shadowgrin wrote:Not impressed with the climax since it's just a twist of what happened in Return of the Jedi.
You may not have noticed, but the entire new trilogy is the "first" trilogy rehashed, and seemingly deliberately so.
I won't go as far as bighort but I do like reminding people that Star Wars was always intended as sci-fi schlock based on old serials, they're what George Lucas came up with after he couldn't get the Flash Gordon license. And he never had any plan beyond the first movie where he hit onto the main hooks, the Jedi/Sith, the Empire/Rebellion and the notion that galactic non-entities (Luke and Han) can become the ultimate heroes.
Empire's "twist" was legitimately huge at the time, but it's not the lasting twist* that sells the film where ROTJ drags. It's not just the Vader revelation, it's that literally everyone gets the shit beat out of them because Vader wins. Luke loses his hand, is defeated by Vader and has to deal with the psychological impact. Han is frozen. C3PO is ripped up. Lando is made to betray them all. The rebellion gets its teeth kicked in at both the start and the end of the film. The film has no hopeful ending and no indication of how they're going to follow up. ROTJ's opening actually is arguably the "darkest" point of the original trilogy as Luke and Leia both take a step up in badass and the "team" goes all out in willing to murder anyone who opposes them directly and upend the Hutt Rule to save just Han alone, THEN they go deal with the whole SECOND DEATH STAR thing for the second half of the movie. Something which, before Lucas re-edited it and the Abrams reboot threw it out, was not the end of the war or the Rebellion or the Empire just because Vader throws the Emperor down a poorly placed endless shaft.
The Thrawn Trilogy, and the EU that originally followed, constructed a much more complete universe that logically followed what the three films showed us. With the Empire and Republic maneuvering in the wake of Jedi.
TFA and TLJ understand nothing about universe building and rehash the same points because it's Star Wars Kids making Star Wars movies as they remembered them. The characterization is just as bad. But arguably their biggest sins is that TFA literally "resets" the universe by blowing up the old one rather than deal with it. A JJ special.
*Especially if anyone views the films in their numerical order. Instead you have to watch them IV-V-(I-II-III)-VI as the prequels render Vader's "reveal" as a non-twist to the audience. (And create more questions considering Anakin has no emotions in the prequels, even slaughtering children multiple times, so why would he even care about his kid enough to topple the Emperor.)