Raze Of Skywalker

Not clever enough?

So, I may be colored by how much people I hang with pan the first two movies in the trilogy, but, wow, that was a bad trilogy.  Like some of the weak extended universe stuff, only less coherent.

I’ll spoil things to some degree below.

Bad acting.

Bad dialogue.

Bad plot.

Bad editing.

Bad sound.

Superfluous characters.

Even the scenery didn’t pop that much as so many things looked similar.

Let’s get into gaming before continuing to review this quite mediocre movie.

What I came away with that I can shoehorn into a gaming post is that there were no stakes in these movies.  Either what they did didn’t matter or it mattered to them but not to me because bad stuff happened to characters I didn’t care about or didn’t care that the bad stuff happened to.

That Ford wanted Han deadified made any stakes for his impalement meaningless.  And, yet, Force Awakens felt like it had the most importance because it hadn’t yet driven the story into some incoherent mess, even if it did start out as something of an incoherent mess with no idea why the First Order or the Resistance existed.

Stakes.

One of the things I find frustrating about GMing is that I try to set up scenes with dramatic stakes, but the players don’t feel it.  I’ve done better letting the players themselves get into situations where they feel the stakes from their own actions.  It’s almost like trying to script anything is a bad idea.  Well, a bad idea when my players don’t feel the script.  Lot of convention games will have a script and the players buy into it.

Actually, I was just having this conversation.  Convention games tend to run better because the players have often already bought into the type of game that’s being run.  If I’m playing Buffy, I expect there’s a big bad at the end who may need some ritual spell to be taken out.  Campaign play has a tendency to just meander.

Personal survival can be high stakes, but only if you actually care about your character and about what threatens its survival.  I’ve played campaigns where I couldn’t care less what happened to my characters as they were just a set of numbers.

Mental struggles don’t strike me as something that common to happen with PCs.  Sure, Ty had mental struggles after he got trollicized, but that was in a seven year campaign, plus there were other reasons to get inside the character’s head, plus Conan is darker and closer to sanity jarring events.

Fame and fortune don’t strike me as stakes that matter a lot.  Fortune because you either retire once you have it or it never mattered to begin with.  Fame because it’s too relative.  There aren’t rivals to benchmark against in hardly any of my play.

Causes – nope.  If you are part of a cause, how can the cause die without the campaign ending?

Power.  Far more than money as a motivator in RPGs, power is something where stakes exist constantly.  Magic items.  External stat bumps.  Gauss rifle replacing AC/20.  Followers.  Going to a better generation.

Now, internal power increases – gaining XP, spending XP – are not as much at stake.  Sure, some GMs will vary XP more, which is often exceedingly annoying, but it’s usually not an issue.  Except for dying causing loss of XP.

Family and friends/”friends”.  These are the stakes I’m most interested in.  Locations are really about the abstraction of friends.  Or, power for those locations where you get to bathe away your disads, or whatever.

It’s not like stakes have to be set right away.  With Conan, the norm was survival first, then make friends to aid their survival.  I imagine a space game could first focus on welfare of the ship before moving on to welfare of various planets/moons.

So, time to be more spoilery.

There were many characters that didn’t need to be in RoS.  Finn served no purpose, for instance.  I was fine with Finn in FA.  He and Rey played well together when the others weren’t around.  Then, the movies split them up or saddled them with chaperones.

BB8, R2, alien Force woman, all of the First Order commanders, Lando, Chewy.  If anything, Lando had more of a purpose being around than Chewy did.  What did Chewy do in the original movies?  Loyal muscle.  Muscle to rally around in a fight.  What did he do in these movies?  I don’t much recall.  What did he do in this movie?  Provide a zero stakes motivator?

While the elements were sort of there to hit dramatic notes, they fizzled.  Time after time, I was like “That should have been a bigger deal.”  Leia’s ending made no sense.  I’m sure Carrie not being around limited what they felt they could do, but there was no setup to have any sort of payoff.  Still makes no sense.  Rey, at least, gave an argument for why Ben should change.  Sounds like Finn was never going to win, but, wow was that a painfully unsatisfying ending.

So much predictability.  I think that’s the thing about the originals – we didn’t know what to expect.  Return of the Jedi just keeps looking better and better in comparison to these other efforts, as it did what it needed to do and had some good stuff as well as the cheesy stuff.

As I’ve said, kind of recently, I think Star Wars is more about marketing nostalgia than being something someone wants to be a part of anymore.  I, now, can see just not caring about any other efforts.  It has so much baggage, now.  The EU did far more coherent stuff with Palpatine to where Palpatine was reasonable (if tired) as a presence.  The EU didn’t immediately make a villain out of the last Skywalker to where you didn’t really care what big nose was doing.

Everything was so rushed in dramatic places and so pointlessly labored in trivial places.  The fights were boring because you knew the results or, in the case of blasters, pew pew ad nauseam.

Deus ex machina a little?  I mean, I don’t necessarily mind some godly interference, but it just felt pedestrian here.

The ending.  Just wow.  Dancing with Ewoks so much better.

Consider how much better the “not that tower” moment would have been done in other SW movies.  Stuff just happened without … again … setup and payoff.

The whole trilogy was that way.  The First Order was never set up.  The Resistance was never set up.  Leia being in charge of the Resistance not, Han off on his own not, Luke hermiting not, Snoke not, Ben not.  Finn got an origin story.  Rey had an origin, if not much of a story.  They carried FA.  Then, stuff happened for reasons that made no sense and in which you didn’t really care about.  How do you payoff when you don’t even realize there’s a payoff happening until you stop to think about it or you could see it coming from a parsec away?

Yes, we understand why this trilogy was a mess – lack of coherent vision to begin with.  What’s sad is that someone couldn’t perceive how little reward one gets from what happens in the end.  Well, that, and why we need supposedly scary First Order commanders to act like children.

Too many close-ups.  This seems to be a thing that movies can’t get away from.  I don’t need to have someone’s face right in front of me.  Well, maybe Gal Gadot’s face.  But, I don’t need to see people’s pores.  I don’t need to see the dirt or the scars.  It’s a symptom of over focus on character examination.  Focus on adventure.  Sure, there are tons of gratuitous action scenes, but how adventurous are they?  It just feels like going through the motions so much of the time on these quests.

Kylo was pitiful, in part because Kylo barely existed.  So much Rey’s bad boy and not someone who existed on his own.  Finn had a lot of that, too, being princeless charming rather than someone who had his own identity.  Poe was always rather annoying.

I’ll just have to fanfic Finn finally saying to Rey “Honey, your calves aren’t all that where you need to show them off all of the time.”

Just amazing how good the originals were that everything since (moviewise, anyway) has been pale in comparison.

The actors’ efforts did come across as earnest.  Just not hugely believable.  The quipping lacked gravitas.  So many relationships felt forced.  Why did anyone care about Leia that much?  Why did Rey care about Chewy that much?  Who cares about BB8?

I can imagine that a novelization of this trilogy could be so much better.  First, give some back story.  Second, give Snoke something to do, like train Kylo.  Third, clarify all of the dramatic moments so that they feel remotely dramatic.

Or, you know, rethink what is trying to be accomplished assuming money isn’t as important as cool.  Ha, ha ha.  Another billion with people who actually think RoS didn’t suck.  Thing is, prequels sucked where I didn’t like any of the characters.  I actually am fine with Rey and Finn and still sucked.

Well, I have more gifts to give out in this joyous time of year besides my gift of ranting about a movie you will have seen, anyway, and can make up your own mind about.