Hacker Cinema
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
2019 · Film · 142 min
Part of Star Wars Collection
Directed by J.J. Abrams
AdventureActionScience Fiction
The surviving Resistance faces the First Order once again as the journey of Rey, Finn and Poe Dameron continues. With the power and knowledge of generations behind them, the final battle begins.
1 positive3 negative5 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
The first time I watched The Rise of Skywalker it was just too much being thrown at my brain. The second and third watch was much easier to process of course. I'm a big fan of older movies and have noticed the shot length difference anecdotally - Lawrence of Arabia and Ben Hur are two of my favorites. So I suppose it all makes sense to me now that there is actually a comparison measurement that has been completed.
When people ask me about The Rise of Skywalker I tell them it was fucking awesome. It had:
- mecha-zombie palpatine
- a daft-punk sniper lady
- a crazy sith-goth-senate
- lightsaber fight on some craggy rocks in the water
- a big bad spaceship (I think)
All you need to really appreciate the genius of the film is to day-drink 2/3 a bottle of single malt then nurse a double of black label during the movie to keep the buzz going.
>The third Skywalker trilogy started off with a bang in late 2015 with The Force Awakens, only to end with a whimper four years later as fans deserted the franchise.
The Rise of Skywalker grossed over a billion dollars at the box office. The current crop of TV shows are some of the most popular things on TV. That isn't what I'd call "desertion". Disney can milk Star Wars for years to come.
It wouldn't surprise me if they've already made back their investment. The five Disney Star Wars movies have made over $4 billion gross. That's not accounting for the parks or merchandising.
I don't see any doom and gloom here for Disney. Things are bad for the moviegoing public, sure, but Disney is doing fine.
The quality of big budget movies has also dropped to the point I'd rather just wait for streaming.
Aside from an indee movie ( Mad God I think ) , I haven't seen a single movie in a theater since Rise of Skywalker.
Yes Disney it was that bad.
I honestly think theaters are obsolete, I'd personally rather stay home and watch Netflix.
I agree Glassdoor is in an unusually difficult niche, but rating systems are all over the place.
Steam reviews are interesting because I have started watching someone’s YouTube lets play instead. Even bad ones are mildly interesting and they quickly tell you a lot more about the game than what I get from random reviews.
The best online review system for me is Rotten Tomatoes which shows both what the general public thinks and what the critics do. Looking at say https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_rise_of_skywalker I appreciate many of the viewers liked it, but it’s the critics that I find actually agree with. Yep, worse than the prequels, but not quite walk out of the movie theater bad. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_episode_i_the_phantom_menace, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_episode_ii_attack_of_the_clones, or https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_episode_iii_revenge_of_the_sith
Financially it's been fine, but the last movie was disliked by critics, the audience reviews were mixed at best, and the fanbase has been at each other throats.
Hollywood tends to pay a lot of attention to CinemaScore (very roughly: exit polls of people seeing it on the opening night), and The Rise of Skywalker got the lowest CinemaScore (B+) of any live-action Star Wars movie - lower than Solo and the prequels. "They audience liked it ALMOST as much as the one with Jar-Jar!" is not what Disney wanted to hear, especially since that sort of thing will have huge flow on effects to the ongoing revenue stream (toys, theme park rides, merchandising). For example, I believe the newest Star Wars ride has sharply underperformed, and Disney leadership will probably believe (correctly) that the poor reception the latest movies got was a driving factor.
And the box office take, while still very substantial, was underwhelming for what was meant to be the crowning glory of a 40 year franchise, and compares poorly to other end movies for big franchises.
The "point" of buying Lucasarts from Disnye's point of view was to apply a lot of money and some of the magic they've used on the Marvel franchise to make a truly vast amount of money, get a bunch of critical acclaim, and set up the franchise as a money spinning machine that will keep filling theatres for spinoff movies every year forever. Instead they merely made a very large amount of money, the critics said the last movie stunk, and the fanbase seems deeply disinterested in more movies, which had led to them cancelling a bunch of planned movies.
It's not that bad, and I'm sure it's fixable, and the Mandalorian is doing great, but MAN is it less than what they were hoping for.
(And persistent rumours have it that Iger intervened directly into the creative process of The Rise of Skywalker late in the cycle. If true, that makes the disappointing TRoS results reflect on him...but I obviously have no idea if that's true.)
That being said....I don't think Star Wars was bad enough to trigger this. CEOs typically can do much worse for much longer, and as others have noted, the choice of replacement (and the speed of the replacement) is mystifying. I would guess ill health, or maybe some sex scandal rather than poor performance being a factor.
One of my favorite little nuances in the original GITS anime is a scene in the middle that immerses the viewer in the world. This video[0] goes into detail about this and how it relates to aspect-to-aspect transitions in comics.
Comparing this element alone with the nature of the 2017 Hollywood film really has helped me identify so many other similar events in media where I previously would have struggled to pinpoint why I felt certain responses to something I watched.
The most recent example being the comparison of the pacing of The Mandalorian with The Rise of Skywalker.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTnl1FVFBw
>Huh. I’d call TLJ the first interesting SW film since Empire.
I agree, and I think time will eventually come to agree as well. TFA was visually interesting as all of the modern Star Wars films were, but plot-wise it was such an obvious fanservice-laden rehash of ANH that it left me unsatisfied. Yes, seeing Han Solo again engaging in space pirate shenanigans was fun, but another Death Star, just bigger this time, really?
TLJ actually tried to say something new and push the lore forward (in a direction a lot of fans didn't like, but still, no longer circling the drain of decades-year-old nostalgia.) I liked what it had to say about the nature of the Force and how the Jedi and Sith were both wrong, I like that Luke turned out to be a flawed character cynical about his mythical status as a hero, and that there is more than just the binary morality of "Jedi good, Sith bad, let's fight now" at play.
My biggest criticism of TLJ would be that, while I enjoyed it as a movie, I think it failed at its role as the second part of a trilogy, spending too much time undermining the previous movie. Although, as far as I know, that's because there never was an "arc" planned for this trilogy, so I don't even know how much blame TLJ can get for deviating from a plan which never existed.
I get a bad feeling that Rise of Skywalker is going to wind up being nothing but a fix-fic for the last two parts, though.
> For those films that are released in theaters, Disney doesn't plan on changing any windows to bring them sooner to Disney+, which means there will be around a seven-month wait for titles like the upcoming Frozen 2 and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to hit the service (Toy Story 4 should become available in early 2020)
Betting the company. Thank god Iger found some time off from his book tour.