So this was my attempt to give TROS a fair shake after giving myself two years to forget, and put all the films in content of each other.
Overall:
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The Force Awakens is a very solid consistent film, internally coherent. The script was reviewed and polished. Its biggest flaw to me is not being very daring or adventurous -- it follows a tried and true path for similar results. So it's well-made but sometimes feels like just rewatching Star Wars with modern production quality and too much familiarity. It was a film I really liked on first view (especially due to the "Thank god, they didn't eff it up!" factor), then on repeated viewings I still think is decent but enjoy less because it doesn't do anything new in itself although laying a few interesting threads (like Kylo Ren fearing he will be seduced to the Light side).
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The Last Jedi is more uneven, some of the jokes feel a little tedious or out of place, but it is actually swinging for the fences. Sometimes it misses, sometimes it hits a particular plot point over the fence. At least it tried to do something new and raised exciting possibilities. It could have been a great launching point for a brave final film. I really like how in the film's middle, there's an opportunity to move away from the old empire/rebellion and light/dark model and have something different. I like that the film does end up with Luke "facing down the entire First Order with a lightsaber" ... but not really. It's really subversive in that regard. Other plot lines feel tedious (Poe being acting like a rebellious teenager, Holdo being a really bad leader in terms of communication, a pointless bombing run in outer space, Finn given little to do / fetch questing, etc). Crait is one of the coolest looking "new planet" visual designs in a long while.
But great production quality on both films with visual and audio -- the 4K discs are stellar.
The Rise of Skywalker
The Pro's
More screen time with Finn, Poe, and Rey together.
Visually and audially "spare no expense" gorgeous.
An attempt at closure for a nine-movie series, however ill-advised that was. (Bringing back Palpatine, focusing on the Skywalker family so overtly -- I hate all of this, but they tried to make Palpatine the Big Bad overseeing everything, and bring Rey's connection journey into the Skywalker fold.)
Some cool lightsaber stunts: Two fights between Rey and Ben, a cool somersault maneuver by Rey. These sequences were pretty inventive. One involves using their force link so the fight happens in two locations at once, eventually enabling Ben to realize where Rey is. The other is on the ruins of the downed star destroyer amid raging seas on the Endor moon. The final stunt was played to death in the trailers.
Fairly decent use of the Force link between Rey and Ben. One involves the fight above, where the environment (from a spinning camera) shows them in effectively two environments at once. Another is when Rey passes him her spare saber -- it's set up by the necklace bit earlier (where Ben is able to grab something off Rey through their link and keep it), and as soon as the scene starts, you know what is going to happen and it makes sense.
Occasional callbacks to prior films. For example, when Rey rides a piece of metal down into the Skywalker ranch at film's end, after everything is over, it hearkens back to her still being that same scavenger girl we first saw riding her sheet metal down from the star destroyer on Jakku.
Harrison Ford. He's really good, and so is Driver. And it is playing off a decent scene in TFA. (It's just a shame it's being utilized in this particular film, which has misguided/inconsistent character arcs.)
The Con's
Retconning anything of TLJ that had value, sometimes with nothing more than a throwaway line. The most obvious is Rey's parentage -- it's a lot of clumsy retcon dialogue that rejects the emotional power of when she realizes she was a no one. ("You come from nothing. You're nothing. But not to me." From a Gen X perspective, which Abrams and Johnson both are, this is actually really touching.) It all amounts to, "Oh, well, okay, we were wrong, here is the real answer."
A lot of crazy shit (like lightspeed jumping) that isn't explained satisfactorily, esp with the tracking of said jumps.
Reducing Hux to an unnuanced joke character and needlessly replacing him with Grant instead of bringing his conflict with Ben to a fevered pitch.
Rolling back characterization for Ben to a stock evil character (aside from not wanting to kill Rey), restoring his mask which previously had identified him as a "boy, not a man" to the degree where he smashed it to liberate himself, all to redeem him so then he could just become a conventional good guy whose only line after his conversion is "ow." It really is a departure from the Kylo Ren in TLJ who had broken free of all external constraints to truly become free -- now he's just back to a conventional, in the box, "damned or redeemed" character.
The fucking dagger. Nothing more to say.
The whole climax of the film. What does it mean when Palpatine is "all the sith?" Or when Rey is "all the Jedi?" So Palpatine needed her to cut him down to possess her body, and just reflecting his own lightning on his body didn't meet that bill and he couldn't just possess her anyway? And so on?
Shamelessly fake drama -- Chewbacca being dead, then it being a camera trick two minutes later. C3P0 being set up for an ultimate sacrifice via memory wipe, repeatedly in the dialogue... then R2D2 just randomly updating his memory from an older backup (so he loses a bit of memory so that's it). etc
Unjustified actions, like Zorii being mad enough at Poe to kill him and remaining guarded for the entire film, yet still giving him the captain's pass she needs to make a better life for herself (her one goal in life) just so he can save one friend (maybe) from the First Order ship after Poe had abandoned her. Don't ask me who her character is, I can't figure out what really matters to her.
Terrible editing on the first 45 minutes of film, there is literally no time to breathe OR time to digest what you've seen. This isn't "action-packed," it's almost non-sensible. Even the dialogue doesn't even matter, it's mainly noise filler to support all the running around. Some of it is incoherent, with the cuts -- I'm still not sure whether Rey was fighting a training ball in the first few minutes of film or whether Ben was attacking her with it, trying to kill her, as one small example.
Terrible plotting on the last 90 minutes. Once we can actually think about what we're seeing, it all either seems to fall apart, is really dumb, or has no point to it. We get a minute of Rey weirdly facing off against her "dark side" self but we all know she's not going that way, and it is never really dug into aside from her momentary guilt from flash-frying Chewbacca that disappears once it's known he is alive. But it all seems to be people running around until they end up at the same place.
Deus ex Machina ending -- there is no hope for the rebellion until suddenly everyone shows up to save them. We are never privy to what's going on in the galaxy. At least TLJ ended with the kids telling the story of Luke facing down the FO and we see it truly inspiring a flame of hope.
Luke Skywalker's force ghost totally ditches any character development from the first two films and he's like a total platitude generic role model teacher. Even Shifu from "Kung Fu Panda" has a lot more character development despite being a similar character. The writing here is shit on a "God's Not Dead" level.
The Carrie Fisher cuts are awful -- snippets pulled in from unused footage and repurposed here, in scenes that don't have any life or content to them.
There are ways to effectively deal with the actress' death, but this wasn't one of them. And then I guess she just decides to pull a Luke and project herself across the universe, effectively dying, to save Ben... but there is no setup for it. We also see she somehow got trained in Jedi/lightsaber fighting (Note: this isn't necessarily the kind of force user she would have been, there are other options), then quit because she didn't want her visions of her son dying to occur, but he ends up dying anyway, and so forth? Like, CUT this pointless stuff out of the film and invest more in necessary plot points. But I guess they needed Leia's saber that she never carried so Rey could give Ben
her lightsaber, and.... uggh.
Discarding established characters like Rose Tico and adding new characters in who aren't really developed.
Lots of plot holes, I can't even graze the surface. How does Ben get from Endor's moon to Exegol after Rey steals his ship and his wayfinder? Why doesn't she remember she's got his wayfinder, after he tells her right before breaking the one she found? So Palpatine just makes a bunch of random Snokes, which aren't really his clones but are super-force sensitive? How can you rule a universe if your strategy is to blow up all the planets and thus not gain any of the tangible resources (labor, military, minerals/materials, economic wealth) that comes with owning them? Why wasn't Exegol's ship maker utilized earlier to make endless planet destroyers? This just barely scratches the surface, I don't feel like making an exhaustive list -- but it's like constantly thinking, "What? Really? Why? How? Huh?" throughout the film.
On second view, I noticed the handful of moments that made no sense in the first view where Finn gets an odd line -- and now I realized it is trying to suggest he experiences the Force. The film however never clarifies this and almost makes it look like he wants to tell Rey he has feelings for her. If you KNOW he is Force sensitive, then then lines make sense. The problem is that anything Finn could have contributed didn't need the Force to work, he would have known it as part of his back story (like where the new transponder might be located), so him being Force-sensitive doesn't even matter to the plot one iota.
The musical cues are all fucked up. If you paid any attention to all the other films that Williams scores, he ties particular motifs to certain characters and is pretty consistent that when you hear the theme, it's tied to the character in question. Even Rose Tuco has a theme. TROS breaks this rule so many times, I have to think that Williams submitted a score that then someone repurposed / hacked up and slapped in wherever they wanted, based on what the music felt like, without realizing they were breaking the rules that Williams has had in place for film after film. Why the hell is Yoda's theme showing up in multiple places where there is no Yoda (for one example)?
The Force dyad thing is not explained ever, it's just trotted out in the finale as if we're supposed to understand it.
Final Thoughts
Films can be judged (in a series) by how they affect other films in the series. Good films bring new things to the other films and allow interpretations in a new light that makes them all better. A film like TROS actually ruins other films in the story, it makes them less than when they were viewed separately and even makes meaningful scenes in TFA and TLJ worse once you recall what TROS does with them. TROS doesn't leave me with anything I want to revisit, and a lot I would just love to forget (but unfortunately I am not a gold metallic robot whose memory banks can be rebooted).
I generally don't buy into viewing a "novelization" as an acceptable way to fix a film. The film is a work of art that should be self-contained to be enjoyed. Novelizations should simply add extra information that brings extra enjoyment, it should not be necessary to understand WTF happened in the film you just watched. A work of art needs to stand on its own. In this case, also the novelization was an apologetic work designed to justify an unsatisfactory film after the fact.
Disney was really operating from a financial basis here, not a creative one, and shot themselves in both feet. It's know that, while TROS still made a lot of money, it was way under expectation compared to other franchises. They rushed a production date that should have been extended by a year, after bringing in a shit-ton of money on Endgame, and they should have played long ball. So you rush a film through production with so many script and story problems, and you make some money that year, but the money that could have kept rolling in for years is really diminished.... and the franchise itself was badly hurt to the degree Disney is now focused on their channel and TV shows for this universe, rather than focusing so much on films. No one really cares about continuing the story of these characters. They needed to ease up and take more time to develop a script NOT dependent on a dead actress and look for ways to build off the first two films satisfyingly, not just ditching a ton of plot decisions already out there.
From my personal perspective, I choose to view TROS as fan fiction and cap the films after TLJ. There is closure for all the storylines, Rey and Ren make their decisions about who they will be after Snoke's demise, and Johnson was good enough to show that Luke's final sacrifice (redemption for his own arc) has reverberations to relight the spark of hope among a new generation (Broom Boy etc). It actually is a decent stopping point thematically and character arc wise.
We take a look back at the much-maligned end of the 'Star Wars' saga, 'The Rise of Skywalker.'
collider.com
