Thirty Eight Random Thoughts Inspired by Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker

I'm not going to review this. I will offer instead some random thoughts which went through my head while watching the ninth installment in the Star Wars saga, and a few that came shortly after. There may be indirect spoilers.

The opening is the single most jarring non-Star Wars-opening scene in the franchise.

The first twenty minutes (which were excruciating) felt like a summary of the middle film  Abrams never got to make.

Who built all these Star Destroyers? Kaminoans? Why did they bury them? Is that good for Star Destroyers....being buried in the planet's crust? WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

Oh, I see...so why didn't they just call this movie Dark Empire - the loose adaptation?

Somebody thought these Leia scenes were a good idea.

These are painful to watch, and not in a "poor Carrie is dead" way, but a "Wow, this dialogue is desperately trying to wrap itself around the cutting room floor leavings of a dead woman's off takes from two prior films.

I like how they're trying to make a poor dead woman's last words recorded on film into profound mentor conversation.

Did Daisy Ridley feel awkward talking to a dead woman's ghost scanned in in post? Because it sure felt awkward to watch!

Why does Poe keep "skip jumping" into active debris zones? Hell, why does he need to do this other than JJ Abram's rule of cool approach to SF?

This movie is starting to feel like the Star Trek: Into Darkness of the Star Wars side of life.

Oh hey the movie got a plot going that wasn't trying to do exposition catch-up and it got interesting for a moment.

Lando got a big happy crowd reation.

Oh look a Sith Holocron.

Sure do wish the Knights of Ren had some depth or dialogue or really anything.

There a lot of stuff quietly being borrowed from The Old Republic series in this movie.

Oh snap I was totally right about Rey's parentage!

The movie is trying hard to give Poe and Finn new love interests, albeit with the briefest of effort to do so....wonder why....

Poe was a smuggler before?

That we are just learning this fact about Poe three movies in is a tribute to how clever and well thought out this trilogy has been.

Hey cool Endor's Moon really does have a grassy plains and a ragin ocean with a chunk of the Death Star in it.

So far the idea that the Death Star II had large debris raining down intact on Endor is the most believable part of this movie's logic straining levels of excess.

Rey can heal? Hmmmmm.

Kylo's guilty conscience moment almost feels like it was part of the plan all along. I think it was!

Oh look there's Luke's X-Wing, and it's covered in plant debris just like when we saw it in The Empire Strikes Back, rather than covered in rust from being submerged for a decade.

Good to know force ghosts are really efficient at interacting with things.

Okay, well maybe it's just Luke's force ghost.

I just realized Anthony Daniels as C3P0 has all the funniest lines in this movie.

So Star Destroyers carry world-destroying guns now. Sure, why the fuck not.

As a total aside I've been reading Justice League Odyssey and for some reason feel like there are some funny and vague parallels with this movie.

I didn't understand the real purpose of the tiny cone robot until stopping at Target after the movie where my kid begged me for toy lightsabers and a RC model of that robot. Ahhh now I understand.

Final sequence is just....like....why are they doing this? Why does anyone think this ridiculous CGI excess is a good and necessary thing? Maybe it is for the contemporary movie audiences but...seriously, it's not even remotely as interesting as what they did in the prior two films. Rogue One had a better end battle.

There's some good Kylo/Rey/Palpatine closure here. Except for the part about how Palpatine got closure like 36 years ago but whatever.

Oh hey look, Ian McDarmid actually is acting and chewing the scenery! This is good.

Oh, Ian McDarmid is now shooting enough force lighting into space to disable the entire Resistance fleet. Alrighty then. All those great Imperial public works were for naught, I guess.

The audience really ate up that final Rey and Kylo moment. You'll know what I'm talking about when you see it.

The whole "single weak transmitter" subplot to focus the ship/beast rider action on was so utterly contrived. Whyyyyyy.

Chewbacca may have only thought he was dead in this movie, but after seeing the movie himself he'll WISH he really had a moon dropped on him! Ba-dam!


I honestly never thought I'd see both Star Trek and Star Wars reach the point where canonical actual movies feel like bad fanfic, but here we are.