Mine is they shouldn’t have made the sequel series without George as a consultant.
If you only like three of the movies, you’re not a fan of the franchise, you’re just a fan of three movies.
Three movies and(or) a TV show.
This is kinda where I was going in my reply.
I am not a Star Wars fan. I have a nostalgic fondness for the very first few movies and even then; I haven’t watched any of them in ages and don’t plan to. A Star Wars label on a piece of media, all things being equal, makes me less likely to interact with it these days.
I’d flip that around to say people shouldn’t seek to be a fan of a “franchise”. To be a fan of a franchise in general is to put a big sign on your back saying “I’m a sucker for whatever company owns the rights and I will spend money if you vaguely make it themed along the lines of the franchise”.
Andor is the best thing to come out of the Star Wars franchise and I’m tired of pretending it isn’t.
I will always love Andor forever simply because they took aim at the unironic Empire stans and shot them in the rhetorical head.
TFA was the only good sequel movie. Shit was cool, don’t care if derivative.
I loved TFA, but also really enjoyed Rise of Skywalker (yes, I’m the one). Though TLJ was appalling though.
Odd. What did you like about RoS? I barely remember anything good from it. Only forgettable movie.
Hard to say, it just felt right to me, the tone was back to something similar to TFA and away from the horrendous attempts at ironic humour that TLJ had (the “Can You Hear Me Now” bit, the lightsaber toss, the “It’s salt” bit, the fucking Porgs, the milking scene…)
As dumb an idea though it was, I still kind of like the grandiose madness of bringing Palatine back as the big bad. And I thought the scenes where Rey confronts him, with the audience of Sith watching, were great, the kind of high stakes, overblown melodrama that Star Wars always did so well.
I liked the use of Rey and Ben’s psychic link (which admittedly was one of the few things in TLJ that I liked), especially the lightsaber handover.
I thought the resolution of Ben and Han Solo’s story was handled beautifully, a really moving moment IMO.
And the part where Lando shows up with half the galaxy genuinely made me want to cheer in the cinema.
All I can say is that I came out of my first viewing feeling great, feeling, “Yeah, that was a Star Wars movie!”
So when everyone hated it, I was genuinely surprised tbh!
The comedic bits were one of the few highlights for me in TLJ. Weird how positive you came out of it. RoS was one of the few movies I’ve watched where I dislike it during the middle of the runtime. I thought the online reception of it was exaggerated but I came out thinking “I get it now”.
Also, the plot points you mentioned I wanted to like when they were shown but they were always a let down. Like the Palpatine fight with the cultists watching was so thematic but the actual fight was so bad. The light saber toss with the psychic link was cool though (even if it did make my eyebrow raise out of my forehead in how odd the rules are for it).
Fair enough - different strokes for different folks, I guess. And my positive view on RoS is certainly not one shared by many people! :-)
Star wars is better without jedi or sith as main characters. The universe is far more interesting when it’s regular people and the force users are rare or very weak. I liked rogue one so much more than the other movies. Jedi and sith and such are over powered bullshit and should be reserved for the rare deus ex machina. They are boring. Except Obi Wan because I have a huge crush on Ewan McGregor.
Magic has no place in science fiction.
I’d argue it’s the other way around: Science has no place in space fantasy. That’s why fans were so annoyed by the midichlorian nonsense - it sought to explain the magic through science.
I can’t comment on “space fantasy” specifically, but I like when fantasy builds complex science and engineering on top of their magic. The magic in something like the Stormlight Archive is compelling in its own right, but it’s massively enhanced by seeing how the ancient civilizations leveraged it to build advanced societies, and how they invent new things using the lower level tools over the course of the story.
If midichlorians were their connection to the Force and that was it it’d be one thing, where Lucas really fucked up was making it a quantifiable power level thing.
HEs gOt moRe maGiC bActErIa thAN YoDA
For someone who wanted to make Star Wars as “inclusive” as possible, Kathleen Kennedy neglected so many opportunities. For starters, we only ever saw one Star Wars character with any disability, and they used it to portray his villainy. No poly characters, no varying religious communities, heck they didn’t even have any relationships between droids and organic life forms despite the Dr. Aphra comics trying to make it clear the Star Wars universe doesn’t have our level of standards for what counts as an expected relationship. It’s almost as if they weren’t trying to be inclusive, just populist.
Luke and Vader are both amputees
Those are injuries though. I mean like an actual medical condition, something like “that character has autism” or “this one has asthma”. We only had one character with a medical condition that was something that wasn’t an amputee, the guy from Rogue One who takes off his breathing mask to take his last breath right before he was about to die. They portrayed it as a dramatic extension of his villainy. “Diversity” in Star Wars is incredibly disappointing.
Missing an extremity is an actual medical condition… I get your point about other kinds of conditions that are congenital or otherwise not directly due to physical harm. PTSD would be a good example of what could have been included in that case as well (this might actually exist in some form from disney). With how poorly so much of it was handled, it’s probably for the best that they didn’t try to tackle autism or Downs syndrome at the same time though.
Gatekeeping amputees as not counting as people with disabilities is actually the hottest take in this whole thread, and not in a good way lmao
I mean yeah, they’re disabilities in the sense that they’re a condition one ends up with that challenges them in some way, but it’s not something “wrong” with a way their body works, it’s just a type of damage someone can receive. They’re also arguably rather excessively easy to use as a stock disability from a storytelling perspective. Imagine if you were making a story and were compelled to give some characters some medical conditions to add to the depth of the story, and you thought “meh, we can just remove a bunch of their limbs”. Or to put it another way, unless the person is a Cyanide and Happiness character, nobody is going to write a biography in their elderly years titled “My Life As A Guy With One Hand” so as much as someone might write one titled “Life As An ADHD Person”.
I have the same semi-complaints (not really complaints per se) about Pokémon. There was one single blind character-of-the-day in the original season (because he was old), the manga version of Bryce was wheelchair-bound (kind of inevitable though for him), and the remake version of Wally was hinted to have asthma, but for two and a half decades of journeying around the world, there was never someone mainstream who popped up who had some kind of uniquely driven medical trait, which after so long doesn’t make you complain but makes you wonder if they’re avoiding it.
They should have it directed by Guillermo del Toro.
Should have had them directed by Quentin Tarantino.
Every discussion about the fall of the Jedi and the Republic proves that Star Wars fans don’t know shit about Star Wars.
I’m curious for your reasoning behind this. Is this lack of knowledge outside of the movies/disney meta? Lack of knowledge about the writing behind it? Do you know shit about Star Wars instead? I’m actually curious what you mean because so many fans know so many different fragments of an almost unattainably large lore space that you sound incredibly wrong and right at the same time.
Leaving aside the Euro/Christocentric opinions on the Jedi’s spiritual philosophy in regards to their “failure to stop the Sith,” anyone that has even a casual understanding of the background should be aware of three things:
1: The Jedi won in the end. How are you going to complain about them not batting a perfect game when they still won?
2: Republic/Jedi history spans millennia. They kept a galactic republic composed of THOUSANDS of species functional while serving as spiritual/political/military leadership. It’s all fake history obviously, but in the conceit of the universe one failure doesn’t mean jack shit, they’re one of the most effective and altruistic organizations in fiction.
3: They don’t “kidnap kids” like half the smoothbrains on Reddit say! They’re, in fact, so adverse to kidnapping and violence they won’t even take a SLAVE CHILD from outside the Republic without consent! It’s a major plot point!
I know it’s not a hot take but I’ll rant.
who the hell had to make Rey a Palpatine and Palpatine not die. that wasn’t epic, that was dumb af.
Darth jar jar would have been wayyy more compelling, funny, etc.
sometimes dead is bettah.
they could have gone a different route with snoke. he was the only compelling new guy and they made him the old guy. bahhh
I think they fucked up by wanting to give every movie to different directors, so in the second one the new director killed off Snoke. Then JJ Abrams somehow returned and probably had a story that required Snoke, but he was dead, so now Palpatine needs to be back.
Could have just made Snoke be the guy cloning himself instead of Palpatine. 🤷 It would have made just as much sense.
They should leave a bit more of the technical stuff up to the imagination.
Take ESB. I have no idea how the AT-AT walkers got to Hoth. It makes the reveal of the giant machines more intense. I have no idea how hyperspace works
I don’t need the tech behind kyber crystals I like laser swords. I don’t need medichlorians, I like mystical space monks.
I think star wars learned the wrong lessons of a decade of hyper realistic film making.
Most everything wrong with Star Wars happened because of the money grab. We could spend all day talking about the all-star cast ruined by awful writing/direction, wooden acting, and awful, ever-present, ridiculous sfx in 1-3. And of course, Jar-jar. They tried to make every film a “blockbuster” at the expense of the actual film in order to rake the cash in from fans.
The straight up cash grab, more awful writing, and bludgeoned fan service in the recent films. They had potential, but meandered as execs made sure to cram in merchandising opportunities and a veritable commercial or two.
The bright spot was Rogue One, which I thought was a fantastic and dark addition to the universe that explained some of the references made in the films. Andor, too, is pretty decent, leading up to Rogue One.
Selling to Disnep was a huge mistake. Putting all the fabulous work of the expanded universe in the back for “creative freedom” and labeling it “fan fiction” basically killed Star Wars for me. Why make movies about Yuuzhan Vong, a novel and incredibly fascinating and creatively written species as the new menace, not detectable by the force, if you can just recycle the old movies?
I never bothered to watch movie 9.
There is no movie 9
George Lucas’s writing in the OT was atrocious.
That’s not really a hot take, but an established fact. Even he admitted that the movie was saved in post production. Everybody has a story with an elaborate line that is an exposition dump and is so robotic it almost doesn’t make any sense.
99% of the salt involved with Star Wars comes from taking it way too seriously and treating it as way more important than it actually is.
I might be the only person on the planet who enjoyed watching all 9 films (with Rogue One being add-on favourite)
I enjoyed 7/9 of them (Rise of Skywalker and Phantom Menace commit the only sin that I think is unforgivable in a movie: They are uninteresting)
But that’s the thing right.
They’re
Enjoyable films
… And that’s it. If one of them sucks, it doesn’t change much in the world at large. And even if you’re the type of person for whom a bad entry ruins a series, it’s not like it’s such a massive loss in the case of Star Wars?
