EPT![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/X7U39Ro.jpg)
It's finally here. The equivalent to the $20 gift card for Walmart that your relatives felt obliged to give you because you are one of the few kids in the family who hasn't messed up their lives horribly!
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is the last time you will ever have to hear about a Star Wars movie ever again. Until the next trilogy, that is, which will be announced to be in development sometime next year. If you are new to the Star Wars thing, I urge you to GET OUT NOW. I want you to invest your time into learning a real skill, like learning how to change a car tire, how to roll a decent blunt, or play a lot of StarCraft and become a progamhahahahahahahaslvgfjesrlgvijlritgjesr
What you need to know is that Star Wars is not just a series of movies. Each single one after 1983 is a brutal assault on your intelligence, and in many ways, your dignity. "But how can a movie hurt you? Hahahah, just turn it off, n***a hahaha, close your eyes, n***a" and I gotta say... I'm tired of you strawmen constantly asking me rhetorical questions in my blogs, so maybe you should shut the fuck up.
Star Wars is like heroin. First, you get a hit of that sweet stuff and it makes you feel like your brain is having an orgasm. Second, you get another hit that sweet stuff, and you get the same feeling. The third hit has ewoks in it, but it's still pretty solid. Pretty soon, though, your refrigerator is growing teeth and attacking you, and you're doing ass-to-ass in a dark backroom for a bunch businessmen for your next dope hit.
Anyway, that's how I feel about Star Wars. It was fun until it wasn't anymore. Did I just get older, or did Star Wars attempt to break my brain without my consent (very important to get consent) out of the blue one day? I think these two things are not mutually exclusive. Just like, for example, Star Wars is supposedly a fun adventure movie for kids, while having images of brutal decapitations, discussions of political procedures, and plenty of dark imagery. You can have both!
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/uC7nIrW.jpg)
The Trilogy Concludes. Again.
Ya know, movies do not need to come in threes. There can be a story with two parts, like Kill Bill. Or however many Halloween movies there are. With the Prequel Trilogy, the biggest problem for me was the pacing. Sometimes, there was no character development at all. Never mind that there was Jar-Jar stepping in the big doo-doo and hitting his head on stuff. That was a miscalculation that would only be the top Star Wars blunder until The Last Jedi. The overall story-telling in the prequels felt really rushed, especially for Anakin, who is arguably the main fukken character. Maybe telling it in four parts would've given the character more time to change, and we can see Anakin go from merely conflicted to outright evil over a longer course of time, and not in 15 fucking minutes.
The final installment of the prequels, Revenge of The Sith, kind of broke me for awhile. I walked around with blankness in my eyes; the hollow shell of a woman wandering with no purpose. You see, the Emperor was just a decrepit old guy in the original trilogy. He did not literally have the face of an overweight vampire. I mean, obviously, there were a lot of other problems, but to list them all would be a huge waste of time because you want to know about Sky Wars: The Final Starwalker.
Let me tell you: this was almost exactly what I expected. There's a one-liner for everything to tie everything up into a nice, neat bow. Sort of. Actually, not really. Hm. Okay, actually, this movie was a cookie-cutter adventure movie that didn't really make a lot of sense, but my brain tries to make sense of the things I see around me, and is still currently trying to trick me into thinking I saw something coherent.
Let's talk about my amazing predictions. This is big-league spoiler stuff, so if you didn't watch yet, don't read!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Or do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My eerily accurate predictions
When JJ Abrams was announced to direct this movie, following the ill-reception to The Last Jedi by fans, I made the video above, which predicted that JJ Abrams would take a shit on Rian Johnson's vision for Star Wars. I said that The First Order would resurrect Supreme Leader Snoke, but this was before Emperor Sheevy-boi was revealed in the 2019 trailer.
Correct: Villain would be resurrected
Incorrect: It was not Snoke
We get a movie that is basically Return of The Jedi. There is a new superweapon, and the resistance has to destroy it before Donald Trump can fire it at San Francisco. The movie starts off with Kylo Ren and the mysterious Lord Hate conversing aboard the new superweapon, which is called "The Galaxy Obliteratorer", but it can destroy the whole galaxy with one hit. Lord Hate has sensed that SNOKE IS DEAD, and come out of hiding to reveal Snoke's true purpose: to destroy the galaxy because he's bad. Kylo looks to Lord Hate for guidance, and Lord Hate says the dark side will guide them and blah blah blah.
I forgot I even wrote this. I had to go back to my October 5th, 2018 blog entry to look at my predictions and I was like "Holy shit" because this is exactly how the movie started.
Correct: There is a new superweapon(s), and the movie starts with the Emperor talking to Kylo Ren at the base of the weapons, Exogul. They even have a stupid name, which is "The Final Order". Now, apparently, all of those ships had crews, so were the crews also buried alive inside the ships? Who knows. Who cares!?
Incorrect: There were hundreds of mini superweapons instead of one big one.
Meanwhile, Rey uses her Jedi powers to fight a secondary villain on Jakku. In the title crawl, it says Rey learned the secondary villain may have information about her parents, so she goes to his castle to confront him. He tries to kill Rey, Finn, Rose, Chewbacca, and BB8, so Rey goes ham and destroys all his shit. Maybe Rose wears a slave-girl outfit, but she definitely is the one who kills him. Perhaps by choking. I don't know.
This was basically me saying the movie would be a rip-off of Return of The Jedi. There were smugglers on a different non-sand-planet that were affiliated with lovable rogue, Poe Dameron, but that's really the only similarity in the first act of the movie. There's no Jabba the Hutt equivalent.
Correct: Nothing
Incorrect: Everything, thank god
Anyway, Rey goes back to Jedi Island to find Luke, but he's not there. But his ghost shows up, and then tells Rey she has to confront the dark side because he saw the darkness in her
This was pretty close. You gotta admit that.
Correct: Rey goes to Jedi Island and Luke's ghost shows up and tells her to confront the dark side and that he saw the darkness in her.
Incorrect: Rey went to the island to hide, not to find Luke.
reveals that in space-heaven, he found Rey's parents and that she and Kylo are actually siblings, and Leia had a baby with someone else, and Han had a baby with someone else, so Rey is Han Solo's daughter, and Kylo is Leia's son
Correct: Rey is part of some family legacy. Again, this is before I knew Palps was back in, so that's why I didn't guess that. But I should have.
Incorrect: Rey and Kylo are not siblings
Technically Correct: Rey and Kylo may be related!?+ Show Spoiler +
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/kUUyg9m.png)
Rey goes to confront Kylo, Finn + Rose have to shut down the shield generator, and Poe Dameron goes to blow up the Death Star 4, possibly with Nien Nunb as his co-pilot. Or Lando as his co-pilot. And Lando goes "I've been looking forward to blowin' up another one of these motherfuckers!"
This is... also really close. Possibly because I was poking fun that the plot of the movie would have stuff lifted from Return of the Jedi. I'm not a wizard. Nien Nunb does show up in the movie, which really surprised me. Finny boi goes after the shield generator, and Lando DOES lead the main attack on the superweapons. WOW GREAT JOB JJ ABRAMS.
Correct: Finn goes to knock out the broadcast beacon thingamajig on General Pryde's star-destroyer, while Poe and Lando do the air-attack on what is essentially Death Star 4.
Incorrect: Rey confronts Palpy-boi, not Kylo, although she confronts him earlier in the movie. So I'll just pretend I'm right.
Lord Hate is killed by Kylo when Kylo turns back to being good, and then Hayden Christensen's ghost shows up at the end with Luke's ghost, Yoda's ghost, Obi Wan's ghost, and also maybe Poe Dameron's ghost, and it makes no sense.
LOL WTF, I MIGHT BE A WIZARD, I DUNNO. All of the Jedi ghosts do show up, but as voices. They actually got them to voice lines in the movie.
Correct: Kylo turns back to good at the end, Luke/Leia ghosts do show up, the ghosts of Yoda, Luke, Obi-Wan, and Hayden Christensen talk to Rey.
Incorrect: The Emperor is killed by Rey (although he technically kills himself in the same manner that he fucked up his face when confronting Mace Windu) not Kylo. Poe Dameron lives.
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/ejPSIb4.png)
I made two prediction-scripts. The second one is more nonsensical, because I was trying to make a 'subverted' RotJ script, but I got some things weirdly close-to-correct:
Meanwhile, Rey, Finn, Rose, Chewie, and BB8 head to sand-planet, where the son of Jabba The Hutt, Bobby The Hutt
lol, so this almost happened. Rose decides to stay behind on Rebel-Base-Planet, and technically, what's they're looking for is a MacGuffin that will lead Rey to find out about her parents. Bobby The Hutt doesn't show up, though. Boo.
a new character shows up who is a total badass, and she's a WOMAN
This happens. Twice.
"No Rey. Snoke was your father."
Goddamn it, I was close.
Their source from inside The First Order is General Hux
NAILED IT. HELL YEAH.
"Well, the galaxy is very diverse." Maz Kanata replies, because they ran out of footage of Leia, and didn't want to do any more CGI of Leia. This is very jarring to the viewers to see Leia suddenly out of the movie. Maybe we see her climb into a space-pod and it gets hit by a random asteroid. Maybe she transfers all her knowledge to Rey by holding Rey's hand and then vanishes into the force, leaving only her clothes behind.
This is partially right. Leia does die in a sort of "Oh I guess I'm dead now" kind of way. Additionally, Maz Kanata is part of The Resistance now, I guess? I think she got some of Leia's lines in the movie because Leia died irl and couldn't deliver them. I thought it'd be funny to speculate that there'd be a CGI Leia, AND THERE ACTUALLY WAS. There is a flash-back where CGI Luke is sparring with CGI Leia using live-lightsabers. Isn't that dangerous? What if Leia accidentally cut off Luke's head?
And Luke goes "Of course not! Your bloodline theory sucks, manbaby fandom!" and looks at the camera again and literally gives the middle finger as he says it.
We got the opposite of this. There was even a reference to Admiral Holdo's warp speed attack at one point, which Poe dismisses and goes "No, that's retarded".
"Why did you become a stormtrooper?" Rey asked.
"There's not enough room in this movie to give me any backstory, so we're not even going to talk about it." Finn replied.
"There's not enough room in this movie to give me any backstory, so we're not even going to talk about it." Finn replied.
Finn did not get any additional backstory. And then Lando swoops in and steals his girl like a playa.
Rey pulls out her lightsaber. Her lightsaber is yellow
wtf im god???
Ivanka is like "Do it."
I was using "Ivanka" as sort of a stand-in for a "woke Star Wars" villain would be: The heir to Supreme Leader Donald Snoke. Of course, the role of Snoke was inherited by Lil Palp, and he DOES say "Do it". It was like hearing the Joker saying "society" in the Joker movie.
"NANI?" Ivanka screeches, and does some force-lightning on Kylo. But then Rey shows her true power and stops the lightning in mid-air, and uses the force to throw Ivanka out a window. Then Rey grabs Kylo and pulls him to safety and they have to get to another room or get sucked into space, but Rey pulls him with her one arm with her, and they are saved.
Kylo does not get force-lightning'd, but he does get force-pushed off into some hole in the ground. Rey does, however, show her true power and stops the lightning, with her double lightsabers, H**K YEAH!
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/T0nHIWG.jpg)
Lingering Questions
This movie pretended to explain stuff, but it kind of didn't?
- Why did Luke Skywalker make a map to Ahch-To?
- Where did Snoke come from?
- Why did the Emperor "make" Snoke?
- Why are there a bunch of Snoke clones in a tank of water?
- If Snoke was grown in a tank as a clone, why is his beginning state a scarred creature?
- Why didn't Anakin's ghost ever appear and tell Ben Solo to knock it off?
- How did Rey learn Wookie so fast?
- Why did Leia send Rey to Ahch-To instead of going herself?
- Why didn't Admiral Holdo tell Poe the plan?
- Who the fuck was DJ?
- How did Captain Phasma survive Starkiller Base blowing up?
- If General Hux hated Kylo Ren so much, why didn't he just go "Oh, sorry, I couldn't get to him in time" when Starkiller Base blew up?
- Who was that old guy at the beginning of The Force Awakens?
- How did Kylo Ren know the map was on Jakku to begin with?
- How did Kylo Ren know there was a map?
- If Luke went to the Island to die (or out of fear), why did he make a map?
- How did Maz Kanata get Anakin/Luke's blue lightsaber?
- Where did Rey learn to pilot any starship at any time?
- Who was the big alien dude played by Simon Pegg?
- Who was the Emperor's wife/girlfriend?
- At what point did the Emperor have a son?
- How old is the Emperor's son? Cuz if Rey is 19 in The Force Awakens, the Emperor's son was around during Return of the Jedi, and Yung Palp didn't have a girlfriend in the prequels. So what the fuck
- Who are the Knights of Ren? We still don't know.
- Why isn't Snoke considered a Sith Lord? Or is he?
- How long has Snoke been around?
- What state is the galaxy in at the beginning of The Force Awakens?
- How powerful is the New Republic?
- How powerful is the First Order?
- If the First Order was the successor to the Empire, where did the Emperor get all his ships and crews and red stormtroopers from? Did he just buy all that from the space casino as well?
- How does the Emperor have the logistics to have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ships with full crews? Those people gotta eat, you know.
- How was the whole fleet buried under... ground? Under liquid? It was definitely a whole entire fleet under the surface of a planet, and were the crews inside the ships that whole time? Why were they buried?
- HOW DID THE EMPEROR SURVIVE DYING IN RETURN OF THE JEDI
- Why are there enormous chunks of the Death Star laying around if the whole thing was completely obliterated?
- Why does the thrust from the Millennium Falcon knock every single stormtrooper down AND cause Kylo Ren to have to resist falling over, but Rey just is standing upright?
- How can the Millennium Falcon turn on its thrusters but remain stationary?
- Why does Rey have CGI rocks orbiting her in the woods? Is that really necessary?
- Why does Rey need to climb if she can just float?
- Why didn't Rey bring Kylo Ren back to life after he brought her back to life?
- If Anakin Skywalker built CP30, why did he program C3P0 to be unable to translate "sith language" into English? I don't think he even knew what a sith was when he was 8 years old. They had been extinct (allegedly) for "a thousand years".
- How does a fleet of unaffiliated randos coordinate as a fleet almost perfectly to all jump into a planet's atmosphere through a very perilous part of space simultaneously? Why weren't they fucking up The First Order before?
- Where did General Ryder come from? How does he out-rank Hux?
- What happened to The First Order after TLJ? Did they take over the galaxy? What is the state of the galaxy after TLJ?
- If the First Order existed, why didn't The Emperor take command of it personally?
- How was Kylo Ren, who was unable to find Rey through the whole movie, able to know exactly where the second Death Star was and where Rey would be in relation to the second Death Star?
- If Rey had turned to the dark side, would she have the power to have vampire teeth? Because Dark Rey had that power, although it was useless.
- Why did the little alien dude agree to help Poe, Rey, and Finn? What did they pay him? Did they threaten him? Did they just go "Trust us, we're fighting The First Order." and he just went along with it because he's a sucker?
- Why does Kylo Ren still have the pieces to his shattered helmet? Wouldn't he just throw that in the trash? How did he shatter a solid metal helmet with his bare hands to begin with?
- Why did Kylo Ren rebuild his helmet anyhow? I'm talking about in-movie logic.
- Did Han Solo's ghost appear to Kylo Ren, or was that all in his head? Did Leia plant that in his head? Why did calling out to Ben kill Leia?
- If only Snoke's ship could track a ship that had gone through hyperspace, how were TIE fighters able to follow Poe through hyperspace?
- Why didn't the Emperor have an air-tight plan, since he apparently has infinite resources, 30 years to prepare, and had to watch two death stars and one starkiller base get destroyed?
- Why does the Emperor have so many resources?
- Are The First Order and The Emperor competing for resources, or have they known about each other all along?
- If the First Order didn't know about The Emperor, then did Snoke know about the Emperor, or did he just wake up with no memories?
- Why did Yoda call down lightning on the Jedi texts? Also, the Jedi texts weren't even in the place where he called down the lightning. So did Yoda know?
- What are the odds that the Emperor's granddaughter would be hidden on the very planet where his former apprentice's grandson went to find a map to his former apprentice's son?
- Why are there so many damn desert planets in this series? Pasaana, Jakku, Tatooine...
- Why did Kylo Ren turn to the dank side? 420 bro
- Why didn't anyone take Rey's midichlorian count to see it was over 9,000?
- How big is The First Order's fleet and why would The Final Order fleet increase it "10,000-fold"?
- Why did Luke send Rey to kill the Emperor if killing him is an illegal move? In RotJ, Yoda and Obi-Wan didn't send Luke to kill the Emperor. They sent him to find the good in his father.
- If Yoda had killed the Emperor in Revenge of The Sith, would Yoda become the heir to the Sith?
- If Mace Windu had kill... yeah, same question.
- Why didn't the Republic build a space-navy or something?
- How is a single star destroyer able to generate enough energy to blow up a whole planet? That doesn't even make any sense.
- If the Emperor was controlling Snoke, why didn't he send Kylo Ren to kill Rey sooner?
- If the Emperor was controlling Snoke, why didn't he tell Snoke to build star destroyers that can blow up whole planets instead of wasting time on Starkiller Base?
- Why is the force so selective about when someone can sense the location of another individual? IS IT JUST BAD WRITING?
- Why didn't Rey vanish when she died?
- Why did Leia take so long to vanish after she died?
- Why is Wicket still alive?
- Why did Rose ram into Finn?
- Did Rose get friendzoned? Yes. The answer is yes.
The Parents Are Pissed But The Kids Love It
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/IgunCna.png)
Critics hated this movie. It's like they're completely out-of-touch with what people want. It's like them and Rian Johnson live together in a little walled garden cult where they pray to their strange and wonderful giraffe-god to return from Zorb-9 and turn the Earth purple again. It's a very complex theology, so I'm not gonna get into it.
The Last Jedi was lauded by critics, but general audiences seemed to dislike it. If you recall, I may have disliked it a little bit. I may have written like 5 very long blog posts about it, and now am writing yet another one. I strongly doubt I'd have to write anything if The Last Jedi was decent and competent. But it wasn't. Everything looked nice. The actors delivered their lines with emotion. The ships looked cool. The fight scene in the throne room was cool until that video came out where the stunt guys broke it down. What went wrong comes down to a couple of critical errors:
First, the plot did not make sense within the context of the Star Wars universe. It'd be like if I made a Lord of The Rings movie. I don't know shit about Lord of The Rings. If I don't understand the logic of the Tolkien universe, I cannot make a decent story.
Second, the plot did not make sense from a writing standpoint. Story arcs matter. Pay-offs matter. Character arcs matter. Character development matters. We didn't get any of that, though. Nothing was answered, nothing was accomplished, no characters grew, and some of the major plot threads were abruptly cut short with no explanation. I understand wanting to make a challenging and different storyline, but if the movie is not internally coherent, it's going to be frustrating for the wrong reasons. Not because it's a complex piece of art, but because it someone took a piece of already-complex art to add to, said they could do it, and then drew a penis or something.
JJ Abrams actually wanted to help Rian out with some continuity of the movie. We know that now because
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/QoF7Glw.png)
Now, do I think bringing back good ol' Sheevster was because Snoke was dead? No. Originally, I did think that. Then I thought way back to a little hint that came before The Force Awakens ever came out: Palpatine didn't have a first name until TFA was being written. Here, take a look, it's in a book, reading rainbow: https://www.tor.com/2014/10/16/palpatine-first-name/
That's pretty significant, because having the Emperor be part of the plot was probably part of JJ Abrams' plan. I wouldn't put that past JJ. He's a pretty uncreative guy. To what extent the Emperor would have been in the films is probably something we may not know until a long time passes. Maybe Snoke would be the final movie villain.
Who knows? JJ fucken does, but he's not gonna tell us
Anyway, I wanted to throw that rant about The Emperor in somewhere, so I just injected it into the middle of my thought about the critics hating this movie while loving The Last Jedi. Responding to a video where Vindicare talks about critics hating the movie, I had this to say:
I can't wait to see the Emperor blow up whole planets with the force or whatever he does, and then see Rey smash him like a bug to avenge the death of Poe/Finn/Kylo/Lando/Leia/all of the above.
What doesn't surprise me is the critics harping on how bad this movie is. This review that I am linking here is the reason why critics are upset with this movie. Take a look at the language used by the reviewer. Look who is being blamed in the review. Not Kathleen Kennedy. Not Bob Iger. The fans are getting the blame. The "angry white male" fans.
The reason the critics like Scott Mendelson hate this movie is because it is not The Last Jedi. So I wouldn't hold your breath for that apology, because they're dying not on the Star Wars Sequel hill, but TLJ hill. Apparently, this movie disrespects TLJ, which is their sacred cow, their god. Scott Mendelson is defending The Last Jedi from the corrupting influence of JJ Abrams.
Yes, the people defending The Last Jedi have gone that off-the-rails defending it to the point where a canonical Star Wars movie -- with a LGBTQ kiss and a female lead who kills the most baddest villain in the galaxy -- is now a threat to their dear friend Rian Johnson's lovechild. You have to ask yourself, then: why are they defending The Last Jedi so fervently, so ardently, so viciously? Because the purple hair lady was amazing and totally saved everyone, that's why, so fuck all you angry white male fanbois who pressured JJ into making this fucking movie that panders to... fans...
Without using some really profane language, I don't know how to express how I feel about the critics and their praise for The Last Jedi. It's like this film means everything to them, and going against it is some kind of high crime. Somehow, the film became embroiled in the greater English-speaking countries of the world's culture war. I don't know exactly why, but I would say that most of the right-wing criticism begins with Admiral Holdo, who is dismissive, condescending, and has purple hair. I, also, did not like her. The main reason I didn't like her is because I didn't like the story because it was a crap story, and her part was written like crap. I have no idea how this story about strong, empowered women became this symbol of leftist resistance when it was written by a white man who has no idea how to write strong, empowered women.
Do I feel like he deserved to get shit on?
lol yes. I mean, insulting him personally, no. Deconstructing the poor plot of The Last Jedi? Absolutely. He's not above that. Anyone who takes an existing property and does not respect it, or does it poorly is going to get flak for it. Remember Dragonball: Evolution? Remember the Netflix Deathnote movie? Hopefully, you don't, but if you do, those are examples of existing intellectual properties which were not handled well when handed off. Another example, which is slightly different is V for Vendetta. A lot of people enjoyed the movie, but the creator of the story, Alan Moore, absolutely hated it. It was taken by some very competent filmmakers who wanted to re-tell the story in a way that reflected their politics.
Rian Johnson did not respect the intellectual property that was given to him.
So, whatever. You can debate me about art being subjective until the end of time, and it won't change the fact that the fans did not like the movie. The fans seem to like Rise of Skywalker a lot more.
Conclusion
eh it was okay.
It's just a movie, after all. No big deal.
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