ST How TROS Has Affected Your View Of The ST Films

If for a minute I suspend disbelief that Rey was always meant to be a Palpatine etc, the movie actually is more enjoyable for me. Leia w force powers, Luke not wanting to train Rey, Rey saying the force is about “controlling people”. For me it’s a better watch and things connect more.

Alrhough now parts of me wishes TFA started with everyone knowing Rey was a Palpatine.

 

I was a kinda 6/10 on TLJ but I actually like it more after seeing TROS. You're right in that things connect and Luke's distrust of Rey and his refusal to train her makes perfect sense. Also after the hectic messfest of TROS, TLJ's moments of visual space and peace are really refreshing.

I still don't think the trilogy flows very well as a whole work, but these two films do work quite well together.

 

Poe’s big speech feels like the speech he wishes Holdo had given everyone else. His struggles with leadership and Finn telling him he’s not leading as Leia would have all come back to VIII.

Finn’s big plan involves using stampeding animals after seeing how effective that was in VIII.

The ancient Jedi texts and Luke’s role with them and activities prior become more clear.

The reveal from Kylo Ren has some truth to it.

The downed X-Wing in the ocean as a metaphor for Luke’s state of mind gets paid off with him lifting it and admitting he was wrong and he and Rey bury the hatchet. Her fight with him as lightning strikes down takes on new life. Her mirror scene of clones takes on new life.

The Rey & Ben hand moment and his attempt to turn her all get paid off more.

VIII & IX play very nicely together for me.

 

Looking forward to doing this as well.
Need to see TROS again first, it has so much crazy energy that it needs a second viewing so i can work out how i really feel about it...

 

Well, I’m sure there’s a difference between the animals and his first go he wasn’t controlling one — Rose was — but the fact that *his plan* involved galloping animals felt like a development off of the Fathiers to me and his comfort around animals.

 

...and Rose's "we'll win this war by saving thse we love" (TLJ) and Finn's friendly pat on Rose's shoulder make things less ambiguous now!

And the loss of hope amid fear at the end of TLJ was real, not ambiguous (which I thought it may have been). Overcome in TROS. Yay!

 

I always thought given time TLJ will grow in popularity because I think a big part of people not liking it was not quite seeing where the story was going. I think when you really sit back and look at all three PT films what we think now could be different in years to come for good or for bad we will just have to wait and see how it ages over time...

 

While it's clear Abrams and Johnson are playing narrative and thematic tug-of-war to a degree with their respective films (I wonder if having all three films directed by three different people like originally planned, instead of 2:1, would help ease that awkwardness somewhat) I still find the ST hangs together better than the PT. This isn't a knock against the PT, it's just that TPM is such a wildly different movie from AotC/RotS that it's hard for it to really feel like a triptych. The ST films definitely don't sit side-by-side as comfortably as the OT, though, which frankly works as cohesively as it does almost by complete accident.

I do agree that there are almost as many things in TROS that help validate the decisions of TLJ as there are rejections of that film's ideas. It's a really weird relationship between the movies.

 

It worked the opposite way for me unfortunately.

After having watched TROS, TLJ makes me even more angry with its direction and its story. For me it was more than obvious that TROS wanted to course-correct a great deal of things, which wouldn't have been necessary if TLJ hadn't invalidated, taken to the opposite direction, or just ignored so many Star Wars themes in general, and specific plot points from TFA.

Now I just rate TLJ even lower than before, because I feel that Abrams could have done a somewhat respectable trilogy if he was assigned to write and direct all three.

 

For me it shows hat TROS being such a mess movie is half Rian's fault. He made such a mess of things with TLJ that you can tell that they were trying to do damage control with this one.

 

The problem with the ST is that there is so much effort paid to setup and pay-off that it feels forced. The OT did this without trying. JJ tried really, really, ridiculous hard to go "see, this happened because of this thing that happened earlier".

 

The only thing that bugs me about the TLJ/TROS connection is that TROS doesn't make any reference to Luke's showdown with the First Order on Crait. I don't see any of the retconning and damage control that TLJ haters are claiming, but not mentioning Luke really undercuts TLJ's third act.

 

I'd more or less agree with that, but it also feels like a weird thing to complain about in light of all the "none of this was planned" criticism the trilogy has received. It's less that "the OT did this without trying" like it was doing so with full confidence in its own concepts and ideas, and more that it just happened to work out really, really well, considering how many major things (Darth Vader is Luke's father, um I guess that means Obi-Wan is a liar now, good thing Alec Guinness played his exposition scene so uncomfortably in the last movie that works, "there is another" okay we'll just say it's Leia, and also she's Luke's sister, ignore the incest, etc.) Lucas & Co. just completely came up with on the fly with exactly no foresight or planning.

Like I said, it "works as cohesively as it does almost by complete accident." It is a miracle any of those three individual films work as well as they do, let alone the trilogy as a whole. Film making is magic, and the OT made the trick work without us ever seeing what was up the magician's sleeve by the skin of its teeth. Despite how perfectly it ended up working, I think the majority of people were advocating for something far more intricately and meticulously planned out than that for these films. As it stands, I think it’s commendable that the ST works as well as it does, considering how wildly different the two directors' sensibilities are.

 

It helps that it’s since been more than a year at least but yeah it arguably does retcon the moment more to be that the tale of magic really resonated with children around the galaxy and the next generations while the galaxy itself remained fearful of the situation overall. I can accept that personally. Feels a little more realistic and I like how TROS had Poe reflecting on Crait overall.

 

Everyone's talking about how dense TROS is, but I'm like... Uh, does no one remember ROTS? It was also stuffed to the gills after TPM and AOTC were relatively short on plot.

 

Why would they mention it? Luke wasn't really on Crait. He just gave the Resistance some time to escape, then died on the island...

Now if he really was there, had a cool showdown with the First Order and died protecting the Resistance, that would've been worth mentioning. But in the eyes of most of the Resistance scattered across the Galaxy (the ones that weren't on Crait), Luke was still gone missing with his back turned on everything.

 

Ok here's a couple of great article's from comingsoon.net about the TLJ connections to TROS ( honouring and undoing TLJ ) :

https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/1115681-6-ways-the-rise-of-skywalker-honors-the-last-jedi

https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/1115682-6-ways-the-rise-of-skywalker-undoes-the-last-jedi

So basically JJ used some of what he liked or deemed useful from TLJ to drive TROS and dismissed what he didn't like........

 

Nobody in the Resistance knew that Luke was a projection. As far as they know, he died on Crait facing off against the First Order (which, in a sense, he did). And TLJ ends with kids telling the tale, with the idea that it's an inspiring story. I think it would have made sense to follow up on that in TROS.

 

There’s way more ways that IX honors VIII than that but that’s a great point about how Luke’s final lines to Ben related to his father (one of the biggest moments of VIII) paid off big in IX and how Luke was also not the last Jedi as he and everyone in the Jedi got behind Rey.

“Lose Rey, we must not.”

The threat of that felt bigger in this also as her dark side continued to grow.

 

I might like TLJ in retrospect if I believed for one second that its events were actually intended to set anything up that happened in the TROS. RJ went scorched earth with his film and JJ was forced to mold something out of the ashes that made any sense.

I would have loved it if Fathiers were used in the charge on the hull of the Star Destroyer...

 

TROS made me feel lesser about TFA and TLJ. Right now I feel like we back to we were at the end of ROTJ all over again. One Jedi to rebuild the Jedi order, a redeemed Jedi helps save the day dying in the process, the Emperor has been defeated again, the Final Order has been destroyed, the resistance celebrates, force ghost, the end. The difference this time is more happens in TROS than the whole OT in one movie. Even if you blame TLJ for not moving things forward in a way to easily connect with the third movie TROS doesn’t move forward either it just repeats ROTJ.

 

Yeah, that is the one big issue that disconnects the movies a bit. That was the biggest setup for TROS, it's what was supposed to elevate Luke's sacrifice to another level, yet it is the one thing that basically gets ignored, while other stuff gets doubled down upon.

 

I am excited to see if it changes anything for me but I doubt it will

 

It was always a pointless moment, headcanoned into this awesome "legend" and I guess TROS tells it like it is, that it wasn`t even worth a footnote and didn`t have any outreach beyond a couple slave kids playing with some toys.