Star Wars Episode IX, The Rise of Skywalker, available on home video

[Bolt]

9 minutes ago, Mog said:

Heck, who wouldn’t want to zoom around the Ghost or the Razor’s Crest?

LEGO covers all my SW toy needs.

9 minutes ago, jenius said:

It could also be triggered by something Leia did. 

Very good point!

Edited January 17, 2020 by Bolt

[Chronocidal]

2 hours ago, Mog said:

Toy Rant Time:  I’d love to have more toys and vehicles from The Mandalorian and later seasons Rebels.

Heck, who wouldn’t want to zoom around the Ghost or the Razor’s Crest?

But the problem is that vehicles are now cost-prohibitive with everyone moving to 6-inch scale figures.

Even if they were to go back to 3.75-inch scale, lots of these big-ticket vehicles are still a bit of a hard sell.  If they make ‘em too small, we’ll gripe that they’re too out of scale (even for 3.75” figures).

I get that manufacturers moved to the larger scale, because it was getting too expensive to make super-articulated figures at the smaller scale and sell them around $10.

But even at these larger scales, the figures are still a crapshoot to get the face-sculpts right, and accessories are kinda hit and miss.

The other sucky thing is that the larger scale kinda discourages folks from army building.

But yeah:  they’re aren’t too many memorable vehicles or designs from the sequel trilogy.

Bottom line:  Bring back the Action Fleet line.  There's literally nothing between Micro Machine and derpy 1/18th-ish scale at this point (except for LEGO, which, what do you know, the only toys that actually seem to sell..).

On the other hand.. Hey.. Bandai.. you know that little line of small-scale toys you have?  I think they start with an "H" or something like that..  

Price-wise though, while LEGO kits are great, the best bang for the buck may be the model kits at this point.  The Bandai kits are amazing, and the Revell ones are basically built to be toys anyway, with just as many lights and sounds as the bigger figure-scaled ships.

Edited January 17, 2020 by Chronocidal

[Thom]

11 hours ago, Bolt said:

Kylo called it " just a  memory" (or something like that) , at the time. I think it reflected his unstable and conflicted state. Han was obviously not a force ghost. 

 

8 hours ago, jenius said:

Yeah, a very conflicted boy wrestling with internal demons. It could also be triggered by something Leia did. 

 I loved that scene! It was Ben reliving that moment and finally making the right choice, and ridding himself of Kylo Ren.  I do have to say, up until that moment I wanted him to die! But coupling his transition back to the Light with that of Leia's death was a good idea. Leia sacrificed herself in order to finally reach her son, and I think she gave him an anchor in the Light by doing it. I think that was the reason her body did not disappear until her son's did and that's because she was with him that entire time.

[kajnrig]

I really liked that scene, too. My brother on the other hand hates it because he hates the entire movie.  He's gone so far as to say that with the canon now being what it is, Palpatine is actually the "protagonist" of the franchise. After all, Palpatine killed off all the Jedi and all the Sith both directly and indirectly, bringing true balance to the Force.

But yeah, besides being really well-acted, the scene was just good theater: a man's internal dilemma across 2.5 movies being played out externally and on screen. I think making him "turn good" was a super lazy way out and betrays the spirit of his character arc, but that doesn't take away from that scene being a much-needed catharsis for him and some just as muchly-needed slow, quiet time for the audience.

Edited January 18, 2020 by kajnrig

[electric indigo]

I loved that scene, too, and massive props to the actors and JJ for pulling it off. This could have easily steered into total awkwardness (hello Anakin...), but the dialogue, and the connection, and the "I know" moment were flawless.

On a side note, did Ben hotwire one of the legacy TIEs to get to Exegol?

[Dobber]

Count me as another that loved that scene. One of the best scenes in the entire saga IMO. 
 

Chris

[Chronocidal]

8 hours ago, electric indigo said:

On a side note, did Ben hotwire one of the legacy TIEs to get to Exegol?

Pretty much.  The theme of this movie seems to be that all the tech in the Star Wars universe has reliability rivaling Zentraedi tech, and ships can sit dormant in deserts, survive their hangar exploding, falling through the atmosphere, and landing in an ocean, and survive underwater for literally decades, and still function with absolutely no trouble.

Heck, they don't even seem to need... fuel...

Edited January 18, 2020 by Chronocidal

[Seto Kaiba]

21 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

Pretty much.  The theme of this movie seems to be that all the tech in the Star Wars universe has reliability rivaling Zentraedi tech, and ships can sit dormant in deserts, survive their hangar exploding, falling through the atmosphere, and landing in an ocean, and survive underwater for literally decades, and still function with absolutely no trouble.

Heck, they don't even seem to need... fuel...

So, as often as the Millennium Falcon breaks down, Luke was right that it was a piece of junk?

I guess it's not that surprising, given that the galaxy far far away has been an interstellar civilization for thousands and thousands of years... they'd have had plenty of time to refine the technology for space travel to improve its overall safety.

[Chronocidal]

50 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

So, as often as the Millennium Falcon breaks down, Luke was right that it was a piece of junk?

I guess it's not that surprising, given that the galaxy far far away has been an interstellar civilization for thousands and thousands of years... they'd have had plenty of time to refine the technology for space travel to improve its overall safety.

I mean, even within this movie, it's constantly broken.. in completely inexplicable ways.

[Dynaman]

To be fair they tried to explain it but the explanation didn't make any sense.  The minor example being that long sliding to a stop landing (I forget where).  The Falcon is quite capable of vtol so at worst it should have just thumped down in place instead of sliding that far.

[Chronocidal]

2 hours ago, Dynaman said:

To be fair they tried to explain it but the explanation didn't make any sense.  The minor example being that long sliding to a stop landing (I forget where).  The Falcon is quite capable of vtol so at worst it should have just thumped down in place instead of sliding that far.

Yeah, that's the main one that comes to mind.  The "landing gear" were broken.  Which.. ok, great.. they weren't broken when they took off.. and they hadn't been in any combat since the time they escaped the star destroyer.. when did they break?  And yes, the "landing gear" being broken should have absolutely zero effect on the ability of the ship to hover.. so... why did they slam into the countryside of that (not the same) moon of Endor? 

On top of this, if the landing gear are having trouble extending, real aircraft have a manual hydraulic handpump to address that exact problem.  Are you telling me that technology in this universe is so blasted reliable (except when it isn't) that no one has ever had this problem and needed an emergency backup system to address it?  Even if you can hover, functionl landing gear are kind of important.

Unless we're in this odd universe where a ship can just collide and bounce off the landscape willy-nilly and have no ill effects... except when they do, because of reasons.

Edited January 18, 2020 by Chronocidal

[Big s]

This argument over modern day aircraft landing gear safety issues is kinda meaningless when you realize that this movie still takes place a long long time ago. They obviously didn’t have safety regulations anywhere near as strict back then as they are today. Missing safety railings and warning signs and the lack of mds sheets. Seriously, I bet most of the equipment and common components in those movies cause cancer. I don’t think osha existed way back then.

On another note, I also really liked that Kylo scene with his father. To me this trilogy even at its worst still had very likable characters. I wouldn’t have minded if kylo actually survived and both him and his lady just disappeared in anonymity at the end.

[Dynaman]

And the doors - don't forget them.  Those alone must have killed billions.

[Chronocidal]

1 hour ago, Big s said:

This argument over modern day aircraft landing gear safety issues is kinda meaningless when you realize that this movie still takes place a long long time ago. They obviously didn’t have safety regulations anywhere near as strict back then as they are today. Missing safety railings and warning signs and the lack of mds sheets. Seriously, I bet most of the equipment and common components in those movies cause cancer. I don’t think osha existed way back then.

See, the "long time ago" bit doesn't work when you're dealing with a galactic civilization that has existed for thousands of years at a level of technology -far- beyond our reality. 

Safety codes, and all that are another issue, and those have always been laughably ignored by most of the movies to set up convenient ways for characters to fall to their doom, but I also tend to think that in a universe that has artificial gravity and tractor beams, you can easily make the case that there would be safety systems in place to catch people who fell accidentally.

I'm not going to argue that that's not a tissue-paper thin excuse, but it's at least remotely plausible.  When I think of all the characters and stormtroopers who died falling from things, I think the vast majority of them were already dead from being shot anyway.

The issue I have with the Falcon breaking in this case is different though, in that there's no reason for the random crap happening to it.  Yes, it's a fickle ship, but that botched landing came directly after successfully stealing it back from a First Order hangar where it was landed completely safely, had no apparent damage, and was not pursued.  When did it break? Why can't it just hover like it did to rescue Rey?  If you're saying the Falcon can't hover, it would have smashed into the planet like a flaming brick and killed everyone aboard, because the only way that ship flies in atmosphere in the first place is hovering.

 

 

 

Edited January 19, 2020 by Chronocidal

[Bolt]

Honestly, I have no idea why the broken landing gear was even added to the story. It was  so lame. At least in TFA , when the Falcon crashes through tree tops and comes sliding to a stop on a cliff edge, it was coming out of hyper drive in the atmosphere..

[sketchley]

Just a guess... but maybe the reasons for that occurred in a scene that got cut?  (not a first for JJ.  E.g. the First Order Snow Speeder chase scene in TFA)

[Keith]

Lightspeed skipping overloaded the VTOL & landing gear, move along.

[Seto Kaiba]

23 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

On top of this, if the landing gear are having trouble extending, real aircraft have a manual hydraulic handpump to address that exact problem.  Are you telling me that technology in this universe is so blasted reliable (except when it isn't) that no one has ever had this problem and needed an emergency backup system to address it?  Even if you can hover, functionl landing gear are kind of important.

To be honest, inexplicably absent redundant safety measures are such a common sci-fi trope that general audiences have kind of a blind spot regarding them... something that's no doubt only exacerbated by the galaxy far far away clearly being a setting which has no OSHA equivalent given that unsigned bottomless pits with no or minimal guard rails abound in everything from power plants on up to moon-sized battle stations.

How many injuries or fatalities have occurred in sci-fi stories because things like seatbelts and door handles are apparently lost technologies?

 

23 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Unless we're in this odd universe where a ship can just collide and bounce off the landscape willy-nilly and have no ill effects... except when they do, because of reasons.

So, like cars?  Go offroading and bounce all over hell's half-acre with no damage, then clip a curb in city driving a rack up a couple hundred dollars in wheel damage...

[Chronocidal]

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

So, like cars?  Go offroading and bounce all over hell's half-acre with no damage, then clip a curb in city driving a rack up a couple hundred dollars in wheel damage...

Except I'm talking about individual instances within this trilogy, using a single ship.  How many times did the Falcon bounce off of the landscape in TFA and come out without a scratch?  And then it catches fire from over-using the hyperdrive (not from colliding with all the thousands of atmospheric obstacles they somehow managed not to hyperdrive directly into, after somehow missing all of the empty space between all of those planets that must have had astronomically microscopic distances between each other), but then the landing gear and hover capability break during landing after a perfectly functional takeoff? 

I get that they're playing fast and loose with physics like all science fiction does (yay structural intregrity fields), but if you're going to have the ship bouncing off of planets repeatedly with no damage, you have to give some reason when the ship suddenly doesn't work after a smooth flight.

Edited January 20, 2020 by Chronocidal

[Dynaman]

14 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

So, like cars?  Go offroading and bounce all over hell's half-acre with no damage, then clip a curb in city driving a rack up a couple hundred dollars in wheel damage...

That reminds me of a Dukes of Hazzard bit I was watching on youtube (*).  One of the stars said they totaled two cars filming every episode - they had two jumps per episode and any car used for a jump was no longer safe to drive.  Take a regular car offroad (not just on the median going slowly) and it will need work done.  REAL jeeps and such are a different story but even they need more maintenance then our normal cars.

(*) - Since the show was mindless at best.  I guess flipping through youtube videos really is the modern equivalent of channel surfing.

[mickyg]

I'm still trying to figure out how Kylo even got to Exegol.  I get that he'd been there before and all but isn't it impossibly difficult to get there without a wayfinder?  Or did Rey send the navigation stuff she sent to the resistance fleet his way as well?  I guess I could live with that answer, except that it's just totally absent from the movie.

I didn't hate this movie, I'm just not sure I loved it, either.  Easily the best of the three for me though.

Edited January 21, 2020 by mickyg

[sketchley]

1 hour ago, mickyg said:

I'm still trying to figure out how Kylo even got to Exegol.  I get that he'd been there before and all but isn't it impossibly difficult to get there without a wayfinder?  Or did Rey send the navigation stuff she sent to the resistance fleet his way as well?  I guess I could live with that answer, except that it's just totally absent from the movie.

I didn't hate this movie, I'm just not sure I loved it, either.  Easily the best of the three for me though.

Couldn't he just follow that trail of beacons that Rey dropped to guide the Resistance to the planet?

[ErikElvis]

I didn’t hate this movie but I’ll def put it behind the original trilogy, attack of the clones, and revenge of the sith.  I hardly watch the phantom menace due to jar jar. I just feeL these new movies don’t fit in to any of the other movies in feel.  Say what you want about the prequels but they felt like Star Wars movies. 

[jvmacross]

8 hours ago, sketchley said:

Couldn't he just follow that trail of beacons that Rey dropped to guide the Resistance to the planet?

Weren't the OT Tie Fighters "short-range" fighters?

[Seto Kaiba]

10 minutes ago, jvmacross said:

Weren't the OT Tie Fighters "short-range" fighters?

IIRC that's basically the first thing that's ever said about them in A New Hope.

(Just checked, yes... Obi-wan says it right after they come out of hyperspace in the Alderaan system.)

[Bolt]

Maybe Vader's had long range capabilities. Sith lords and emo siths get the cool sh!t..

[Seto Kaiba]

15 minutes ago, Bolt said:

Maybe Vader's had long range capabilities. Sith lords and emo siths get the cool sh!t..

Wasn't Vader's a competely different ace/custom model?  

[Bolt]

I never studied SW fighter craft specs , (Just lightsabers) but I believe so. He drove that thing all over the galaxy, hunting Jedi after order 66 .(In some of the comics). His personal star destroyer was always handy tho.. 

[Mommar]

34 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Wasn't Vader's a competely different ace/custom model?  

Yes, Vader's fighter was capable of Hyper-Space travel.

[Chronocidal]

12 hours ago, mickyg said:

I'm still trying to figure out how Kylo even got to Exegol.  I get that he'd been there before and all but isn't it impossibly difficult to get there without a wayfinder?  Or did Rey send the navigation stuff she sent to the resistance fleet his way as well?  I guess I could live with that answer, except that it's just totally absent from the movie.

I didn't hate this movie, I'm just not sure I loved it, either.  Easily the best of the three for me though.

These are precisely the sorts of questions they specifically do not want anyone to ask, because the only available answer is "Screw the rules, I have plot."

None of the "navigation" sideplot in this movie made a lick of freaking sense.  First they show Kylo having to dodge and weave through a nebulous mass of whatever that was on the way there, implying it's a very difficult route to take.  Then they show him arriving toward Exegol, from within a distant nebula... that only occupies a tiny portion of an otherwise completely clear starfield, meaning the approach should have been clear from literally any other direction.  Then after Rey recovers the navigational macguffin from his burning ship (how lucky for her that it wasn't damaged when she landed it on Ach-To, and set it on fire¹), she flies a vintage x-wing that's been submerged in water for over a decade through the same course.

And then we see the itty-bitty Resistance squad navigating the churning mass of space blood that Kylo's ship barely fit through.. with a sub-compact version of the Tantive IV?²

Then.. Kylo flies a vintage hyperdrive-less OT Tie Fighter out of the wreckage of the second Death Star.. on the same route, without the nav macguffin?  Okayyyy...

As a final middle finger to anyone paying attention. the movie ends with every ship in the known galaxy somehow making that same journey, and arriving at Exegol.  Did they just happen to figure out that you could approach the planet from a direction not riddled with a nebulous mass of cloudy red plot cancer?  

----

1. Someone needs to explain how the nav macguffin happened to survive Rey lopping one wing off of Kylo's tie on Pasana... that was his fancy Tie fighter, right?  So the macguffin he later crushes with his bare hand survived him totaling his ship in the desert.. or did he just not have it with him for the crash?  How was he going to get back to report that Rey was dead once he killed her?  Did he leave it in his spare fighter back on his destroyer?  Did it also work like a tracking device to find the second macguffin in the wreckage on Endor, since he didn't have the knife?  Or did he just ping her on Force Skype with a "Where you at?" gps locator?

2. Yes, the Corellian Corvette/CR-90/Blockade Runner model they used was like a soap-box derby cut-scale replica.  They pulled a reverse JJ-Prise on it, and forgot that ship is like three times the length of the Falcon.

Edited January 21, 2020 by Chronocidal

[Bolt]

5 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

Did they just happen to figure out that you could approach the planet from a direction not riddled with a nebulous mass of cloudy red plot cancer?  

Didn't you know? They brought that gigantor creature from the Maw to eat all the obstacles 

[jvmacross]

16 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

Then.. Kylo flies a vintage hyperdrive-less OT Tie Fighter out of the wreckage of the second Death Star.. on the same route, without the nav macguffin?  Okayyyy...

 

The wayfinder obviously was "force teleported" to Kylo by Rey....along with the X-wing's hyperdrive engine....so by the time we saw Rey do the same trick with Anakin's lightsaber, it was already the second or third time, at minimum, they had performed this force shenanigan off-screen!  JJ figured the audience would have rolled their eyes out of their sockets by this point in the movie had it actually all been shown on screen.  The novelization and the JJ Binks Cut will go over all this in exhaustive detail!

[Chronocidal]

It pains me how accurate that sounds.

As an odd side note.. I discovered something rather sad (and yet amusing) yesterday.  I had to go by my local Wal-Mart for some household stuff, and dropped by the toy section out of curiosity.  Outside of the usual LEGO assortment?  There was no Star Wars section.  Complete lack of anything.  No vehicles, no figures, no lightsabers, no dolls, not even any of the themed HotWheels cars.

[Bolt]

Baby Yoda hasn't hit retail stores yet..?

[jvmacross]

1 hour ago, Chronocidal said:

It pains me how accurate that sounds.

 

better yet.....Ben "Force Teleported" the Tie Fighter with himself onboard to Exegol since he already had been there....yeah, that's how it works