The Snyder Cut

[Tyndmyr]

The context in TLJ--a child soldier who's coping with his fear by overcompensating and resolving to die in a futile gesture, precisely because his training as a child soldier tells him the sublimate himself through self-destruction--is very different from that in Rogue One. Also, Johnson is making a conscious statement that fetishizing heroic death over survival isn't inherently a good thing: war isn't about aesthetic gestures, and if you're consciously attempting to be Horatius on the bridge you're doing it wrong. It is right and good to struggle, fail, and survive to try again.

So, I don't think that's actually justified by talking about Rogue One. We have a "heroic sacrifice" in this very same film. Admiral Holden kills herself to blow up the big pursuing ship. Why is that sacrifice okay and others ain't?

But that's the point: fascists are pathetic and a joke and can still kill you. Hux and Kylo as sad manbabies with WMDs are perfectly good antagonists without any third act additions. Battering people into submission with violence and terror isn't actually four-dimensional chess or Ultimate Evil, and wasn't even when the Emperor was doing it.

Not really. Hux in particular is just not actually scary to the audience. He doesn't appear competent, and he lost his WMD in movie 1, so...all he has are disposable mooks that keep failing to accomplish anything. You can't carry the finale of a trilogy on just wave after wave of minions dying, that'd be exceedingly boring.

Pulling a big bad and a planet full of ships out of nowhere was kind of lame, but they did need some sort of danger.

Kylo is interesting, but at this point, he's far too personal with Rey. They have a thing to explore, but Kylo literally doesn't care about any of the others.

Whether The Force Awakens intended it or not, the First Order as presented on screen reads as a conscious in-universe attempt to replicate the Empire's core imagery by people who fetishize the Empire but fail to understand that the Empire had no meaning beyond the Emperor's whims. It's the second beat on "history always happen twice, first as a tragedy, then as a farce." There is a quality of parody to the First Order--they are poor photocopies of the Empire--and that's great storytelling. It's very real to life for present authoritarians to smear themselves in the ashes of past successful authoritarians in attempt to seem potent.

Eh. That feels the case with Kylo. He's embracing that motif hard, and it becomes a tragic tale for him, and it mostly works. Seeing him as the rage filled Vader wannabe? Yeah, I'm down with that.

But the rest of it all seems rough. The First Order as a whole isn't anything but a discount Empire. Too much parody, and you end up trying to make Spaceballs. And we already have Spaceballs. You shouldn't try to make Spaceballs when you've been hired to make Star Wars.

Now, yeah, maybe if we'd followed Finn's story more closely, that could have been interesting. I'd love to see that whole Stormtrooper aspect. But, as it was, there's no meaningful reason to use the first order livery instead of sticking to Imperial aesthetics, which honestly get repurposed a lot anyways.

Was it that bad? I recall like five seconds of exposition on why the embargo was happening because of trade, then we get to a massacre of robots manufactured entirely from glass jaws and tissue paper. Phantom Menace is built on how the mundane grievance is inflated by Palpatine/Sideous because destabilization is more important than who wins or what the issue at stake is.

I believe there was also some trade/diplomacy covered in the second prequel movie, but I couldn't tell you what. The film's mostly only memorable for lines about sand and such. I'm not against a grand political space opera, and hopefully Dune lives up to that when it comes out, but I can see not wanting to get too close to prequel territory.

The problem is that Episode 7 also does essentially nothing to forward the trilogy as a whole and we could skip from 6 to 9 and miss pretty much nothing. The trilogy started off worthless, so it's hard to be upset that the second part simply continued to be worthless.

It at least introduces characters. Yeah, the story is basically a recycled retelling, so there's nothing novel there, but you at least know the new characters and where they stand in relation to each other. 8 and 9 need to at least build on that, and frankly, that shouldn't be all that big of an ask.

This doesn't make seven great as a film or anything, but if you wanted to salvage the prequels, you at least would want to make sure all those characters had something relevant to do.