The Rise of Skywalker Reactions to "Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker"

[Albright]

Saw it today and loved it.
It was the perfect balance between nostalgia, fan-service and risking new things.
This is what TLJ should've been.
What a great trilogy it could've been, if all three movies were made by JJ
It's great how it ignores TLJ as how Rian Johnson ignored TFA

 

[heatvision38]

I guess my question is, do you think this movie is a result of Abrams having to clean up Johnson's mess and you blame TLJ's failure for the quality of this one? I'm just trying to get a clear picture. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Personally, I think it's both. TLJ screwed the pooch as a middle movie, but JJ could have made many better decisions with ROS. JJ still continued to write Rey as this incomparable paragon, for example rather than give her a more authentic feel. He just tripled down on her OP-ness which RJ had doubled down on from JJ's original sin in how he created Rey. That's just one of umpteenth examples of how JJ went from bad to worse.

Both are to blame (JJ and RJ).

 

[heatvision38]

My reaction is mixed, but it leans positive. Judging TROS just by its entertainment value alone, I think it holds up very well. I was entertained. It looked cool enough to me and kept my attention. My only gripe visually is the Emperor... they just never seem to get his physicality right, IMO.

The problem with the movie rests on the larger story decisions. This ending feels no more satisfactory than the ending we got in ROTJ.... which begs the question about the point of this new sequel series. Are we better off? Is the story better off? I don't know.... it feels like a long ways to get back to where we started... and at worse, these new movies kind of neuter the originals. THat's unfortunate... and those were the issues that the creators knew faced them.... right off the bat. And I don't think TROS was able to overcome those obstacles.

There's a lot of lost opportunities that show themselves in this movie. Like... the quasi romance between Ben and Rey... that actually worked! If the story hadn't been so caught up with trying to psyche us out... if the sequel trilogy had had one creative vision, maybe we could have had a forbidden love Star Wars story. But the whole thing feels pieced together, because in fact it was.

I say all that, but I'll also say this: TROS is not the worst Star Wars movie. Not by a long shot IMO. My list now goes:

ESB
R1
ANH
TFA
TRoS
RotJ
Solo
RotS
TPM
AotC

That's my take. The SW universe is in the same exact place it was before the sequel trilogy. This trilogy could just as easily not exist and nothing would be different.

OT starts with 2 dark force users (Sith) and the jedi order almost extinct and the galaxy terrorized by a tyrannical force and ends with the 2 dark force users gone and the tyrannical force defeated, and one sole Jedi left to uphold the legacy. This new trilogy starts and ends the exact same way. What was the point? This doesn't "complete" the Skywalker saga; it was already complete.

Had they come up with a better macro plan for this trilogy (how Luke helped regrow the Jedi order as just one of many possible examples of showing forward progression to the overall story), then it could have necessitated its own existence. As it is, this trilogy feels pointless and empty, devoid of any really purpose or meaning.

The worst part is it now has me feeling apathy for the SW universe as a whole, and that's the worst place you want a fan to be (and I think I'm far from alone).

 

[Havok83]

I disliked the end with Rey taking on the name Skywalker. She's a fraud and not one. It did not sit well and they had Luke/Leia there to kind of approve it but she didnt know them that long and they didnt raise her. She didnt even have a parent/child relationship with them

 

[TheVileOne]

The Dyad thing is just contrived haphazard nonsense. How would Palpatine and/or Snoke not even be aware of this before?

The Dyad is a major turning point and a paradigm shift in the mythology, and it's just introduced and presented in this odd, herky jerky manner. It's just one of many reasons why this movie is over-stuffed.

Chris Terrio is not good at spinning multiple plates like this in a major movie. Look at Batman v Superman it's 20 million subplots just collapsing under their own weight.

 

[Doctor Jones]

Personally, I think it's both. TLJ screwed the pooch as a middle movie, but JJ could have made many better decisions with ROS. JJ still continued to write Rey as this incomparable paragon, for example rather than give her a more authentic feel. He just tripled down on her OP-ness which RJ had doubled down on from JJ's original sin in how he created Rey. That's just one of umpteenth examples of how JJ went from bad to worse.

Both are to blame (JJ and RJ).

The problem is both are undercutting each other. The main culprit is Kennedy for me. If she wanted a nostalgic rehash to get the franchise in track, Abrams will do that for you. Everyone is either doing or not doing what she has envisioned and at best it's scattershot.

 

[godisawesome]

Okay, I already had one review on here, but my buddy is a TLJ fan while I hate TLJ, and here’s our dual review. Spoiler: it’s pretty negative.

‎FranchiseWars on Apple Podcasts

 

[Spider-Fan]

This is a movie I just find getting worse in my mind as time goes on. I still like TLJ a lot, but I don't think in the future I will revisit TFA or TROS much at all. They just don't offer me anything the OT didn't already offer but better. I really am hating this wave of nostalgic sequels now. Yeah, we get a Blade Runner 2049 or a Doctor Sleep sometimes, but most of these ''sequels'' are glorified remakes that throw in familiar characters for nostalgia while not doing anything terribly original outside of superficial elements. If you have no originality to offer, please don't waste my time. I want new and original Star Wars. Not a 200 million dollar fan fiction.

 

[Detective Conan]

This is a movie I just find getting worse in my mind as time goes on. I still like TLJ a lot, but I don't think in the future I will revisit TFA or TROS much at all. They just don't offer me anything the OT didn't already offer but better. I really am hating this wave of nostalgic sequels now. Yeah, we get a Blade Runner 2049 or a Doctor Sleep sometimes, but most of these ''sequels'' are glorified remakes that throw in familiar characters for nostalgia while not doing anything terribly original outside of superficial elements. If you have no originality to offer, please don't waste my time. I want new and original Star Wars. Not a 200 million dollar fan fiction.

Agreed. Randy Marsh has the best take on why studios still do these “nostalgia sequels”

 

[Spider-Fan]

Agreed. Randy Marsh has the best take on why studios still do these “nostalgia sequels”

LOL, South Park has gems sometimes. But in all seriousness, this movie sort of stands for everything I think is wrong with studio franchise mentality right now. Studios care far less anymore about doing anything creative, and just exploiting popular brand names that they know people like us will get suckered into seeing because it carries a brand loyalty. I'm at the point where so many of these terrible glorified rehash films just don't do it for me. Instead of telling good stories, we have to appeal the four quadrants and make sure that nobody will possibly get offended by the movie we're putting out now because we fear Twitter backlash. It puts the filmmakers in a bad spot creatively, and that's just the problem. If you want to know what is wrong with Star Wars, it's the fact that Star Wars is currently creatively bankrupt.

After first viewing, I said this movie was mediocre at best, I have to admit I was wrong. Rise of Skywalker is just a bad movie made to pander to an audience that was mad at the last one, and in doing so offered nothing of value creatively, and was just a stew compiled of notes made by people reading Reddit and Twitter and garnished with some familiar flavors that worked in the past. The movie says nothing and is just empty calories. I hate everything it stands for, lol.

 

[Spider-Fan]

I'm going to add to my above points and say that my personal opinion is that they should never do another Star Wars saga movie. I think they should never do an episode 10, 11, or 12. Obviously, I'm not saying never make Star Wars movies. Just saying that the creativity within the Saga itself is dead. The only way I see life being breathed into this is suggest do more things like the Mandalorian, or do new movies based run new characters and new ideas and new things. The potential for the universe's Star Wars is vast, and it baffles me that these movies had so few new ideas.

Let's look at the Marvel movies. The reason those movies still feel fresh and new for the most part is that they continuously make different types of movies. Yeah, almost all of them have that same Marvel flavor that we know, but we're still getting a spy thriller here or a cosmic romp there. They're not just recycling the same 5 or 6 story beats. That is why the MCU can still go another like a hundred movies and still maintain the love and appreciation of the audience, well we're many fewer Star Wars films into that franchise, and it feels all so stale and boring. This series needs a complete and utter change in strategy from the top down.

 

[henzINNIT]

This film just makes me sadder and sadder over time. So much missed potential. It's not even just a decent Abrams film. I'm convinced something went terribly wrong behind the scenes.

 

[Spider-Fan]

This film just makes me sadder and sadder over time. So much missed potential. It's not even just a decent Abrams film. I'm convinced something went terribly wrong behind the scenes.

I honestly don't think it is that complicated. The studio wanted to please everyone, so they brought in JJ to get people back to swooning like they did after TFA. JJ made a movie that pandered to its audience and didn't please as many people as they had hoped. I don't think it's that anything went wrong per se. Once JJ was brought on board, I think he got to make the movie he wanted to make. The issue seems to be more Disney doesn't understand their own product in a creative sense. They know how to sell it but they don't know what's actually good about it.

 

[Brother Jack]

I don't think it would have made for a better film, in fact it probably would've been worse, but I find myself kind of wishing Colin Trevorrow made this movie. It would probably have at least been less driven by nostalgia and fan-service.

 

[Spider-Fan]

I don't think it would have made for a better film, in fact it probably would've been worse, but I find myself kind of wishing Colin Trevorrow made this movie. It would probably have at least been less driven by nostalgia and fan-service.

I would like to know at least what his idea was.

 

[henzINNIT]

Never thought I'd say this, but yeah I would have preferred Trevorrow too. At least it'd be different. I didn't realize going back to the well would be so underwhelming. Hindsight of course.

I honestly don't think it is that complicated. The studio wanted to please everyone, so they brought in JJ to get people back to swooning like they did after TFA. JJ made a movie that pandered to its audience and didn't please as many people as they had hoped. I don't think it's that anything went wrong per se. Once JJ was brought on board, I think he got to make the movie he wanted to make. The issue seems to be more Disney doesn't understand their own product in a creative sense. They know how to sell it but they don't know what's actually good about it.

This could well be the case. The film just seems much more messy than the average from JJ, but perhaps that is just a weak script.

 

[Frodo]

For me TROS is very much a reactionary film to fan responses to TLJ and Solo. Much in the way BF was made as a response to BR, which faced a more controversial response in 1992, and much in the way JL was a reaction to the reaction to BvS.

In all three of those cases, TROS, BF, and JL, they're basically "safe", popcorn fluff, crowd pleasers which don't aspire to be much more .

Those films are very much the studios saying "Please like me!".

 

[BatLobster]

Ehhhh idk about Trevorrow being better. Jurassic World was about as on-the-nose with member berries, self-aware callbacks and schlock as anything. I enjoyed it for what it was at the time, but it feels cut from the same cloth as the sequel trilogy for better or worse. I'd say probably worse. Trevorrow also wanted Luke alive for his film, so right off the bat you know he had his own "fanservice-y" ideas he was aiming for.

I also don't really think TROS was all that reactionary, in a pure sense. A lot of it was being written and conceived prior to TLJ's release and subsequent reception. For example Ian McDiarmid got the call in November 2017. JJ pitched the whole story of the film to Bob Iger immediately after TLJ hit theaters.

I think a lot of the so-called safe choices in TROS just come down to being a trilogy-capper. The burden of tying up loose ends and bringing a story to a satisfying conclusion is always very tricky and tends to leave people disappointed. Multiply that by 3 with it being the conclusion to a 9 film arc, to the most treasured film franchise of all time. Then factor in that Leia was always meant to have a bigger role in this film, and Carrie was gone. It had a lot it was up against. I just think they should've let it be the longer, more robust film it clearly wanted to be. There's a lot of great stuff in there that really needed more room to breathe.

But if anyone thinks there was any possible version of this movie that would've had us all nodding in agreement, going "that was great!"...nah. Never was going to happen. We all have too much baggage when it comes to the saga. Pretty much any choice is controversial. Including playing it up the middle.

 

[Patrick77]

Just catering to fans doesn't work, obviously. It's not like ordering food at a restaurant. There can be some give and take. I don't know that fan perspectives are completely worthless. It's not a bad idea to understand why a particular thing is compelling to people.

The Nolan Batman films are a great example of this, imho. They are not based on a fan wish list, but they understand why Batman fans love Batman so much.

It's not about pleasing everyone, or simply delivering on expectations, but understanding the core appeal and building something compelling around that.

I thought that Endgame was also a good example. That movie made a lot of unexpected choices, took characters in challenging directions, and built its plot around a pretty wild time travel concept, all while telling a story about mental health recovery (in summary).

Is everybody happy? Did everything work perfectly? No, but the movie delivered something grand and satisfying that felt like a worthy culmination of the saga without being tame or predictable.

I agree about Jurassic World. That movie is very similar to The Force Awakens in many respects. Basically a remake.

 

[Herolee10]

Honestly, I could forgive TROS if it was just a bad film.

However, I don't think that I'll ever get over the fact that this film essentially ruined the Skywalker legacy.

Bringing back the Emperor just so that Rey could defeat him was a slap to the sacrifice made by Anakin and the hard victory earned by Luke.

This whole trilogy was basically Kathleen's/Disney's way of robbing the Skywalkers of their accolades and handing them down to their own original character (Rey) in the most forceful (pun not intended) way possible.

 

[Herolee10]

I'm going to add to my above points and say that my personal opinion is that they should never do another Star Wars saga movie. I think they should never do an episode 10, 11, or 12. Obviously, I'm not saying never make Star Wars movies. Just saying that the creativity within the Saga itself is dead. The only way I see life being breathed into this is suggest do more things like the Mandalorian, or do new movies based run new characters and new ideas and new things. The potential for the universe's Star Wars is vast, and it baffles me that these movies had so few new ideas.

Let's look at the Marvel movies. The reason those movies still feel fresh and new for the most part is that they continuously make different types of movies. Yeah, almost all of them have that same Marvel flavor that we know, but we're still getting a spy thriller here or a cosmic romp there. They're not just recycling the same 5 or 6 story beats. That is why the MCU can still go another like a hundred movies and still maintain the love and appreciation of the audience, well we're many fewer Star Wars films into that franchise, and it feels all so stale and boring. This series needs a complete and utter change in strategy from the top down.

If we got someone like Fioni or Jon with complete creative control of the franchise, along with bringing in the likes of the Vong as the main villains for the next main films and Cade Skywalker as the new protagonist then I'd be willing to give any new trilogy another chance.

 

[TheVileOne]

This is a movie I just find getting worse in my mind as time goes on. I still like TLJ a lot, but I don't think in the future I will revisit TFA or TROS much at all. They just don't offer me anything the OT didn't already offer but better. I really am hating this wave of nostalgic sequels now. Yeah, we get a Blade Runner 2049 or a Doctor Sleep sometimes, but most of these ''sequels'' are glorified remakes that throw in familiar characters for nostalgia while not doing anything terribly original outside of superficial elements. If you have no originality to offer, please don't waste my time. I want new and original Star Wars. Not a 200 million dollar fan fiction.

That's why I don't get all this hysteria for a sequel to Joker. They made this one off standalone character piece on the Joker. It doesn't really lend itself to any sequels. It's very ambiguous. Why do a sequel for it? Yeah, Joaquin Phoenix was really impressive in the movie. But this is not really the comic book movie that lends itself to a sequel. It's like people are more obsessed with the idea of a sequel than a sequel itself.

 

[Slade W]

Spoiler

I liked the movie, but felt it was rushed and messy. Most problems had an extremely quick solution. Kylo Ren turning good was not the best and him kissing Rey did not feel right.[

 

[Spider-Fan]

If we got someone like Fioni or Jon with complete creative control of the franchise, along with bringing in the likes of the Vong as the main villains for the next main films and Cade Skywalker as the new protagonist then I'd be willing to give any new trilogy another chance.

I don't think it'd work. Better to just start a new with another period of Star Wars history not tied down by the baggage the main saga has at this point. That or something really fringe to the established universe like Mandolorian. The main saga has no life. They killed it

 

[Calvin Ellis]

I don't think it'd work. Better to just start a new with another period of Star Wars history not tied down by the baggage the main saga has at this point. That or something really fringe to the established universe like Mandolorian. The main saga has no life. They killed it

Unless Disney moves forward with their rumored plans to reboot a lot of classic movies.