ajp4mgs
Super Freak
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2017
- Messages
- 2,305
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That's certainly fair. And I hated Dark Empire too, so there ya go.
But the problem remains that Dark Empire set up Palpatine from the start of that story while TROS tried to cram it in as if it was planned and cohesive. It wasn't even coherent to a large degree, much less synchronized.I respectfully disagree. It *is* different. The secrecy of the Death Stars only meant that they were intentionally kept secret *from the Alliance* so as to avoid disruption or destruction before becoming fully operational. They weren't kept secret from the Empire (the overarching antagonist), nor were they used as some sort of new/separate antagonist. As the audience, we clearly understood them to be weapons of the Imperial war machine.
The use of DS2 in ROTJ is nothing more than the main adversary re-employing a familiar weapon in the existing war against the protagonists. Still very much the same bad guy, and same story structure. In contrast, the Final Order was kept secret from even the top chain of command of the First Order. When Kylo presented their existence, it was suggested to him that Palpatine's offer should be refused. In my mind, that makes them an entirely new antagonist in the ST, not merely a new weapon/fleet of the existing one.
To go even further, the Resistance didn't even do battle with the First Order in TROS. They took down the Final Order on Exogol, but didn't even engage the occupying forces of the First Order at the end of the movie. Not only was the main antagonistic force of the first two movies replaced in the third one, they weren't even engaged in the end battle at all!
And I don't see the Final Order as analogous to the Separists vs. Republic in the PT. Palpatine was very much front and center for the audience; he was creating the antagonistic tension the whole time. In the ST, the burgeoning of the First Order - and the ascendancy of Kylo to Supreme Leader - were set up under a different context and then rendered virtually meaningless in TROS. New main bad guy, new conflict, new motives, and new story (with new family/lineage backdrop).
I don't see how any of this makes for a cohesive trilogy. What did Palpatine have to do with the Ben/Luke situation, and Starkiller, and Snoke's throne room? Who was seducing Ben to the dark side? Who conceived of the plan to wipe out the Hosnian system? What role did Kylo's killing of Snoke play in the end? To just answer "Palpatine" to all these questions without any prior setup just seems really lame to me. The story didn't progress organically, and it just plays as disjointed.
But they smashed a Cheez-It into a puzzle of Keebler crackers. To slap it down and force it into place, then turn to the audience and say, "See? A complete picture!" is nothing more than hoping the audience isn't too keen on doing any actual thinking.
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