Board 8 > Star Wars Episode 9 Discussion SPOILERS

(+) Yeah! (+)

Enjoyed it overall. Cried at several points. Never felt the movie was dragging.

This is not a movie I'd suggest people see without seeing a lot of other movies in the series. (At least episodes 4-8). There's a lot of visual storytelling where it makes references to stuff in other movies with just a visual and no explanation.

But man, Palpatine was a weak villain.

Like...they chose OT Palpatine who basically has three personality traits

• Lightning
• Evil Laughter
• "Kill this person that you hate and become sith forever"

They could have chosen like...Prequel trilogy Palpatine, who has a little depth and character development. They could have done Darth Jar Jar.

Like...I get that Rey and Ren had been built up for ages to team up eventually, which means that naturally they should bring in some big threat. But OT Emperor is pretty bland. (Overall the Ren and Rey stuff was pretty well-done though, so overall good impressions of the movie).

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Mr Lasastryke posted...

abrams probably planned kylo = sequel trilogy's vader, snoke = sequel trilogy's emperor but johnson screwed that up

And this was absolutely correct to do, because while I liked TFA a lot I would have had a lot of complaints if the entire trilogy had simply been a retread of that same dynamic. That's why after TFA I was very firmly on the "Ren should kill Snoke" train, and I was so happy they went in that direction to mess with it a bit. But as I said, I hoped that would then lead to irredeemable Kylo.

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XIII_rocks posted...

And this was absolutely correct to do, because while I liked TFA a lot I would have had a lot of complaints if the entire trilogy had simply been a retread of that same dynamic. That's why after TFA I was very firmly on the "Ren should kill Snoke" train, and I was so happy they went in that direction to mess with it a bit. But as I said, I hoped that would then lead to irredeemable Kylo.

i'm fine with the idea in theory but then the story should have played out differently. in TFA they introduce snoke without explaining anything about him (why is his skull half crushed? why is he obsessed with the empire? why is he apparently the big leader now that kylo answers to?) and in TLJ he just dies ("well guess you'll never get the answers to those questions lol!"). that's dumb. johnson obviously wanted to tell a different story than abrams but you can't just do this when a ton of groundwork for the story has already been laid. the sequel trilogy feels like one of those board 8 fanfiction projects about the character contests from back in the day, with a bunch of different writers continuing the same story (and even those felt less disjointed, really).

in fairness, i think they made the same mistake (to a lesser extent) in the OT with boba fett. in ESB they're all like "hey here's this mysterious new (not counting the holiday special) villain he's really going to do some awesome shit in the next one!" and then in RotJ they're like "oh he unceremoniously died whoops."

this just reminds me of how rare something like the lord of the rings trilogy is. when you don't have a story that was meticulously planned out from start to finish, you always get stupid shit that doesn't make sense from a narrative standpoint.

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Mr Lasastryke posted...

i'm fine with the idea in theory but then the story should have played out differently. in TFA they introduce snoke without explaining anything about him (why is his skull half crushed? why is he obsessed with the empire? why is he apparently the big leader now that kylo answers to?) and in TLJ he just dies ("well guess you'll never get the answers to those questions lol!"). that's dumb. johnson obviously wanted to tell a different story than abrams but you can't just do this when a ton of groundwork for the story has already been laid. the sequel trilogy feels like one of those board 8 fanfiction projects about the character contests from back in the day, with a bunch of different writers continuing the same story (and even those felt less disjointed, really).

in fairness, i think they made the same mistake (to a lesser extent) in the OT with boba fett. in ESB they're all like "hey here's this mysterious new (not counting the holiday special) villain he's really going to do some awesome shit in the next one!" and then in RotJ they're like "oh he unceremoniously died whoops."

this just reminds me of how rare something like the lord of the rings trilogy is. when you don't have a story that was meticulously planned out from start to finish, you always get stupid shit that doesn't make sense from a narrative standpoint.

Well LOTR is one book that was published like 50 years before the movies so it couldn't really be disjointed as the source material wasn't. The OT is more of a miracle in that sense - the emperor barely gets a mention in the original, and ends up as the overarching villain. It doesn't feel planned out but it worked very well.

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Grand Kirby posted...

I think it's clear you need someone like Kevin Feige to make it work like the MCU. All the other cinematic universes that have crashed and burned is proof of that.

Of course, having blueprints for a trilogy isn't as hard as creating a massive universe, so I only assume they didn't feel like the movies needed a strong overarching direction because they felt Star Wars fans would eat it up no matter what. And they were half right...

When The Force Awakens came out, the MCU was getting backlash over the films supposedly feeling overly "made by committee", with it not helping that there had been a number of high-profile clashes between the directors and Marvel Entertainment. So the whole deal with Star Wars was that each director would have creative freedom. Once Marvel got its stuff back together it became plainly obvious that this approach was not going to work for Star Wars.

The other big blockbuster films of 2015 aside from The Force Awakens were stuff like Jurassic World, Furious 7, Age of Ultron, and Minions, then there were also flops like Terminator: Genisys, Fant4stic, and Pixels. The previous year's biggest hit was Transformers 4, and other big hits from that year included Hobbit 3 and Maleficent. Oh my freaking god what an awful decade for blockbuster cinema.

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Stop

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TLJ had the line that nobody is ever too far gone.

But it would've been nice to have Rey actually go dark side, which would've made room for Kylo's face turn. Kylo with Han mannerisms was great, but had zero lines.

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HanOfTheNekos posted...

TLJ had the line that nobody is ever too far gone.

But it would've been nice to have Rey actually go dark side, which would've made room for Kylo's face turn. Kylo with Han mannerisms was great, but had zero lines.

The line was, "No one's ever really gone."

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ok

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Isn't it kinda funny that half of the plot points in Star Wars are about securing plans for the ultimate project? Characters are always concerned about designs/schematics, blueprints and maps.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

When The Force Awakens came out, the MCU was getting backlash over the films supposedly feeling overly "made by committee", with it not helping that there had been a number of high-profile clashes between the directors and Marvel Entertainment. So the whole deal with Star Wars was that each director would have creative freedom. Once Marvel got its stuff back together it became plainly obvious that this approach was not going to work for Star Wars.

I hate to give LMS credit but this is all actually true

has he finally stumbled upon the reason star wars sucks now

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Seginustemple posted...

Isn't it kinda funny that half of the plot points in Star Wars are about securing plans for the ultimate project? Characters are always concerned about designs/schematics, blueprints and maps.

Is anyone else kind of concerned about how easy it seems to be to build planet destroying weapons? The Death Star seemed like a really unique piece of technology that took an unreasonable amount of time and resources to make, which is why it's such a relief it when it was; the assumption being that it was not something that could be achieved so easily. ...Then they make a new one a short time later. Then a bunch of terrorists make an even bigger one. Then there were thousands of small ones made into a fleet.

Maybe it's supposed to be analogous to nuclear weapons... Hopefully in the next trilogy every single planet has one and the entire saga is based around signing non-aggression pacts with each other.

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CoolCly posted...

I hate to give LMS credit but this is all actually true

has he finally stumbled upon the reason star wars sucks now

You act like they didn't meddle in Rogue One or fire directors for Solo and Rise of Skywalker.

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That doesn't change the plan from the beginning to give creative control to the directors. It just means they freaked out and started changing things late when things weren't going well.

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Way better than I had anticipated because I had zero expectations after TLJ.

Highlights:

Palps, baby! Force storm omg cool factor turned to 11.

I marked out for Wedge. I marked out for Chewy's medal.

This was actually fun. Sure it basically was damage control to clean up the mess of the previous film, but hey. They did a decent job.

But of course the pacing was on speed and things came at you a mile a millisecond.

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I watched a list of things that allegedly almost happened with Episode 9 and one of them was that there were talks of splitting it into two movies. That probably would've been terrible.

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yeah they can't split that into two movies

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I actually thought splitting it into 2 movies would have helped a lot. The problem is they went in a completely different direction from episode 8 so they basically had to set up and resolve episode 9 in one film.

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the comments about splitting up the movie are very out of touch imo

like, they didnt HAVE to cram a million things into this movie, even if they had some catching up to do from episode 8. they did that because they wanted to. because they thought that's what mainline star wars movies need. If they split it up into two movies, you would get two movies crammed full of shit, not two well paced movies.

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I also thought Episode 7 was a big part of the problem. It didn't do enough to advance the plot for the first part of a trilogy.

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TFA did at least as much to advance the plot as ANH did!

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Mr Lasastryke posted...

TFA did at least as much to advance the plot as ANH did!

ANH introduced the whole universe, including concepts like the Force.

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TFA at worst did a good job of introducing a few characters to build the trilogy around. The entire trilogy is basically built on the good will of Kylo Ren and Rey (even with all the hate for Rey)

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Episode 9 could have easily been two movies

if episode 8 didn't exist

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skullbone posted...

Episode 9 could have easily been two movies

if episode 8 didn't exist

So true.

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Man, I remember how many topics we went through when Episode VIII came out. They don't make Star Wars movies like they used to.

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Because The Last Jedi was interesting, at the very least.

There isn't anything worth discussing to this movie.

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We can always talk about how a sand kid built a robot to full galactic specs, including anti-sith translation protocols.

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TheRock1525 posted...

Because The Last Jedi was interesting, at the very least.

There isn't anything worth discussing to this movie.

Interesting in a bad way, yeah. But I'd much rather a RoS over something like tLJ.

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FFDragon posted...

We can always talk about how a sand kid built a robot to full galactic specs, including anti-sith translation protocols.

I feel like the anti-Sith protocols had to have been added later. It's not like someone couldn't have reprogrammed him at some point or whatever.

or it could have been the Force

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FFDragon posted...

We can always talk about how a sand kid built a robot to full galactic specs, including anti-sith translation protocols.

In fairness, Anakin didn't build C-3PO, he just fixed him.

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I mean, it's already ridiculous that Anakin built a bog-standard protocol droid

it literally made no sense

it's the Force

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Anakin didn't build 3PO, he fixed up a junk 3PO model protocol droid from Watto's shop over the course of several years using parts from said shop.

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I can't believe Anakin literally forged metal himself in order to construct C3PO

Now THAT'S podracing

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Is anyone here familiar with The Clone Wars? I've been interested in watching it and I've seen lists online of the episodes in chronological order and people are saying to watch it that way. Any input on that? The problem is that I generally like to watch things in release order.

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Just watch it in release order. You won't lose anything that way. If you really like it you can watch again in chronological order but I never found any reason to.

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CassandraCain posted...

Just watch it in release order. You won't lose anything that way. If you really like it you can watch again in chronological order but I never found any reason to.

Agreed. I would watch the minisode series first, then the shitty Clone Wars movie, then the series, then Rebels, etc

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Honestly I would just stick to watching Clone Wars, skip the movie and everything else.

Although I don't remember the minisodes so can't comment on their quality. Rebels has some amazing moments but pretty much only when it's paying off story threads from Clone Wars that weren't finished. Otherwise Rebels is just okay.

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TheRock1525 posted...

Because The Last Jedi was interesting, at the very least.

There isn't anything worth discussing to this movie.

Partly because it's the final movie in the series and they wrapped up most of the plot threads. Like...we can't speculate on what will happen between Ren and Rey because that storyline is all wrapped up (even though I felt like they handled the link and dynamic between them quite well in this movie).

I guess we can speculate on the one remaining dangling plot thread which is that they really strongly implied that Finn is an untrained Jedi. Like...Finn in this movie got all the sorts of lines that would have gone to Leia in RotJ, he would point at a ship and just be like "no, it's that ship, I can feel it." Literally only Jedi do that kind of shit.

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CassandraCain posted...

Honestly I would just stick to watching Clone Wars, skip the movie and everything else.

Although I don't remember the minisodes so can't comment on their quality. Rebels has some amazing moments but pretty much only when it's paying off story threads from Clone Wars that weren't finished. Otherwise Rebels is just okay.

The Thrawn plotline was very well done and I was glad to hear he will likely be returning in some other media.

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Great_Paul posted...

Is anyone here familiar with The Clone Wars? I've been interested in watching it and I've seen lists online of the episodes in chronological order and people are saying to watch it that way. Any input on that? The problem is that I generally like to watch things in release order.

See the Mandalorian thread where we just had a discussion about it. I personally would suggest watching the show in chronological order. I think it adds a whole lot to the show and it flows much much better. Also don't skip the movie, no idea why that guy would say that...

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Yeah the movie introduces the main character of the Clone Wars, just treat it like the first 3 episodes. Also just get through the first season, show really picks up after that.

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The movie is bad but you should watch it since it introduces the main character, like skull said. Watch in regular order, chronological seems very weird for something that's blatantly an anthology and mostly in order to begin with. All you really get is a few arcs reordered and more bad episodes popping up in your later viewing.

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PSA: I just played Jedi Fallen Order and it's better-written than almost all of the SW movies (in general)

Go play that

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I liked it but the kiss scene was dumb

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Waluigi1 posted...

Also don't skip the movie, no idea why that guy would say that...

Trying to save him an hour of his life I guess? The movie introduces Ahsoka, that's all it does. Not worth watching imo but I mean either way is fine obviously.

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Ironic.
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