Star Wars

Oh god I’ve just read the reviews/barely-literate rantings on Rotten Tomatoes. There really is no hope for the human race.

I was really let down by it personally (and I loved TFA, and Finn and Rey which sadly feels more like me having to mention to avoid acusations of sexism/racism more than me simply saying that I liked them as they were in TFA) but it might be too much of a galaxy brain tier film for me I guess, I was happy to just be disappointed by it (and fully expected to be in a minority, which I wasn't, to my surprise) until twitter fucking exploded with all these garbage takes on why people who didn't like the film are probably stupid and also that the old films are actually rubbish that it really set me off, but oh well.

They're not rubbish (except the prequels), they're just very straightforward.

The Last Jedi was so exciting to me because it was the first evidence that I'd ever seen that a Star Wars film could be more than a simple good-vs-evil story in a particular production design aesthetic.

And "good people can do the wrong thing for the right reasons" is not a staggeringly complex theme to tackle in science fiction.

Yeah; there's not a lot of theme in Star Wars, up until The Last Jedi; it never gets deeper than "Fascists Bad, Freedom Good", and "staying calm is better than getting angry".

Though a lot of "fans" seem to have missed that last part…

I don't think it's quite fair to say there's no theme to earlier Star Wars films. There's a recurring theme throughout about when it is ok to fight and when it isn't.

In Empire Luke goes to fight Vader, despite Yoda's warnings and we all remember how well that went.

In Return Luke defeats the Emperor and saves Vader by choosing not to fight.

In Revenge of the Sith Yoda chooses to stop fighting the Emperor because he is giving in to anger to try and win.

The whole prequel trilogy is about a false war, manufactured to put evil into power.

There's definitely more to it than Goodies Vs Space Nazis, even if The Force Awakens goes into a lot more depth than the others do.

There's a recurring theme throughout about when it is ok to fight and when it isn't.

There's a recurring motif of people fighting or not, but I don't know that it goes into a deeper philosophy about the nature, necessity and cost of violence.

In Empire Luke goes to fight Vader, despite Yoda's warnings and we all remember how well that went.

I was thinking about this even before you posted, and it doesn't really go all that badly, in the grand scheme. Yoda makes some big dance about "destroy everything for which they have fought and suffered", but that's not really the case. Luke's a few fingers short (briefly) and a few people get waylaid rescuing Han, but when they get back to the rebel fleet, it's been doing just fine without them.

There's a recurring motif of people fighting or not, but I don't know that it goes into a deeper philosophy about the nature, necessity and cost of violence.

I believe the idea is that whenever someone is fighting to defend someone or something they love the overall result is positive. When they are fighting for their own gain or simply to win the fight, things get worse. I haven't re-watched the films since reading the theory but it sounds about right. There is the slight wrinkle that Anakin does all his bad deeds to try and save Padme but I think the idea is that he was deluding himself because he didn't want to face up to the truth.

I'll see if I can find the article…

Anakin does what he does not purely out of selflessness for Padmé, but in an attempt to exert power and control over his life - and the universe at large - which has been heretofore denied to him, first by slavery and then (in his perception) the Jedi.

Plus, he was always a short-tempered little twerp.

The Last Jedi really isn't that good. I can understand Gar doing the Gar ("I was tortured in an Iron Maiden and I thought it was amazing, I don't know why everyone else doesn't like it") but it has a lumpy, uneven structure, ridiculous plot, Canto Blight and some very, very dull bits. I didn't mind the handling of Luke, but most of the rest of it was pretty messy and borderline shite. Rogue One, on returning to it a few times has gone up in my estimation and I think it's the best of the new bunch.

I could do without the Internet whining about it though.

What really gets me is all the whining that Johnson has "ruined Star Wars" like Lucas hadn't already shit all over it already with his prequels. I actually prefer TLJ over TFA. Don't get me wrong, I like TFA but could Abrams have wanked off the fans any more?

Imo the biggest reason The Internet doesn't like TLJ is because it didn't prove any of their theories regarding Abrams' mystery boxes to be correct, if anything it dismisses them or leaves them well alone which I think is down to it being set so soon after TFA

The Internet will undoubtedly be happy that Abrams' tedious reheated fanservice is returning for the finale, I'm sure, but honestly I'm struggling to drum up much enthusiasm for IX.

With all its many faults, Solo was still the best SW movie since RotJ. Fight me.

I really liked it. It was a shooty explody space opera with some fun exotic planets. I don't want much more from my Star Wars tbh.

Although it failed the Bechdel test hilariously. At one point Han and Woody Harrelson are on the beach having a chat, leaving two female characters overlooking them on a dune. After a minute of the men talking it cuts to the women, one of whom says, "I wonder what they're talking about…".

Finally watched Solo last night. It was pretty much as everyone's said: fun enough on a moment-by-moment basis but ultimately a fairly mediocre movie, and a terrible Star Wars film.

It was pretty much derailed from the first frame by the fact they'd cast someone as Solo, in a film called Solo, that looked, sounded and acted nothing like Han Solo; by contrast the casting of Lando was pretty much perfect. Maybe they should have made that movie instead. And although it started off reasonably well (the train heist was decent) it quickly became an exercise in shoehorning in references to everything Han Solo had ever done, said or referred to in other movies, and as such it was less an actual movie than an in-progress ticklist. The self-congratulatory blasts of Star Wars music every time something fell into place were particularly embarrassing.

Emilia Clarke can't act, the robot was a comedy character who wasn't actually funny, and the appearance of

Spoiler - click to showDarth Maul at the end was just utterly bizarre. I missed virtually the whole of the next five minutes trying (and failing) to reconcile the timelines in my head, and spent the remainder of the movie waiting for it to explain things, which it never did. My Star Wars-loving friend tells me that it's based on a load of back-story explained in a cartoon series of all things, which seems like a very peculiar reference to slip in to a major movie with absolutely no word of explanation.

As others have said, it feels like extended setup for a sequel which will never be made; although I probably wouldn't enjoy that much either, at least it would be able to tell its own story. Solo just felt like fan-fiction, and bad fan-fiction at that: in meticulously explaining every last bit of back-story in perfunctory and unimaginative ways, it's made the movies' universe feel smaller, and a lot of the enigmatic references to things like the Kessell Run in earlier movies have now lost much of their charm (in much the same way as the prequels turned the Clone Wars into something rather dull and obvious). Solo will never be the worst Star Wars movie, not in a universe where Attack of the Clones exists, but it's a film that somehow cheapens the whole saga by its very existence.

I watched the original Star Wars trilogy over the last couple of weekends, for the first time in over twenty years - and it's possibly the first time I've ever seen all three in quick succession. It was my son's first time seeing any of them (he's not previously displayed any interest in them, and has only recently become any sort of movie watcher) and he'd managed to avoid picking up any knowledge of them at all, so all the twists that we take for granted these days landed with full force - the death of Obi Wan, the identity of Yoda, I Am Your Father, Lando's betrayal etc etc. So it was great to see it all through his eyes.

My opinion of the movies pretty much flipped with this viewing though. I previously would have rated them ANH > ROTJ > ESB - I'd always disliked Empire a bit as being just a succession of set pieces with no real beginning or end. But watching them all in rapid succession, it's clearly the best one, isn't it? All the characters are at their peak in Empire, Harrison Ford practically steals the movie, and it bounces between its storylines with ease. (Only the last third of ROTJ really manages to come close). Conversely I found the original Star Wars to be a lot slower than I remembered it, it takes an absolute age to get off Tatooine, the music cues are ridiculously unsubtle and the whole thing looks a lot cheaper than the other two. Jedi, meanwhile, is fun but a bit silly, and has been hit especially hard by the shitty 90s CGI that Lucas rammed into the Special Editions for no good reason whatsoever. But overall they are all enhanced by watching them as a single piece, and they've all aged remarkably well - especially for sci-fi.

That said, my son's favourite of the three by far was Return of the Jedi, and the Ewoks were the best characters apparently. So there is no hope for the younger generation. Phantom Menace next weekend, heaven preserve us, but I'm genuinely intrigued to see what he makes of Jar Jar Binks.

The Phantom Menace then, a very odd movie that I haven't seen for a very long time. It's not anywhere as near as terrible as it's made out to be, but it is terminally confused. At heart it wants to be a study of power, of how people can manipulate political situations for personal gain, but then - perhaps realising that's pretty advanced for a series about magic men in dressing gowns hitting each other with laser swords - it over-compensates with a whole load of stuff "for the kids" and it never even comes close to reconciling the two.

From a kid's perspective the first half hour is pretty perplexing. We had to pause the movie after the opening crawl to explain what was happening, before any characters had even appeared on screen. (When the first words you see are "Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic" and your child turns to you and asks, "Who's Turmoil?" you know you're in for a long ride). There then follows an incomprehensible half hour about Congress, the Trade Federation, the Senate, Padawans, Sith, trade blockades and handmaidens, lightened up only by the quite extraordinarily racist caricature that is Jar Jar Binks (and he's not even the most racist thing in the movie: step forward blatantly Jewish shopkeeper Watto). It does settle down - after 45 minutes Anakin is trying to win a pod race, and from that point on the plot is fairly straightforward - but that's a very steep curve for a family movie.

Good points: it's got great visual design, it's got a lot of new ideas, it's not remotely a rehash of anything that's gone before, the lightsaber fights are much better than those in the original trilogy, Liam Neeson. And I liked the casting of Jake Lloyd as Anakin Skywalker: with his little piggy eyes and shifty facial expressions he's (probably unintentionally) rather sinister, like someone trying badly to act like a cute kid.

Bad points: extensive racism, the invasion of Naboo looks like a PS2 cutscene, Natalie Portman is surprisingly terrible, too much weightless 90s CGI, it's all rather boring.

I remember it being much, much better than the second one.

Coincidentally, I've just rewatched Episode 1 and 2 for the first time in forever, too.

They're still naff, but now that the anger has died down there's definitely some interesting stuff in each film. The world-building is better than the Disney films, with some great night-time city scenes in Episode 2. (For the record, I liked Force Awakens and loved Last Jedi.) And the stuff in Episode 2 with Obi Wan flying around the galaxy investigating is genuinely enjoyable.

But most of all, whatever muck you throw at the prequels, you can't deny that Lucas had a story he wanted to tell. And he didn't really deviate from that, even when people moaned about Episode 1. That alone makes the prequels more interesting than Risible of Skywalker.

Also I'm now on a Star Wars binge, with the films, Battlefront 2, and I've just subbed to a month of Marvel Unlimited to catch up on the comics.

If you are watching through the prequels and classic films again I highly recommend tracking down the blogs which detail the Star Wars Ring Theory. It's really interesting and it explains WTF George was up to. It doesn't justify all of the shit in the prequels, but it at least makes sense now.

I'll have a google.

Anyone watched Clone Wars? I've watched the first two films, so Clone Wars comes next chronologically. Is it actually good, or is this another Avatar Airbender situation?

I'd not seen any of it, but The Clone Wars has a stellar (ha!) reputation; the showrunner is Dave Filoni, who's also a big driving force behind The Mandalorian.

What do you mean by 'Avatar Airbender situation'?

People act like it's the second coming of Christ, but it's just an inoffensive cartoon.

I think I'd give it higher praise than "inoffensive". It's definitely one of the better kids' shows out there.

It's an Avatar Airbender situation.

Yeah, there's some good bits in Clone Wars but it's certainly aimed at kids and there is a lot of filler.

People act like it's the second coming of Christ, but it's just an inoffensive cartoon.

Attack of the Clones: oh god, the endless sappy romance sequences. How the hell the plank that plays Anakin ever got the role is utterly beyond me. There's one scene in particular where he's declaring his undying love for his equally wooden co-star in a kind of constipated gasp that has perhaps the worst acting and dialogue I've ever seen in a mainstream movie.

Which is a shame, because actually the rest of it was nowhere near as bad as I remembered. In fact it was pretty fun. Jedis vs Droids was a particular highlight. I'm surprised how much I enjoyed this without the burden of expectation. And the boy loved it.

A lot of All the problems with the performances in the prequels are down to Lucas. There are good actors in those movies, and they're universally terrible; on set he would just repeatedly tell them to rein back any emotion. Ian McDiarmid, and to a lesser extent Liam Neeson, are the only ones who get to do anything like acting.

Surprisingly I thought Revenge of the Sith was actually really decent. It's clearly the best of the three prequels and it actually manages to lift the other two by simply existing. The three are so clearly a single story (unlike the other two Star Wars trilogies) that viewed back-to-back you can forgive the slow first part and slightly misguided middle part more readily when you know it all comes together in the end. Ewan McGregor's great, Hayden Christensen's much better when just required to glower rather than be a romantic lead, Ian McDarmid looks like he's having all the fun in the world and the special effects haven't aged at all. Yep. Enjoyed this one a lot.

Yep, also just finished Revenge of the Sith and pretty much agree. It was a pleasant surprise after years of remembering it as a bag of wank.

It's got a few godawful bits, including possibly the worst line of dialogue of all time.

Obi Wan: "Anakin the Chancellor is evil!"

Anakin: "From my point of view the Jedi are evil!"

Oof. But otherwise yeah, some genuinely enjoyable stuff. Ewan McGregor is excellent, considering some of the lines he's given are crap. And the last half hour (are spoilers still a thing for this film?) with the transformation, and death, are a lot darker than I remember. Definitely pushing the 'family film' definition.

That's not even the worst line in that trilogy, never mind of all time.

"It's over Anakin! I have the higher ground!" (spoken as Obi-Wan gains all of six inches' height advantage on the world's smallest hill, against a Jedi who can leap eighteen feet straight up in the air) made me guffaw.

Nothing there is as bad as Attack of the Clones' romance scenes though, and you're never more than thirty seconds away from some ridiculous piece of screen-filling CGI, so I'm happy to let it pass. The only bit I really disliked about the movie was the whole "Padme dies of a broken heart" bit, especially as there were a couple of far better ways to do that scene that had already been set up. They did Padme's character a big disservice in this third movie.

I always thought it was pretty clear that it was Anakin's fear of the prophecy which killed Padme?

I mean, it's still not great but it's clearly established that fear is bad and doing the wrong thing for the right reasons will not help avoid prophecies of doom.

Well, they could have done it two ways - either go with the whole “dies in childbirth” thing they’d set up all the way through the movie (ie nothing you do can cheat fate); or, have Anakin slapping her down on the lava planet be the fatal blow (ie his rage betrayed his intention to protect her). As it stands it seems like she was perfectly healthy but died because she was a bit sad, which may not have been the intention but does kind of undermine the end of the saga.

On to The Force Awakens, because why not.

I've only seen this once before, on release, and I loved it. Coming back to it now, especially as part of a Star Wars viewing marathon, I was significantly less enamoured with it. It still looks great, and it gets away with a lot thanks to the energy and charisma of its new cast (Daisy Ridley is particularly good) but it's a very… safe movie, for want of a better word. It doesn't take any risks. In many ways it's effectively a remake of the very first Star Wars movie, and while it reguarly inverts the series' tropes (Kylo Ren being Han Solo's son, for instance), it never subverts them.

What you end up is an entertaining popcorn movie that's curiously forgettable, because there's nothing here you haven't seen before. Honestly I'd take any of the prequel movies over this one, because while they're failures, they are at least fascinating and ambitious failures.

I saw The Force Awakens with Sarah's entire family, all of whom are big Star Wars fans, and when it ended, we sat on silence for about 20 seconds, then there was a collective "…hm."

It really looks the part, but it's got wildly inconsistent characterisation, muddled motivations, and no real through-line.

Finn gets the shortest end of the stick on all of this. He quits the First Order, reaches Poe and runs off to join the Resistance because… Poe murdered his friend in front of him? He's a first-timer who can't bring himself to fire his gun in combat, then an hour later, he's an unflappable badass who can take on a First Order riot trooper using a lightsaber - a weapon he's never used before. Oh, and he was a stormtrooper, but he worked sanitation, because that's what you use fucking stormtroopers for.

So much stuff happens, but huge amounts of it have nothing to do with the story. The rathtar escape is a particularly glaring example of this, accomplishing precisely nothing that a dialogue scene a tenth the length couldn't do, all so some tentacle-beasts can smash up a ship we don't care about and eat some mooks we've never heard of.

And don't get me started on the squandering of Phasma.

Abrams wants desperately to be Spielberg, and he's halfway there; like Spielberg, he's great at getting a specific emotional response out of you in the moment. But Spielberg knows how to hang the whole thing together around solid characters. Abrams doesn't, which is why, when you think about it afterwards, all of his films are a bit unsatisfying. Nobody has an arc, because nobody has a core role - they're just whatever he needs them to be in that instant.

The Last Jedi: clearly the best one, and it's not even close.

Yeah, pretty much.

It's entirely unrelated and a completely different genre, but I highly recommend Rian Johnson's next movie, Knives Out. And his previous one, Looper. I've still not seen Brick, but I've heard very good things.

I haven't watched Brick in years, but other than it being a bit jarring at times when teenagers talk like 50's gumshoes I remember it being very good.

I still haven't actually seen Knives Out, which I really need to rectify.

I liked Looper, but haven't seen Brick or Knives Out (though the latter is definitely on my list of things to watch when I get the chance). @aniki, is it rewatchable enough/well-enough served with extras (if you know) that it'd be worth picking up on bluray? I've hovered the button on it a few times.

You'll definitely want to watch Knives Out at least twice. Can't comment on the bluray extras.

is [Knives Out] rewatchable enough/well-enough served with extras (if you know) that it'd be worth picking up on bluray?

I have it on Blu-ray (and bought it digitally for laziness reasons), but haven't checked out the extras yet. I'm very keen to get the director's commentary watched, though.

I've seen it… three times now? I don't think it's the kind of movie where you'll be noticing something new every time, but it's so much fun to watch. And in the case of Daniel Craig, to listen to.

The Rise of Skywalker. Sorry, I would spoiler this but for some reason the spoiler tags on this board break if you include line breaks. And I have a lot to say. I'm guessing you've all seen this anyway.

A mess. A sporadically entertaining mess, but a mess.

• Palpatine AGAIN, I mean seriously?
• Why was the first hour of this movie a series of Bethesda fetch quests? Bloody mystical dagger FFS.
• Shitcanning Rose is the biggest act of corporate cowardice I've seen in a long time.
• Just so much stuff happening, all the time, with no space to breathe.
• Killing Chewie then bringing him back 5 minutes later is shit. Wiping C3PO's memory then restoring it 5 minutes later is also shit.
• New characters that do nothing and go nowhere. I'm thinking of you, potential Poe love interest whose name I've forgotten, and you, potential Finn love interest whose name I've forgotten. Honestly just let Poe and Finn kiss, you've pandered to every other element of the fanbase, might as well give this bit a go.

On the other hand:

• Pretty much everything with Kylo Ren and Rey in it is solid gold. Adam Driver completely won me over in this.
• A couple of brilliant scenes. Again all Ren/Rey related. Rey in the desert with the lightning fingers. The remote duel, like a Jedi Zoom call.
• Clearly they wanted to do more with Leia than they were able to. That's just a huge shame all round.

Generally though I don't think I've ever seen a movie where the editing choices are so transparently up there on screen for everyone to see. There are plot lines, characters and setups throughout that go nowhere. I genuinely can't decide if the movie would have been better served by cutting an hour out of it, or just doing an Infinity War/Endgame and letting it sprawl over two movies. It's way too frenetic as it stands and it just becomes a blur of lightsabers, CGI and explosions.

And it's just such a SAFE movie. It's like they looked at the reception to The Last Jedi and just decided to roll back everything people didn't like and give the audience what they thought they wanted in order to make more money. That's not how great movies are made. Say what you like about George Lucas, when everyone hated The Phantom Menace he basically said "fuck you" and gave them five more hours of the same. Go George.

And it's just such a SAFE movie. It's like they looked at the reception to The Last Jedi and just decided to roll back everything people didn't like and give the audience what they thought they wanted in order to make more money.

Part of me wonders, now, if that's the real reason Colin Trevorrow was taken off. If he wanted to continue doing something interesting, and the backlash made them panic and say back to what they saw as a safe bet. I dunno, it's pure conjecture, but plenty of people have made a bad movie and kept other projects that are lined up.

It definitely has the whiff of corporate interference about it. There’s no way you can look at The Rise of Skywalker and say, yep, that’s someone’s artistic vision right there.

JJ would have to have artistic vision first.

We all like ranking things, right? I’ve spent all day mulling this over and came to the conclusion that my personal ranking of the Star Wars movies from best to worst is as follows:

The Last Jedi
The Empire Strikes Back
Star Wars
Revenge of the Sith
Return of the Jedi
The Phantom Menace
The Force Awakens
The Rise of Skywalker
Attack of the Clones

Need to rewatch Rogue One and Solo before I can add them but my gut feel on having seen them each once is that Rogue One is bottom half and Solo is rank last.

I have a feeling Rise of Skywalker night actually get worse on repeat viewing.

The Last Jedi above any of the original films is clearly insane. Any of the original trilogy above literally any film ever made is also insane.

Skywalker is pretty shite, and arguably the worst of the new three, although TLJ is a dumpster fire as well. Force Awakens is largely knockabout entertainment and fine. Rogue One I've enjoyed more and more each time I've seen it. Its respectful of the lore and has clearly been made by someone who understands the franchise. The space battles are cool and the plot passable. It's shit in bits but not too bad. Solo was shit and on second watch was also shit.

So, the correct order is:

Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
New Hope
Rogue One
Force Awakens
[quality gap]
Last Jedi/Last Skywaker (both bad, with small redeeming bits, largely Adam Driver)
[quality gap]
Solo
[Wanking off Jacob Rees-Mogg]
The prequel trilogy

Rogue One is awful. It has too many characters, most of whom bring nothing to the plot, and none of whom have a satisfying arc; it was clearly hacked to bits and Frankenstein'd back together in the edit; and the final-act battle is just a poor retread of Return of the Jedi, and doesn't fit with the opening of the original nearly as well as it thinks it does. Also, Darth Vader makes a pun.

It looks the part, I guess, other than the horrifying CGI Peter Cushing/Carrie Fisher.