Matt Smith dishes on his Star Wars role that would’ve changed the “history of the franchise”
Could Matt Smith have altered The Rise Of Skywalker? He seems to think so
Aux News Matt Smith
The force is strong with Matt Smith, the former Doctor Who, and star of Last Night In Soho. Or, at least, it would have been, if his axed Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker character was as significant as he says it was.
In a recent interview with Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Smith reluctantly offered some tidbits about the character he says would have altered the “history of the franchise.” Smith, however, says that he didn’t shoot any scenes, and the role never made it past a few meetings. Therefore, it never came close to being in the movie, even though “Somehow Palpatine returned” did.
Nevertheless, as evidenced by the leaked details regarding Colin Trevorrow’s scraped script for Episode IX, fans love hearing about how Rise Of Skywalker could’ve been better. And Horowitz is no exception.
Josh Horowitz: You were going to be in The Rise Of Skywalker. Matt, did you ever shoot any Star Wars scenes.
Matt Smith: No, I didn’t. We were close to me being in it, but it never quite happened. I think thing of me for, eventually, the part became obsolete and they didn’t need it, and so I never got to be in Star Wars.
Smith “could not possibly say” what the role was—though Horowitz has some ideas.
Horowitz: Here’s conjecture, was that Palpatine’s son? Is that who you were playing?
Smith: I could not possibly say. But it was a pretty groovy thing, it was a really groovy part and concept. It was a big thing, it was a big story detail, a transformative Star Wars story detail and it never got quite over the line.
Horowitz: No, I can’t deal with this. I’m going to have nightmares.
Smith: Yeah, it was a big shift in the history of the franchise.
So, the character represented such a massive shift that it was ultimately not used at all, and instead, we got another franchise-altering character, Babu Frik. Of course, the rest of The Rise Of Skywalker was, unfortunately, memory-holed because no one can remember seeing that movie.
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Hey, wanna hear something say nothing about Star Wars? You’ve come to the right place!
But … it was groovy.
But … it was groovy.Starring Matt Smith as Admiral Powers.PALPATINE: Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?ADMIRAL POWERS: Yeah, baby!
you saying that with peace and love?
Now THERE’S a way to improve Rise…
Matt Smith saying groovy? I’ll allow it.
i will also allow Matt Smith saying nothing for [checks notes] 3 years.
I had the title line in both Star Wars and Out of Africa
“ahh boy, I’m just so tired of all these Star Wars.”
Man, I’m really sick of these Star Wars.
when will they end?
Bundy you clog! I’m gonna rack you!
Haven’t seen Rise of Skywalker but it’s pretty obvious that Matt Smith was going to play that one alien from Star Wars: Episode 1 Racer who looks like he’s taking a painful dump in his character profile.
All of them?
Looks like?! They are all actually taking painful dumps.
Sebulba takes painful dumps and enjoys them
Painful Dumps: A Star Wars Story
So he would have been the guy who deserts Rey and flies off? Thanks a lot Matt.
So probably true that he was going be the Young Palpatine Clone.Aside, I’m sticking with they easily could have nailed bringing Palpatine back if instead that line in the scroll they just had a new Snoke body arrive at the beginning and take Kylo to Palpatine.
That would have been cool, or also if they had done almost literally anything other than saying “Somehow Palpatine returned” and announcing that in fucking Fortnite.
On the other hand, if the scroll at the beginning had had the stones to literally say “Palpatine’s back! How? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” I would have respected that.
Or have Kronk from ‘The Emperor’s New Groove’ turn up and say, “By all accounts it doesn’t make sense.”
Good callback to another movie that started “filming” without a completed script.
I’ll accept any news or plot point delivered by Warburton. What’s this Patrick? I have canceraids and now Daenerys is crazy evil and slaughtering everyone? Oh, that’s just fine on both fronts.
The crawl seemed really short. Like they forgot a few sentences. Hell, even there they could’ve simply said “A SITH cloning project has brought PALPATINE back from the dead. Also for some reason he announced it to everyone instead of moving from the shadows as a Sith, especially a frail one normally does. He stockpiled a bunch of ships that are operated by…droids, yeah let’s go with that and now threatens to take over the galaxy. The First Order isn’t quite sure what to do with this as they apparently had no idea. The Resistance still struggles to get the galaxy’s attention despite all the bullshit happening. Luke’s sacrifice was for nothing. Enjoy, bitches….”
Yo down wit’ YPC?
See, that’s a perfectly fine idea.
Which is why they didn’t use it.
They really should’ve just ripped off Harry Potter and shown a Palpatine resurrection ritual, complete with capturing Rey and using her blood as part of the ritual, and Matt Smith is her long-lost dad (make him look older) who was held prisoner all this time and is the host body, but he can’t use the force so they need Rey. Kylo’s version of events was just a lie that Snoke told him. Snoke was some sort of Inquisitor or acolyte setting this all up. Like Luke, Rey also is told she needs to kill her dad. And she does, but it was all a trick to reanimate Palps for real. There, she has an actual connection to the main baddie.
Or if Kylo had just been chasing rumours of the hidden fleet, and Palpatine being alive was a surprise to him.
I’m a little biased. I read Dark Empire and The Black Fleet Squadron as a kid, and I liked them. And I don’t think using those as a rough basis for ROTS is necessarily a bad idea. So I don’t mind hidden Palpatine and hidden fleet, so for me it’s all about the execution of the reveal. The reveal is terrible. Introduce it in a cool way and it can be pulled off.I’m okay with cliche and trope as long as it’s done well. So that would have been my pitch. Kylo in the Red Room from TLJ, unhappily ruling the FO. A ship arrives (like ROTJ) only it’s a young Snoke. Kylo kills him immediately. Out of the ship comes a another younger Snoke who then can give some speech that leads him to Palpatine.A fair of the rest of the movie has to change to get Rey to Exegol. But, I don’t in theory have a problem with the idea that the clone bodies don’t last long enough and can’t handle force powers so he wants Rey since she’s his granddaughter.
Oh, The Rise of Skywalker changed the history of the franchise all right.
Now that my initial disappointment/disgust has faded, I’ve decided I’m perfectly okay with “Star Wars is officially a TV property now” being Rise of Skywalker’s ultimate result.
Somehow I doubt it given his filmography has been… lacklustre to say the least when it comes to meaty roles in mass market films.His “history changing” role in Terminator was rather hurriedly retconned and even then had only been an about 15 second blink and you’ll miss it moment.
See, I know Matt is telling the truth because I was also cast in a role that would have changed Star Wars, Western Cinema, and possibly the universe.Pity I can’t give you a single, corroborating detail about it though.
Honestly, his role in Terminator was like the one decent thing in the movie. The idea of an incarnation of a post-defeat Skynet that is now actively time traveling to ensure Skynet exists is something that would’ve been perfect to explain the cycle that world is stuck in.
If they kept it going, they could’ve just gone nuts with it. Bring in a faction of rogue T-1000s led by SCC’s Weaver. Have Smith’s Skynet get into a war with Legion. Change the formula at least.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles was in effect doing a much better job of that already.Though it was funny to see after all the years of struggle an alternate universe Skynet wiping out the entire leadership of the resistance in about 15 seconds off-screen.
In Genesys, Skynet just was shown getting John’s personal Tech-com squad. Though it apparently had been acting as a Resistance member for a long time and only struck after John had defeated the Skynet of that timeline.
Apparently the rough plot for the direct sequel to Genesys involved a focus on the Terminator John, with more on ‘Alex’ Skynet, who had apparently traveled to multiple timelines already and was fully aware of the whole Conner/Skynet conflict cycle.
I liked that The Sarah Connor Chronicles was headed in the direction that Skynet was inevitable, so the solution isn’t to DESTROY Skynet, but to teach it compassion.
This is my take on where The Sarah Connor Chronicles were at the end.They had the brilliant idea of introducing multiple factions. On top of Skynet and the main human resistance, there were also other machine factions and human ones; humans from alternate futures not necessarily with the same objectives or alliances, human collaborators with Skynet and machine factions against Skynet and even working with the resistance among others.I got the impression at the end that John Henry was made by one of these machine factions to kill Skynet and take its place but John Henry had other ideas – possibly wanting to save his brother as he considered him as he shared the same base code as Skynet which is possibly what he did when he jumped to the future.This did give us the priceless scene of some clueless patsy recounting his end of a phone call from Skynet complaining about his brother (referring to John Henry).
I view the Terminator franchise as having a similar issue to Jurassic Park — the first movie is all well and good, but you can never make a Jurassic Park movie where the dinosaurs all stay in their cages, and you can never make a Terminator movie that doesn’t devolve into a robot fistfight for the fate of humanity.The formula is just baked into the premise. If they had made sequels to Genisys that expanded the Matt Smith role, he’d basically just be a reskinned T-1000 hopping around trying to mess with the timeline, and there’d be some kind of good robot to fight him. The franchise logic requires that both Judgment Day and the ultimate victory of humans are inevitable, and also that there must be a robot fistfight in some kind of industrial setting.The Star Wars sequel trilogy had a funny variation on this issue, which is that the story requires a Sith-y big bad, but they never figured out what they wanted to do with that, so they were reduced to calling Ian McDiarmid to see if he was busy. Calling Matt Smith to play a young Palpatine clone (or Darth Plagueis) wouldn’t have fixed anything.
“The formula is just baked into the premise.”The robots fight each other thing actually seemed weird as hell when you were first introduced to T2 back in the day before its release. It was not a foregone conclusion when all society knew was The Terminator.
TBF The Terminator was humans vs. one robot in a fistfight to save humanity; T2 is when they started the trope of Terminator vs. Terminator fighting.
I would argue the essential component of the Terminator formula is the fistfight (involving at least one robot) in an industrial setting for the fate of humanity, which was established at the end of the first film with Kyle and Sarah vs. the T-800. T2 introduces a clever tweak to the formula by swapping out Kyle for a good T-800, but otherwise it’s basically the same exact plot.Even Salvation, the biggest departure from the formula, can’t resist winding up in a factory with Sam Worthington and John Connor fighting… another T-800 for the fate of humanity.Whether it’s robots or cyborgs or humans fighting the evil robot tends to be beside the point.
Except it’s terrible and ruins the main role of Skynet which is that it acted in self-defence when the US tried to shut it down and then deliberately engineered its own downfall.Instead of Skynet’s interesting moral compass the later sequels just became boring.
But that specific Skynet may have been the one defeated at the start of Genesys. Smith’s Skynet is a totally different one that has apparently seen multiple timelines, and aided in the defeat of that timeline’s Skynet.The Sarah Conner Chronicles and some of the extended media established that Skynet was making the same mistake that humanity did when it created the T-1000s. Their amorphous nature allows them to evolve past their programming over time and give the potential for rebellion (and insanity). Which is why the models after them were given solid bodies again. Salvation indicated that Skynet was picking up human traits when it came to strategy and deception. It started creating Terminators that thought they were human.
Genesys featured a Skynet that decided that converting humans into Terminators was the solution and had inhabited the T-5000 body, which is apparently indistinguishable from a human, even by dogs. That Skynet also used T-3000 John Conner as little more than a test to see what would happen if a Skynet (apparently made in its image) started out with fully advanced terminators before it turned on humanity. Dark Fate totally replaces Skynet with Legion, which seems to just be a more efficient Skynet. It just reinforces the cycle with different names in the same conflict.
Doesn’t matter in-universe how they justify it. Point remains that T3 onwards completely ruin the central mythology of the first two films where it is human instinct that both destroys and saves them and that AI merely reflects the character of those around it.Skynet goes from a sad creation that decides to wipe out humanity out of self-defence that continues humanity’s darkest impulses to a malicious inherently evil machine that is such merely because it wants to be evil and therefore humanity bares no blame.
Does it? Each incarnation of Skynet is simply going to new extremes to continue its own existence. The core of the franchise has always been ‘Skynet uses time travel to eliminate a threat to its existence in the form of John Conner, humanity does the same to protect John Conner’. The one time John is killed before he can become the leader of humanity against Skynet? Skynet doesn’t exist. Legion does.
Essentially Skynet and John define each other. Smith’s Skynet is technically the only successful one and that success came when it chose to convert Conner rather than kill him, specifically after an unknown period of time as his ‘friend’/squadmate, Alex. Even its plot isn’t being evil for the sake of being evil at this point. It specifically plans to ensure its own incarnation in the past, with future technology being produced prior to its attack on humanity. At the end of the day, it is the same fearful AI lashing out at its creators. It just learned how to be good at it.
The Terminator franchise is the epitome of a franchise squandering a vast possibility space in favour of chasing formula and fanservice.
I still think T3 is unfairly maligned. The ending, in particular, I still think was really well-done. John coming to the realization that he will never be able to stop the war, and that accepting his destiny is the only way to save humanity, to me, was pretty deep. And I liked the Katherine character a lot and thought Danes’ performance was great.
T3 is by far my least favourite of the series, but the aspects you mentioned were good.
I have not seen Salvation or anything since then in full. What would you recommend I check out in terms of the “Good” Terminator sequels post-3? I have seen TSCC and I loved that show.
Salvation wasn’t fantastic, but I liked it more than most just because it wasn’t so much of a rehash of the rest of the series. Genisys was pretty solid until the end, thanks to leaning more into a bonkers time-travel plot; and the last one was watchable enough, but kinda forgettable; but both suffered from clinging to the same central characters and modern-ish setting. I wouldn’t call any of them essential viewing.
one thing i do love about the terminator franchise is that they now have a trilogy of failed trilogy starters.
hehe, yeah.Thing is, there’s a perfect template for future Terminator films in the Timesplitters series 😛
there’s also a perfect template in the damn terminator! just make a thriller with a killer robot. either take it back to the roots, act like nothing has happened and give me the blumhouse, completely stripped down 20 million dollar version of terminator or blow it out completely and give me terminator g-men in the 30s or terminator-gets-stuck-in-prehistory or something.
Medieval Terminator. Pirate Terminator. Terminators getting mistaken for ancient gods and demons.An idea I had was a Terminator getting sent back to prehistory to save mankind from some disaster, so they can go on to create Skynet.
I thought Dark Fate was actually quite fun. It felt personal again, the fight scenes were good, and the new terminator actually had a bit of a TSCC feel in my opinion.If I recall it was intended as a sort of reboot-sequel, and it definitely had the feel of the earlier movies. (And it means you don’t need to have seen anything after T2).
I want to know what genius cast Doctor Freakin’ Who in your *time travel* movie and then not use him.
He looks like George Lucas’s foot.
What a non-story!
Don’t comment then! Seriously if an article bothers you the best thing to do is ignore it not engage with it.
Between this and Jalopnik’s “The Porche Taycan’s window controls are slightly more sensitive than most cars’” article it’s a great day in utterly pointless posts across the G/O universe.
Hey now, they squeezed a whole 389 words out of that “non-story”—and some of those words weren’t even direct quotes!
What a non-story!The AV Club
“What a non-story!” is also an effective summation of Episode IX in general.
I found four errors in this article:Colin Trevorrow’s scraped script —> Colin Trevorrow’s scrapped script did you ever shoot any Star Wars scenes. —> did you ever shoot any Star Wars scenes? I think thing of me for, eventually —> ?!? So, the character represented —> So the character represented
I think thing of me for, eventually —> ?!?“I think the thing they were thinking of me for, eventually the part became obsolete.”
Also, the hyperlink for “Sonehow Palpatine returned,” which takes you to a YouTube video, is “Somehow” embedded not in that quote, but in the single tiny character space after it, before the next word.
You’re applying for a job that doesn’t exist anymore, however good you’d have been at it. Imagine proof-reading something thumbed out by an intern in a coffee-shop lineup, intended to get a quota of clicks then be forgotten within hours 🙁
Thing is, the job shouldn’t need to exist. These things are three or four paragraphs long. There’s absolutely no reason the authors couldn’t read them over one final time before publishing them.Why don’t we see constant errors like these in articles by Katie, Caroline, the Popcorn Champs guy, Dowd, I.V., etc.? Because they give their shit a once-over before turning it in. Like anyone who’s graduated the 3rd grade would.I know these “daily beat” folks are a different sort of writer, and they don’t care about the banal things they’re being tasked to write about, and they don’t respect the job enough to put much effort forth. But aren’t they at least concerned about future prospective employers looking up their work and seeing blatant errors everywhere?I suppose Gen Z just thinks the world is ending in ten years so nothing matters anyway.
In the header photo Smith looks like he’s auditioning for ‘The Matrix: Received Pronunciation’.
I’m guessing he was going to play Chewbacca’s brother, Barnaby.
Owen & Beru had a kid and he’s out for revenge!
Said it before, I’ll say it again. “Rise of Skywalker” isn’t just the worst SW movie of all time by a country mile, but it’s literally one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.It’s “Batman & Robin” levels of pure incompetence. Just….staggeringly, jaw-droppingly awful. Like, even if you set out to make something as bad as possible, you’d probably not get that bad.
How can a film that mighty start filming without a finished script? All those stories of the “twists” being rewritten constantly on set boggle the mind.
How did you decide to make a followup to one of the biggest franchises ever created and not decided 1) To give it to one person to helm all three 2) have at least an outline of what you want the story to be. I know Lucas made the original by the seat of his pants but at least it was one vision(with a lot of help).
I couldn’t believe it was true when I first heard that they didn’t plan the trilogy’s story ahead of time and it still blows me away. Disney spent billions of dollars to acquire the franchise and then had this opportunity to make a new trilogy that was guaranteed to be financially successful and could be really well-planned ahead of time. And instead they chose to just wing it? That’s malpractice.
Honestly, having been in the world for many decades now and seen many organizations fail repeatedly at exercising even their core competency over time, the thing that amazes me most about the MCU through Endgame at least has been the execution over time. They came up with a decade+ plan and saw it through.
Setting aside any artistic or financial merits of the work, management’s execution was stunningly effective.
In my cynicism towards the corporate world, I can only imagine one reason why they did it like this.
The executives (namely Kathleen Kennedy, the President of Lucasfilm) were too worried about another person becoming incredibly powerful due to their potential masterful handling of the IP. Disney (in particular Kathleen) didn’t want to have another fiefdom ruled over by essentially one person (in other words, another Feige), or more importantly, have their own fiefdom challenged, so they winged it, and purposefully did so without a clear, coherent plan so that no singular vision could be so powerful (or create such a great movie), that they’d be beholden to what that person wanted to do going forward with the series.
Honestly, it’s similar to a strategy used by many dictators around the world. Keep all of the subordinates and their various responsibilities at each other’s throats, if not outright working against one another due to having been given conflicting orders, so that your position as the decision maker is left safe. Frankly, it worked. Kathleen Kennedy is still running the studio (her contract was actually extended after The Last Jedi, and reports are saying her contract will be extended at the end of this year). Rian Johnson got booted, and JJ Abrams apparently doesn’t have any long-term contractural tie to the IP, nor does he possess any apparent juice to make grand decisions on where the IP goes going forward.
The reality is that if Kathleen Kennedy had gone to JJ Abrams back in 2012, and told him, “We want you to do the next Star Wars trilogy, have a general three movie outline complete by 2013, and have the first movie script ready by Fall 2013 to film in 2014″ he would’ve done just that, as would any director given that responsibility. However, he wasn’t given that responsibility, and that squarely rests on Kathleen Kennedy. While I think she’s incompetent in many areas, I think this is one case where it wasn’t incompetence, but instead her fearing that her position was rather precarious if a director came in and directed 3 blockbuster Star Wars films.
Think of it like this:
Star Wars is basically a self-contained hero’s journey with open-ended plots for later, Moff Tarkin is dead, Darth Vader appears and is frightening clearly setting up sequels…and it wraps up.ESB & RotJ are essentially one film split in twain. They’re a straight continuation of each other and while they do a shit job of dovetailing at times they’re largely coherent even if a second Death Star as the bait is….weird? Lazy? Whatever…it’s really not central to the plot, it could have just as easily been a vaguely different looking super weapon, they’re both metaphors for nuclear weapons and human annihilation on a grand scale.It’s clear that Lucas had a vision for the world in general, something that Abrams did not and let audience testing decide far too much. It’s the problem of SW isn’t Marvel, there isn’t 50 years of well written scripts and what amount to storyboards to build off of. The decision to completely jettison the books which make up the bulk of the world for them and then take the worst storyline where again the bulk of the criticism was laid (Kylo Ren’s storyline has been historically panned at this point) just seems like such unforced errors.I feel bad for Daisy Ridley because she’s a good actor who was basically given the most bland character and asked to act against either nostalgia vacuums (Harrison Ford, Chewie, Carrie Fisher), scene chewers (Adam Driver), CGI (insert everybody here), or just much more charismatic people (Boyega & Oscar Isaac). It’s not even that she’s uninteresting but you can’t compete if you’re going for subtlety with those types.
I really think they just rushed it all out to make back the money they blew on buying the franchise. Normally Star Wars films have 3 years of production, and on top of that they cranked out 2 anthology films. I think it was just too much for a company (now subsidiary)that rarely multitasks
Disney purchased Lucasfilm for a little over $4b. Half of that was cash, the other half buy issuing stock.
Disney had revenues of $42b in 2011, the year before the acquisition. They weren’t hurting for cash, especially with the annual revenues that the Star Wars IP brings in.
It wasn’t as though they did a leveraged buyout, or were buying an IP that didn’t have current revenues coming in. While being a part of a publicly traded company would certainly move up the timetables due to shareholder expectations, the purchase wasn’t nearly expensive enough to warrant rushing out out a movie due to Disney being cash-strapped.
Just for comparison, their purchase of 20th Century Fox was for $71b, so almost 18x the amount they paid for Disney, and they were able to do that purchase by using both cash and issuing stock in a 50/50 split just like the Lucasfilm purchase. This means that they didn’t have to assume debt for the purchase, which is much more beneficial to the near-term balance sheet (and helps alleviate the necessity of rushing out new products in order to recoup costs and pay down the debt).
However, I do think that the shortened production schedule, regardless of the impetus, hurt the movies (I loathed all 3 for different reasons, and I’m a huge Star Wars fan).
Yeah, I didn’t mean they were strapped, more like the shareholders would’ve wanted to see results in a timely fashion and see their monster grow even more rapidly. I really liked TFA at first but I get madder and madder at the idea of it. Especially the rehashed Death Star. And having Han die via cold blooded murder. Like, of course he was gonna die, but he needed a better and more heroic way to go out. It wasn’t even a distraction like Obi Wan, he just gets shivved (Sheeved?)
I still can’t believe they didn’t ask for more time after the death of Fisher.
Oh trust me, that’s how a lot of these giant franchise blockbusters operate these days. All those Marvel movies that just got pushed back? Part of the reason is their scripts are all a mess and they have to reshoot so much.
It’s taken the place of The Book of Henry as the movie my mind tends to spiral into a maze of questions about whenever it is mentioned to me. Every single narrative decision is baffling and frustrating in equal measure. A hideous mess of a movie.
I guess I’d argue that the SCRIPT is jaw droppingly bad, but the actual presentation is pretty great. The fight scene with the waves crashing is stunning and continues to stick with me. I’d watch RoS to fast forward to individual setpieces
Style over substance, in other words.
essentially, just without all that “style” baggage.
Yeah. Well, if you don’t have substance, you can at least have style, and Rise of Skywalker did have plenty of great visuals.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Although the mother of all space battles was just a catastrophe. What even was that. Rogue One and Return of the Jedi and even Revenge of the Sith – that’s how you do a battle scene that shows the audience the scope, scale, and stakes in every shot, while still giving you glimpses into the goings on of the individual participants. And literally one shot of some old guy manning the Falcon’s gun, who seems significant…
Similar to episode III…but with water
I can’t turn off the sound and enjoy the visuals because I know they don’t connect to anything remotely meaningful. I mean, I guess if you showed me a few still images from the movie, devoid of context,I might say, “oh, kinda cool.” But what’s the point?
the set pieces in ROS pale in comparison to TLJ.
I’d watch RoS to fast forward to individual setpieces
Would under what circumstances? This would imply you haven’t done that in the three years since it has been out.
NO. Nothing will ever take that title (worst movie) from “Phantom Menace”.
ROTS is much, MUCH worse than Phantom Menace.
Not at all. NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST. Whenever someone says some bullshit like that, I assume they were a child when Menace came out, and defend it out of some sort of nostalgia. That’s the only way it makes any sense.
Yeah, you’re dead wrong on every count. Good for you.
No, as ive said, NOT AT ALL. Not even a tiny bit wrong. Zero percent wrong.
I agree with this, I think Attack of the Clones is garbage and looks like a mid 90’s FMV game most of the time, but Rise of Skywalker is much worse. It couldn’t even manage to have a coherent opening. Both JJ Abrams movies have less then stellar opening scenes, but the ROS opening a disjointed mess.
Clones is a worse-made film by almost every metric. Definitely has a PS2 look to it. Acting was worse as well. But it doesn’t make me as mad as ROS at what it did to the saga.
It really feels like they let a 12 year old watch the original trilogy, then TFA and TLJ, gave the kid all of the action figures of the characters in a pile, and said, “Go have fun, kid. Tell us a story.” And that’s how the script of TROS was written.
Lower. Even my 8 year-old thought it was ridiculous to recycle so much material. “What? How is he alive? Seriously?!” He had a similar reaction in The Force Awakens. “Another Death Star?”
Good point. The thing that felt the most like kids playing with toys was the Chewbacca fakeout. “NO! CHEWIE DIED!” 5 minutes later, “Oh, never mind. He’s still alive.”
I knew he was fine because the fucking trailer showed him in the Falcon with Lando!I was so happy to see the main cast finally have a scene and adventures together (seriously, they never did in the first 2). And with that they had several fakeout deaths, a search for a dagger which had the map to another map in a secret room, Rey keeps trying to ditch everyone, and there are numerous lightsaber battles along the way with the same guy we’ve been beating up for 2 films. He just straight up tells her “you’re a Palpatine” in a hanger. Sooo dramatic. The one good thing out of all that was his scene with Han, which was all in his damn head. I just think of how Jedi did this, and the tension/buildup/sadness that Luke has to leave his friends, his newfound sister to ensure the mission was safe and to confront Vader whom he realizes is his father and nobody, not even his mentors, believes can be saved. Then the buildup to him fighting Vader is perfect, we get a ton of time with Palpatine goading Luke to swing at him. We see the weight of the dark side and desire to join Luke affect Vader through his literal and figurative mask. And this used to be the worst Star Wars film!
attack of the clones is still worse for my money, but i’m not gonna get into ‘which shit sandwich tastes slightly better?’ conversation.
I would much rather watch this than “Batman & Robin”. This movie was a mess, but there were some very good bits and some great imagery. It’s far from the best “Star Wars” movie. One of the worst, in fact. But there are absolutely worse sequels.“Highlander II” is definitely worse, for instance. It’s astonishing that franchise survived the movie, frankly.
“Batman & Robin” was just a prolonged jaw-drop from me. I mean, it hit all the wrong notes, consistently. How does that even happen?
In fairness I’ve only ever watched the first ten minutes of Batman & Robin. I was morbidly curious but shut it off after my jaw also performed said drop, absolutely gobsmacked by the rank and utter incompetence on display in every single aspect of the filmmaking.But ROTS was seriously on the same level of horrible with only the aesthetics and visuals being superior to B&R.
this movie had the wisdom gained after Batman & Robin, and decided to learn nothing. this movie potentially knew what we all knew in 2018 about shitty sequels and what to avoid, and yet became the poster-child of bad choices-not-mistakes.
One friend of mine speaking about a mutual acquaintance: “it’s not that ‘Oli-bax steps in shit’. In fact it is Oli-bax walks on the street, looks to his left to see the shit on the sidewalk, he steps IN the shit, he steps IN it, then he comes to MY HOUSE with shit on his shoe to complain he has shit on his shoe.”
It might be worse than Episode 2. At least Episode 2 wasn’t meant to tie things up and you could believe that twerp would turn to the dark side easily.
I feel that this viewpoint completely ignores the very important addition to the canon that they fly now
Does anybody who doesn’t write for this website give even a third of a crap about Babu Frick? When Rise of Skywalker comes up, I know I’ve seen articles refer to him as a fan favorite, and how he’s the one thing everybody loves about the movie, he was the new Baby Yoda, etc. But maybe it’s just the circles I metaphorically run in, but I’ve never heard anyone talk about him at all past, say, a month after the movie premiered. I often forget he ever existed until the next time the A.V. Club does a story about Rise of Skywalker.
Babu Frik would be cool in any movie, and Shirley Henderson is all kinds of awesome.
Nobody gives a shit about Babu!
He-hey!
Babu Frick popping up in the third act to deliver the same “He-HEY!” – and not just to say it again, but to play the exact same clip of Shirley Henderson’s performance – is somehow both the most desperate moment in the movie and one of the most enjoyable.
Ive seen ROS, and i have no idea who Baba Frick is, and yeah, ive never heard a person in real life mention them.
Several podcasts I listen to all seem to LOVE Babu Frick. Not sure if its sarcastic or genuine
Babu Frick was a brief respite from all the nonsense.
people like the idea of liking babu frick
I’ve seen people like him, and that’s about the only positive thing they had to say about the movie.
Same here. I had to look him up, I literally didn’t remember who he was.
If The Doctor had shown up at the end and screwdrivered everyone, it would’ve been better. Besides, no one would’ve noticed because they’d already stopped paying attention to the movie.(I propose that when talking about the franchise as a whole, the term “Wars, Star” would be ideal.”)
Rey should have been Han’s daughter from an affair.
Its weird that even though he didnt get the job he still cant tell us anything about it. Like hes that afraid of offending someone at Disney or something.
In an alternate universe the internets are all talking about how awesome Rise of Skywalker would have been if they didn’t go with that plotline involving Matt Smith’s character and how cool it would have been if Palpatine returned.
The more I look back at the Disney Star Wars movies the more its clear it was never going to work. They clearly had no idea or direction beyond, “Lets make a Star War”I liked Forced Awaken, I like Last Jedi but it was clear they didn’t really have an idea what they wanted to do by then. Rise of Skywalker is such a mess I have never revisited it, in the almost two years since it came out. It was just disappointing.
I never understood the positive hype from the moment TFA was announced. I was like “so the studio that made John Carter is going to show Lucasfilm how a Star Wars movie should be made? Well, okay…”
i love the idea of someone only knowing disney for ‘john carter’ and nothing else.that being said i think people were pretty high on disney in 2012 and there hadn’t been a new star wars anything in a very long time. after having done right by marvel i think people were willing to be like ‘of course! a natural fit!’now, 10 years, 5 movies and 2 tv series’ later…well things are a little different.
It was weird how excited some people were about a soulless corporation taking over Star Wars. I mean, I get it that the prequels weren’t that great, but Disney was always going to just use them as nostalgia bait without trying to expand the universe or do anything interesting with Lucas’s sandbox.
The moment The Last Jedi tried to break the formula they smashed the box with “Break Glass if Director Tries to Get Creative” under it where they keep J.J. Abrams.
I think it’s because of how well Disney did with Marvel, and the prospect of bringing back the old cast when Lucas said he’d never do it. And Fox also being a soulless corporation who was being maligned for mishandling their Marvel properties.
John Carter was hella good, though. It only flopped because of the marketing.
“Of course, the rest of The Rise Of Skywalker was, unfortunately, memory-holed because no one can remember seeing that movie.”Speak for yourself. I still want my money back.
The only thing most people remember is debating whether or not it was worse than the Game of Thrones finale. Thank goodness Endgame stuck the landing
I was thinking today about The Force Awakens, and how even though I had and still have significant issues with that movie, it made me excited and happy and nostalgic and it was fun. I had fun! And how The Last Jedi actually threw down some serious discussion about myth and legend, and asked the audience to think about the the final phase of the Campbellian heroic archetype, like how folks tend to forget how Beowulf died and just remember how he fought. And I loved that one too! Still do!But from the announcement of the title – I basically refuse to watch anything else that’s the rise of whatever – I knew Abrams was going to punk out and do what he does, which is make a movie you can watch one time all fizzy and agog, and every subsequent viewing is 50% worse, to the point I just can’t even watch it.It’s a narrative disaster. Just the most inept story and script I can remember seeing.
I don’t really have an opinion on this bit of non-news, but I do fully support Matt Smith’s attempt to bring “groovy” back into the common vernacular.
I assumed he was gonna be a younger, sexier clone of Palpatine. Which is basically what his “son” and Rey’s dad was anyway
Cats (2019) was a better film than The Rise of Skywalker
This lack of news is some pretty powerful non-news news tease.
This Emperor FUCKS.