The Rise of Skywalker The Last Jedi vs The Rise of Skywalker

[Consona]

Here is JJ directly refuting that. (bottom video)

BULLS**T.

 

[TheVileOne]

As I've said before, JJ Abrams talks a very good game.

 

[Batmannerism]

Wow. A tough choice.

Both movies had unnecessary macguffins and pointless sub plots. Both movies feature lead characters who have almost no chemistry and only a mere fraction of the charm of the original 3 leads. So in that sense they are nearly equal in their faults.

The Last Jedi, had a few original ideas in it ( unlike The Force Awakens, which was such a rehash of A New Hope that George Lucas should have got the main writing credit). Luke Skywalker's story was deeply depressing- although it ended well. The whole Del Toro subplot was a giant waste of time.


Rise of Skywalker, jumped around kind of aimlessly for the first 40 minutes or so but got better. It has a number of ridiculous plot contrivances ( e.g. the Captain's medallion ) and the premise that Palpatine is alive and built a massive doomsday fleet could have been good....if it had been revealed gradually with a little explanation so that it made sense.

Similarly the revelation that Rey is the Emperor's granddaughter could have been a real head spinner ( not quite "I am your father." but it could have still been good) but it was revealed in such a boring way that I just didn't care.

Probably the best thing in the film was Kylo's redemption story.

I felt like JJ had a list of things he had to put in the movie and he had to tick them off at certain intervals ( "okay, that's 1 hour 45 minutes, time for a cameo from an original trilogy cast member, cut to Dennis Lawson. Check" )

Rise of Skywalker was not as bad as it was made out to be, but could have been a lot better - I feel the same way about TLJ. Ah well.

I ca say that Rise of Skywalker wasted a lot more opportunities than TLJ.

Which one is the better film ? Good question, I'll have to really think about it and come back to the poll.

 

[Sian]

Honestly, I would rather she had been killed off screen than this. It's an unfortunate situation, I agree. But with the way it was done in this movie it sort of added a cheapness to it for me. Every time she was on screen it took me out of the movie and I thought that it completely didn't work. I know this sounded good in theory, but in execution this didn't work at all

Carrie Fisher was wonderful in The Last Jedi. That should have been her final performance and that should have been how we remembered her.

 

[Sian]

100% in agreement with you there.

It would have been better for the film to begin with Leia's funeral, and then have her deleted scenes feature as flashbacks. They could even use her injuries caused by the attack on the Raddus as being the cause of her death. If the wanted someone to train Rey, it could have been Luke's FG.

 

[RaimiWebSpidey]

Last Jedi by a landslide. It’s easily the best Disney Star Wars film we have gotten so far. You could tell the director actually had a vision and wanted to move the franchise, instead of pandering to fans and being lost in nostalgia. TLJ is elite, TROS is underwhelming mediocre.

 

[godisawesome]

I’ll reluctantly choose TLJ.

I think both movies are horribly screwed up, but at least TLJ has some conviction behind it.

And while both waste Boyega as Finn and seriously handicap Ridley as Rey with the abysmal Reylo subplot, I’d grudgingly agree that the paltry fight with Phasma is better than space horses, while the Praetorian Guard fight is actually a good fight scene to me, even if I know about the supposed choreography problems and think the story leading to it is stupid.

Plus, while I disagree with the direction and degree of Luke’s breakdown, Hamill’s performance is unimpeachable and award winning for a reason.

Both films are horribly skewed when it comes to Kylo, babying him and treating him with a generous double standard, though I’d say the imaginative flourishes of Ben Solo (“Ow” and the shrug) are also evened out by Johnson having *just* enough perspective to keep Kylo evil at the end of his movie.

The only edge I would *maybe* have TROS take would be a slightly more genuinely escapist air and less hipster-ish approach to the material... but that doesn’t really work if you’re still following the few fatal mistakes of TLJ that didn’t get removed - Kylo/Ben as the only Skywalker kid, Rey poisoned by TLJ’s very weak and cancerous version of Reylo logic, and Finn being dismissed and ignored.

TFA remains the one with the greatest box office take and the most positive overall reception for a reason - all three films are in some way devoted to copying the OT, and while TLJ does at least have the cajones to be a somewhat cynical analysis of Star Wars by a hipster, TFA has some genuine diversity advantages and simply better and more constant characterization decisions than the rest of the ST. TROS is the film with the flaws of both predecessors.

 

[Sian]

Actually, I think TFA was the bigger hit because fans were so excited to see the OT cast all together again!

 

[BatLobster]

I have to say....after seeing The Batman, directed by JJ's good buddy Matt Reeves, I feel even more cheated that they couldn't just commit to doing a big 3 hour epic for the conclusion to the Skywalker saga. Considering Endgame was also 3 hours, I will never understand why this film had to be shorter than The Last Jedi. It was billed as the final chapter of the freaking STAR WARS saga.

I think there are some good story beats and ideas in TROS, but what it's trying to accomplish is a very big lift and we got a cliffnotes version of it.

I fully admit that TLJ left things in a challenging place for the story, but that didn't have to be a bad thing. They could've risen to the challenge and been ambitious with a meaty story. I think if people had walked out of TROS feeling like they had been taken on an epic rollercoaster ride, it could've gone a long way with people at least respecting the movie-- even if there was no pleasing everyone with the creative decisions..

Instead, we're given Palpatine's return via exposition in the opening crawl, and it feels like the movie is in a rush from the opening frame.

This is a long way of saying TLJ easily, but I think TROS had the potential to surpass it, which makes it all the more frustrating for me.

 

[Gothamsknight]

The Last Jedi. easily! Say what you will about the film, but it was bold, and attempted to move Star Wars past the nostalgia bait that it had sort of become, and I say that as someone who had loved The Force Awaken. Rian Johnson was boxed into a corner with the movie, so he did the best with what he could. He also actually tried making Kylo the primary villain, which ended up getting thrown out in TROS for the return of Palpatine, which felt really lazy to me.

 

[henzINNIT]

This is a long way of saying TLJ easily, but I think TROS had the potential to surpass it, which makes it all the more frustrating for me.

I don't think JJ has an epic conclusion in him. His ideas seem to only ever go as far as riffing on something. He's a decent director but letting him work on the scripts was probably a mistake. Pairing him with Chris Terrio was fatal.

For all the flack TLJ gets, a lot of its choices were following through on the rotten foundations JJ had left behind. Scattered pieces and thinly drawn history. They were flawed but I still enjoy 7 & 8. They deserved a much better resolution, as did we.

 

[Brother Jack]

TROS was literally the second time Abrams had ever finished a multipart story he started himself, and it was the first in a film series. He doesn't really do endings. He starts the production, does the pilot, and then leaves the keys in the ignition for other (usually better) creatives to drive. He's far more a producer than a director. He thinks like a producer, as in, how he can make a product that appeals to the maximum amount of people. It's why he's constantly aping older stories. He knows people love them. And to his credit he's made a very successful career at doing that. But as far as cohesive storytelling goes, he falls short.

 

[Sian]

I did hear that post TFA he had zero notions of where the story was going from there, and that it was 'up to who came next to come up with a plot', which is why it seems a bit unfair that Rian Johnson got so much flak for essentially having to carry on the story with so little to go on - personally I thought he did a great job.

 

[Mr. Peanut]

You know, it's funny. I used to really hate The Last Jedi. Then Rise of Skywalker came, and I had a lot of fun with it. I'll admit it had a lot of mindless fluff, but for whatever reason it helped me stop taking Star Wars so seriously, and instead just sit back and enjoy it for whatever it has to offer. Which inadvertantly ended up helping me enjoy The Last Jedi a lot more and appreciate its strong points.


I mean, at the end of the day I'll always have the original version of the OT to go back to as a standalone work of art. So that frees up the modern Star Wars universe...with the Special Editions and PT and ST and all the extra stuff on Disney Plus...to just be a fun sandbox to mess around in.

 

[Filmfreak]

They're by far the two worst Star Wars movies in the Skywalker saga. None of them had any idea what to do with the characters. Some of the most inconsistent storytelling I've ever seen.

 

[henzINNIT]

They're by far the two worst Star Wars movies in the Skywalker saga. None of them had any idea what to do with the characters. Some of the most inconsistent storytelling I've ever seen.

Eh. The prequels still exist and still suck. They get undeserved credit for their story, the lowest hanging fruit of all considering they were prequels with an end-point already determined, and they still botched most of the path there. The era is mostly popular because of 7 full seasons of a TV show that corrected a bunch of mis-steps and actually made characters likable.

 

[Filmfreak]

I was never much of a fan of the prequels and I remember being really glad that someone other than Lucas was going to take a swing at the franchise when Disney bought the rights. I was also glad that more than one person would direct the sequel trilogy, like it happened with the original movies, to help keep things fresh. And boy, was I wrong. It's one of those things that you get to appreciate something you didn't care for, not so much for its own value, but because of a much worse follow-up.

The Force Awakens was a well directed movie but like so many others have said, it's too much of a remake of A New Hope, with other various elements of the og trilogy. It felt like a tribute, more than a movie with an identity of its own and it offered nothing substantially new. The Last Jedi decided to take the bare minimum its predecessor had lain the groundwork for and completely throw it away, but without actually replacing it with a new clear vision or anything interesting at all. And then came The Rise of Skywalker where Disney decided to make a fan service film that ignores the previous one, just like the previous one did for the one before that, and go back to the safety of episode IX, because of all the toxic hate the last one had received. A hot mess with many different views of how people wanted this to go, but without any sort of clear path and coherence.

I still don't hold the prequels in the highest regard, I'd definitely still struggle with the majority of the cringe-fest that is Attack of the Clones, but, in retrospect, I at least see some vision and love with those films, whereas I feel ever since Disney had put their claws into the franchise it became some corporate money-making machine with the sole purpose of milking everything that it once was, by creating more and more content and therefore achieve its only goal of making some rich people even richer.

 

[spiderman2]

Eh. The prequels still exist and still suck. They get undeserved credit for their story, the lowest hanging fruit of all considering they were prequels with an end-point already determined, and they still botched most of the path there. The era is mostly popular because of 7 full seasons of a TV show that corrected a bunch of mis-steps and actually made characters likable.

I agree episode 1-2 are 2 of the worst movies I have ever seen and I will never watch again. 3 is enjoyable but still very flawed. It's laughable to me that anyone could put episodes 1-2 over 7,8 or 9 or solo or R1. But people also say 7 is a remake of episode 4 but it's really not if you watch Chris stuckmans video talking about that he makes good points. 7 is a perfect star wars movie just a shame that 8 and 9 couldn't keep that going.

 

[Brother Jack]

I think there's an argument to be made that TROS is the worst Star Wars movie, narratively speaking. As an ending to what was ostensibly a nine-part story it botches the landing so completely that it hurts the whole sequel trilogy and by extension the entire Skywalker saga. But as far as filmmaking techniques do it is vastly superior to the prequels in some key ways. It's better shot, staged, and certainly acted. I've heard some people say the PT was a good story told badly and the ST was a bad story told well. That's a pretty gross and reductive overgeneralization but I think there is some truth to it.

 

[henzINNIT]

I think there's an argument to be made that TROS is the worst Star Wars movie, narratively speaking. As an ending to what was ostensibly a nine-part story it botches the landing so completely that it hurts the whole sequel trilogy and by extension the entire Skywalker saga. But as far as filmmaking techniques do it is vastly superior to the prequels in some key ways. It's better shot, staged, and certainly acted. I've heard some people say the PT was a good story told badly and the ST was a bad story told well. That's a pretty gross and reductive overgeneralization but I think there is some truth to it.

Yeah agreed for the most part. TROS is a more palatable film than the prequels to me but it's so lacking in story that it basically damages previous entries. 'Better' in many departments, but easier to dislike.

 

[MessiahDecoy123]

TLJ is heavily flawed but TROS was one of the worst blockbuster I have ever seen.

It was torture sitting through that trash.

TLJ at least had some iconic scenes and I wouldn't mind watching it again.

 

[Sian]

Whether you love or hate the prequels, what they did have was a strong plot - the gradual rise to power of Palpatine, the fall of the Jedi order, Anakin and Padme's tragic love affair, and the setting up of the rebellion.

TROS had no plot. In a nutshell. As everyone here knows I'm a very big Kylo/Ben fan, and was aware of his ultimate fate thanks to leaks, and although terribly disappointed I still decided to see TROS, but half an hour into the film I just knew that I wasn't going to like it, and not just because of the ending.
I knew after thirty minutes it was going to be a bad film, but I didn't realise just how bad.
Palpatine's return was so badly handled it threw me. Snoke revealed as a clone was ridiculous.
The dialogue was poor. Some of the acting was half baked. Leia was demonised. Why didn't she train her own son when she was capable of training Rey? It made her seem like a horrendous mother. Rey and Kylo's repeated fighting was tedious; we'd seen it all before. Poe was completely retconned and the way Finn ran around screaming for Rey all the time was profoundly awful. Then we had a story that kept changing, and the constant 'false surprises' - we are led to believe Rey had killed Chewie, which was a genuinely unexpected shock, then it's 'oh, it's ok, he was on another transport ship we previously saw no sign of.''
Worst of all....Rey was elevated to goddess like levels and her character was an embarrassment. Every other character was rendered unnecessary because Rey was good at everything, plus being so wonderful even Zorri Bliss adored her even though she knocked her on her butt at their first meeting.

Three years later, and I still can't believe they ended a nine film saga with such an awful film. I don't think I'll ever be able to accept it.