Daisy Ridley, throwing caution to the wind, weighs in on Skywalker ending, Baby Yoda egg scandal
Aux Features Film
In what’s sure to spark another round of edifying discourse online, Daisy Ridley has weighed in on the controversial ending to The Rise Of Skywalker while making it abundantly clear she has no interest in reprising her role. Ridley’s in good company on the latter point—Oscar Isaac and John Boyega also seem relieved to be free of the franchise—but we imagine she’ll get some pushback for saying she was “totally, totally satisfied” with how it finished. She should get a Twitter account so people can levelheadedly discuss it with her.
“I think for me the beauty of Episode IX is it ends with such hope and such potential,” she told IGN. “I just feel like that was Rey’s perfect ending. The big battle was in Episodes VII, VIII, and IX.”
As for what Rey’s up to these days? “I think really she’s probably running around the forest somewhere having a great time.”
But, while her fanbase would likely love to see her frolic with Ewoks, Ridley doesn’t sound all too interested in putting it to film. “I just don’t know what else she could do that I didn’t have to do,” she said. “Also, there are so many amazing characters in Star Wars, that it’s sort of an amazing thing. I was watching the new episode of Mandalorian, and it’s just like the places it can go beyond even where it is now is so exciting.”
Ridley, determined to fire up as many nerds as possible, also weighed in on the Baby Yoda egg scandal. Like a happy person, she’s chosen not to overanalyze a lighthearted scene on a Disney sci-fi show in which a magical, pointy-eared gremlin eats the eggs of a human-sized frog lady. “I’m like, ‘Yoda, do your thing.’ The creature got to be where she needed to be with the eggs. It’s all good. It was beautiful.”
Yes, Daisy, it was beautiful, and we hope to say the same about your upcoming movie, Chaos Walking. Doug Liman’s long-delayed adventure flick is due out in March. Prepare your takes now.
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*pushes glasses up nose*Umm, she ended up on Tatooine. They don’t have forests.
“Umm, she ended up on Tatooine.”
She’s um, talking about what Rey did AFTER the trilogy, not AT THE END OF them…
It’s not like she would have stayed there. She was returning Luke to his home.
I’m sure they have a mass bantha graveyard called The Forest of Bones, or a field of towering, sun bleached alkali crystals called the Grove of Shards. If a planet can have a sea made of dunes it can have a forest made of not-trees.
… it’s not like she has to stay there… 🙄
But did she stay or was she there just to bury the two lightsabers? I think after being on her other desert planet, she’s done with sand.
Well, she never came right out and explicitly told the audience how much she hates sand. I mean really, who would do that?
I’m thinking that’s Daisy’s interpretation of what Rey would do…go back to a forest planet and chill. Now if this was Rey in the context of the movie…I’d say she would never want to see a sand type planet anymore if she could help it.
She doesn’t like sand. It’s coarse rough and irritating and itgets into everything.
She just went back to bury the lightsabers there. That was my takeaway from the ending. Didn’t mean she was stranded there.
Object permanence is SOME SHIT- I’m always like, how’d you get over there when I wasn’t watching? Are you telling me things can happen when the camera isn’t on?
Came here, scrolled down, wasn’t disappointed etc.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of nerds suddenly cried out complaints and were never silent.
i’m pretty sure she planted the lightsabers and the magic beans in them caused a forest to spring up.
Wouldn’t be the strangest thing Star Wars has done…
“….let’s call it “The Forest of the Whills”, it’ll be FINE
I’ve said this before about Rise of Skywalker and I’ll say it again: What did we honestly expect from the director of Star Trek: Into Darkness and the co-writer of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice?That being said, Daisy Ridley has every right to say she was satisfied with how Rise of Skywalker ended. Just as Mark Hamill said he personally disagreed with how Luke was handled in TLJ. It’s her opinion and I respectfully disagree with her.Really, it’s mostly JJ and Terrio’s fault that Rise of Skywalker turned out as bad as it did. Trevarrow’s script, while not perfect, could have worked had they worked a few more drafts of it. But instead they decided to rip off Dark Empire.
“What did we honestly expect from the director of Star Trek: Into Darkness and the co-writer of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice?”
Another BAFTA nomination maybe? Or a second Golden Globe nomination? Or maybe a matching Oscar statue to go with the one he already has?
It’s also Kathleen Kennedy’s fault for allowing the trilogy plot to be written like an incremental story-go-round instead of as a coherent fully-planned story.
Counter-point: The OT was written incrementally with lots of major plot elements and twists not planned out from the beginning. The prequels were a fully-planned 3-movie arc.
…yeah but the Bad Lady didn’t do the franchise the way I pictured it in my thinky-space.
Yeah, the biggest mistake was just hiring people who are shitty at writing movies.
She also has done a phenomenal job with the TV part of Star Wars, and even Rogue One and Solo were great.
Indiana Jones, Aliens, Godfather 2, Empire Strikes Back, Blade Runner 2049, I’m sure there are more. Unplanned sequels can be great. All the good sequels are adaptations that I can think of.
i still believe that deciding to tell the sequel trilogy “round robin” style was the most inspired thing about them – for the reason you mention, AND the fact that just about every person with even a minor interest in SW has a different opinion on what constitutes “good” SW.TLJ made TFA a better movie. It’s too bad that, instead of using ep 9 to work out some of the kinks in 8, Disney chickened out altogether.
Yeah, I honestly enjoyed the Force Awakens but recognized it as using the exact same blueprint as the OT for its jumping off point. The Last Jedi really was kind of a shock to the system for some, but I loved it. I think it builds on the legacy of the Jedi from the prequels and maybe that’s why some couldn’t get into it. TROS was easily the most disappointed I’ve ever been in a movie.
TLJ could’ve been an all time great if they had stopped the movie at the point where Kylo kills Snoke, and it’s left on a cliffhanger where he asks Rey to join him, or even have her agree to join him and have the Resistance NOT escape, be either captured or almost completely wiped out besides the inexpendables. They wrapped the movie up too well with killing off Luke and Kylo failing yet another duel, knowing the audience would be rather let down that none of the original stars would be around for the third one, nor was there any mystery to what was gonna happen next. If they left it with Luke sensing how bad everything was, and deciding to take action, meanwhile Rey goes AWOL that would’ve left a better middle chapter. And if they had any pre-planning ending the film on a cloning facility hinting at Palpatine’s return (also giving a quick and sensible explanation to where he came from)
I’m just here to agree with you.This idea that only something that is preplanned from beginning to end can be great is such a dumb modern take and completely ignores pretty much all of entertainment history. It’s dumb and lazy take.
It is not so much that it needed to be planned from beginning to end as that they should have coordinated on the basic storyline. Rey must find Luke/Luke does not care. Snoke has some big plan/Snoke is dead and not really important (later it was Palpatine all along), Rey has some mysterious important past/Rey is nobody particular and anyone can be special (later Rey IS from a major bloodline), and so on. Just at least agree on the key plot points.
I would aim even lower or higher than that depending on how you view the flow chart.Either a) give the people the time they want and need so that we would have either gotten JJ’s Trilogy or Johnson’s 8 & 9. B) Hire people that have the same vision on the project you hire them for. Because I’ll die on the hill that the biggest problem with the ST is that JJ and Johnson have diametrically opposed views on Star Wars and their fandom with Star Wars.
yeah, improv can work as long as all the people involve know how to yes and. and that third movie did not.
You would still like your planned trilogy to have some cohesion. I’m not sure people are saying only things preplanned are great, just that this trilogy would have been better served with some more planning. But really, TROS just majorly botched the last film. A better script and story would have allowed the lack of planning to not really be a big deal at all.
counter-point counterpoint: the OT was special, made by skilled individuals doing what they do best, with minimal interference; the Prequels were hampered by their maker thinking “whatever i do will automatically be awesome Star Wars” while he had 15 years to overthink things through; the Sequels were hampered by their maker being fucking Disney, trying to recoup $2billion via blandly aiming low.
The overall structure of the Prequels may have existed prior to filming but it has been extensively documented that Lucas was literally writing at least Episodes II & III while they were filming.
Counter-counter point, they didn’t know they were making a trilogy with the OT. George Lucas made a movie, it did shockingly well so he kept going. Disney knew from the start they were making a trilogy, you’d think they’d at least give some thought into where it’s all going to go.
Counterpoint-counter-counter-counter-point :
Yeah that’s true, but at the same time the OT didn’t have the weight of decades of lore and expectations. Plus we can’t act like the Star Wars fanbase isn’t one of the most overbearing. Say what you will about the prequals, but at least the flowed into each other decently and had a story that made sense (albeit with some weird prequal side plots.) The pain of these films is that for some reason Disney really believed that they could just strike gold like the OT did and then royally screwed it all up.
The thing I, a nerd who has never written a thing beyond poorly punctuated comments see as the biggest problem, is the lack of time the new trilogy had. The OT had roughly 6 years compared to the 4 that the new films had.They literally lost one of the franchises’ biggest stars and just kept on truck with less than two years to put it all together.
Very true on the OT. But to be fair, no one knew there would be more than one film. In fact, they were mostly sure the original film was it. So although Lucas did have some thoughts on the future, not much went beyond that. JJ and Kenedy’s trilogy on the other hand was well intended to a trilogy. It boggles the mind that it did not get planned and flow better than it was.
It’s more that it was written by two completely different creatives who had wildly different visions for the franchise and apparently didn’t coordinate much. It’d be like if Empire had been directed by Terrence Malick without any of Lucas’s script or notes. And then Jedi was exactly the same.
I’m not sure the arc of the prequels was the real problem with them. The overall structure of Palpatine’s rise and fall actually works rather well.It’s that no one dared question Lucas during filming. There was no real back-and-forth to improve upon what had been written. No one questioned his direction or the woodenness of his actors.Planning is good. Unlimited auteurism usually isn’t.
Counter counter point: The OT story all came from a single creator/source. Lucas wrote a multi movie treatment that was at least the foundation of the trilogy, and was obviously involved throughout to craft the story. The Sequels were creatively disjointed and ultimately had writers that explicitly opposed choices made in the previous movie.
I was gonna say–if that above commenter thinks the sequel trilogy had a messy run, wait until they learn about the OT.
The OT stories were all written by the same person, which is a different circumstance. The ST movies had two separate creative teams with very different visions playing hot potato with the plot.
Eh. They greenlit a bad third movie, but everything up until then had been pretty great. If Rise of Skywalker had worked out better nobody would be complaining right now about plans or the lack thereof.
I agree there would be fewer complaints, but people WERE already complaining that TLJ just uprooted much of what started in TFA.
Except it didn’t. There’s jack in TLJ that “undoes” anything in TFA.
It may not have gone the way people expected it to go, but that’s obviously an entirely different thing.
Good point. I tend to ignore those people because they’re wrong :-)I kid. Mostly. I know that even if The Rise of Skywalker had been universally beloved there would still be people complaining about TLJ, but I also think TLJ is a masterpiece and the best Star Wars movie overall.But my larger point still stands. The Last Jedi zigged when people expected it to zag, but it built on what The Force Awakens set up even if it did so in surprising (and to some people, frustrating) ways. Rise of Skywalker had a character say, “Actually, that wasn’t true. Here’s the real true surprise revelation that actively negates the one in the last movie.”
This a wierd gripe to place on Kennedy’s head, since Lucas did the same.Her real mistake was setting a slate of movies on a schedule instead of letting them breathe.She got enormously lucky with the standalones and that Rian Johnson is maybe one of the top 15 directors working and surely the best director that would take on starwars on short notice. They should have just backed off the two year schedule after TLJ, and let everyone breath. JJ. and Trevorrow both acknowledge that they were writing scenes as the movie was shooting and didn’t have storyboards for how some of the scenes would look so noone really knew what was going on. Everything in the movie could have worked, but you have to lay the ground work and do it right and JJ. was just shooting to a deadline.
Yeah I think it was the rush to finish them and recoup the investment by being as risk-averse as possible. You can tell just by how much each movie is an attempt to blunt the last’s controversies. They were also obviously thrown off by Carrie Fisher dying, but that also would’ve been a great chance to delay production of episode IX or even scrap the whole trilogy idea and make a 4th one, why not “end it” on an even 10?
Ride of Skywalker was shit, but i disagree with the idea that it’d have been solved by plotting the whole thing in advance. There are so many variables good and bad that you can’t know in advance. Poe died halfway through Force Awakens until part of the way through filming. A plan would have meant no Poe. And no plan would have known Fisher was going to die. And thats before you get into who plots it oir and how that balances with having filmmakers with their own ideas and takes. The original trilogy was made up as it went along and that worked out alright.I do think that Kennedy and the powers that be should have kept a tighter grip on telling a coherent story within the approach they chose though.
The secret is that plotting a long story is hard, and people who write movies aren’t particularly good at plot. Especially with mega-budget movies, tight plotting isn’t nearly as important as shuttling the characters from one setpiece to another. Ironically, Rian Johnson is unusually gifted at plotting movies. The fact that he couldn’t write a Star Wars sequel without descending into “and then this happened, and then they were on Hoth only with salt” suggests (to me, at least) that the folks at Disney had a tight grip, they just had no idea what to do with the stuff they were holding.
Planning it out entirely in advance wasn’t strictly necessary provided there was a single creative force behind all the films, instead of allowing the third film to literally overwrite the movie that came right before. Fuck.
The irony in you mentioning the exact formula that Kathleen put into Mandalorian that makes it so popular.
Kathleen Kennedy has shit all to do with The Mandalorian. That is all John Favreau and Dave Filoni.
Actually it takes all of them, from Ludwig Goransson to Dallas Bryce Howard, to Taika Waititi.
This show is great because all the parts are coming together perfectly, I thought you understood that by now?
Star Wars is entirely based in pulp serials. It’s more than ok for them to be written without an overarching story (but I will admit that it is dumb to market and promote them as a singe ‘saga’ if that’s not how you’re producing them).
WTF do you expect from Disney. They want your money. They knew how to get it. They didn’t care about the method used.
People seem to forget the impossible situation they were put in after Carrie Fisher passed. The first two movies in the trilogy were clearly setting things up for Leia to be at the center of the final movie and crucial to Ben Solo’s redemption arc. Obviously they had to rethink things and go a different way. That doesn’t excuse the silly Maguffin plot or all the fake-outs of “Beloved character is dead, no wait he’s fine”, but I at least am willing to cut the writers some slack in what had to have been an extremely difficult process of basically removing the main emotional anchor from the story.
Mark Hamill said he personally disagreed with how Luke was handled in TLJ.Wasn’t that more an initial reaction to the script than a sustained fundamental disagreement with the film? I don’t think he’d have turned in such a good performance (better than a lot of his OT acting) if he’d been dragged kicking and screaming through the film.
Yes but afaik he never really walked it back or showed that his opinion changed. Dude knows how to play the game, and after his initial displeasure became public he didn’t really toss gasoline on either side’s fire. As far as him doing a good job despite whatever his feeling may have been. Yeah. It’s a job. A job where you pretend the entire time. And he’s Mark fucking Hamill, not Bruce Willis. He’s never been the phone it in type. Even his ubereats ads are compelling.
I watched the making the film behind the scenes on TLJ BluRay — Mark Hamill was cracking jokes about how he hated his character’s arc during the entire filming of the movie, and is obviously struggling with it/arguing with Rian Johnson. I don’t think he made peace with Luke’s fate until he saw the final product.https://www.indiewire.com/2018/03/mark-hamill-the-last-jedi-demoralized-the-last-jedi-sxsw-2018-1201938578/
He’s come out many, many times and said that he thinks the film is great. He apologized for airing his opinion in public and that behind-the-scenes converstaions and disagreements are part of the process and nothing to fret over.But, of course, people willfully choose to ignore most of that.
Hamill apologized because Disney made him. He even said as much.
Or, you know, the opposite of that.https://geektyrant.com/news/mark-hamill-doubles-down-that-disney-did-not-pressure-him-into-apologizing-for-his-last-jedi-comments
yeah, no. He literally said the opposite of that, that Disney never forced him to say anything.
That interview has become a “it can mean whatever you need it to in order to make your point” thing, but you are correct. Hamil stated in an interview that his initial reaction was negative because it bothered him that Luke would lose hope, but on reflection he was reminded of how often youthful optimism gets crushed into cynicism by life.
Is there anyone out there who’s like “I am personally upset with you, actor and star of the movie I hate, for not hating it as much as I did”? TRoS was truly awful, but (unless she was calling out genuinely abusive or heinous behavior) it would be pretty damn unprofessional and disrespectful to the rest of the cast and crew for Ridley to just throw her own movie under the bus. Plus, like, why wouldn’t she be proud of her own work?
Oh I know. It’s just that after the harassment she suffered for her role in the Sequels I just want to clarify I’m not making a personal attack against her.
Oh, definitely. I wasn’t responding to you so much as the weird “fans must be pretty upset with Daisy Ridley for defending her own damn movie” framing of this article.
Even Kstew said she’s proud of the Twilight movies! I doubt that that’s 100% true, but she and Daisy both made it through huge franchises with insane fanbases AND got a lot of hate. I’m not interested in arguing with them about how they should feel about the arguably biggest moments of their lives.
her acting was fine. it was just terrible writing.
Wish they’d ripped off Dark Empire properly. I can only imagine that was what was going on with the Matt Smith role that was touted early in production. What a mess that movie was, even after it came out they were still essentially editing it by saying ‘Palpatine was a clone actually’.
That script didn’t have drafts. They just pulled a checklist off Reddit.
Kennedy: So JJ, whaddya thinkin for Episode IX?Abrams: Okay, hear me out on this. What if…Kung Fu Panda 2 but, like, Star Wars?Kennedy: I love it! JJ, you’ve done it again.
I expected more from the writer of Argo.
Alternatively, what did people expect from the director of the Force Awakens and the Oscar winning writer of Argo? Both creators have had their duds but they’ve also both done great work. Which is why it’s so strange that they managed to do not nearly as good a job as Trevorrow, who’s never done anything particularly great.
Jurassic World really wasn’t that great, it was just better than Lost World and Jurassic Park 3, which was not a huge hurdle to jump. Even then the action scenes in Lost World were and still are amazing.
Daisy Ridley did well by the material she was given, but it seems like she’s having a lot more trouble lining up work than her costars. Considering how many newcomers have seen their movie careers fizzle after headlining a Star Wars movie, she has some real incentive to speak well of the project.
What Disney needed for Star Wars was another Kevin Feige.
Actors have very, very different perspectives on movies than the audience. Her response to the movie is 100% going to be about her character’s arc. The emotion and growth and not the plot or anything else. The only other factor would be the experience of filming. What it was like on set and with the rest of the cast & crew. If that was good she might remember the whole movie more fondly.
Good point. I think a lot of the time, the only time an actor ever watches their movie from beginning to end is at the premiere and they probably don’t care then.I can’t imagine most actors giving a crap about what happens in the scenes they’re not in, for that matter.
A lot of actors can’t stand watching themselves onscreen and so only pretend to watch the films at the premiere. Also, Daisy is a harsh critic, so she only watches her films when forced, so she says.
I’ve always assumed most actors duck out of premiers as soon as the lights go down…who wants to stare at their own face for two hours like that?
And even at the premier it’s probably like a painter looking at a portrait or a single listening to an album. All they can see is the mistakes. The shitty brush stroke or crack in the voice.
She probably sits there and thinks “my expression there was wrong” or “I could have given that line better” or “what the fuck are my hands doing?” or “I was so tired during that scene and it shows.”
or “really? that take?”
These actors aren’t stupid. They saw—even more clearly than us, I’m sure—the pure inanity and cowardly artistic choices of Rise of Skywalker. It was a blatant attempt at righting the storytelling ship via reintroducing (nonsensically) a familiar villain. They were saying, “Hey, remember the Emperor? See, this really is Star Wars! Forget the Last Jedi crap!”
(I actually did not like The Last Jedi at all; it seems like trying to de-mythologize material whose creative soul depended on mythology was a self-defeating strategy, but goddamn I respect Johnson for at least trying something interesting. Also, too many bizarre plot developments.)
I always thought the Rey character was kind of poorly defined, but Daisy Ridley can clearly play an action hero in her sleep: she’s naturally empathetic and believable. I hope she’s in better stuff, and that JJ Abrams atones somehow for that disaster. Anyways, Star Wars has never been so irrelevant—not financially speaking, of course, but you know what I mean. (Edit: yeah, I know people love the Mandalorian, but one excellent Netflix show isn’t enough to make up for years and years of lame movies)
I thought Rogue One was great. Between that and the Mandalorian, the evidence points towards them needing to stay away from epic trilogies from now on.
Agreed. I also liked Solo more than most. It had its problems, but I had a good time watching it. Not so much RoS.
Didn’t like Solo much. But RoS is the absolutely worst SW film ever, so anything looks good by comparison.
Rogue One was very good.
Solo was a mistake, they should have done a Lando movie instead.
Ten year old Bammon Taylor would never believe I’m saying this, but if they never make another SW movie ever again, I’d be quite fine with it if “Original Trilogy 2.0, now with more special effects” is the best they can do.
They saw—even more clearly than us, I’m sure—the pure inanity and cowardly artistic choices of Rise of SkywalkerIf they indeed exist, which I would politely suggest they do not.
I just wanted one more scene at the end and I would have been as satisfied as I could have been with the ending (without having to rewrite the whole thing): Rey sitting on the desert sand, meditating peacefully, talking about the nature of the Force. Camera pulls back – Finn meditates next to her, listening quietly. That’s it. Just acknowledge the dropped “Finn is Force sensitive” plot thread and show Rey taking her first steps as a teacher.
They did it better in the Lego SW Holiday Special
I do wonder if I’ll ever be able to watch this ABSOLUTE BOLLOCKS ever again. Since it remains an important Star War, this makes me sad. Even Attack of the Clones I’ve seen three or four times, on purpose.
It’ll probably seem more like a dumb sort of watchable movie in a few years. The prequels are dreary af and I watch them now and then, but at least at their worst the sequels aren’t boring? Still got some nice production design etc, but it’s wild that ROS seems worse to me than any of Lucas’ choices like midichlorians. Guess I finally know how fans felt after watching Phantom Menace, which I was a bit too young to appreciate just how bad it was/was received at the time.
I saw Phantom Menace and RoS in the theater. Of the two, TPM was by far the more unpleasant experience.
I remember really liking the first half hour or so of RoS, wonder if that would be the same on a rewatch. I genuinely don’t know which is the worst film, I don’t think RoS is ever boring, but its so shite, whereas Phantom Menace was so boring, but does have some interesting ideas, which RoS doesn’t at all. I don’t think there’s a single interesting idea in RoS, its all just sloppily trying to retcon things, wrap things up, and stuff as much crap as possible into the runtime so nothing can breathe or be thought about long enough to realise it makes no sense.
But it had Wedge!
Keep us updated, will you?
My frustrations with the prequels led me to re-watches hoping I’d just missed something. And for its messes, there are parts I can appreciate.TROS is the first one that I really have zero desire to re-watch. I don’t think I’ve watched a single scene on YouTube either, which is usually the hallmark of an okay movie.
I did try once. I made it about 30 minutes in. What pressed the Stop button wasn’t so much what was happening onscreen at the time, more that i remembered what was coming up in the rest of the film.
“Throwing caution to the wind, Daisy Ridley says something completely anodyne and non-controversial that’s unlikely to interest anyone.” Try harder with your clickbait, guys.
“something completely anodyne”Well yeah, to those of us that have slightly bigger concerns than an actor’s opinion on one of their movies.But give this a couple of days to percolate through the interwebs, an there’ll be plenty of MRA rage to choose from.
Well you got riled up, kid.
I feel so bad for this woman.She’s gonna be getting stupid ass questions like this forever.Maybe one day she will go full “I don’t give a fuck” mode like Harrison Ford did and never look back.
Hopefully she’ll get cast in a Terminator or something so she can be harassed with some variety.
I’m picturing an Alec Guinness Force ghost warning her that nerds will ask her inane questions for the rest of her life.
Well, I liked Rise of Skywalker and all the other sequels. They made me a Star Wars fan again after the disappointment of the prequels.
My take:The ST is all fine.I liked all 3. I had problems with all 3.I can rewatch them and be entertained. I have bigger problems with the adult fan base. That feels Star Wars needs to be made for them. When Star Wars should inherently be aimed at tweens and teens awhile being good enough for adults.
My counter to that, as a children’s librarian, is that children’s entertainment is perfectly capable of being coherent and consistent, and has gotten better and better as folks have slowly realized thatA: Kids aren’t dumb, andB: Kids who grow up in the information age are particularly not dumb.You’re right that Star Wars has a shit fanbase (I think fandoms in general are more bad than good, it’s not great to let the thing you like to subsume your identity, but yeah SW has a rough one), and you’re right that these have always been movies for kids. But you’re allowed to make good movies for kids, people do it all the time, and the target demographic for the sequel series shouldn’t give it a blank check to be nonsense.I’m glad you like it, and I’m glad for anyone like me who didn’t like how it ended up but managed to move on because we’re grown-ass adults. But I’m very much not into “well it’s for kids so who cares if it sucks?” as a mentality.
I think “good enough for adults” might have been the wrong choice of words. I’m not stating it as a qualitative thing.I mean if more so as Star Wars is something that should be aimed at teens in the sense of it should be like an intro to grand adventure and trope. It should be well made movies that are entrance ways into feelings and emotions for the viewer.It shouldn’t be made for the adult audience that knows all the tropes and so you’re trying to write directly to them. (it’s my biggest problem with TLJ. It’s a film made to speak directly to long time Star Wars fans). Star Wars, the films specifically, shouldn’t be lore and continuity bound and aimed at pleasing people who watch every episode of every cartoon and read every book.IMO, Star Wars should be a series that fills teens with wonder and awe first. And makes them want to watch more films and experience more wonder and awe and drama. That’s a bit rambling, and I’m not sure totally coherent. But it’s not a quality thing. I do think kids and teen programming can get a bad rap, especially anything labeled YA. But Star Wars should be a great YA series. That’s what it inherently is.
While I’m glad you didn’t mean it in the “oh well it’s just for teenagers so it can be bad” sense, I’m confused at the notion that teens aren’t interested in investing an insane amount of energy into lore, considering that’s their whole thing. Fanfiction as a medium is fueled by teenagers who want so much more lore that they make their own.
I don’t want to go on too much of a diatribe.I’m not saying teens aren’t interested in pouring energy into lore.I think the focus on lore and canon has had a negative affect on media and entertainment. The knowing of information and filling in the background with details of an outside has superseded just telling a story with emotional impact. Lore and canon has created a media where all people look at is the big picture and buy into a universe and a feeling of you have to watch everything to get all of it. And losing some immediacy. There’s a lot of here’s something in book 1, episode 1, whatever that might payoff or come back in Book 6, episode 70, spin-off #3 etc and less here’s something that happens in hour 1 and it’ll affect you by the end of the credits. Anyway, focusing on Star Wars, I just feel the Star Wars films should be entries to lore and canon, not payoffs to lore and canon. If that makes sense.
But it doesn’t actually do this. The new trilogy isn’t made for the superfans. If you’ve read and watched all of the canon star wars material, this new trilogy will only leave you more disappointed. The only people I know that have liked the latest trilogy as a whole, are people who can enjoy something regardless of it’s quality.
My take (as a lifeline SW fan) is that people take the franchise about space wizards far too seriously.
I’m generally of the belief that the hardcore fans in any fandom take their entertainment way too seriously.It’s entertainment, it should bring you joy. If it stops bringing you joy, find something that does. Bad parts can’t ruin good memories of these things unless you the fan choose to let it.
There’s plenty of room for you-be-you. I like both “hard” SF and a Tolkienesque sweep of master-planned self-consistent history, but when people try to make Star Wars into either of those things, I just go to my happy place and listen to the crashing waves and the seagulls while they enjoy themselves in their way. Even though The Empire Strikes Back was in many ways the better movie, to me there’s nothing like the original (and most of the rest was downhill from there, the three prequels definitely being the low point). Of course, I can never again be the person who saw it that first time in 1977—that remarkable film that took themes we’d all seen and made them into something we’d never seen—and everybody who came up in those four decades or so started out as a different person than me and then had a different first experience with Star Wars. De gustibus…
I’m with you. The first time I watched RoS I was a bit disappointed that it didn’t make a lick of sense but now I can watch it and enjoy exciting scenes and decent acting & directing. It’s fun. The kids really don’t seem to care that there’s a magic dagger that points the way.
Opposite of the prequels really. Good, interesting plot (I think anyway) but an almost completely flat, joyless experience with mostly terrible acting and directing.
I hated it the first time I saw it, but the second time I realised that if I zoned out and just watched the images and listened to the score I could have a good time, because it still had the cadence of a Star Wars film, and I like Star Wars.
While I agree with you, my litmus test for such things are watching how my 12 and 5 year old react to media. They also didn’t like ROTS. I understand that it’s just silly space Wizards and it’s for kids but personally I don’t foresee wanting to rewatch it and it taints them new trilogy for me.
Firstly, just because something is “for kids” doesn’t mean it should be bad. And secondly, your comment is just ignorant. A businesses job is to make money. When you’re making a product you want to sell it to the most amount of people possible, so ideally you know your target audience and advertise to them. Its just a fact star wars is mainly followed by adults at this point. Making a decision to focus on kids inherently goes against good business. Pokemon is a “kid’s” game, but if nintendo makes a decision that makes the game less fun for adults, you’d better believe they’d not only see backlash but a huge loss in sales. What a business wants their target audience to be, and what they’re target audience actually is are entirely different. You adjust to the market, because the market won’t adjust for you.
Not even to start an argument, I don’t plan on replying because we all believe what we believe, but I’d love to hear someone actually defending the Baby Yoda Eats Egg gag, because I thought it was deeply unfunny. As I’ve expressed elsewhere, the issue isn’t that he’s eating the eggs (dark humor can be great!) but that the show is trying to have it both ways by making the eggs a critical dramatic plot point and ignoring that for a gag in a way that makes Frog Lady a confusing character (these are the last of her line and she hasn’t, y’know, counted them?).
It straight-up does not work as a joke, and I feel like its defenders are so hellbent on yelling down SW’s standard shithead fans and/or defending the right to include dark humor that they’ve missed the part where it’s just not a well-executed joke.
I am not a passionate partisan on either side, and I agree it’s a little implausible the frog lady would respond as she did, but I definitely laughed each time Baby Yoda either ate an egg or clearly thought about eating an egg.
I have never been so tense during an episode of The Mandalorian as I was watching the Child eye those eggs. And when he was playing with the hatched tadpole later? Oof, I needed a stiff drink to calm down. I mean, I also laughed, but it was one of those break-the-tension, nervous, maniacal giggles.
Yeah, it was definitely not clear at all to me that he had developed a non-hunger-related fondness for the tadpole. That’s where the frog lady and I parted ways, I would have kept my tadpole well away from B.Y.
It never read as intending to be funny to me. The Child is completely amoral. People have projected the shit out of its cuteness, a perspective completely unsupported by the text. I like the amoral Child, and I thought those scenes were excellent. Complaining about it is bewildering to me. In summary, it is as completely horrible as you think it is but *that was the point*.
It never read as intending to be funny to me.
Comedy dude Peyton Reed directed the episode and it has all the beats of a joke and the studio exec that defended it did so by pointing out that it was a joke. So yeah I’m straight-up baffled by this take.
There is a fine line between humor and shock. Personally I found it funny in the “I can’t believe they are doing this” way.
I guess I will clarify for the combative types.Of course it was comedic, but it wasn’t a throw away joke. I mean that was the core complaint, a callous, racist/speciesist, sight gag?Those elements are present but it was intentional and well rounded, due to the underlying observation that The Child has always been a borderline monster.
The Child is completely amoral. People have projected the shit out of its cuteness, a perspective completely unsupported by the text.I like the amoral Child, and I thought those scenes were excellent. Complaining about it is bewildering to me. In summary, it is as completely horrible as you think it is but *that was the point*.Very young Children are relatively amoral.
I’ll step up to the plate: The eggs were unfertilized so he wasn’t eating fetuses, just endangered eggs. Also he’s a small kid, so he doesn’t understand right from wrong yet and could very well end up a screwed up sociopath, which is a much more interesting story than him being the epitome of all that’s pure and good. Kids aren’t pure things, they’re destructive and thoughtless if allowed to be. Mando has to learn to be a father whether he likes it or not. I think the one knock is that the frog lady never noticed, she should’ve freaked out after counting them and refused to let him stay with her and her husband, forcing Mando to find some other way to hide him
As I said, my point isn’t that Baby Yoda shouldn’t do stuff like this on principle, but that this particular gag isn’t that funny. Like, I’d be down to see him munching on living tadpoles that represent the last of a species if the joke was good, but if the joke messes with the tone of the episode then it just doesn’t work.
In her defense, the best part of RotS was when it finally, mercifully, ended and we didn’t have to watch it anymore.
I liked the part where I didn’t care if I missed anything when I left the theater to use the restroom. It was nice to not feel like I had to hurry back.
The Star Wars franchise is like the Republican Party: it’s totally amazing both are still popular and somehow still exist/have viably lasted this long.
They also both peaked in the 1980s and have been a shell of themselves since
Good on Daisy for sending positive vibes and not getting ropes into ridiculousness.
Boring actress with nothing controversial to say. More at 5.
I consistently rewatch Rise of Skywalker AND eat frog-lady eggs. Come at me internet!!!
An actress is justifiably pleased with one of her movies. What’s the big deal here? Should I have been triggered for some reason?
It wasn’t a “lighthearted scene”, it was horrifying. And it’s not “overanalyzing” to have the appropriately horrified reaction in the moment.That said, Ridley is wise to dodge. Hopefully she never has to talk about SW ever again.
I preferred the story of Rey Solana.
The sequel trilogy was largely boring and occasionally risible in a very 2010’s way, but the thing that bugs me the most is the Kylo Ren character. Vader was at least cool, even though he too had rage issues. He didn’t throw his helmet around like an angry toddler. And the feud between Kylo and that ginger-haired guy whose name I don’t know seemed like weird Stepbrothers shit, not like the geniune gravitas we got from grand actors like James Earl Jones and Peter Cushing. I mean, I get the modern symbolism, but c’mon.
God I hope never give JJ any movie, not just star wars movies to direct again. That guy is stinker and grosser than a balut
I remember almost nothing about SWTRoS, except that a) I watched it and b) it seemed like reasonable karma for all the critics of SWTLJ (which I thought was pretty great).
daisy proves that it is possible for marginalized voices to make it big in the entertainment industry trans rights are human rights
Rise of Skywalker was fine and that’s ok. Not every movie in the series is going to be Empire Strikes Back.