Star Wars: Episode IX - THE RISE OF SKYWALKER

[The Buffinator]

See, I think I was more comfortable with the idea of ROTJ Palps being an actual old man with Sith powers, but because GL selected Palps as a significant "big bad" in SW in the PT (and making him this blend of human and ghoul,) I'm open to the idea he was/is something far more - a kind of "eternal evil."

That being said, the storyteller in me has a huge problem with an eternal evil choosing to take on the form of someone who LOOKS EXACTLY like eternal evil. Eternal evil hides behind many things - there's not a whole lot of hiding going on with a hunched, cackling old man with a butt crack for a forehead and yellow eyes. You know what I mean?

Well, while he rose to power in the PT he was hiding in plain sight as a senator and then chancellor. It wasn't until his confrontation with Mace Windu that he morphed into the ghoulish, butt-crack foreheaded, hunchbacked embodiment of evil that we all know and love/loathe. At that point I think he was ready to seize control of the galaxy and establish his empire, after which he no longer needed to fool anyone.

 

[xipotec]

If they were transported back to 1983 I'd be willing to bet that they'd have hated ROTJ even more than TROS. Let's face it, on average teenagers today are much more sophisticated (and cynical) than those back in 1977 to 1983. I mean, back then I thought that the Furry Lollipop Guild defeating a legion of the Emperor's finest troops was the most ridiculous plot line ever, so I can only imagine how vicious today's youth would be. I know GL was trying to draw parallels between the Ewoks and the Viet Cong, but seriously - some of the traps they had set up to take out the AT-STs would have had to be there long before they teamed up with Luke, Han, Leia, etc..(and their construction would have been detected), plus it was laughable to think that any of their primitive weapons (Arrows? Slingshots? Rocks?) would phase stormtroopers in any way whatsoever. That said, the majority of us gave them a pass because we were more interested in the culmination of our heroes' arcs and less on how they got to that point. Thirty-six years later, it seems many of us are somewhat less forgiving.

They would have hated the entire trilogy.....its safer to hate stuff now than like it.

Look at youtube, the highest rated stuff is ?10 things wrong with?


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[Prime Clone]

First I wondered where Palps got the resources for the Final Order fleet, then after his display of ?unlimited power? I wondered why he even needed it.

And was there any need for the whole Snoke/First Order charade?

Over to you, LF Story Group. You?ve got a LOT of ?splaining to do!

 

[Khev]

What an epic and well thought out post.

I dunno - time travel paradoxes, and the forgiveness of them, is part of movie fandom. Mostly, because setting those paradoxes aside unleashes fun and thrills. What we are talking about here is complex in a way that unleashes density and obscurity.

You're saying that the Connor paradoxes are hard to get your head around, but you CAN just take it at face value and have a good time. On the other hand, here clearly defined Palps details tie deeply into Rey's journey; you have to understand them somewhat fully to even understand what she has to go through - and "do."

Hmm I guess I feel differently on that. Rey was a girl raised in isolation that desperately sought to "belong," learned her grandfather was evil and killed her parents and that the only way to possibly save her friends was to do what he wanted and strike him down. For me we had everything we needed to understand her plight and get behind her. It sounds like we differ there which is of course fine.

One thing that sucks for her is that *both* stories about Anakin Skywalker (he murdered Luke's father/he *was* Luke's father) were almost literally true for her. She had the crappy revelation of being related to Palps *with* the knowledge that he *also* murdered not just her father but mother too.

So you think the Eyes Wide Shut entities in the bleachers are living people?

I wasn't totally sure when watching whether they were corporeal minions or avatars of all the Sith spirits inside Palpatine but have since read that they were living members of the "Sith Eternal" cult.

This points the way to my next question: what is Exogol? Is this a massive military+temple complex on a planet that was set up maybe 30-40 years ago? Like if we turned on all the lights and asked everyone to stop what they were doing, what would we see? People living in massive housing and building star destroyers, and a temple place with genetics scientists?

I love the corsucant temple/subterranean ROTJ conept art vibe, but I think a lot of people's pushback - beyond Palps himself - relates to the character and reality of exogol. Like if we did a timeline of ROTJ to TROS, what would we see on Exogol? What would Pryde (who is supposedly OT era) tell us about what he saw over that 35 years?

The sense is of a surprise attack - like an entity biding his time to unleash a massive military with new whiz-bang tech. Yet... why? The resistance is down to like a VW bus full of people (not including broom boys of course) at the end of TLJ and even in TROS doesn't seem like a massive force. So why didn't Palps just steam his armada out earlier? Like years and years ago.

As much as I loathe Chuck Wendig he did introduce a concept that I liked into his "Aftermath" book that said that the remnants of the Empire would never go to war again with *just* military might, no matter how mighty their military might be. After the Empire/Rebellion conflict they determined that as long as the Rebels had the Force on their side their technological terrors would always fall.

So to answer your question I would say that Palps didn't unleash all of his planet killing Star Destroyers because he himself wasn't ready to participate "in the flesh" yet.

(This "timing" thing gets into other issues we'll discuss later about why Palps wants his grandaughter's body to possess when (at least based on what were heard in the OT and saw in the PT) force sensitive bodies aren't exactly in shorty supply in the galaxy. Yeah, Rey leapt from his loins so maybe she's more special, but if he's an eternal Sith evil, then his power resides in his eternal spirit, not his DNA/offspring, right? )

The Exogol thing is this weird combo of tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of Imperial military personnel - living in complete secrecy/seclusion - plus (tens of?) thousands of scientists who are both building never-before-seen cutting edge tech onto countless thousands of SDs, but are also genetically producing beings (with blurred lines between Sith cultism, spirit and DNA) while Exolgol also being this staggeringly massive religious/Sith location where tens of thousands of Sith entities (are these people who traveled here, or spirits that possessed bodies to travel here?) reside and... well, not sure what they do week by week and month by month.

Then there's this "on no map" thing - why? Is it like Event Horizon where it's kinda hell in space? The whole sequence is unclear what the red/lightning space is they travel through, and whether Exogol is a planet or something more abstract - like an evil cloud city or something (you see SDs rising up from mud/water though, so I assume that's a physical planet surface)

I love the idea of Exogol being some sort of pocket dimension *within* the SW equivalent of "hell." I guess that's where Han expected to see that one Rebel soldier who told him that his tauntaun would freeze before he reached the first marker, lol.

I promptly deleted your midiclorians bit.

Well she *did* hear voices "telling her the will of the Force." Just sayin'.

It's one thing to speculate on Palps origins and backstory, but it's another thing altogether to have NO CLUE as to whether he's animal, vegetable or mineral. You know what I mean?

I wouldn't say that that is the case. I don't see why we shouldn't assume that he's the same consciousness that we'd come to know in the OT and PT, just in a different (and physical) body.

This seems to be one of those situations where you can argue he's kinda alive to take care of certain tricky questions, BUT to take care of other tricky questions, he also might be purely a "Sith spirit" - and yup, MAYBE he's the remnant of the living man we saw in ROTJ, BUT he also might be a clone. I'm just saying that this slippery slope is an issue - that the lazy side of screenwriting is a pathway to many outcomes some consider to be lame.

Fair enough and I'm not here to tell you where the line is between what's cool and what's lame, I'm only saying that I like what was presented on screen and some of the interpretations that it allows.

What I was saying is I can't even tell you if he's a "ghost/spirit" or a living person we met in the earlier movie. It seems that we are supposed to say "we don't know and that's kinda cool" but to me it just becomes story quicksand. If you say "Palps had a child and that child parented Rey" - and that happened within a normal human lifetime (ie Palps in TROS is of an age where he could indeed be Rey's granddad) then don't be saying "maybe he's a spirit, maybe he's a clone..." etc

I'd say he's the living person we met in the prior films, the same one who sired Rey's father before his PT/OT body was tossed over the railing and blasted into blue flame. Then where it starts to get really interesting is when you consider whether his more elaborate explanation to Rey of why he wanted her to strike him down (ie so he could possess her) *also* applied to Luke in ROTJ and whether that *also* means he's been tricking *all* of his prior apprentices (including the one who thought he was murdering Plagueis!) into "striking him down" as well.

That's just a whole can of awesome sauce for me that elevates the entire Saga IMO. Others might think that that goes right off the deep end into "lame" territory and that's okay too.

I just can't wait to see this freaking movie again.

 

[jye4ever]

I love how they included midichlorian when Qui Gon said Every jedi that has ever lived lives in you Rey.


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[ZE_501]

[...]Over to you, LF Story Group. You?ve got a LOT of ?splaining to do!

 

[Wor-Gar]

You win oldest reference of that day!

 

[TaliBane]

As much as I loathe Chuck Wendig he did introduce a concept that I liked into his "Aftermath" book that said that the remnants of the Empire would never go to war again with *just* military might, no matter how mighty their military might be. After the Empire/Rebellion conflict they determined that as long as the Rebels had the Force on their side their technological terrors would always fall.

To be fair, what we saw onscreen in TROS renders ANY type of military might totally redundant. I mean at the point that Palps can single-handedly take down seemingly several thousand ships simultaneously - from several miles away - who needs anything?

They should just strap Palps on the front of a single TIE fighter and fly everywhere, blasting planets, militaries, entire peoples into submission.

In ROTJ , I got that Palps was scary and a threat and had some witchy powers, but I would never have assumed that he could look out the window and blast the entire rebel fleet out of commission. To me, the whole stakes of the struggle kind of go out the window at that point. Like rebels saying "why bother?"

It's an issue with the wider ("new") force-type realities in TROS - who needs a DS1 type attack or even the Holdo manuever (whoa - LAME attempt to sidestep that prickly issue, right?) when force users can throw ships around without huge effort and Sith dudes can blast thousands of ships out of the sky?

So to answer your question I would say that Palps didn't unleash all of his planet killing Star Destroyers because he himself wasn't ready to participate "in the flesh" yet.

I love the idea of Exogol being some sort of pocket dimension *within* the SW equivalent of "hell."

I still don't get why - given he's so MASSIVELY powerful in TROS - he couldn't have done all this ten years (or more) earlier. Yeah, Rey's body is a nice force-y upgrade but he doesn't NEED it to wipe the floor with the rebellious fleet, or even toss out Palpie zingers and smirks, right? He seems like he literally could "take on the whole Empire myself" - and win, easily.

And I gotta get this out there - threats, stakes and hypotheticals aside, the idea of Palps literally in Rey's body (esp. 5-year old Rey) is kinda funny - it could have been completely silly had it happened onscreen, especially as she cackles and calls her self "Empress Palpatine" and starts leering and doing Palps stuff. And all the troops would be like... "wtf - it's Palps in heels?"

It's kinda weird too that he announces to everyone what's going to happen "she 'kills' me, then I jump into her body, and you take orders from her - because it'll be me." So no use just having her be a slightly evil Rey - it'd be full-on party-Palps but coming through Rey.

And it's hard to have your cake and eat it too - I can accept a RO Vader castle or a Sith temple in some kind of hell in space, but when you're talking about tens of thousands of regular military personnel - grunts, officer, designers, scientists etc - living in dorms or whatever for years or decades, doing mundane stuff (building, arguing, pooping, having kids - there were female Imperials in TROS) that's where you start to lose me.

I'd say he's the living person we met in the prior films, the same one who sired Rey's father before his PT/OT body was tossed over the railing and blasted into blue flame. Then where it starts to get really interesting is when you consider whether his more elaborate explanation to Rey of why he wanted her to strike him down (ie so he could possess her) *also* applied to Luke in ROTJ and whether that *also* means he's been tricking *all* of his prior apprentices (including the one who thought he was murdering Plagueis!) into "striking him down" as well.

So you are of the opinion that the Palps entity we see in TROS is the still-living (if only just barely) person we saw in ROTJ, who somehow escaped DSII before it blew?

I just can't wait to see this freaking movie again.

For once in the ST, I'm with you on that.

 

[a-dev]

Seeing it tomorrow with the brother. Another of my brothers said it was a ****ing chore to sit through.

 

[Otomofan]

I didn't make it straight through the camrip I downloaded. It was just pure trash, start to finish. It's more of a parody than Spaceballs.

But it doesn't bother me, cause I'm over it. Last Jedi still fills me with such anger cause it was so purposely offensive and went out of its way to destroy Luke Skywalker.

This movie is just a bad joke, like "Justice League." Just jaw-dropping that something so poorly thought out actually made it to screen, but it means nothing to me.

I know everyone's still excited to talk about it cause it's still brand new, but I wonder if we'll still be arguing about it a year from now?

I don't know....I can't take it seriously. It's a comedy. Rey grabs a ****ing spaceship out of the sky and pulls it down. That's possibly the dumbest thing I've ever seen in a Star Wars movie. Unbelievable.

 

[TaliBane]

Seeing it tomorrow with the brother. Another of my brothers said it was a ****ing chore to sit through.

All three of my brothers are barely aware a SW movie has even come out.

At the big Xmas gathering I had to try to discuss it with nieces and nephews, who weren't all that interested either.

I'm a "unique" individual in my family it seems.

 

[momaw]

I dunno - time travel paradoxes, and the forgiveness of them, is part of movie fandom. Mostly, because setting those paradoxes aside unleashes fun and thrills. What we are talking about here is complex in a way that unleashes density and obscurity.

You're saying that the Connor paradoxes are hard to get your head around, but you CAN just take it at face value and have a good time. On the other hand, here clearly defined Palps details tie deeply into Rey's journey; you have to understand them somewhat fully to even understand what she has to go through - and "do."

I don't know, the paradox's in Endgame were so ridiculous they pulled me right out of the movie. Endgame was such a convoluted mess I'm not sure how anyone could have liked it, but here we are.

The Exogol thing is this weird combo of tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of Imperial military personnel - living in complete secrecy/seclusion - plus (tens of?) thousands of scientists who are both building never-before-seen cutting edge tech onto countless thousands of SDs, but are also genetically producing beings (with blurred lines between Sith cultism, spirit and DNA) while Exolgol also being this staggeringly massive religious/Sith location where tens of thousands of Sith entities (are these people who traveled here, or spirits that possessed bodies to travel here?) reside and... well, not sure what they do week by week and month by month.

Gee, you really better not watch Episode 4 then. They built a planet sized superweapon in total secrecy over the course of decades and fully manned it in that one

Then there's this "on no map" thing - why? Is it like Event Horizon where it's kinda hell in space? The whole sequence is unclear what the red/lightning space is they travel through, and whether Exogol is a planet or something more abstract - like an evil cloud city or something (you see SDs rising up from mud/water though, so I assume that's a physical planet surface)

What, like Kamino?



Just on the Palps TRoS massive overpowering, strap him to a tie fighter and take out the galaxy, I got the impression Exogol may be an ancient Sith stronghold (way older than 30-40 years - the visual dictionary says Exogol was "fuelled by a dark agenda over 1000 years old" and the wayfinders were ancient when Vader and Palpatine had them - but the TLJ one said Luke's door was an x-wing wing and we know how that turned out...). Perhaps it's even the ultimate Sith stronghold so completely shrouded with the Dark Side that it amplifies Sith powers. Perhaps when Palps leaves that place his powers are reduced to what we saw in the PT/OT without his supercharge juice?


Yeah yeah, none of this is explicitly communicated in the movie so head cannon. But this dovetails back to Endgame. I could live with the open questions and the imagination filling some stuff takes in TRoS. But in Endgame it broke me. We all have different thresholds.

I hope you like it more on a second viewing and some stuff clicks into place more. It did for me (also a couple more headscratchers showed up so...)

 

[Wor-Gar]

They should just strap Palps on the front of a single TIE fighter and fly everywhere, blasting planets, militaries, entire peoples into submission.

In ROTJ , I got that Palps was scary and a threat and had some witchy powers, but I would never have assumed that he could look out the window and blast the entire rebel fleet out of commission. To me, the whole stakes of the struggle kind of go out the window at that point. Like rebels saying "why bother?"

If I had to pick my favorite "thing that bothered me" it was Palps super-charged Force lightning. And there was no shortage of choices.

I mean, Palps force-lightning used to just bounce people around like Gozer's lightning... but now suddenly its like a Death Star ray. And people justify it by saying he has all the ancient Sith in him.

The end of the movie comes across like playing a fantasy game with a child -- one who keeps losing and has to quickly invent incredible but poorly-thought-out powers to try and top you. You know, like when you used to play war, and the kid you just shot dead to rights suddenly says "no, I have a super alloy shield under my shirt that is impervious to bullets, AND my rifle is actually a rail gun so you and your entire army are now dead". What!? That pretty much kills the game, time for lunch.

 

[SilverStar17]

I didn't make it straight through the camrip I downloaded. It was just pure trash, start to finish. It's more of a parody than Spaceballs.

But it doesn't bother me, cause I'm over it. Last Jedi still fills me with such anger cause it was so purposely offensive and went out of its way to destroy Luke Skywalker.

This movie is just a bad joke, like "Justice League." Just jaw-dropping that something so poorly thought out actually made it to screen, but it means nothing to me.

I know everyone's still excited to talk about it cause it's still brand new, but I wonder if we'll still be arguing about it a year from now?

I don't know....I can't take it seriously. It's a comedy. Rey grabs a ****ing spaceship out of the sky and pulls it down. That's possibly the dumbest thing I've ever seen in a Star Wars movie. Unbelievable.

Yoda grabs a spaceship out of the water and lifts it up.

 

[momaw]

The end of the movie comes across like playing a fantasy game with a child -- one who keeps losing and has to quickly invent incredible but poorly-thought-out powers to try and top you. You know, like when you used to play war, and the kid you just shot dead to rights suddenly says "no, I have a super alloy shield under my shirt that is impervious to bullets, AND my rifle is actually a rail gun so you and your entire army are now dead". What!?

You're just ticked off you didn't have the super alloy shield under your shirt that is impervious to bullets, AND a rail gun. You just didn't plan ahead going into battle with such well-thought-out powers. This is why Batman will always beat you, and he would have taken down Palps much quicker.

 

[Khev]

And I gotta get this out there - threats, stakes and hypotheticals aside, the idea of Palps literally in Rey's body (esp. 5-year old Rey) is kinda funny - it could have been completely silly had it happened onscreen, especially as she cackles and calls her self "Empress Palpatine" and starts leering and doing Palps stuff. And all the troops would be like... "wtf - it's Palps in heels?"

I actually picture that Empress Rey would be like Satan in The Passion of the Christ. Creepy androgynous "being" played by a woman with a man's voice.

And maybe Palpatine would only live as "Empress" until giving birth to himself, lol.

So you are of the opinion that the Palps entity we see in TROS is the still-living (if only just barely) person we saw in ROTJ, who somehow escaped DSII before it blew?

Yep I would say that the Palps in TROS is the same "person" we saw in the OT and PT but just in a newly (albeit crudely) constructed body. In my head canon I'd say that transferring a previous consciousness into a new body requires a much different process than the traditional Kamino way and that the machine holding the partial scarecrow body was all wrapped into that somehow.

For once in the ST, I'm with you on that.

Seeing it tomorrow with the brother.

Very much looking forward to your review even if you already know all the spoilers in advance.

 

[TaliBane]

I don't know, the paradox's in Endgame were so ridiculous they pulled me right out of the movie. Endgame was such a convoluted mess I'm not sure how anyone could have liked it, but here we are.



Gee, you really better not watch Episode 4 then. They built a planet sized superweapon in total secrecy over the course of decades and fully manned it in that one



What, like Kamino?



Just on the Palps TRoS massive overpowering, strap him to a tie fighter and take out the galaxy, I got the impression Exogol may be an ancient Sith stronghold (way older than 30-40 years - the visual dictionary says Exogol was "fuelled by a dark agenda over 1000 years old" and the wayfinders were ancient when Vader and Palpatine had them - but the TLJ one said Luke's door was an x-wing wing and we know how that turned out...). Perhaps it's even the ultimate Sith stronghold so completely shrouded with the Dark Side that it amplifies Sith powers. Perhaps when Palps leaves that place his powers are reduced to what we saw in the PT/OT without his supercharge juice?


Yeah yeah, none of this is explicitly communicated in the movie so head cannon. But this dovetails back to Endgame. I could live with the open questions and the imagination filling some stuff takes in TRoS. But in Endgame it broke me. We all have different thresholds.

I hope you like it more on a second viewing and some stuff clicks into place more. It did for me (also a couple more headscratchers showed up so...)

I actually never saw Endgame until I got a screener disc a few weeks ago and finally watched it. I have almost zero interest in MCU and really thought EG was pretty universally loved (in that massive BO = universally loved way .) When it seemed a little silly, I thought it was just me not "getting" it. I have a close friend who is on the poster for Endgame so I won't say anything more about it.

I get the DS1 comparison, but it is singular - a battle station. Exogol is so many things all rolled into one - it's the fruit salad of SW places. I can actually believe the DS1 could have been built in secret - I mean the Manhattan project (one of the most secret projects of WWII) employed 130,000 people. All the DS1 is is a massive engineering challenge on a tight timeline.

Exogol is like the DS1 (complete with 250k regular joes) literally situated in Biblical hell complete with chanting demons, with a cloning lab and thousands of scientists thrown in for good measure - all run by an entity that nobody knows for sure is alive and is possibly even spectral.

And Kamino was simply outside the galaxy, just as there are tons of known objects outside our Milky Way galaxy. That doesn't mean it's supernatural or anything. I was unclear on what the "unknown regions" meant in TROS - other than space that hadn't been mapped. It seemed more like the hell thing in Event Horizon was the intention (which frankly is a pretty silly movie) than just "this is off the beaten track."

And on that underwater x-wing on Ach-to. I mean there was so many people on here that were like "duh, it's underwater and the wings are missing, dummy - of course it's a wreck!" then there's Rey with the helmet on, flying a million miles and transmitting like the craft was delivered yesterday.

 

[Khev]

I have a close friend who is on the poster for Endgame so I won't say anything more about it.

You don't say? Male or female...?

 

[Otomofan]

Yoda grabs a spaceship out of the water and lifts it up.

Do you literally sit at your keyboard waiting for me to post just to be a contrarian ass hole after everything I write? Would you kindly leave me the **** alone?

 

[SilverStar17]

Do you literally sit at your keyboard waiting for me to post just to be a contrarian ass hole after everything I write? Would you kindly leave me the **** alone?

Gee, why does Otomofan have a hard time making friends?

Seriously though, what’s the most believable thing you’ve seen in a SW film?