Spoilers Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - Grading & Discussion

I don’t. It’s just such an obvious T.H.White The Boy Who Would Be King type thing that it’s always been there. Magical swords? Crazy old wizards? It’s in the text.

 

Star Wars (and The Boy Who Would Be King) follows the hero’s journey. Lucas got his inspiration from not only the serials of the 1930s serials. Not only from, yes, Arthurian legend. But from a host of other legends and myths. All of them end up with a hero in the end. Not all of them are connected to some sort of a secret destiny. They simply answer the call.

 

Yes. Not all of them are. But, generally speaking the ‘this belonged to your father’ speech generally speaks to destiny and dynasty. Arthur was son of Uther, Uther who was doomed to fail due to giving into his desire for Igraine, but whose destiny would be fulfilled by his son. Luke was the son of a Jedi, and explicitly all but given to avenge his fathers death until the Empire twist and later stuff puts him even deeper in the role carved for him. Put it this way....if Ben had turned out to be to result of an unwitting trust between Luke and Leia, it would have been perfectly in keeping with that, and had the modern audiences enthralled no doubt.

 

I wish JJ Abrams from the get go gave us something authentically true about Rey's background from the Force Awakens. He gets the most blame for the Rey back story issue because he failed to establish anything about her from the first film.

 

Again looking solely at the original film, there are only two lines regarding "destiny." The first being Han...

and Ben's

If you are to look solely at Star Wars, Luke's destiny is to be the hero who destroys the Death Star. Luke's father left no journey for him to find his lightsaber. He simply wanted Luke to have it. There's no completely out of the blue suggestion that Vader is Luke's father. There's only the suggestion that he chooses to follow his father's footsteps. If you want to go a step further, what has become known as "the Force theme," John Williams intended only to be Obi-Wan's theme. Now, the Force Theme is synonymous with destiny in the Star Wars universe. But, while important, it meant so much less back looking only at Star Wars.

The concept of destiny is so underplayed in the 1977 film, its a blink and you miss it kind of thing. Again, you're choosing to suggest that destiny plays a bigger role. If that's how you see it, cool. But Lucas was creating modern myth. He was taking bits and pieces from all of these things and in hindsight, absolutely! It's Arthurian legend! But if I am to look solely at the modern myth created by the 1977 version of the film Star Wars, I think he was just borrowing from a lot of sources and creating his own thing. That, to me, does not indicate a destiny more than being the hero in that moment. After, it absolutely grows.

I don't think there's a wrong answer as it really is an interpretation. So I'm happy to agree to disagree here.

 

I suppose you can argue that it is suggested in IV but only cemented in in V. But there’s no denying that seed of the dynastic / destiny is right there in IV. (There’s too much of his father in him/thats what I’m afraid of, the handed down ‘weapon of a jedi’ with the implication it’s Luke’s destiny to become one, the fact that the known villain is said to have killed Luke’s father....it’s Watto’s Red Flag Sale everywhere.)

 

I don't think I would argue that the seed isn't there. It's just not as important as it became in the next several films. I would say its like the ring in the Hobbit, which became "The Ring" in the follow up book.

 

Nah. That’s *too* overt a ‘not much macguffin’ book one to central importance jump. Episode IV has overt tropes/elements/components of the traditional epic, but it could have chosen not to use them.

 

There’s a million ways to interpret the Beru/Owen conversation.

 

Oh, I am not going with ominous Vader portent, that is only there retrospectively. Taken on its own though, it’s still another pebble of destiny/dynasty.

 

I mean, I don't see Luke's father being anything more than a macguffin to insight him to action.

 

The fact that so much was changed in favor or Poe--and robbing Finn of his own identity--to even speak about it is exactly what I pointed out: it was not Kathleen Kennedy's (and others) concern at all. Boyega and Finn were nothing except the long-lived a racial token only recognized to be the ever-used "flavor / diversity check mark" to prove how progressive white Hollywood liberals are. Boyega (and Finn's) dignity were nowhere to be found in that offensive Star Wars sequel trilogy.

See my response above. Kennedy, et al., are not clueless about race ad its use in film, so how they choose to misuse a black actor and his black character were conscious decisions. He was meant to be pushed into a corner while Rey was the end-all, be-all.

 

He’s up to his ears in those. The message, R2, the death of Auntie and Uncle. The sabre and the whisper of information of the father he never knew is a little more Excalibur shaped I feel.

 

I think he was meant to be more when created for TFA...he actually had a lot more thought and development in that film. But you can see that literally going downhill even by the end, but it’s totally done when he is basically Binksed in TLJ. The way they responded to the Rose Tico backlash was the final nail in his coffin..and the Poe backlash frankly. That’s why we are suddenly getting a ton of Poe stuff in the last film, and nearly nothing for Finn. As to TLJ...fuck knows what they were thinking there. He’s co-lead for what is basically the main plot of the film, but it goes nowhere even in context. He should have been the Harrison Ford of the ST, but he’s not even the Billy Dee.

The biggest thing is...I don’t think it was even ‘unconscious racism’ despite what we are discussing. It comes back to the absolute lack of a cohesive vision. That’s why everyone, including Boyega, was hanging onto the ‘he might be a latent jedi’ for so long. The recent stuff about Rey just cements it. A lot may be said for how little Lucas planned for the OT, but when it’s one guy telling a story, at least he tended to have an overall shape in mind.

 

I really think they should have either just gone with Abrams for all three, or found a different director for The Rise of Skywalker. By going back and forth with Abrams, not Abrams, and then Abrams again, it really creates a kind of disconnect between The Last Jedi and the other two. At least if they had gone with another director for TRoS, then each one would have had it's own tone and style instead of the weird back and forth we ended up with.

 

One proper head writer would have done the trick if we’re honest. Fuck it. We all should have gone to the phantom menace in 3D, then George would never have sold up. Even if we hated it, at least we would be clear cut about it. No obvious ‘if only’ staring us in the face. And no one could have an ‘is Rey a Mary Sue’ argument, because even with the weird ass lense they use to make everyone’s lower face huge, she still doesn’t have a beard.

 

An actor having to point out a literal point of continuity represents an Assistant Director or Script Supervisor not doing their job rather than a narrative problem.

I will once again reiterate that there is absolutely nothing that happens in The Last Jedi that is inconsistent with what ends up happening in The Rise of Skywalker, and will also once again reiterate that JJ Abrams was absolutely aware of everything that Rian had planned for TLJ long before he agreed to come back for TRoS.

 

There is no way that makes up for years of outrage and insult. Fans were horrible to Lucas before that.

 

Oh yeah, technically they are consistent, but it's also pretty clear that Abrams and Johnson had very different ideas about where things should go. And tonally and stylistically they are very, very different, and that's what I'm talking about with the disconnect, just how different the movies look and feel.

 

I fundamentally disagree.