@judaspete said:
@mighty-lu-bu said:
@judaspete said:
I'm curious what people make of the audience and critic review score disparity for Rise of Skywalker. When The Last Jedi had a similar disparity in the opposite direction, a lot of conspiracy theories came out that Disney was paying off critics, I'd say the current situation blows a hole in that theory, so what gives? What is it that fan like and critics don't, and vice versa?
I think the answer is fairly straight-forwad, but i do want to hear others opinions before I go into mine.
I don't know about all of the so-called conspiracy theories, but as a Star Wars fan, I will tell you that I thought that both the Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker were superior films when compared to The Last Jedi.
It boils down to this: fans were generally happy with The Force Awakens and they were willing to overlook the film playing things rather safe. Fans were not happy with The Last Jedi and the biggest two complaints that I hear are that they didn't like the political themes in The Last Jedi and characters were not good. Personally I did not like The Last Jedi, but that is because everything that was established in The Force Awakens was either butchered or disregarded altogether. I also felt like Rian Johnson had no idea who Luke Skywalker was as a character and it showed in the terrible writing.
I saw the Rise of Skywalker on Thursday and without giving too much away, I can say that many of the issues I had from the previous two films were fixed. We also got the proper send-offs to many of the original trilogy characters and the writing/story was much better than the previous film.
You are seeing people defend The Last Jedi by saying the reason why the user reviews are so bad is that it was review bombed, but that this is just nonsense. Why wasn't The Force Awakens or The Rise of Skywalker review bombed then? We have a much more likely scenario: The Last Jedi wasn't that great of a movie. I know casuals loved it, but actual fans, eh not so much. Look at HelloGreedo for example- he made a successful YouTube channel because he crapped all over the prequel films, but HelloGreedo is just a casual fan who has even admitted that he hasn't played the video games, he hasn't watched the animated shows (The Clone Wars, Rebels, The Resistance), nor has he read any of the books (nothing from the EU and nothing from Disney's new canon)- this is about as casual as you can get and this also represents most people defending The Last Jedi. This is akin to someone claiming they are an MMA fan, but all they do is watch UFC main events and they skip the UFC fight nights, skip the minor UFC events and they watch nothing from other MMA organizations.
Alright, so you kind of answered why fans hate TLJ, can you think of any reason why casual fans like it? That's kinda where I meant for this thread to go. What is it that casuals like about TLJ and don't like about RoS, and why does it seem to be the opposite for "real" fans.
I have no explanation of why they liked it because the writing/story wasn't that good. The music and the visuals were amazing though and I would even argue that the music in TLJ was superior to the music in TFA. One of my biggest gripes with TLJ beyond the writing is how bad they portrayed Luke Skywalker. I am not going to lie, I am a huge Luke Skywalker fan and his story arc from ANH to RoTJ was simply amazing. Luke Skywalker as a character has always been selfless and he has always put others (including his friends) before his needs and he has always done what he believed was right. In RoTJ, Luke decided to go behind enemy lines because he thought his father, who was not only Darth Vader, but a Sith Lord and number 2 bad guy in the galaxy at the time, still had some good in him and he also thought he could be redeemed. After beating his father in a duel, the Emperor wanted Luke to kill Vader (similar to how he convinced Anakin to kill Dooku), but Luke, unlike his father, resisted the temptation to the dark side giving us one of the most badass quotes of all time:
"No, I'll never turn to the dark side. You've failed your Highness. I'm a Jedi, like my father before me."
This and all of the other deeds defined Luke Skywalker as a character and after the Emperor tried to kill him, we all know how that ended with Darth Vader becoming Anakin Skywalker once again and throwing the Emperor to his death.
So this same Luke who always did the right thing did three things in the TLJ that were so unfitting to his character:
-He threw away his father's lightsaber (Anakin's lightsaber)
-He attempted to kill his nephew who was the offspring of his twin sister and best friend (yeah because that makes sense)
-He refused to help the Resistance fight the First Order
Where were the loremasters when they were shooting TLJ? They should have spoken up and told Rian Johnson that he wasn't portraying Luke Skywalker correctly. Also, we have all seen the video of an emotional Mark Hamil proclaiming that he told Rian Johnson that his portrayal of Luke was not fitting and that it was going to upset a lot of people- if you haven't watched the video, here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynBuQoSzeEE
TRoS is not perfect, but it was the best thing we the fans could have hoped for after the disaster that was TLJ. Also, I mentioned HelloGreedo previously, a Star Wars YouTuber who I dubbed as a casual fan. He loved the TLJ, but thought that TRoS was just "OK". His Video review of TRoS has over 5k likes. In contrast, Star Wars Theory is a YouTube channel that does a complete nosedive in all things related to Star Wars lore from books, movies, shows, and video games. In his video review of TRoS, he makes it clear from the beginning that he was not a fan of TLJ, but he loved TRoS... his review has over 64k likes on YouTube.
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