A STAR WARS recap and discussion! (Spoilers in this thread)
13The sith is back, baby! Star Wars IX is the last of a trilogy that started with a foundation of spite towards the prequels, continued with spite towards cookie-cutter stories, and ended with spite towards itself. More importantly though, it is the culmination of 9 films that detail the rise of a powerful force that survives crushing blows and near extinction but is ultimately victorious.
The plot is pretty dense so to help those who are struggling to remember everything that happened, I am here with my hazy memory of how things went down.
The film opens with a title crawl that tells you the twist of the movie is that the dreaded Emperor Palpatine didn’t really die after getting thrown in a pit, and the text seems to indicate that he butt-dialed the galaxy I guess? Then we cut in media res to the evil Kylo Ren stabbing a bunch of aliens.
At this point, things start moving at 10x speed in big info dumps so everything is sort of a blur: I think Kylo was looking for a map at this point? Or maybe he already had it? Then Finn and Poe are in the Millennium Falcon and pick something up from some dude and then come back to the base and Leia is copy/pasted onto the film reel with vague one-word lines while the other actors stand in awkward positions so they match where her eyes were looking before she died 3 years ago.
Some more stuff happens, and eventually Kylo meets with Emperor Palpatine in his floating inverted ziggurat of doom. The Emperor is dangling from his life-support like a toy picked up in a crane game and he shows Kylo his jar of pickled Snokes and tells Kylo, the guy that currently controls the galaxy, that he can give him the galaxy. Then as he hangs from wires, the Emperor declares that he has actually been a puppet master all along! Also Ren, who’s parents weren’t important before? They totally are, idiot! Also, he has spent the last few decades building new star destroyers that have giant death star laser dicks on them.
Around this point, the plot finally stops to take a breath at some weird music festival that Lando is attending after Luke ditched him on the planet like 30 years ago. The movie becomes Indiana Jones for a bit, they find a knife, Rey meets a snake, and Chewbacca dies but don’t worry because he doesn’t really die. The heroes travel to another planet to ask if Poe’s girlfriend’s drunk baby can perform brain surgery on C-3PO which will kill him (but don’t worry because he doesn’t really die). Then they go to the bad guy’s ship to steal the knife back and rescue Chewbacca, and a guy who was Hitler Junior in the last two movies literally says the line “I’m the spy!” and saves the heroes.
Next up, another planet! This one is where the Death Star 2 crashed, and the Falcon also crashes into it. But who’s that on the horizon? Looks like there’s a new girl character in town! She is a former Stormtrooper just like Finn, and that’s about all the character development we have time for because Rey lined the knife up with the death star like a Goonie looking for rich stuff and cracks the case: the sith thingy is in the Emperor’s throne room! Huuuuh?!
Rey fights Evil Rey like how Luke fought Evil Luke, then Rey fights Ren like how Luke fought Darth, then she finds out she’s Palpatine’s granddaughter?! Then Rey fights Ren like how Kenobi fought Anakin (but with water instead of lava). At this point, Leia tries to force-talk to Ren but Rey stabs him and it kills Leia (but don’t worry because she doesn’t really die(?)) and Ren starts to die but don’t worry because Rey heals him and fucks off in his spaceship. Then who should show up but Dead Han Solo! He didn’t mess with the force so he can’t come back as a force ghost, so he’s just a memory haunting Kylo or some bullshit. It’s a genuinely nice scene though, issues get resolved, and Han says his favorite line again.
Now Rey is seen throwing sticks and porgs at Ren’s burning spaceship when suddenly Dead Luke pops out from the flames. He tells Rey that everything he said in the last movie was wrong and actually the Jedis own, and she should take his old x-wing and Ren’s computer box and go finish the job that he and his dead dad tried to do ages ago.
Rey flies to Lightning Planet and sends the rebels a text about where to go, and then Finn is like “dang New Girl Character, my last girlfriend thought animal racing was cruel, but let’s ride these animals into a deathtrap warzone” and together they shut off the emperor’s DirectTV dish and allow the good spaceships to shoot the glowing red weak points on all the bad spaceships.
Meanwhile! Down on the surface, the Emperor has a long exposition about how he and Rey are related and if she would please kill him then he could haunt her because he is every sith lord? Then he shoots lightning at the spaceships, Ren shows up and kills his high school friends, and then the Emperor is like “oh fuck I can just eat y’alls souls and be alive again” so he does that. So Palpatine is like “I’m every sith” but then Rey is like “I’m every jedi” and melts Palpatine with the power of 2 lightsabers and then Lando shows up and is like “I’m every spaceship in the galaxy” and they do that scene from the ending of Serenity and everyone keeps shooting laser dicks together.
Rey dies (but don’t worry, she doesn’t really die), and Ren heals her. Then Marcia and Greg Brady put aside their weird sibling energy and make out and Ren immediately dies from embarrassment. Leia also dies too for some reason? Anyway whoops guess she wasn’t dead but she’s sure dead now. Bug alien lady confirms that Leia had declared “the wookie can have a medal over my dead body” and loots her stuff to give Chewbacca a medal.
Finally, Emperor Palpatines’s plan to destroy the Republic and end the Skywalker/Solo bloodline is achieved, and the movie closes with the his lineage burying their lightsabers. The end.
6.5/10, it was fine.
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You left out the Baby Yoda- Jar-Jar light saber fight.
Thanks! Now I won’t have to watch the movie. That’s a relief.
That would be: “Snakes! Why did it have to be snakes?” Right?
@rockblossom @Moose
I was thinking
or
@mike808 @Moose You must have missed one of the spinoffs/sideshow/TV series/cartoons/fanfic series: Indiana Jones is still searching for alien artifacts when he encounters a real alien in a TARDIS and decides to travel with The Doctor, who takes him back in time to a galaxy far, far away, where he gets accidentally left behind on Kashyyyk, where he is saved and befriended by Chewbacca and decides to reinvent himself as Han Solo. He still hates snakes.
In short, Baby Yoda from the Mandalorian was “born” when Yoda died. Luke just overlooked this because Baby Yoda was so very small and was hidden under the blankets. If you look closely, you can see the blanket move! Turns out, this is how Yoda’s species reproduces. Crazy, right?
@medz I don’t want to give them any more money so I’m taking your word that this is canon
@medz @Moose And Chewbacca breeds porgs for live prey on the MF for his keto diet.
@medz @mike808 @Moose That scene with Baby and the frog made me realize why Yoda chose to exile himself in a swamp, and why didn’t like the taste of Luke’s food bars.
You know its not going to go well when a movie starts with a deus ex machina trope to save the plot.
I liked the one that had Alec Guinness AND Peter Cushing in it. But kudos for bringing CHRISTOPHER LEE into the series! That was a class move.
Star Wars is best enjoyed unexamined. 10/10. Best part was the light saber swap between Rey and Kylo. The theatre I was in erupted in cheers.
@canuk same at ours today. The last hour was magnificent.
@canuk same at ours! Movie magic, we loved it
@JuliaC I love a good story of redemption!
@canuk Yes! Beautifully acted, nostalgic, a moving good time! I think the complaints of it “being the same story” are unfair. I think they got it right, I just wish it could have been longer so we could linger in the quieter moments. Every a Star Wars feels like a gift to me.
Also: Poe: “they fly now?!” Rey (or was it Fin): “they fly now.” Even J. J. Abrams doesn’t take it too seriously.
And people wonder why I gave up on the series years ago.
Mark Hamel was a good kid.
@Cerridwyn Luke underwent the Hero’s Journey with all its pitfalls, failures, and striving and sacrificing to complete his task. Luke went from callow youth to an actual hero.
Then it all got trashed. Meh.
Well, we just saw it this afternoon, and I’d have to say the opening synopsis provided by @Moose is pretty much the way I remember it - we realized on the way home we couldn’t even describe the storyline, or even how the movie started, we had been so bombarded.
But I loved it - I was the fan they were ladling out the servitude for, and you can just see them flying down the checklist of hanging chads from 8 previous movies that needed to be resolved. Scenes that would’ve been 10-15 minutes in other movies shot past is 45 seconds with a couple quick cuts from Rey on the ground doing something, crew back up on the Falcon getting affected by it, Leia and troops back at base reacting to that, and zip, it’s on to the next planet.
Oh there were things to nit: like where did that first gaggle of old ships come from? Why weren’t Anakin and Kylo/Ben in that last shot with Luke and Leia? Will we ever know what Finn was going to tell Rey? And what about those stablekids from the last film?
There were tons of jokes and winks throughout the movies, including some (like 3CPO’s magically extending head harness) that indicated the storytellers were just there to have good ol’ rollicking time and so what if the effect wasn’t perfect. And the line, near the start, of “… this thing’s been sitting here for 42 years?”
Altho the setups for future movies in the victory party scene were pretty obtuse, I thought the ending scene and setting was near perfect.
Kylo Ren wins the multiple death contest for being fatally stabbed, shocked, blasted down the obligatory deep hole, and still coming back to finally do it himself.
And Daisy Ridley acted the best dead person ever!
Saw this yesterday so I could finally open this thread. Your opening post was perfect.
I enjoyed the movie and I cried.
My only real beef was the 30 minutes (30 minutes!!) of ads and previews starting at the posted showtime. I can handle a couple previews and maybe a plug for the local Ford dealer, but we got insurance, furniture, lots of coca-cola, chips, barbecue sauce, candy and personal care products.
Did get the Wonder Woman and Black Widow previews back-to-back so that was kind of cool.
@stolicat That’s an outrageous amount of advertising horning in on the stated showtime. You paid for your seat already.
@stolicat @therealjrn I go to regal, it’s exactly 20 minutes of previews for every movie. It’s easy to plan your movie time when you know it’s going to be 20 minutes after whatever time they say.
@RiotDemon @stolicat
/youtube let’s go out into the lobby
@RiotDemon @therealjrn this was at the nearby CineMark (nee Century) quasi-plex, which otherwise is a pretty nice place. They seem to own/operate most of the larger theaters in the area. I’ll send them a nice but nasty email about it.
With reserved seating it’s not an issue to get there early anymore, I noticed quite a few people coming in about 15 minutes after the posted start time. I’m sure they’d never give a set time for the amount of ads in the presentation, as they want your butt in the seat.
@stolicat the reason I found out is that I had several different employees point it out. Mostly the ticket takers when they were ripping my ticket stub and there was a long line at concessions. I think they wanted you to know that you had plenty of time to buy snacks.
I was at a different regal Christmas Eve for Star Wars and 15 minutes after the start time there wasn’t anything on the screen. By the time I made it back to the front to find someone and back in my seat, it was 19 minutes after. The movie started exactly 20 minutes after. No previews. I’m glad I went and told someone otherwise they might of skipped the beginning of the movie. Apparently the time the movie ends is most important.
I been pretty mad at Star Wars since episode 1 or so, in my youth. Continued unabated through the most recent movies. I did skip episode 3. Do you think I should also skip episode 9? That’d have some of that poetic rhyming George Lucas talks about, with the same thing happening repeatedly, just worse over time.
@InnocuousFarmer
@InnocuousFarmer @mike808 would you have to go back and skip episode 6 to maintain the rhyme? Then you’d miss the critical role of the Ewoks in the overall story arc …
Go see 9, and remember it’s a cartoon - a fascinating, addicting, absorbing cartoon built on legacies and archetypes that have been in our stories forever, watch the incredible effects and production values and have a good time!
@mike808 @stolicat I watched it, got dragged along with my family. Sooo…
was some good trailers. Wonder Woman in the 80s, Ryan Reynolds the Grand Theft Auto Non-Player Character, Black Widow. Those all looked like fun movies.
…
J.J. Abrams, you son of a bitch. Of course it was you. Nobody else does your brand of incoherent childhood-raping concept art.
@InnocuousFarmer @stolicat
Michael Bay’s ear-rape explosions and gratuitous lens flare as a plot substitute is a close runner-up.
Looks at 6 Underground.
@mike808 Little-known true fact. His full name is J-Writing-is-Hard-Lets-Get-Drunk J-Fuck-It-It-Looks-Cool Abrams.
Ok, I think I’m done now.
Happy Holidays everybody!
(@mike808 I don’t know what you mean. He did that movie with Megan Fox opening the hood of a car. And… probably other things, in that movie.)
@mike808 I kind of remember there were some metal termites? Probably what was wrong with her car. They must have been in her engine.
My memory tells me that the Transformers series was a Poignant Tale of a Young Woman and Roadside Assistance. So it was, and so it shall be.
Have to say, I loved it. Enough throwbacks to the original trilogy to keep me entertained. The woman sitting next to me pretty much reacted the same way to every scene that I did and we developed this nice quiet little bond. When Chewie finally got his medal we both laughed and cried a bit. I whispered to her, “About time!” My gf wasn’t happy with the ending and thought Ben should have lived but I was fine with it. I felt like he knew deep down he would never be able to fully rid himself of the dark side and he didn’t want to live that way.
Curious, did anyone else happen to notice what appeared to be an Anthony Daniels cameo as a pilot toward the end of the big fight scene?
@cinoclav are you sure you didn’t see Wedge Antilles? They’re both older, thin, grey haired gentlemen.
/image wedge Antilles now vs then
@RiotDemon Pretty sure Wedge was with Lando.
There were some things I liked, but the first 30-40 minutes were awful, one McMuffin chase after another and a terrible allusion to a love triangle with no chemistry. JJ’s ‘homages’ to other movies got really distracting after awhile. Didn’t stop me from crying hard over Leia, Chewey’s reaction wrecked me. Once the focus went back to Rey/Ben, it got better. I did love the pay off of them being able to transfer objects via their bond. It didn’t end badly, except I wanted her to not have a last name. Just be Rey, like Cher. Adam Driver was clearly in a better movie than everyone else.
Thanks for the summary. I went to see it last night and had to ask my daughter who Kylo’s father was. I guess I should have studied up before I went. Now I kind of know what happened. I may go see it again.