[DiracSpike]

Originally Posted by Thor

The thing is though, this movie was very similar to a combination of ESB and ROTJ. A young jedi gets trained by a hermit jedi master in a desolate place.There’s a dark area in said desolate place where young jedi has a vision.The bad guy and the good guy meet up in the throne room of the ultimate bad guy.Ultimate bad guy makes good guy look out of the window at their space fleet getting destroyed.Good guy and bad guy team up to kill ultimate bad guy.The Empire First Order invades a Rebel Resistance base on a white planet with the help of Giant walkers while the defenders rush to trenches.
Most of the main scenes were a roll-up of those two movies combined, the only truly 100% original sequence was the stupid Canto Bight casino Act that basically stops the movie dead. The only fresh new direction this movie went was making Luke Skywalker kind of a dick, at the end we still have a band of freedom fighters against the evil power except this time it's run by two guys in their 20’s.There was some good stuff in this movie but they kept cutting away from it for useless plotlines which only make sense in the context of them wanting to set up new spinoff trilogies.A fresh direction would have been Rey turning to the dark side by joining Kylo Ren, but that would never happen because Rey has never once been challenged or experienced failure during either of these two movies, which makes it hard to relate to her.She’s mastered everything she’s ever tried, there’s no struggle in her character.Its boring.

The sad truth is Star Wars has fallen prey to the main Hollywood money making scheme these days which is the method of soft rebooting beloved franchises. It’s essentially a remake, the exact same things happen, but they set it in the future and keep referencing the original movies to make it feel like a sequel.It happened to Jurassic Park, to Ghostbusters, and it’s happening now to Star Wars.I was really pumped for TFA, I didn’t read any spoilers or watch the trailers because I was excited about what would happen, but my heart dropped as soon as I read that opening crawl.They just reset everything to the beginning, there was nothing new there.I don’t blame Disney for doing it, they needed a minimal risk movie to put their movie on the right track (financially, not story-telling wise) and it obviously worked because the movie was well received and made a tonne of money.There were a few new additions that were creative but that’s the trick of the soft reboot, at the core the story is stale because it’s a clever way around not straight-up remaking a movie.I was in the minority of people who didn‘t like TFA because I’d seen what was essentially the same movie 20 years earlier on VHS tape, and I’ve seen a much better, less convoluted version of this last movie before as well.Say what you will about the prequels, and lots of people have, they were stories that we hadn’t seen before that didn’t rely on cheap nostalgia and virtual shot-by-shot retakes like these last two movies.It’s ironic that the main piece of originality in TFA, the vision Rey has in the cantina and the mystery box associated with it, was completely stepped in on this movie like it didn’t matter.More so than a bunch of nerds being upset that their Snoke theories were a waste of time, I think most people who turned on this movie because did so because it snuffed out the one bit of mystery and intrigue from the remade A New Hope.As a result the cracks are starting to show around this new trilogy, the Rotten Tomatoes score and the 42% decrease from the first Tuesday numbers between this movie and TFA are indicative of that.

People might say “Well this movie isn’t for you, 27 year old DiracSpike, it’s for the kids and a new generation of Star Wars fans”. I agree with that, it’s obviously true because if they were making these movies for people who watched the Original Star Wars they wouldn’t just do a cheap remake of those movies with the exact same villains and problems just set slightly in the future to try and remind you that this isn’t a remake.If some 10 year old kid out there is stoked on these last two movies and it’s their first introduction then that’s great, I’m happy for that kid.I’m also happy it’ll help Disney keep pumping out movies and toys and video games and hopefully make them a lot of money because I’m a Disney share holder and that’s good for me.But for me as someone who enjoys originality and story telling, these are just hollow window dressing movies that I haven’t enjoyed and won’t pay money to see any more of them in the future.