for TFA, which itself seemed to first convey this "fire and ice" theme:



I hadn't even realised, but Pyro's good at this stuff:

"Pyrogenic" is also an anagram of "recopying". Kinda freaky what gets sublimated into these clone units, isn't it?

Anyway... 

It's really great to finally have you here, Ingram, whether your visitations be short or long. I've been hoping you'd check this place out for some time. How do you like the decor? Wait -- don't answer that. We're still moving in. Barely got a functioning TV. 

Thanks for sticking up for me and asking about me on TFN in the PT social thread(s). Yeah, I know: I feel a bit of a cringe factor directly mentioning that place, too. Kylo: I feel it, too. I kept meaning to sneak back and privately thank you under a new name. 

I can't post on this name because I'm banned. And I can't thank you under Pyrogenic because, despite the fact we may sometimes seem like the same entity, we're actually different people -- usually. No, seriously, we are. I did register a new name on TFN. I think it was two names, actually, after misplacing my sign-in details for the first. But I never had the heart to actually post there again after being ejected without explanation.

It was interesting, I thought, after a couple of good folks here pointed it out to me, that a certain PT moderator first lied about there being any kind of purge. Putting some salt in the wound, my banning took place in June 2017, the year of Star Wars' 40th anniversary. Talk about a charitable, ecumenical sensibility! I had even planned a celebratory post on the original film, and intended to reprise some of your remarks made to IMDb in your celebration threads (if you remember those), but that went by the wayside. I missed the anniversary month itself, and promised myself I'd get to it the same date in June, but I was booted about a week before the date, so was unable to rejoice in the original film -- let alone say anything further in that auspicious year about the prequels or the sequels.

Where was I? Okay, just indulge me for another paragraph or so...

So a PT moderator first lied about my ban (and our own mikeximus would be another that was banned a month before I was), but then later admitted I had been banned (or we had been banned) when you made mention of my absence a second time, months later. The other PT mod, on the other hand, while actively posting in the same thread, was quiet in both instances: the one who actually banned me (and mikeximus). His stooge, who initially chose to lie/conceal when you brought the subject up, actually had a private discussion with me on Facebook some months after my ban, only to deny that TFN was in any sense authoritarian. He said, despite his denials (and a slight softening after I adduced a lot of evidence in favour of my position), he'd do his best to vouch for me and help me return if I wanted to "make a case" for coming back, but I was reluctant to suck up to anyone, let alone grovel to be let back in, given the absurd premises of my banning to begin with. Eventually, after I saw him publicly lie about anyone being banned, pretending it was just people moving on with their lives, I decided he was without scruple and that I'd be better off never speaking to him again, or posting there -- at least while those individuals remain as moderators.

It's sad that human affairs often have to be so bitter, and often laced with treachery and deceit, but that's sort of the lesson of the PT: power corrupts. Hilariously, the mods on TFN don't see that lesson, and they don't see themselves as corrupt. They worship the movies as a fetish object. And even that is pretend. One of the two PT mods I was just describing doesn't even like the PT very much (going by some of his recent posts) -- a common pattern on there. Didn't Lucas say that that's what he was exploring in the PT? How people think they're doing good, even when much the opposite is occurring? Well, again, I think that's the behaviour of certain mods on there, in a nutshell. They like ruling over their empire of dirt. That little drop of power obviously gives them a thrill. A bit off-topic, I suppose, but I was keen to give you my side of the story, at last. 

Another irony in all this is that I may have started off and continued as a staunch Disney critic, but I'm not some anti-Sequel Trilogy fundamentalist -- clearly. Everyone should be allowed to opine as they choose. Censorship is pretty much always a dick move. It means that truth is unable to collide and repair error. It also encourages lying and cowardice. Had I been allowed to continue on as I was, since I wasn't in violation of any forum rules (even the moderator stooge admitted that much to me in private), I would likely have come to a similar set of opinions on these films as I now express, in time. But I'm unable to share those views with anyone on there. Frozen out. As my name somewhat fatefully implies. But life goes on. That was probably all a bit more mawkish that it needed to be, but oh, well...


Ha! You do me a lot of credit. I suppose my response was a stream-of-conscious/initial-reaction mosaic thing. The hour was pretty late and I'd only just gotten back from the showing. Quite an epic drive to get there, too (I live miles from an appropriate movie-house). Call it a Skywalker pilgrimage. But less desert; more wind, rain, windy roads, and sheets of fog. And boy, was that a surprisingly expensive cinema ticket. I saw "The Force Awakens" in a bespoke cinema a bit closer to where I live, but they unfortunately weren't showing TROS. I think Disney gouges prices and small places can't necessarily afford the fees. Shame. They had TFA and "Rogue One" (which I saw at a different location). Pretty sure they had "The Last Jedi", too. But didn't go out and see that one for various reasons. Nor "Solo". But in the place I saw TFA in, they really made the effort. Customised movie program (which I still have), iconic decals on the wall inside the auditorium (Alfred Hitchcock, Sean Connery as Bond, Leia crouching at R2 to record her message to Obi-Wan, Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill" -- just the place to see an iconic blockbuster series at). Conversely, while the place I just went and saw TROS at had big TROS banners in the lobby, it's otherwise an impersonal multiplex theater.

I have to hold up my hand to the notion I liked this movie better than you. I had and continue to have reservations about it, but something sort of hit me about TROS from Day One. Little things, big things, sweet nothings. The blue logo. Restful, peaceful: Jedi. The intensely expressionistic and undeniable use of blue and various cyanogenic shades in the movie's overall visual palette. The ice theme: how could a guy calling himself Cryogenic not like a good ice theme? The lush, organic, wholesome shades of colour on the jungle planet. The desert planet and its brightly-attired revellers. The Laketown-like feudal village planet. Kylo's red blade against the dark blue abyss. The ferocious waves of water on Death Star planet. A clad-in-white Rey (Skywalker). Red-eyed Threepio. Star Trek V-style anachronistic space horses. See? There's a visual logic and a serene, spooky beauty to the look of TROS I just love. Like "Die Another Day" meets "The Dark Knight Rises" meets "Skyfall" meets latter-installment "Harry Potter" seasoned with a bit of "Indiana Jones" (Ingram's blood pressure rises). Yes, it may be Abrams, and it may be terribly frenetic and derivative, but it has this furious fastening of visual choices that I love. I've never been able to say that, by contrast, about TFA. Or even TLJ. TROS is the first and only splurge-y Sequel Trilogy movie, and it's better that it happened once rather than never. 


LOL! I understand that feeling. And apt: TROS is an angram of ROTS.

Did you notice they worked both an exclamation mark into the start of the crawl and even the word "REVENGE"? 

According to co-writer Chris Terrio (who we may have to thank for this movie's sense of smart-cheesiness more than Abrams himself), that word was hotly intended to be there:

www.indiewire.com/2019/12/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-chris-terrio-spoilers-1202198680/

“We debated and debated what the crawl would say, and we wanted to have the word ‘revenge’ in the crawl, a message of revenge in the voice of the late Galactic Emperor Palpatine,” Terrio told IndieWire.

I know what you mean, though. Even the title makes me wanna start breaking out food/cooking jokes:

The Rise Of Doughwalker
The Rice Of Skywalker

But yeah, what a goofy closer, eh?


Little is forbidden here. Refer to yourself and reprise yourself as much as you like. Your writings shouldn't exist in one location. They need to be beamed all over the Internet, then the solar system, the galaxy, and finally, the universe. I'm only half-kidding. 

The thing about this Sequel Trilogy, especially under Disney/Abrams, is that it was always going to be the Target/Walmart/Costa Coffee/Instagram version of Star Wars. So I often get a slight shudder trying to contemplate it as "art" (or, I suppose: "Art"). At the very least, the Lucas films are finely-done edutainment. I don't know if I can be so casually generous toward the Disney films. Any of them. TLJ probably deserves the most praise. Though, at this very moment, I'm more eager/excited to watch, discuss, and think about TROS. If TFA was just some basic burger and fries combo with some tasty sauce, then TLJ was a mightily-stacked sandwich served on a gorgeous plate, while TROS is more a greasy pizza that's come nervously flying out of the oven and been hastily put in a takeaway box for immediate delivery. It's at least trying to impress and do something; even if it's often hasty and a bit highly-strung about it. I love your terms, though: "branding course correction and normie fan servicing". 

You actually just reminded me of something. It's so random, it's almost ridiculous. Kylo flinging that First Order (or Final Order/whatever) guy against the ceiling. Obvious callback to his grandfather doing that to a rebel soldier at the tacked-on climax to "Rogue One", prismatically transposed with his grandfather assaulting Motti after being insulted at the big-wig Imperial conference table. Once again, I was surprised the film cut so quickly there, and slightly annoyed. But it makes a certain kind of sense. TROS is so damn glib/lazy/fruity/nutty about so much of its own lore. Like: "Yeah. Whatever. Kylo can do all that Vader stuff. Next." It's very hard to place it. But, essentially, there is a disconcerting offhandedness about TROS that is sometimes enjoyable in its mercurial oppressiveness. Like the gremlin of Rian Johnson's bathetic riffing in TLJ carried into the mechanism and locked up the gears of the last installment. The Force of Rian Johnson can have a strong effect on the frenetic-minded. 

You would probably find much to agree with in the following review (I admit: I stole the word "prismatic" from there):

www.polygon.com/star-wars/2020/1/6/21051843/star-wars-rise-of-skywalker-trilogy-end-return-of-the-jedi-revenge-of-the-sith


Well, in a way, JJ Abrams is the hipster wrecking ball that's come along to prove all that abstract/tone poem/pure cinema guff is bullshit and gets in the way of creating a more direct meaning through delectable vamping. If Lucas is highly theoretical, then Abrams is more like a boxing glove to the face. It's crude -- even crass -- but it works. That's why, in a way, that super-let's-get-straight-into-it teaser-opener is so effective: it's Abrams showing you who and what he really is. He'll trash anything to get to a cruder meaning; or a cruder effect. There's a sort of offbeat lyricism to his approach.

If Lucas is jazz, Abrams is rock 'n' roll -- or bebop. He almost communicates with a kind of bludgeoning, Anakin-ish, "if it works" Morse Code sensibility. He melts down Lucas' careful paintings, jams the oily sludge into a bottle, and hopes you like the result once he's slapped a bright label on it. Huckster is much the right term. He performs a series of cruel affronts. Yet there is a perverse sense of exhilaration -- even artistry -- in the best of his approach. He's a good interpreter/remixer. He can take concepts and get them across. Perhaps loudly and garishly, but he's consistently good at it. He has the makings of a stylist and a storyteller, even if he's not quite either of those things in any of his films to date. His fluidic, incipient genius is obvious (in retrospect) with Kylo. Abrams can cast well and make his ideas vivid. He's not an ideas man, but he's capable of working ideas, sensations, and emotions to the screen nonetheless.

Abrams is also more modern than Lucas. He doesn't lean back into history and the vivacity of human imagination as much. His inspirations and influences seem confined to more of a boomer envelope: that's his temporal worldview. Yet, like Lucas and his obvious idol, Spielberg, he tackles projects without fear. There's a certain cheery optimism and a can-do spirit to Abrams that's quite remarkable. Whatever Abrams sees or doesn't see in the former films, especially the prequels, his passion for the concept of Star Wars is, I think, both deep and real. In that sense, the sequels were lucky to get a person who wanted to do his absolute best, and who believed very strongly in the core brilliance of the series -- albeit a very OT-centric one. The prequels will never quite be his idea of Star Wars, but he clearly took notes from ROTS, and this was obvious even in TFA. Maybe he didn't take enough notes, or the right notes, and maybe his sensibility is hopelessly at odds with Lucas', but he does get the grain of Star Wars, I think. Perhaps more than any filmmaker alive, I think Star Wars gives this man a warm glow. Of course, it's a very lucrative property, too, and he isn't dumb. Yet the same could be charged of Lucas. How many filmmakers are billionaires? 

I don't like the dispensing of Lucas' formalism. But I don't hate it, either. I lamented it more a few years ago. When I think Star Wars, I roundly think of George Lucas and all the particular fascinations he baked deeply into the series. It's his baby. It always will be. But my brain has started saying "Kylo Ren" and "Rey (Skywalker)" as much as it has "Jar Jar Binks" and "Padme Amidala". Weird, huh? Abrams' creations have started to embed themselves in my mind. Also, when fans started trashing TLJ, while I first enjoyed it and was right there with them (payback, I felt, for everyone going easy on TFA and Disney as a whole), I now feel like coming to the defence of these filmmakers and their contributions. More Star Wars might be a horrible thing. But it might also be a good thing. An encouraging thing. An uplifting thing. And Abrams, more than anyone, perhaps (well, Kathleen Kennedy deserves her dues, too), has delivered exactly that. As Pyrogenic has intimated, we should perhaps look upon these movies as an insane bonus. They didn't have to be made. The PT is safe where it is. It certainly got pushed down a bit, and Lucas' more esoteric concepts were either dropped or truncated: almost like the difference between a good novel and the more Procrustean demands of cinema where you often come away thinking the novel was better. Something definitely got lost in translation. But there have been some gains, too. Maybe it's the universe smiling on us, in an odd way, because we enjoy Sofia Coppola's LIT so much. If we enjoy "Lost In Translation", then we must also enjoy lost in translation. 

Alex is probably chiming in about now:

No, Cryo. It wasn't lost. It was abandoned, discarded, rejected. 

Yes, true. But broadly, it was lost. 

Frodo: "I'm afraid I lost it."

Anyway, long drive to a short stay at the beach. Just getting things out of my system.

I could never rebuke you. Only riff around you. 


It's funny that you and Alex have both rendered a comparison with Michael Bay. Richard Brody does so in his New Yorker review, too:

www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-robotic-familiarity-of-star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker

His opening paragraph:

The faults of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” are those of the franchise over all, distilled and magnified because the film’s director, J. J. Abrams, is mainly a distiller and a magnifier, and brings virtually no originality to it. His earnest and righteously grandiose direction evokes, as few movies do, a craving for Michael Bay at the controls. Since the prospect of a refined stylist such as Wes Anderson or Sofia Coppola—who’d likely chafe at the narrow limits imposed by such a franchise film—is too much to ask for, a boldly imaginative vulgarian such as Bay would be a welcome substitute. See the opening chase scene of Bay’s “6 Underground,” currently on Netflix, for a sense of what can be done with an emotionally stultified and dramatically trivial script. It’s not good, but it’s at least full of surprises and provides a baseline astonishment. It would be fascinating to see the colossally derisive wreckage that Bay could make of the rigidities and pieties of “Star Wars.”

I'm cheating and skipping past your other observations. You are unmatched in outlining the visual style of the series; especially when it comes to camerawork. I could add a thing or two, but I suppose I lack a measure of personal objectivity when it comes to TROS right now. Abrams is much more grubby and gross than Lucas, and maybe only fitfully interesting, but I know I was pleased, at the very least, with how he handled and built on those "Force Skype" encounters between Rey and Kylo in TLJ. Pleasingly, from the same source given earlier, co-writer Chris Terrio also confirmed that those encounters were directly inspired by Rian Johnson's choice to have them bridged by the Force in TLJ:

www.indiewire.com/2019/12/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-chris-terrio-spoilers-1202198680/

Terrio and Abrams were also able to build on the special relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren that’s brought to thrilling life in “The Last Jedi.” In Johnson’s film, the two are so deeply linked that they can communicate from great distances. There’s plenty more of that in “The Rise of Skywalker.”

“That was a great gift of ‘The Last Jedi,’ in that their relationship seems very intimate and specific,” Terrio said. “There’s a way in which, in ‘The Last Jedi,’ Rey and Kylo Ren interact, and they just seem like they’re part of the same whole, that spiritually, they’re really one person. That really helped us in thinking about Rey and Kylo Ren, which is to say that we wanted to elaborate on the idea that Snoke bridged their minds in ‘The Last Jedi.’ But what we wanted to say is that there’s something deeper there, and leave it to debate about at which point they became this dyad in the Force, where they were really two, or were they one, whether that was a mistake that Palpatine made by bridging them and therefore creating this thing. But regardless, their relationship is extremely interesting and complicated, and it was one of the things that J.J. and I loved about ‘The Last Jedi’ that we luckily inherited and could build [on].”


Like Kylo's cracked helmet? Sorry. Just riffing metaphors. Basically, to steal a Lucas metaphor this time, there is something in the marble: something inside that porcelain mask that might still be considered alive, erotic, determined, lurid, and purposeful. 


Even that planet name is amazing. This film does better on many levels. But I hear where you're coming from. The most hilarious bit there was probably Threepio in those same mock-Jedi robes. A really slick moment -- such as I recall it: one viewing in -- is when Rey and Poe's old flame nearly come to blows. I can't really critique it on a technical level right now (mind/memory too fogged), but I did like the suddenness of it, and the utter clarity and beauty of Rey's blue blade in the dark surroundings, and how Zorri's gun (the full character name is Zorri Bliss -- rad!) points back at Rey in the same diagonal vector. I also love, in a wonderful character moment, how Rey so quickly retreats from fierce and cold to sad and needy. Very well-directed moment. Like she was already recoiling from the "Palpatine" inside her; remembering the "shuttle" incident from earlier and clearly troubled by it still. Also gave me a flashback to Luke watching Yoda die, and his gaze softening from frustration and horror to love and acceptance. Rey is a Jedi and a Skywalker, alright! This kind of stuff, I adore. I mean, TROS has some nice brush-strokes like that. Han seemed to get most of those in TFA. Finally, those strokes go where they're needed: to the main protagonist (if you accept that the protagonist is really Rey-Ren combined). Nevertheless, as I just said, I hear you. 


Fair reading with solid, entrenched examples. Vivid and kitsch -- one of many Force Dyads in the movie and of the movie; or within/without the movie! Yep. Won't argue that point. Can't really argue any of your points. Maybe Star Wars needed to get cheesy-cool at the end of the saga. I mean, in a way, it has always been that. Still, I'm not insensitive to your deeper point. If TROS is some mixture of overstuffed, overexcited, silly, scuzzy, kinky, goofy, cracked, crazy, laboured, and absurd (like AOTC turned to charcoal), then ROTS exudes a crystalline perfection and a gnomic charm utterly foreign to these sequel entries. ROTS isn't afraid of getting goofy, but it's also very focused and careful in its rich chimerical happenings. There's a bumpy, skimpy, undisciplined madness to TROS -- like toast sprinkled with hundreds-and-thousands -- that it's like things are happening without the right degree of articulation and elaboration. But that's also a principal delight. Abrams is really trying to please here. It's like a kid playing with toy soldiers. Lucas' cheeky easter-egg prophecy at the start of ROTS (everything including "the kitchen sink") comes true in TROS. They got rid of midi-chlorians. But everything they put into the film is like a midi-chlorian speaking back. Rey even hears the voices of past Jedi commanding her to action. "When you quiet your mind, you'll hear them speaking to you." Or every idea is like an Ewok. I mean, those Ewoks were a bit patchy and whimsical, weren't they? Somewhere, Chief Chirpa is puffing on his pipe and making it all happen.


Well, that's sort of what I meant, at the outset, when I said TROS is pseudo-visionary. It has these wonderful moments of visual expression. But whether they're sustained or always used eloquently is another matter. That desert scene still blew my mind. I was loving every second of it. I was hoping for something good based on the trailer, but the movie exceeded my expectations there. Abrams can be perfectly visceral and on-point when he wants to be. My delight in that sequence was increased as I watched and realised that Rey shearing Ren's fighter wing was like an idea reprised from "The Art Of The Force Awakens". Same with Rey's introduction with the floating balls. Evokes imagery in "The Art Of The Last Jedi". Super cool stuff. I wish TFA had started this out-there and then the trilogy could have gotten increasingly bolder and wackier. Apparently, that wasn't what they were prepared to do; so I'll at least take TROS as final-lap compensation. "It's Skywalker!" Boy, us prequel nerds love our podracing references, don't we? "Very fast, very dangerous." 


Cryo doesn't do rankings, but if he did, they'd probably be the best rankings in the world.

Oh, wait... Ingram has that down to an artform, too.

I'd probably have a similar list, but you have more affection for ANH. And I haven't seen "Solo". 

Right now, almost every Star Wars movie interests me more than "A New Hope". I know... "Heresy! Destroy it!"

In a further surprising report from Cryoland, "Rogue One" has grown on me. It had to happen eventually, I guess.