1 hour ago, GreenDragoon said:

It's exactly the type of thing fans asked for after TFA (and TLJ).

Training montage for Rey and Leia ('why can she use the force when we've never seen her training' was a frequent complaint).

The medal is mentioned everywhere with a pleased "finally!".

Palpatine was demanded as BBEG from early TFA on, as were the (hilariously bad) fan theories on Rey's parents. Her being a palpatine was one of the top2 or 3.

Inclusion of Lando and Wedge were both loudly asked for and cheered on.

So I don't know what to tell you, these things are clearly fan service to me.

The training with Leia didn't add much. Maybe because of the juggling to adapt Carrie's unused footage.

The medal felt very awkward. It was a ridiculous injustice to Chewie in ep. IV, and I don't think giving him a medal now corrects anything. They should just throw these medals in the trash instead.

Palpatine being alive undoes all of the OT. Who the heck would ask that?

Lando appears of out of the blue. Wedge has 1 second of screen time?

If this is fan service, it's a really bad one. (and this fan here was not serviced at all)

20 minutes ago, Odanan said:

this fan here was not serviced at all)

Not even a prison sort of "serviced?"

I'd love it if someone could solve in the 7 basic questions for this movie, for each character. Here it is for TLJ in a video , and these are the questions:

1. What does this character want?
2. What does this character need?
3. How do those wants and needs conflict with each other within the character?
4. How do they conflict with the outside world?
5. How do they conflict with other characters?
6. How does the character change through those conflicts and how does the resolution affect them?
7. What impact does that change have on everyone else?

For Rey:

1. Want: Defeat Palpatine, save Kylo, save the galaxy (?)
2. Need: Come to terms with being a Palpatine herself
3. Internal Conflict: She is tempted to join Palpatine/Kylo (?)
4. Conflict with world: First Order/Trust among friends (?)
5. Conflict with others: Leia and Palpatine (?)
6. Change: Becomes the savior of the universe? A Jedi again?
7. Impact: Saves the universe

I really don't know. The answers for Episode 8 are almost identical:

1. Want: External validation
2. Need: Emotional independence
3. Internal Conflict: Who to join?
4. Conflict with world: First Order
5. Conflict with others: Luke and Kylo
6. Change: Becomes a Jedi
7. Impact: Saves the Resistance

I hope someone else is able to fill it in, because I really struggle this time. Episode 8 was really clear in this regard.

I enjoyed it, but yeesh that was like 2.5 movies worth of plot in one movie.

I think Rian Johnson used that mind meld in an interesting way and JJ just used to have people talk plot at the camera.

I didn’t hate that part, but I didn’t love it.

14 hours ago, Frimmel said:

Wait. Wait. What?!!??? I haven't read any full on spoilers for this. Tell me that isn't actually in the movie. What? Really? No. They went there with? No. No. No. You're kidding me right?

14 hours ago, Cerebrawl said:

They made her Emperor Palpatine's granddaughter. She then takes the name Skywalker. Hence why some call the movie "The Rise of Identity Theft".

So not only was anakin potentially created by the force via palpaltine, BUT he also is Rey's grand daddy? FUT THE WHUK.

14 hours ago, Frimmel said:

That's awful. I knew JJ was a lazy hack but that tops even my Marianas Trench low opinion of him.

JJ's good if all you want in a movie is gratuitious death, destruction and mayhem with no or little plot.. But not for much else.

15 hours ago, Frimmel said:

And I'm a little hung up on this too. The Force can now be used to teleport objects? Can JJ actually tell Star Trek and Star Wars apart?

Nice write up by the way. Very thoughtful.

The Force has been getting weird for a long time now. Just go with the flow. With Nightsisters, Bendus, and Mortis, is this really an issue?

14 hours ago, FTS Gecko said:

Out of interest, would anyone have preferred the reverse? Rey (Palpatine) dying to save and redeem Ben Solo, for him to take on the mantle of the last Skywalker?

Because, let's face it, all Skywalkers dead and their legacy made completely redundant while a Palpatine lives is... incomprehensible, really.

Gah. I'm just going to watch Episode 6 again and call it quits. Untile the Auralnauts adaptions arrive, at least.

I can pretty much guarantee that was Treverrow's original plan.

14 hours ago, GreenDragoon said:

To me, even that question misses the point. TLJ told us, showed us that ancestry does not matter! You are who you choose to be. The slave stable boy might one day save the galaxy.

Finn chose his fate, Poe chose and learned to pick up the mantle of leadership, Rey started to believe in herself and her place in the center of the story despite being no one. All flavored by the simple, lowly mechanic Rose that your intention and choice matters more than the outcome (you have to save what you love), and tempered by Yoda's and Luke's wisdom that failure is the greatest teacher while taking yourself too seriously is bad.

Rey should not even be a Palpatine in the first place, but JJ understood that as little as the fact that he forced Rian to release the tension from TFA's finale in some way.

See, I disagree. The end scene is pretty clear. Rey doesn't choose to be a Palpatine, she chooses to be a Skywalker. And her ancestry did not choose her destiny. As far as I am concerned, she is still a child of nobody's, since clearly Sheev Jr did not do much while he was alive, since no one really knew about him.

11 hours ago, Odanan said:

Palpatine being alive undoes all of the OT. Who the heck would ask that?

I don't specifically mind Palpatine being the villain, but I feel the way it was done was kind of clumsy: essentially the opening crawl being "....and Palpatine's alive. Sucks to be everyone else" when that feels like something you should have built to as a mid-film climactic twist. He needn't have been strictly alive, either - this is a setting in which ghosts can have massive narrative impact and "dealing with the legacy of/mistakes of an earlier generation whilst finding an identity of your own." Is a big part of the overarching plot (The first order as a whole basically fits that description). Taking a classic example, Baron Harkonnen's ghost/memories/whatever you want to call it being a key villain in the sequels to Dune does not cheapen the achievement of killing him in Dune itself, because the whole setting is fundamentally changed by the events surrounding it.

What comes close to undoing everything is having a random meha-weapon one shot everything built and producing a ludicrously huge fleet from nowhere. (turning you back into rebels v empire)

It's why my biggest pet hate with episode VII is the whole leia/korrie/hosnian storyline got cut.

2 fake out deaths kind of piss me off, though.

Three arguably. I think 3PO bugs me most. It's not death per se, but a big part of the setting has always been "what would you sacrifice for love/freedom/victory/whatever" - many important fights are won by self-sacrifice and moral choice not "I bought an extra level of the lightsaber skill".

The whole translation thing is contrived but isn't sprung spontaneously, it's built up to, they try to find alternatives (and fail) and ultimately it's a meaningful sacrifice that only he can make. It's no different in many respects to data's death in Nemesis and undercutting it with "and back to normal" kind of cheapens it a bit to me.

I'm just going to dwell on the final battle for a minute here. As @InterceptorMad points out on the first page:

15 hours ago, InterceptorMad said:

His entire big thing at the end of this film, leading the ground assault to destroy the signal tower thing, which would have been cool if ships weren't flying around the entire time THAT COULD JUST SHOOT IT! IT'S RIGHT THERE! JUST FIRE A TORPEDO AT IT!

This moment right here killed any remaining enjoyment I could take from the movie. The entire final battle is predicated on a tactical blunder that is so mind blowingly stupid it corrupts everything that follows.

As InterceptorMad says, the comm tower is exposed on the destroyer's hull. Any of the fighters flying around could have hit it from the air, and it's not like they had the excuse of their weapons not being up to the task. Their guns seemed perfectly capable of taking out the much larger ventral cannons later on, and even if the comm tower was more heavily armoured than those, the Resistance had much bigger guns available. They could have shot a torpedo into it. They could have had someone ram the thing. They could have had the corvette they brought with them fire its guns on it. They could have taken said corvette and had it ram the thing. There is no way to justify the best course of action being for the heroes to land a ground team on the hull of the destroyer and charge across its hull on horseback to take out that tower.

Poe then goes on to not even attempt to fight back after the strike team is down. His fighters just roam about waiting to get killed, seemingly unconcerned with protecting their strike team or even trying to take a destroyer or two down with them. They don't even attempt to make a run on any of the destroyers until Lando arrives with reinforcements -- which are gathered using the same plan as used in The Last Jedi. Because that worked so well last time, when it was Princess freaking Leia herself asking the galaxy for help. When they were "only" asking the galaxy to stand up against a First Order that had just been rocked by the loss of its flagship and a fleet of Resurgant s. When they weren't asking them to fight Emperor freaking Palpatine himself and an armada of thousands of freshly-produced star destroyers.

The whole battle was nonsensical. I only assume Abrams hoped it would be lost in the maelstrom of bombastic effects that seem to be his only real strength as a filmmaker.

31 minutes ago, DR4CO said:

Because that worked so well last time, when it was Princess freaking Leia herself asking the galaxy for help.

Again - part of the pet hate with The Force Awakens not featuring Korrie's story - I quite like the fact (which gets explored in the Black Squadron comics) that that's not actually a good thing - the reason she's a resistance general and not a republic senator is that the first order leaked the whole 'darth vader's daughter' thing into the media and to anyone who wasn't a rebel veteran she was essentially a political pariah after that point.

But the whole "it totally didn't work last time, lets bet our entire plan on trying again" is rather flimsy.

14 hours ago, GreenDragoon said:

Pretty sure it was an old one that he found on Endor. Because that's where he was left stranded.

I mean the First Order TIE fighters which jump them as they're picking up the message on the ice asteroid. They follow the Falcon through the hyperskip sequence, which means they must be hyperspace capable - so they should be TIE/sf (or TIE/ba or TIE/vn, but they're clearly not interceptors), but it looks more like they're TIE/fo; I don't recall seeing the cogwheels or weapon pods. That might just be the angle of the shot, though.

1 hour ago, Sithborg said:

The Force has been getting weird for a long time now. Just go with the flow. With Nightsisters, Bendus, and Mortis, is this really an issue?

Sort of, it's mostly a symptom of Disney's writers lack of respect for the star wars lore.

In the EU there's a planet of dark sider elemental benders. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Shapers_of_Kro_Var

C3P0 has the best lines from the movie. The congratulatory well done sir you lost them and then that changes into your terrible was fantastic.

I thought it was grand - 5, maybe 6 out of 10.

Here's a few random.points.

It felt like JJ crammed two scripts into one movie (with a few bits removed), and you can tell due to the lightning pace of the film. Almost too fast.

It also doesn't explain if Palp survived or was cloned (the tubs of Snoke bits suggest he's a clone). With more time I'm sure we would have been told.

The lightsaber battle felt like a lightsaber battle, rather than a rhythmic gymnastics routine.

Wedge's cameo is probably the shoetest cameo in film history, but somehow still the greatest thing in Star Wars.

The Jedi voices was a nice touch.

It felt like a Star Wars film again, unlike the Last Jedi. Some the new planets were interesting, and felt life like.

Having the three heroes share scenes together immediately elevates the film. You realise just how much this is missed in TLJ.

Because the film was so crammedd packed with stuff, I feel this lead to a rushed finale, particularly the space battle.

Seeing the regular joe pilots run to their ships (and later celebrate) felt like it made the war feel bigger.

2 hours ago, Sithborg said:

2 fake out deaths kind of piss me off, though.

Gah. Had the same issue with The Last Jedi. "Kylo can't kill mom, surely? OH NO Quickdraw shot first! Oh Leia's dead. How will this affect KylPSYCH! She's actually alive because of incredible never before seen Force ability! Oh, Finn's dead. The guns in his skimmer are melting and warping. What a heroic sacrifice to save his friends He's so totally deaPSYCH! Rose Rico out of nowhere to wreck I mean save the day! Oh and not forgetting Luke's dead, going out like a boss like Obi Wan to save his frienPSYCHE! it was an incredible never before been seen Force ability! He wasn't actually there, he's finDOUBLEPSYCHE! No, he's totally tired. He's dead.

1 hour ago, Cubanboy said:

C3P0 has the best lines from the movie. The congratulatory well done sir you lost them and then that changes into your terrible was fantastic.

Protocol Droid Snark is one thing that is always welcome, be it Threepio or K2SO.

2 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:

I mean the First Order TIE fighters which jump them as they're picking up the message on the ice asteroid. They follow the Falcon through the hyperskip sequence, which means they must be hyperspace capable - so they should be TIE/sf (or TIE/ba or TIE/vn, but they're clearly not interceptors), but it looks more like they're TIE/fo; I don't recall seeing the cogwheels or weapon pods. That might just be the angle of the shot, though.

Ah, those didn't bother me at all. I meant Kylo arriving on Exegor. How did he get there with that old TIE/LN?

3 hours ago, Sithborg said:

See, I disagree. The end scene is pretty clear. Rey doesn't choose to be a Palpatine, she chooses to be a Skywalker. And her ancestry did not choose her destiny. As far as I am concerned, she is still a child of nobody's, since clearly Sheev Jr did not do much while he was alive, since no one really knew about him.

Not what I meant. I was saying that the message completely contradicts TLJ, which I was talking about. The ending rehashes a TLJ theme (make your own choice) but worse. And after Leia told us "don't be afraid of who you are". Rey's solution to that is to... be someone else?

Funnily enough, my prediction 3 years ago after TFA was that she would end up as Skywalker by taking on the name, not by blood relation.

9 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

How did he get there with that old TIE/LN?

I honestly don't remember seeing the ship he arrived in, just stalking inside past the X-wing and jumping onto the chain..

Given that it presumably lacked a magic whommy pyramid of navigating, how he got there at all regardless of ship is a good question (was Rey's course supposed to be broadcast to everyone or was it on a rebel/resistance channel?).

4 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:

I honestly don't remember seeing the ship he arrived in, just stalking inside past the X-wing and jumping onto the chain..

I'm telling you, it's an old TIE, parked right next to Rey's T65. I am 99% sure it was an old TIE as it's not that hard to tell them apart.

Just now, GreenDragoon said:

I am 99% sure it was an old TIE as it's not that hard to tell them apart.

I can't see him finding a working hyperspace-capable imperial ship - especially since, as you note, the TIE/ln wasn't hyperspace capable.

I guess if you want to reach for reasons for it to be a TIE fighter, he could have taken the skimmer to shore, and gone to the grounded cruiser the deserters came from, and borrowed a hyperspace-capable TIE/sf from there? Or he could have found a working communicator and ordered someone to come pick him up, but then you'd expect to have seen a First Order capital ship and fighters at Exegor. But in either case it would be a First Order TIE. The lighting might make the one look like the other but as you note they do have some physical as well as chromatic differences.

It wouldn't be a ship that just happened to be using the pad, either - if it was a Final Order fighter, it would most likely have been a TIE Dagger, and you wouldn't have mixed up that silhouette with anything civil war era.

Just watched it. Overall, I enjoyed it. There wasn’t any major scene that drew me away from the movie. Also, I didn’t walk out of it with too many questions. It is much much better than TLJ.

Pros:
+Great lightsaber fight. Very close to an actual sword dual, not a gymnast dual.
+Lots of action. (Almost too much. See cons)

+Chewie actually showing emotion

+Ben dying to save Rey

Cons :

-zombie-Palp makes sense only if it was described HOW. Ie: clone, etc...(unless I missed it)

-too fast/too much action. Never had the opportunity to relax and take the plot in. (Thin as it is)

-Kylo showing up in a TIE/LN!!!
-Felt too video-gamy. Get this piece for this piece to do that..

-the whole Goonies-dagger thing and to be used with the debris of death star2.
-The ‘land assault’ for the antenna. Been way cooler for Ywing bomb run or Bwing strafe run.
-Ben/Rey kiss.
-Ben/Rey bond continued after Snoke’s death
-Where did all the Sith people come from

Found it interesting and necessary:
•Jedi training for Leia. I felt this was to explain Merry Poppins scene better, though there is not any mention of Leia training or using the force in any of the books.

•Holdo- maneuver being explained and dismissed.

Missed opportunity (from my point of view)

•when Palp was talking about the bond between Rey/Ben. I was hoping for a Raven/Bastila reference

•more cameos from the Calvary ships. So much focus on being together, and with everything being Cannon now, would have been way cool. (Jace in the Ghost! Oh my...)

•more characters death. Not to be morbid, but would have put more weight on the final attack

•R2 being the one telling this story “a long time ago...”

55 minutes ago, Ccwebb said:

-The ‘land assault’ for the antenna. Been way cooler for Ywing bomb run or Bwing strafe run.

Or, since it was clearly intended to give Finn (who's not a pilot) something to do, a boarding action but a 'proper' one, inside the ship.

2 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:

Or, since it was clearly intended to give Finn (who's not a pilot) something to do, a boarding action but a 'proper' one, inside the ship.

I was thinking putting him at the gunner seat again, but that was already done. Why repeat a good thing? Lol

I agree, inside the ship assault, former troopers vs stormtroopers would have been awesome.

6 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:

I don't specifically mind Palpatine being the villain, but I feel the way it was done was kind of clumsy: essentially the opening crawl being "....and Palpatine's alive. Sucks to be everyone else" when that feels like something you should have built to as a mid-film climactic twist.

I think the first words in the opening crawl killed the film for me. The impact of his return from the dead was gratuitously thrown away.

I don’t think Palp was a clone. I think the Sith reanimated his body with this new healing business.