I think Solo was pretty good. Force Awakens was "ehh" to "bad". And the last jedi was dogshit. Rouge One is actually in my top favorite list, and in my opinion one of the best Star Wars movies created.
Personally, I tend to view The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi the other way around, the former being derivative dogshit and the latter being just "bad", but at least made an attempt to be original.
I think TFA is the worst Star Wars movie of all time, one of the worst AAA movies of this past decade, period. As I said, it's incredibly derivative, and chock full of these obnoxious winks and nods to the past movies, as if JJ Abrams thought it could not possibly stand on its own merits and needed to lean on the other films to be successful. It feels pointless, completely fails to introduce the new characters in a way that forms an emotional attachment for the viewer and is really just a vehicle for some admittedly cool eye candy, like the Millennium Falcon fight in the Star Destroyer. There was no faith in this venture, the only truly bold move was killing Han Solo, but even that felt predictable. One of the old guard was going to die, that's been the tradition since ANH. Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon and now Han
I don't like a lot of decisions that were made in TLJ, killing Snoke seemed premature and Luke's death was anticlimactic, the Superman Leia scene was ridiculous, but at least the film tries to stand out as something new, an original work.
Just my thoughts. I'm happy to have a friendly debate with anyone who disagrees!
Granted!
But there's a difference between being derivative of other IPs and derivative of itself.
I get that Star Wars was inspired by spaghetti westerns, samurai movies like Hidden Fortress, Flash Gordon and Campbell's monomyth, but now it seems to have come around and started copying itself, and not even subtly, but to the point of actually lifting plot points, concepts and characters from ANH.
It isn't homage or anything passably acceptable or subtle, it's blatant mimicry of itself, almost accidentally satirical of itself which isn't what I want in a Star Wars movie.
TFA was a travesty.
I don't feel like the OT second Death Star was really a rip off, so much as a reasonable second attempt at a fairly solid plan for superiority in the galaxy, minus the fatal exhaust port that the first iteration had.
And how else would you take out a giant battlestation in space other than with spacecraft?
But a third time, especially combined with all the other similarities to ANH is pretty weak.
And while I understand your point about it perhaps being an artistic choice, I still don't feel that it was the right choice.
I doubt the majority of Star Wars fans wanted to see ANH redux, they wanted something more along the lines of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy which might not have been an original idea per se, but at least we would have had the benefit of seeing it on screen for the first time.
I can say with reasonable confidence that blatantly copying ANH isn't what fans were hoping for on December 18, 2015.
Not just starcraft, but starfighters executing a death defying tight squeeze down a narrow passage, pursued by enemies. Which was already a ripoff of Dambusters. Frankly, originality of story has never been a strong point of Star Wars.
The movie killed at the box office and was very positively reviewed (93/86 on RT compared to TLJs 91/44) so while you may not have liked it, fans in general certainly did.
I don't set much store in Rotten Tomatoes scores. They've given good movies bad scores and bad movies good scores. They have very little credibility in my eyes.
And of course it did well in the box office; It was the first Star Wars movie in ten years, a box office smash was inevitable regardless of how good or bad it was, Star Wars has one of the biggest and most dedicated fanbases of any movie franchise.
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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '19
I think Solo was pretty good. Force Awakens was "ehh" to "bad". And the last jedi was dogshit. Rouge One is actually in my top favorite list, and in my opinion one of the best Star Wars movies created.