Hello Internet - Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Hello Internet Christmas Special

Episode Date: December 25, 2019

🎄Merry Christmas 🎄 This episode brought to you by our patrons: https://www.patreon.com/hellointernet Discuss on the reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CGPGrey/

And you know what time it is. It's Hello Internet, Star Wars Christmas special time. Rise of the Hello Internet. Rise of Skywalker. Rise of Skywalker. The ninth of the nine. The epic final conclusion to the story. The story promised many years ago as a nine films, three, three act plays by George Lucas himself. 42 years in the making and it's all wrapped up. It was already all plotted out in his head, ready to go.

It was already there. Well, you and I, Brady, you had the excellent suggestion when we recorded a previous episode that we should see the final film in person. Yeah. And we did. We did yesterday. And I was very happy to have my brother in Star Wars arms with me there for the conclusion of the whole thing.

It felt very appropriate for the moment. I more just wanted to see some of this legendary popcorn eating for myself. Were the stories what you expected? It lived up to the hype. You went for a refill halfway through. I was pretty impressed by that. Yes, I had a special app running to let you know what time in the movie is the boring part to skip to time for those all important bathroom breaks and popcorn breaks. And yeah. But I didn't even use it. I just got up part way through and said i need a quick toilet break and

you said oh that's good because now's the perfect time according to my app that's because you're force sensitive brady you just you could feel it you just knew when the time in the movie my midichlorians were tingling and then you went and saw it again today, unbelievably. Yeah, so we were trying to figure out when the recording is going to happen. It's the holiday season. I think both of us this year in particular feel like a lot of stuff has piled up all of a sudden towards the end of the year. And yeah, we were just trying to figure out things. And my original thought was, oh, we'll watch the movie and we'll record right afterward. But that didn't work out. And I was thinking, I've seen it a second time today, where I was trying to be like the sneaky person,

getting the very back row of the theater and typing very quietly on an iPad with the brightness turned all the way down, taking notes on the Star Wars movie. We were a bit naughty though, Graham. We did have a little chat after the film because we couldn't help ourselves in the foyer of the cinema, but we'll pretend that didn't happen. No, I think that is totally fine for us to acknowledge that this actually happened, because I think we've been totally good with all of the other movies where we haven't discussed it before the special. But this time, yes, we both came out of the theatre and we stood next to each

other and we had a little 10 minute conversation just to say, how do you feel at the end of this? You got to talk about it. You got to get it off your chest. You got to just like bottle it all up. Well, yes. And also I had to know because when you watch a movie with someone that you know, it's a different experience. And I don't know if you had that experience, but you are sort of getting a sense from the other person, right? Through either through their action or their inaction, perhaps, of how is this person perceiving the movie? Or just through the force.

Yes. Perhaps if you are a dyad with another person, you have a special force connection and you can sense how it's going. You were the Kylo Ren to my Rey and we could just see each other at random points in the film. Yeah, well, I was concerned for you going into this movie, right? for myself because we had mentioned a couple times when watching the trailers leading up to this movie about the possibility of the Emperor coming back. And both on the podcast and in person, I feel like you were holding on to the idea of they're not going to really bring him back. Surely, they're not going to really bring him back. And that's why I had to know immediately what your reaction was afterward. Because not only do they bring the Emperor back,

the Emperor gets the first line of the movie, right? Movie opens, Emperor. He is right there. And I was just thinking about you. Grey, the dead speak. Yes. So, that's why I had to know, how are you doing after this movie, Brady? Wow. I'm all right. Yeah.

I'll say one thing. I'm glad they brought him back straight away and they like ripped the bandage off like right at the start of the film. There was no will they or won't they. They were like straight from the start. They were like, he's back. And I'm glad they did that. I'm glad they didn't eke it out. But I think it was a terrible, terrible decision.

So, you were not on board with the bringing of the Emperor back? No. Okay. No. You know, I will never watch Return of the Jedi the same way again. You think, oh my goodness, isn't that amazing? Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker made the ultimate sacrifice to save his son and killed the emperor. No, he didn't. Makes that look

pointless. Just ruins that moment. Just completely cuts the legs out from under that moment. Anyway, how are we going to do this? How are we going to talk about this film? Are we going to do like the usual summary and I don't know, how's this going to work? You've seen it twice in two days. That's going to be super fresh in your mind. I did see it yesterday, but. Well, you're a big fan of getting things right out into the open. Yeah. And so, what I would start with is our overall reaction, that little conversation that we had

right after the movie finished. Yes. Because it went exactly the way I was expecting. Like the feeling I would, the read I was getting off you during the movie that I thought like, I think he's thinking the same thing that I am. And we perhaps had like the most agreement we have ever had about a Star Wars movie immediately after the film, which was, we both felt nothing, I think is probably a fair way to describe it in the immediate aftermath.

Nothing tinged was just the slightest amount of disappointment. Right. Like a flavoured water. It wasn't like a true drink. It was like a water, so flavourless, but maybe there was just a little bit of like infusion of disappointment too. Interesting. Yeah. I've been trying to think about metaphors, how to explain this. So, you know, like my wife asked me what I thought of it, and a couple of people have asked me what I thought of it. And I've been saying this thing over and over again, which is, oh, I had no emotional reaction

to any of the content on film, a sort of nothing. And so, people will then immediately say, they go, oh, it must have been really boring then. I was like, no, it wasn't even boring. It was a sort of nothing. I think you, master of metaphor and analogy, have actually hit upon something that's pretty good. It is very much like drinking normal water when you're not thirsty. That's the sort of the nothing. Like it's the definitional nothing. I wasn't bored. I wasn't bored. I wasn't excited. It wasn't even like the previous movie where watching it,

I was like appalled. Yeah. At least you had the confusion to fight against. Yeah. Or it's like, look, as we all know from the emperor, hate can be a real motivating factor. And so it's like, oh, I don't like this movie, right? But at least you go, oh, but I know that I'm alive because I'm feeling an emotion. I'm feeling an experience. And that was my initial reaction to watching the movie last night is like, I just had no emotional register. And I was kind of dreading watching it again this morning for you know in preparation for the show and it was it's like what an amazing miracle this is i watched it again and had like the exact same

reaction this total nothing i honestly was like i was dreading being bored but it was it was the same like i'm not bored i'm just i'm just drinking water when I'm not thirsty. It sounds like you've finally gotten over an ex-girlfriend. When you break up with someone, you might still have a flame for them, or you might be really angry at them and not like them. But eventually, with some of your exes, it can get to a point where, like, you just don't think about them. And they're just like a person, like any other person in the world. Maybe you've finally gotten over Star Wars completely.

Well, I can't remember if we talked about it on the show or if it was in Goodbye Internet, but you raised the interesting question of, what was it? Like, if you could unsee one of the Star Wars movies, which one would it be? Or if like one of them could have not be made, which one would you pick? My pick there was totally The Last Jedi, where I felt like that movie just totally broke me from Star Wars. And I felt like, oh, I have, I just don't care anymore. You know, the way this movie was written and everything that happened, it's just like, okay, I don't care. And then this movie just completely reaffirmed it of, I just don't care.

Nothing in me cares. I think maybe what we needed was The Force Awakens. This is the realisation I've come to. The Force Awakens, which was, you know, pretty good film. We certainly enjoyed it at the time. I don't know if history will be kind to it, but we enjoyed it at the time. Yeah. And I think that's what was needed. It erased all the badness of the prequels. Yes. It gave us like a little, a chance to say goodbye to our favourites

and see everyone again, you know, see the Millennium Falcon again and see Han Solo again and even got to see Luke. And I was like, nice, good, that's fixed things. It's time to stop now. And these second two were like flogging the horse. Yeah. I realised that was it for me. The Force Awakens was the realized that was it for me the force awakens

was the end of the saga for me well i did like i have liked some of the in-betweeny movies but i just consider them like standalone movies i did like solo and i did like rogue one yeah i'll always still give that surprisingly entertaining solo did like totally didn't expect that surprisingly entertaining but yeah i i agree like i think the word we used at the time was cathartic. That The Force Awakens was cathartic of, oh, I watched a Star Wars movie in a cinema and I enjoyed myself. And yeah, as I've said later, I just I have no interest in revisiting that movie. But I'm always glad for that experience of as an adult, I went into a movie, I saw a Star Wars movie and I had a good time. And great,

it's clearly the best of the third trilogy by a mile. And yeah, I'm glad I had that experience, but it has not been fully replicated. Yeah. So, I'll go a bit further though with Rise of Skywalker, this new one. It wasn't just neutral. I do resent it a little bit for being such a poor ending to the trilogy. Like, Star Wars did deserve better. So, I'm not just going to come out and be totally meh. And I think part of the reason for that is, you know, I should have known better,

but I did hold out some hope for it because even though the trailers didn't have much in them that made me excited, the music got me. Because it's had that kind of, I don't know how they did it, but that kind of new mix or sound of the Star Wars music where it sounded like the end. And as always with Star Wars music, it was great. And that did make me think, this is something's going to happen. I'm going to be moved. Yeah. You know, they're holding something back and, you know,

I'm going to feel something at the end. And the fact I felt so little does make me a bit angry. I kind of feel a bit robbed, not robbed of like my childhood or robbed of something I deserved because, of course, I don't deserve anything. I do feel robbed of a couple of hours of time. Because I did feel during this film, like, I actually would rather not be here. I was thinking at times, I was thinking there were things I'd rather be doing.

No offence to you, Grey. You know, I love your company. Yeah, but you're not in my company in a situation like that. We're both experiencing a thing where we have to look at the screen. And so, you're thinking about your taxes or whatever during that. Yeah, I was. A few times my mind wandered. I was just thinking this is just not a good use of my time. Should we go through the film?

Do you know what I did actually yesterday? I read the Wikipedia plot description. And when you read the Wikipedia plot description, that tells you how rubbish a film it was. I guess all plots sound a bit stupid when you just read them, you know, sentence by sentence. But reading some of the things in the description, reading the Wikipedia description of this film really hammers home how daft the writing of this film was, the plot of the film was was and the plot is its biggest problem yeah like i will give i will say that it is always unfair to like summarize a movie like you can make any

movie sound really stupid yes in the same way that like a thing some youtubers will do if they're criticizing someone they'll like play a clip of that person talking and they'll underlay it with dumb sounding music it's like yeah but anybody sounds stupid if you play Curb Your Enthusiasm music underneath them as they're talking, right? Like it just, I think this movie totally just solidifies the fact that there was absolutely no plan for the final trilogy at all. Because after The Last Jedi, the middle one, which I had the strongest negative reaction to of any of the movies, I often found myself in disagreements with people where they were trying to make the point of, no, this is a brilliant movie. They're overturning everything in Star Wars and they're going to have a fresh start and everything is going to be new.

And there's so much genius in this movie. But the third and final movie puts a total lie to that argument. If you made that argument disney and the mouse are not on board with you they just bypassed all of that and it completely solidifies there was no plan and it's totally baffling to me that if you you $4 billion on a franchise, maybe take a little while to think through what you want this trilogy to be. What is the story you're trying to tell? I'm sure they did that. I refuse to- Obviously, they did do that. They probably did it too much. I genuinely don't know. I get the impression they gave the first movie to J.J. Abrams and let him do something. And there wasn't any plan for what's going to happen in the second and third movie.

I really don't think there is. And the totally amazing thing to me is here we are. I now find myself thinking about the prequels and thinking, well, at least they had a story they wanted to tell. Like, it's so bizarre to find myself going back and thinking, like, you know what? They were boring movies, but Lucas wanted to tell the origin story of Darth Vader, and it was boring, and it was dumb for a bunch of reasons. But it was a story. The guy had a place he wanted to start with, little toddler Vader, and he wanted to end up with a guy in a Vader suit, and that happened. That was an arc that occurred. Do you think it was this director ego thing? J.J. Abrams did something. Johnson did something different.

And Abrams wanted to take it back and say, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's go back to my way of doing it. I have heard this complaint, right? I did a little bit of reading last night. And there's this complaint that the second film, you know, was paradigm changing. Yeah. And then the third film in this like final saga undercut all of that and undid all of that. Can you give me some examples of that? Because I actually haven't read any practical

examples of it. What are some things that happened in the second film that was like new Star Wars lore that has then been wound back in this film? So, it's not so much new Star Wars lore. It's more like ignoring the existence of the second movie. And so what I would say is probably one of the biggest things is the second movie ends with the entire rebellion being 12 people on the Millennium Falcon. And that's it. And it is a real downer ending for that movie of like, the entire rebel fleet just got destroyed. There's basically nobody left. And this movie just sort of dodges around that, that they never really explain, oh, there seem to be some more rebels and there's some more

ships, but like, where did they come from? They just kind of like dance around that more and never really address how totally screwed the rebels are at the end of the second movie. Right. Whereas if you think of the original trilogy, the beginning of the third movie is trying to like directly fix the things that happen in the second movie, right? Like we got stuff to do. We've got to save Han Solo.

He's been frozen and yeah whereas i think you could have someone watch the first jj abrams movie and the third jj abrams movie skip the second and they might not even notice that they're missing anything that it's just like oh okay we just we're just continuing along but there's a bunch of little things that I think are... Okay, I'll give you what to me is one of the example that sort of made me laugh out loud in the theater, which is there's a scene where Rey goes to throw away her lightsaber and ghost Luke Skywalker catches it. Yeah. And he says, quote, a Jedi's weapon deserves more respect than that. And then Mark Hamill turns directly to camera and says, f*** you, Rian Johnson. I think that is as close as a director can come to insulting somebody else's movie.

The very opening of the second movie is Luke throwing away his lightsaber, which a lot of people complained about as ridiculous, including very prominently Mark Hamill himself was like, I hate everything about this and it doesn't make sense. And so, to have a line like that in the movie is a real like, we're rejecting this other thing. Yeah, you're right. That was a real slap in the face. It was also a stupid thing in the second movie though. So, fair enough. Yeah, but it's a totally stupid thing. There's a couple of like minor details. So, right away in the movie, Kylo Ren remakes his helmet. In the beginning of the second movie,

the first thing Kylo Ren does is destroy his helmet. There's just a few things like this which really strike me as you've made an intentional decision. Like Rian Johnson undid all my stuff. Now I'm going to redo it back in front of him. Perhaps my favorite one is when the rebels are planning a battle, somebody yells out, hey, why don't we perform some Hodo maneuvers and have some real damage on the fleet? And Hodo is the general in the second movie who

performed the kamikaze maneuver to destroy the big bad at the end of the movie. And someone else goes, no, no, no, that was a one in a million. We can't do that. It's just very strange, right? Of, oh, the big climax of the previous movie, we can't do that. We're going to explicitly say that's not an option in this case. There's just stuff. There's a lot of stuff like that, which strikes as going back or sort of undoing things. It's like that awkward moment as well, when a couple has an argument in front of you and you're like, oh, I wish I wasn't having to see this. And it's a bit like that was happening between the two directors.

Yeah. It really feels like that. There's another part in the movie where Kylo Ren is talking about, you know, Rey's family. And he says, oh, you know, what I said about your parents is true. Like, your parents were nobody, you know, but, you know, there's more to you than that. It's just like, it's very clear there's no plan. Like, you wouldn't have all of this stuff in the last movie if you didn't need to like go back a little bit so i really think some of those those smaller things are as close as directors can come to fighting publicly it's kind of like

you know that game where you sit in a circle and you have to make up a story and everyone makes up a word and you just keep going around in the circle and you have to make up a story and everyone makes up a word and you just keep going around in the circle and the story unfolds as people just ad lib it. It's like they've done that, but with the Star Wars movies. Okay, you make a film and then you hand it off to the next person. Now you make a film. Now you make a film. Like, because when you say a word, you know what you hope the story is going to be. And then the person sitting next to you says like, carrot. You're like, oh, what did you say that word for? You ruined my plan. Yeah. There's one more, which is my personal favorite. You remember Rose from the second

movie? The one for whom, if you save a single animal, the entire loss of the rebellion is worth it. Perhaps the dumbest rebel ever in the whole army. She's in this movie and she only has like so few lines, but one of these lines as the heroes are all going off to, you know, start the actual story. She like, again, turns to the camera and says, General Leia needs me here right now to help with some stuff. So I can't go with you guys. It's very like, goodbye, Rose. You will not be in this movie. But we couldn't cut you from the movie because it would have looked bad.

Right. And then Finn, who was like her romantic love interest in this movie, he says something like, yeah, yeah, help out Leia. And they do what I can only describe as the most friend zone shoulder pat humanly possible to capture on film. He walks by her, he uses his opposite hand to give her a real solid bro pat on the shoulder and keeps moving. And it's like his platonic right hand. It's amazing, right? Why on earth would you have Rose be such an important central character and a love story with Finn where they kiss as all of the rebels die in the background to then in the next movie be like, she's got to stay here for some other reasons. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. So my one high level thought is just that no one I think can reasonably claim that Disney had a plan. And that's absolutely astounding to me

because Disney seems like they're in the biggest rush in the world to get movies out for some reason, which I presume is Disney+. And my second high level thing is just that it's hard to care because the very opening of the movie where we can start talking about stuff is indicative of the entire thing. Oh, the Emperor's alive. How is he alive? Doesn't matter. Oh, who was Snoke? The Emperor made him. Don't worry about that. The Emperor says, everything that's happened up until now has been my doing.

Okay. And then the Emperor, who's, by the way, on a different planet, Icicle. At least the Lucas tradition of dodgy names in more recent times continues. Was he better? Because names like Endor and Tatooine sound really cool, but all the modern names sound rubbish. I really think that's an exposure effect. I think the new names always sound dumb.

And if you just hear them a bunch, but it's just Icicle just sounds too much like Icicle and I can't get it out of my head. But I think that's an exposure thing. Endor sounds real because in our brain it's like, oh, but it's a place. I understand. It looks just like the Redwood Forest. It's real. Fair enough. But so, the Emperor exists on this totally featureless planet that is apparently the most isolated planet in the world. There's nothing. It looks like if lava just coalesced into a sphere of rock. But it looks evil because that's where you'd go. There's nothing. It looks like if lava just coalesced into a sphere of rock. But it looks evil because that's where you'd go.

Right, yeah. Why would you go to a comfortable place with sofas and stuff like that when you could go to some rocky, jagged place to live all your days? And he's like down in a hole somewhere. And I don't know, it kind of made me think of like when Saddam Hussein was found and they found him living like in the middle of the desert in this like spider hole in the ground, like, oh, okay, this is where the emperor is, like the most inhospitable barren place in the world. And then the emperor raises up his hand and from the surface of the planet, just raises up thousands and thousands of Star Destroyers and says,

oh, hey, Kylo Ren, if you kill Rey, all of these Star Destroyers will be yours. By the way, that imagery for just a few seconds of all those Star Destroyers was cool. Very cool imagery. But my main point is, I always think with movies, how they start is how they go on. And this is an astounding example of this because, like, I made a note because I just had to see. It is seven minutes into the film. There are ten vitally important questions that have been raised just in these minutes. And none of it will ever be explained in any way. How did the emperor survive?

Okay. Forget that. I don't even care how the emperor survived. How did he get from Endor to wherever the hell this is? Don't worry about it. It's not going to be explained. Okay. Okay. I don't even care how the emperor got to this planet. How did he manufacture all of these star destroyers? Totally unexplained. And like, are there people on those star destroyers or are they just empty ships? Totally never addressed. It's just crazy. And the whole rest of the movie is like this stuff happens and who cares why? And I think like the movie almost immediately conveys to you, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that the emperor survived. It doesn't matter that like the empire is more you know it's gonna i guess it has to because it's still was how bloodless the film will be in a way because there is that other cool opening scene where kylo ren's like battling all these people in the snow or something because he has

to find the sith wayfinder because we all need our sith wayfinders and then they sort of pan out and he's like only he single-handedly has massacred hundreds and hundreds of people and they're all lying there in in the snow barely a mark on them, even though they've all been cleft in twain by his lightsaber. Brady, they all laid down and went to gentle sleep, right? I know. I know. It's not a lightsaber. It's a sleeping pill that he hits them with or something.

There's a plot line later on where whatever his name is, that general guy gets shot in the leg. And he shows up with a bandage and the bandage has like a perfect red dot of a circle on it to show that he's been wounded. But I was looking at that and I was thinking, is that the only blood in the movie? Like, I think it is. I think it's the only blood in the movie. And it has to be there. Otherwise, it would look even dumber if they just had a wrapped bandage around this guy's leg. I don't necessarily have a problem with the blood or the lack of blood, but it does sometimes in those scenes, you think, I've just watched this guy, if the cutaways are to be believed, dismember an army. And then the wide shot is like, everybody's fine, don't worry about it. The other scene where that was really noticeable to me was there was one of these desert scenes where they're being chased by these stormtroopers on like flying speeders and stuff like that. And every time they take out one of the bad guys, you always see the bad guy like fall

off the thing before it blows up. Like you could almost make a case for everyone surviving the film, because you just always see the stormtrooper just fall off before it hits the cliff and blows up. Like, ah, no, don't worry, kids. No one died in the making of this movie. Yeah, it's funny. There's sort of an exception to that later, where I feel like, always a bad sign in your movie, where I'm beginning to feel bad for all of these stormtroopers who are getting shot. Again, it's always a bad sign in your movie where I'm beginning to feel bad for all of these stormtroopers who were getting shot. Again, it's always a bad sign, but like your heroes are this unstoppable death squad, like marching through everywhere they go. And I'm like, I haven't actually seen the bad

guys do that much bad stuff. It's just that strange mix of violence that's also totally bloodless. So another thing, just while we're talking about stormtroopers, I wasn't even going to mention this, but it was one of the things that stuck in my head, so I will. Because for the first time in this film, I noticed a lot of the time when stormtroopers get shot, they did make a lot of effort to make sure we saw like the impact on their armour, like a little burn mark on the armour and then fall over dead. And it did make me wonder, because they die so easily, stormtroopers, when they get hit by a blaster, why do they wear all that armour? Like, what is that armour in,

like, day-to-day stormtrooper activity? Because most of the time they're, like, you know, on a ship or on a Death Star, but even when they're out just doing the rounds, if blaster fire so easily kills a stormtrooper, no matter where it hits them on the armor, what is the point of that armor? I think the point of the armor is to stop blunt force trauma, like from an Ewok throwing a rock at you. I think that's the purpose of that armor. Okay, not very good at that either. Look, the purpose of the armor is for the uniformity of the stormtroopers,

it's to look cool on film. It achieves that. But you are totally right that at a certain point, you feel like, okay, showing the burn marks on the armor is cool, but it also makes me start having questions. And yeah, I'm with you here. Maybe just once I'd like to see a stormtrooper take a hit and keep going instead of just falling over, right? Like they're ducks in a shooting gallery at a carnival fair, you know, just ping and down they go. I feel like we're not going to be going through the film like in order here because we're already jumping all over the place. So, should we make a decision to just talk about whatever we want to talk about whenever we want to talk about it?

I think that's fine because I went through and made a bunch of notes. But one of my other meta complaints about the movie is there's a genre of movie and a genre of editing style that I often think of as everything is happening and nothing is happening. And I find this often visually exhausting to watch. If you watch reality TV shows, this is where it's often most apparent. Like there's some reality TV show about like people living on a boat, like it's the crew on a boat or something. And they have this incredibly frenetic editing style to hide the fact that nothing is really occurring. And music have this incredibly frenetic editing style to hide the fact that nothing is really occurring. Music videos work that way. Yeah, music videos has a similar sort of effect.

Now, J.J. Abrams, whatever you want to say about him, he is a competent movie creator, and that goes a long way. I would be curious to see someone go through all of the movies and say how often is there a cut that changes location in the movie and i would bet this has to rank up in the top three maybe it's even the top one of all the major star wars movies where we're someplace we cut somewhere else and then we cut back. I mean, there's one excusable reason for it. And that is this new thing that happens between Rey and Kylo Ren that's happened before. How they can kind of see each other in different locations.

And that does cause that confusing editing technique of hard cuts to different locations. But also, like, a trademark Star Wars thing was always the cheesy wipe to get you from one location to the other location. Like, from the original films, you know, those circle wipes and things like that. And that was always the Star Wars grammar of saying, okay, now we're going to another planet, another story. But obviously, they're very uncool to use those wipes now. They're very out of fashion. Yes. fashion. I think Dave Jabins likes them. So, he always hard cuts from one location to another. Well, he seemed to do it a lot. And it sometimes is jarring because you're like, oh,

we've gone somewhere new and he hasn't given me any grammar to tell me we've done it. Yeah. There's one or two of the traditional Star Wars wipes, but you are right that most of them are jump cuts. And when I was making some notes on the movie, I didn't actually include any of those like forced conversations as cuts that change location because I had no problem with them. Like on my list of things that I like about the movie, that is probably one of the things that I like the most, because it's also a continuation and an expansion of what happened in the previous movie. I think it's like the only thing that is a continuation. And I feel like it gave me the one thing in the movie that I thought was, wow, that's a great payoff later towards the end. Like the only moment of like emotional flickering. And also I noticed in both viewings, the only time that the crowd cheered was for this same thing. So I didn't have any problem with that, but I have, I have a number of notes here where there are planet changes back and forth that happen in under 90 seconds. So it's like, oh, we're in one place. We flash

back to the rebel base just for a few lines of dialogue that don't really have anything to do with the main story. And then we flash back to another place. There are a surprising number of very short, very sudden scene locations. And I think that's part of this feeling of like lots is happening, but also just none of it matters. And so I want your opinion on something because the very first scene transition after we established that the emperor is alive and he has a million star destroyers that I don't know, he like crafted by hand, I guess, in the last 30 years while he was doing nothing. We cut from there to the Millennium Falcon. And the Millennium Falcon is running away from TIE fighters. And what are they doing, Brady?

What's this new move called? Light skipping or something? Yeah, light speed skipping. It's the cool thing that all the Millennium Falcon pilots are doing these days. What did you think about this? I don't like to say things are implausible in a fantasy film. But not only is it implausible that you could go from lightspeed from one place to another and land like, you know, just the right side of a pylon and that. Let's take that out of the equation. We'd never seen it before.

It didn't really serve much purpose. It wasn't even that cool. And it didn't get used later on in some way to save the day, which is what I was expecting. It seemed completely pointless. Except to show that he's bit of a bad boy. And then he could have that really awkward interaction with Ray where they were supposed to be angry at each other for reasons I didn't understand. For reasons of trying to re-establish that these characters know each other and are best friends, even though they spent almost the entirety of the previous movie apart and never spent like a lot of time together in the first movie either. At least that explains why they have absolutely no chemistry.

Yeah. But the light speed skipping, I agree, it was the same thing of... So, my other thing that I think contributes to the general feeling of, I just can't bring myself to care about anything, is the sheer number of new things that are introduced in this movie. And sometimes just don't even pay off in this very movie. And the light speed skipping is one of those things. It's like, oh, oh, okay.

Poe's an amazing pilot. He can jump to light speed without doing calculations. Even though this is maybe like one of the most established facts in the whole of the Star Wars is like, you can't jump to light speed whenever you want. And he just slams forward on that light speed button four times in a row and does perfect jumps and everything is cool. But also the thing about going into light speed is you can't easily then be chased. But these TARDIS keep following him through all these skips. Yes, yes. That's my other thing is not only have they introduced that light speed skipping exists, somehow the TIE fighters are tracking them and it's like okay in the previous

movie the big capital ship can track the other people but that was the whole plot was like there's specialised equipment we need to see it's oh no, all the TIE fighters are just enabled with like light speed tracking now. It's so bizarre and it never comes up again. And I have a bunch of things that are labeled in my notes. It's like, oh, there's just new things, like stuff you've never seen before. It's brand new in this movie. And it again, this to me really doubles down on the idea that there was no plan because I kept thinking about the Marvel movies and Endgame. Now, I don't even know it. We've never discussed it,

but like, have you watched the Marvel movies? I have not. I've not. No. So this point doesn't really depend on having seen them and it doesn't matter. So I was thinking about the final Marvel movie, Endgame. Now, that movie does not have great writing. It has very fundamental problems with its plot. But it was one of the most enjoyable movie watching experiences that I've had in a long time because it was two hours of just paying off stuff from all of the previous movies. They just did an amazing job of,

hey, we've got 20 movies that you've probably seen. We're going to pay off something from every single one of these movies. So it's just a really satisfying experience. And in that movie, they don't feel the need to introduce lots of new things. There's one thing that's introduced, there's a problem with it, but it doesn't matter because the whole rest of the movie feels like I am watching the satisfying conclusion to a thing. They don't have time for new stuff. And so that's why this one, again, it speaks to the lack of planning of why are we messing around with like daggers we've never heard about before and light speed skipping and Leia is a Jedi master, but we never saw any of that. And there's sand snakes in the desert and last minute new Jedi powers and just like

so much new stuff. It's like, you wouldn't do this if you had planned it in advance. So yeah, the light speed skipping again is seven minutes in and we're establishing something that's like, there's going to be a lot of new stuff in this movie. None of it's going to matter. And even on the really tiny scale, there's like a slug who's on the Millennium Falcon who gets named. They're like, oh, hey, Claude, did you fix that? The whatever thing is. And he only has like one reaction shot and then shows up at the end of the movie. It's like, why is this a named character? Well, you can't sell a toy if you haven't got a name these days.

I guess, but it's like, it's so weird. And when I saw like, oh no, they're naming a CGI thing, like this slug is going to follow them the whole time. Nope, he doesn't. It just like completely disappears. The new, even the new cute robot wasn't that great this time. Like didn't get used much. Every time they introduce a new droid, that's usually been the one thing that worked.

But this time, I mean, he was cute and he had a cute way of talking, but didn't really. That's the other one that I didn't think of as well. It's like, oh, there's a new droid. There's now we have like droid abundance. We've got four droids that we have to care about in this movie. It's like too many droids. This is the final movie. You don't really need to introduce a new droid. You know, like you could do this in a million other ways. Well, speaking of droids, we'll come back to new Star Wars powers and Jedi powers, because that's important. But can I talk about the one thing that I didn't like about- that I most disliked in this film?

Please. C-3PO. The C-3PO storyline. I mean, he's been Deadwood for a long time now and not funny for a long time now. But the C-3PO story in this film was so boring and unnecessary. And then the one thing about it that maybe was going to be good got completely undermined anyway. So, there's this storyline where they've got one of the numerous objects they have to find on this adventure is this sword with Sith writing on it.

I didn't know Sith was a language, but okay. Yeah. And C-3PO won't tell them what it says because his programming forbids it and they have to know what it says. Ridiculous, but all right. Yeah. And C-3PO won't tell them what it says because his programming forbids it, and they have to know what it says. Mm-hmm. Ridiculous, but all right. Yeah. This also raises the question where C-3PO explicitly mentions that he can't read it because of a law passed by the Galactic Senate. And it's like, okay, so we're officially establishing the prequels exist in this world.

But wasn't C-3PO, didn't Anakin built him? Was C-3PO, like, was he, Anakin really busy following all the procedures of the Galactic Senate to not translate Sith? Like, it's such a strange detail to be the thing that causes a problem. C-3PO has shown himself to be different from droids. And anyway, that's by the by. As much as I don't like it, I'll go with it for a second because I have no choice. And then so the only way they can get the information out of him is to erase his memory.

And they do say maybe we'll get it back, but probably not. So, like erasing his memory and then there's this like emotional moment where he has one last look at his friends. You know, I'm having one last look at my friends before my memory goes, which I guess could have been moving if you're in the right frame of mind. And the idea of C-3PO having seen all this stuff and then having to sacrifice it all and lose all this memory of everything for the greater good and like reboot. I don't know. Maybe that is a good storyline. You know, it's the closest you can get. It's one step away from him blowing up.

You know, okay, he's going to be erased. That's an interesting thing to have done. And they do it. But then, like, 20 minutes later, R2-D2 just, like, reboots his brain and he gets all his memories back anyway. So, like, even the emotion and that power of I'm having one last look at my friends and the haunting music and the losing his memory, even that gets taken away from me a short time later and it's business as usual. It just really annoyed me, that whole storyline, that C-3PO stuff. But this again backs up, the movie is telling you not to care. C-3PO has basically in Droid World sacrificed his life and they undo it very shortly after. The number of fake deaths and then bringing back is very high on

this movie. Chewbacca as well, yeah. Chewbacca. And it depends a little bit on how you want to count, like what is the fake death or not. But there are at least four major, we killed this character for reals, oh no, we didn't moments. Kylo Ren as well, yeah and who else uh ray right ray dies at the end oh yeah yeah you forget like the main character dies but it's so inconsequential because within seconds they bring her back to life yeah it's the same thing of the movie is telling you don't care don't care about the consequences of what you've seen in fact they do it to kylo ren twice yes they do it to Kylo Ren twice.

Yes, they do it to Kylo Ren twice. Because he dies at the lightsaber battle and then you think he's dead down the hole. There's another one which I give as a quasi counting as his death, which is his TIE fighter really explodes at one point on the desert planet. I was watching a second time. It is an unambiguous, that thing exploded. And it's like, we can talk about force powers. Luke is able to receive a million bolts from AT-AT, cool, whatever. But no one would survive that crash. It is a fiery explosion, ball of death. And it's like, oh, he just gets up and

walks out of it. Okay. It's funny you mentioned the C-3PO thing because, you know, if I think back on all of the beloved Star Wars characters, of the core, C-3PO has always been my least favorite, you know? Not that he's bad or anything, but it's just like, he doesn't have much to do. He's the comic relief. He's fine, but I've never loved him. And in the later movies, he's become more annoying. But the thing I was really aware of in this movie is the level of ignoring C-3PO is really off the charts. The number of lines of dialogue he has in this movie

where just no one responds to him. I wonder how much of that was done in post where, again, someone's leaning over J.J. Abrams like, make it funnier. Have C-3PO say something. Yeah, yeah. We can do it with C-3PO because he can be on screen and his mouth doesn't need to move. But the end result is his whole plot line leading up to the moment of his sacrifice, he has been just completely ignored by the new central characters probably more than any other movie. And then when he says he's going to sacrifice himself, nobody says anything to him, right? There's no, oh, hey, thanks, C-3PO. When I was really watching closely the second time because I thought, oh, to accomplish something for me. And I just like, yeah, whatever machine, that's what you're supposed to do. But it's like, it's C-3PO? Like, we have established that he's like a person in this world?

And he's done it all and been there for all of it. And like, Lando Calrissian walks in and they like, oh, pee their pants. C-3PO has seen more crap than that. He's been everywhere. He was on the first Death Star when they were on that. You know? Yeah. And I was wrong. One character says something. It's the new droid. And the new droid says, sad. He says one word. He says sad.

And then what makes it even worse is right before they pull the plug on C-3PO, like, I know it's supposed to be played for a joke, but he says, oh, I just thought of something else that might work. Wham! Kill him. It's the one time I laughed in the film, though. It's the only thing I laughed at in the film. But it was totally inappropriate.

It's almost because it's surprising. Yeah, it's like a really inappropriate joke. I just find it so strange that the character I care the least about, I'm like, why are you doing this to see three people? Like, it just feels mean. Like, it's mean and you're ignoring him and he's sacrificing his whole life. And he's, oh, I'm taking one last look at my friends.

It's like, how well does he know these people? And then none of them say anything to him. This droid who showed up 10 minutes ago is like, sad. He thinks of a way to possibly save his life and they guillotine him anyway. It's like, it's brutal. I can't think of a Star Wars film that I found less funny than this one too. And this film tried to have a lot of one-liners in it and just nothing landed. Even the prequels I found a bit funnier because at least you had, you know, Ewan McGregor can deliver a line and you had some decent actors that could deliver a funny line.

And that had like the gags kind of worked. Except in the prequels, 3PO gags never work. And I think they gave too many of the gags in this film to 3PO who is just not funny. Yeah. He's just not funny. Like that may have been funny like in the 70s having a sort of a camp droid delivering one-liners, but that's not funny. Like that may have been funny, like in the seventies, having a sort of a camp droid delivering one-liners, but that's not funny anymore. And they gave him too much of the comedy to carry. But even Poe, who I thought would be funny, he wasn't funny this time. And like,

just the jokes were, they weren't even dad jokes, but they were just, there was just a series of unfunny jokes. Force Awakens was really funny, wasn't it? Like, had really good jokes in it. This one was really disappointing on the gag front. I think also the difference with C-3PO is more of the humor is derived from a character basis, that in the original trilogy is like, oh, he doesn't want to be dirty. Like, he's got all this stuff in his gears and it makes him really unhappy. Not exactly jokes, but a way that a character can be amusing. And I do think that's sort of why more of that stuff lands. And you just get the feeling like he's this weird droid who obviously is not supposed to go along on adventures because he can barely move. And he's sort of wrapped up in this stuff. Whereas yeah,

this time it's much more like give him jokes to say. But yeah, I really found myself in the first viewing. I couldn't believe that if I had sympathies, it's going to see 3PO for just how brutally the movie is treating him as a character, like the character I care the least about. Stupid plot line. Stupid plot line. Yeah. Yeah. It was an absolutely ridiculous plot line. My complaints about many movies is video game plots of, we have to go here to get the thing to do the thing. Now, of course, in many movies, you have to get something to accomplish a task. Movies need there to be reasons to do something. There's just a question of how much does it feel like an arbitrary job? So like, Lord of the Rings, we got to get this ring into that mountain. And the story happens because of that. And yes, it's a video game plot, but at least it's the direct action. The more indirect a movie becomes in its plotting, that's where it starts to feel more gamey.

Oh, we don't need to directly do this thing. You know, we need to go get the key to open the gate to then do the thing. Yeah, like a Tomb Raider game. Yeah, exactly. Now, this movie, the level of indirection is crazy. It's like, okay, Emperor is alive. We need to get the Emperor. The characters explicitly say that in the beginning.

Like, oh no, the Emperor is alive. We got to get him. Okay, so what needs to happen? Well, in order to get the Emperor, we need to get the Sith Wayfinder Which is a little pyramid that's a map which can tell you what planet he's hiding on Yeah It's like, okay That looks disturbingly like a save point

Jesus, I didn't think of it, but you're totally right That is going to be like a save point in a future Star Wars video game for sure Okay, well, how do we find that uh well we need to pick up the path of where the clues are it's like okay so it's just then established that that luke and lando went on an adventure to try to find a clue to find the wayfinder and there are there is a passing reference to the sacred texts. Yeah, that these exist. Yes, that's how Ray knows it's a thing.

It's like, okay, so then the characters need to go to a desert, not for any particular reason, but because this is where the adventure finished. And in the other way, it feels like a video game lando is still there in the desert which is like yeah wait so what happened like how long ago was this adventure with luke because in the previous movie luke's been like on an island for 30 years like so what happened here lando just decided he really loved living in this abandoned desert maybe like maybe he met a girl or something. Maybe he did. Maybe he met one of those elephant girls. Like, you know,

good for him settling down, you know, whatever. But it's just, it's odd. He happens to still be there. Right. He happens to still be there. They happen to run into him. And then from there, again, they need to go find the ship, but like the ship doesn't have a clue on it. And so they get sucked into quicksand. The quicksand happens to land them in a pit where they find a dagger. And what were the odds that they fell into that quicksand at that point? I know.

At the end of this big long chase. It's like, okay, so you fell in the same quicksand pit as the other guy. You all get sucked under, but don't worry, it just drops you conveniently in a little cave. It's like, how does that quicksand work exactly? Ah, whatever, just keep moving on. And okay, so then they find a knife. The knife has Sith written on it, which leads to the whole thing you just complained about with C-3PO not

being able to translate it. So then they get the translation from C-3PO by murdering him in a heartless fashion. And so the translated clue tells them they have to stand on the shore and use the knife. The blade of the knife is the outline of where on the fallen Death Star. Like in the Goonies, it's like the Goonie medallion on the rock. Except like, how has that Death Star in that incredibly violent ocean, not like eroded or broken in any way, and it still has the same shape that you can find exactly where to look at it? Don't ask, don't ask. And then like, the the cherry on top here is it's not even that if you line up the knife with

the outline of the ship that that tells you where the wayfinder is. There's a secret compartment on the knife that needs to be pulled out in order to then point to the exact spot. Yeah. I honestly think I may have never seen a movie that has more layers of indirection with brand new stuff in the way of achieving the goal. And again, like, I just think comparing it to something like Lord of the Rings, lots of stuff happens in Lord of the Rings, but you know what they always have with them?

The ring. And where are they trying to get it to? The mountain. the rings but you know what they always have with them the ring and where are they trying to get it to the mountain so like you have something as as a viewer to hold on to in your mind of like this is the thing that's occurring but this amount of like oh we just keep introducing new stuff that needs to happen is like a crazy level of video game plotness again, why is all of this new stuff in this movie? Because there's just nothing to work with because there was no plan. Yeah. I just can't believe they couldn't have got someone to come up with a really cool story. Couldn't someone have just conjured something up and said,

there's some pretty smart people around the place and I've got lots of money to pay. On a meta level, I know that Disney has decided that the entire extended universe that exists in Star Wars is non-canon. They're like, oh, all of those books and comic books and stuff, like none of that really exists anymore. Which is, you know, okay, whatever. Like, I understand you want to have a corporate clean slate. That's fair enough though, because a lot of stuff happened in those books.

I read some of them and you would have a lot of anchors tied to you if you had to follow all of that. Yeah. And I completely get it. But my point is this, you have 40 years of additional material. Take the best stuff from that and make a trilogy out of it. Like surely you already know which of these books are popular, which storylines do people like. You've actually been market testing Star Wars ideas unintentionally for decades. There has to be a good story in there. I still remember all the names of these characters from these books. Thrawn and Mara Jade and all these people. I remember them all. There's totally stuff to do in all of that. And you have at least a place to start. And it's where,

again, I think of the Marvel movies where they've made a lot of these comic book movies, but they're also very rarely totally brand new. They're looking at a character and they're thinking, what are the stories that we know people like about this character and adapting it into movie forms? And so, like, you've got something to start with. It's crazy that it was all, like, all brand new and also unplanned at the same time. Having seen it twice, Gray, can you explain something to me? I can't guarantee it. What's the deal with healing powers? Can you do low-level healing and you're okay, but if you heal someone too much, you die? And also, why did Princess Leia die? Okay. Okay. Right. So, I happen to write down Rey's exact line because-

Because the first time we see it, she heals the snake. She heals the snake. Yeah. There's this monster snake. Again, just out of nowhere, she's like, oh, I'm going to heal this. The snake has a wound, conveniently. Normally in Star Wars, there's no hesitation just to lock the head off any monster that jumps out from behind the corner.

But this time she suddenly says, I've got a different idea. Okay, the force, maybe the force told her to do it. Yeah, yeah. The force works in mysterious ways. Yeah, so whatever. So she heals this snake and then she says, she turns to BB-8, which is also weird because nobody else seems to care that she's just done this thing. Like none of the other characters react, Just BB-8's hanging around.

And she says to him, I transferred a bit of life to him. You would have done the same. Right. Which is strange on two levels. Level one, it's like rose levels of stupid. Okay. If you mean that in a literal sense, like you will live less because you healed this snake, that's just stupid. Okay. If you mean that in a literal sense, like you will live less because you healed this snake, that's just stupid. That's a terrible decision-making matrix here when I think the

three of you in this pit could have easily taken out the snake. One of you is a Jedi. Like it's just a bad calculation. How many wounded animals have you passed in the many years? Like, are you going to heal all of them and then just die? So, she has like sacrificed a year of her life to heal the snake, has she? Or is that- That is, I think, the implication that you're supposed to have. Okay. So, she'll be lying on her deathbed in 60 years thinking, oh man, if it wasn't for that snake, I could have had another year. Yeah. It's the only thing that makes sense with what happens later in the movie. Yes. Okay. And then it's also strange that she says, you would have done the same to bb8 it's like wait does can like do droids have life are there are there jedi droids like i don't understand like

it's the weirdest thing to say it's like you're giving me your phone charger the other day to give me a little bit of extra charge you would would have done the same, Gray. Yes, I suppose I would have. I don't know. It just, it strikes me so strange. And especially because I sort of missed this the first time around, but the second time it's much more obvious that they're clearly establishing many times that Finn is like a force sensitive dude, that he's got like connections with the force. And it's like

shouldn't she say that to him like if this is a thing that you want to have in your movie that you're establishing that finn has some connection with the force she should say that to him don't say it to the droid it's bizarre but so no you're not wrong it's not really explained it's just like jedi can now heal things And it really bothers me because the thing about that that's unbelievable is, hey, wasn't your whole prequel trilogy about Darth Vader really wants to be able to save his lady's life when she's going to die in childbirth? And the whole thing is Palpatine's like, well, a Sith, we might have ways that we can save people's lives.

Oh, actually, it's a Jedi power. Jedi can do this. Unless maybe the, I mean, obviously the argument could be the Force knowledge has moved on in those 30 years, but let's pretend it hasn't. Because then Luke could have saved his dad on the Death Star, you know, oh, don't, I can't take your helmet off, you'll die. Nah, just give me a little bit of your life force and everything will be good. Even if I accept that force technology evolves over time, right?

Like, let's just say, yeah, there's force tinkerers and they're always working on new stuff. Yeah. And they've released the iPhone force 12 every year, right? Like, whatever, there's new features. That's totally fine. Yeah. You know, you have to add new stuff. And again, I like the telepathic communication between Kylo and Rey. Like that's an enforced thing.

I'm totally on board. But the reason it's great is because it does not thematically contradict fundamental parts of the earlier movies. And also the reason that kind of works great is you can tell it's new like they're confused by it yes as an excellent point that's an excellent point yeah yeah they're both wondering what's going on in the previous movie luke is like this is super dangerous that the two of you are having this tele this is weird like this is a new thing but like the healing she just does like it's just like she knew she could do it oh i can fix that you know she knew she had that power and Oh, I can fix that. You know, she knew she had that power. And like, and Kylo obviously knew too, because when he saves her later on, he didn't see her do it to the snake.

But he saw her do it to him in his fake death, which brings us right back to your question of, why did Leia die? Please. What happened? Because this is how I understood it from my first viewing. It seems like Leia knew that Ben and Rey were having a fight. Yes. So, she did a telepathy moment with Ben to distract him so that Rey could stab him. And using telepathy sucks life force as well, obviously. Because the telepathy moment she had to do to distract Ben, Kylo, sapped her energy. But then her body didn't disappear until Ben-

Oh, I don't know. I don't know what's going on. It's confused. There's also this thing which I find really annoying, which is Maz Kanata, who was like the lady who had the lightsaber from the first movie. She's brought back, again again for no apparent reason. And given way too much prominence and importance. It's like J.J. Abrams really liked this character and was like, hey guys, screw Rose.

We're going to give a lot of dialogue to this character who you haven't thought about at all. But she also just, again, like turns to the camera and says, oh, Leia is going to do a force thing now. And she literally says like, it is going to take everything that she has within her to do. And I mean, look, there is the meta problem that Carrie Fisher died. And so what are they going to do about her in the story? I understand that. Like, I think they did a good job of having her in the movie and all of the rest of this.

But it doesn't make the movie any less weird that this is the choice that you've made. And that you're also going to build it up like she's going to do this impressive force thing and it's going to kill her. Like, couldn't you have characters make some comment at least about like, oh, she's sick or she's frail or something? Because she seems totally normal. Exactly. This is how the Wikipedia plot describes what happened in one and a half sentences. There's a duel going on. A dying Leia, so now suddenly she was dying, I didn't realise that. Yeah, there's no indication of that. A dying Leia calls to Kylo through the force and Rey impales him. Sensing Leia's death, Rey heals Kylo.

Yeah. Why? Who? What? Yeah. Like a... It is another example of don't care. I mean, all that she does is she literally just whispers the word Ben to Kylo.

And my interpretation is the same as you of it distracts him. It turns his head. It's like she, you know, she force tapped him on the shoulder in the way to make a person look behind them. And, you know, this kills her. The effort to do this kills her. Because it's so long distance, maybe. I guess.

Who knows? You know, whatever. It's incredibly difficult to do yeah and then ray brutally murders him by stabbing him with his own lightsaber right through the center of his stomach yeah and then immediately decides to heal him i wonder how many years that cost her of force life yeah i will give a nice little detail, which is that when she force heals his wound, it also gets rid of his scar on his face, which I think is nice. And it also really, I think it really contributes to the feeling of he's a changed person now. But I think they made his scar more prominent in the beginning of this movie.

And then his scar is healed after she heals him. And I wonder if that cost her extra life force to heal his scar as well, in addition to just the wound. Bonus points, yeah. Also, just coming back to life force for a second, if say like Rey spent 30 days of her life to fix that snake, say, and then two years to fix Kylo after the battle. Right. When she dies and then gets brought back to life by kylo like how much should he top her up like does she she started or like what i don't know what her credit is anymore there's also a weird thing that the emperor says about how it's going to take because the emperor

is like a zombie again they're sort of unclear he's got bad fingers his bad fingers his eyes are all like again things i can say that are positive about the movie i can't deny i love every minute that the emperor is on screen like i just i just do you overrate him i reckon i 100 grant that i overrate the emperor but i'm just like i'm so happy to see him but like this is great i love the they do a new effect on his voice like they really deepen his voice and effect on his voice. They really deepen his voice and they make his voice really resonant. And I don't know, he's just fun on screen. And because I had no emotional attachment to this movie, I was like, I don't mind. You go,

Emperor. You got plans. You got stuff you want to do. It's reasonably clear. But to your point, he makes a comment about how to like bring him back to life, I guess requires the two Jedi. He's like, Oh, I need two to bring back the one. And that, that certainly implies there's like a,

like a wireless charging inefficiency in this life transfer. That's right. That was a weird moment in the film. At least 50%. Because one minute, he was completely self-sacrificing. I'm quite happy to be struck down by you, Ray, you know, to make the Sith all powerful. Yeah. And it's almost selfless of him.

Yeah. And then suddenly- This good guy Palpatine. Yeah. And then suddenly he's all greedy again and wants to suck all the life force out of the two of them so he can be the big boss. I just don't. Well, yeah, the Emperor's plan sort of doesn't make sense either because it's just not-

Like, does he want Rey dead or is he, like, super psyched to have her be the Empress? Did he send out Kylo at the start to go and kill Rey? Yeah, that is his explicit promise. Kill her and I'll give you these 10,000 Star Destroyers. So what if Kylo had gone out, found Rey, stabbed her straight away, and then she's dead? When in fact, what he really, apparently what he really wanted was for her to come there and strike him down. Well, I think Kylo would have then returned and the Emperor would have said, I was just

fooling. And you've proven that you're the strongest apprentice. Why don't you strike me down? Because I need two of you to bring me back and this is my best path. Yeah. It's not great, but at least it's less convoluted than we need to bring C-3PO to Baba Duke in the desert to translate this dagger to go to the place to find the thing. So, it's like, I'll take what I can get. I also feel like they threw too many new characters in. The last film is not a time to be throwing in these new characters. No. This was actually one of my big complaints about the way Harry Potter ended. Because I quite liked the way Harry Potter ended, except they started throwing in all

these new characters, these Bathilda bag shots and Dumbledore's brother. And like, it just was confusing and felt like it was being made up as it went along. And this is what this felt like. They threw in this bounty hunter criminal girlfriend. Yeah, it's Poe's ex-girlfriend. Who's played by Kerry Russell, who's like a great actor, but we only see her eyes for a few seconds and she doesn't actually, we never see her face and she doesn't really get to act very much. Seems like a bit of a waste of quite a good star.

Yeah, it's Captain Phasma all over again of like, you've got a real actress and she's just under a hood the whole time. Like why bother? She doesn't even really do anything. Why bring this character in? And I saw her on the red carpet because I saw red carpet shots when the film came out. And I was like, oh, brilliant. Kerry Russell's in it. I love her.

She's awesome. Can't wait to see her in the film. And she just like wears a helmet and does nothing. Yeah. It's one of my other examples of new things because she is is part of the we have to translate the dagger plotline. And I thought, oh, we've landed on this planet, we've run into Poe's girlfriend, it's her. He says to her, hey, we need to get this droid to be able to translate the dagger, why also then have another character who is going to be the person who can make this happen? Why not just say she knows how to do this? Like, I agree with you, there needs to be character consolidation. Like, this is not the point for lots of new people to be involved. And there's this Janna woman on the Death Star planet who like joins in as well and is a bit of

a nothing character. Like, you know, suddenly just joins the adventures and I haven't had time to bond with her. I don't care that she's saving the day, but all right. I guess they needed her. Well, yeah. We'll mention her now. Yeah. So, Finn gets a girlfriend, I guess, sort of. This is where you and I took a bathroom break. We recognised this was the low point of the movie of like- What does Finn say in my bathroom break? I never found out what his secret was. Okay. So here's the thing that happened, listeners. Brady and I watched the movie the first time.

And I forget, it's two or three times when they're close to death, Finn says that he has something that he wants to tell Ray. You assume it's going to be like, I love you or something. Yeah, of course. Like, it's obviously what it's going to be. There's nothing else any character would say seconds away from death. And Brady and I took the bathroom break and sort of both missed this, like, five-minute section of the movie where they found, again, in this really confusing way

on what should clearly be Endor or the forest moon of Endor. The Death Star has crashed down onto a planet, not an Ewok in sight, not a tree in sight. And I had to keep reminding myself, I think this is supposed to be Endor or the forest moon of Endor. I understand that some Star Wars people will come up and be like, well, the main planet doesn't have Ewoks. I don't care. If you're trying to place this thing, I want forests and I want Ewoks. So we know we have a connection to this is the place where the battle happened. But anyway, no Ewoks, there's just like a tribe of people on space horses. Again, no civilization in sight for thousands of miles. I forgot about the space horses.

This is where they get established, Brady. So Brady and I missed this little section of, you know, what's the deal with the space horses? Now, at the end of the movie, after when we were outside talking, Brady says to me, what did Finn say during that section? Like, because I came back a minute early. Like, oh, this must be where they resolved the Finn wants to tell Rey something. They did not resolve that, Brady. At no point in the movie do they ever resolve the Finn wants to tell Rey something. Now, by total coincidence, on Twitter today, I happened to come across someone who tweeted a little clip of JJ Abrams,

where someone in an interview asked him, hey, you never resolved that thing where Finn wanted to tell Ray something. What did he want to tell her? And of course, I, like you, would assume that he wanted to tell her that he loves her. Especially because in the first movie, probably one of his better lines is he's like, you got a boyfriend? Like he says it in a really genuine way when he's like being awkward and stumbling over things. He was funny in the first film. That was funny, that film.

So J.J. Abrams' answer to this question is Finn wanted to tell Rey that he is force sensitive. And I don't believe that. I think that is a lie. Like I don't know why on earth J.J. Abrams would say that, but I refuse to believe that that is the thing. That seconds away from death, any character would be like, oh, by the way, we're force bros. You know, it's crazy. I do think maybe they want to make him like a Jedi later, because they do keep putting a light-

Even in this film, they put a lightsaber in his hand once unnecessarily at one point. So, maybe, maybe. But so, in just weird filmmaking stuff, that's never resolved in this movie. And apparently, he wanted to say that he's force sensitive. Like, okay. So, does Rey love Ben, Kylo? Because they have that big smooch at the end. And that's not like a, you know, Jedi kind of related okay no look that's like a that's a love kiss okay god damn it no we have no we have to put a pin in that for a second let's come back to that because it drags up too much stuff because i've got stuff to say about the kiss we'll talk we'll talk kissy kissy later stay tuned people the kissing's coming later

we're first of all space horses okay space horses and also stormtroopers so okay the people who are riding the space horses on the forest moon of endor or endor are former stormtroopers who have all deserted the empire uh that happened when i was having a way right yeah yeah me too the first time around okay and so the second time i was like well i can't wait to find out what happened in these two minutes. And it's like, oh, it made something that you already didn't like about the film worse. What does it say that I didn't know that? And now I do know that.

It doesn't change anything, I think. Right. Yeah. It's like, whatever. Who cares? So, him and the main girl have a little moment where he's like, oh, yeah, I was FN-126. And she's like, yeah, I was SX-743. So they've got something to bond on. They have something to bond on. And now he has a girlfriend,

so he doesn't have to pine over Rey. Okay, cool. Okay. Okay. But so here's why I really don't like that. Because going back to violence against stormtroopers. Now, there are many times in this movie where stormtroopers die. There's one in particular, which is there's the chase scene that's happening in the desert. They're on speeders. They're being chased by stormtroopers who can fly now and they shoot them out of the sky and one explodes and all the rest of this. Now, a stormtrooper is chasing the whole gang on their speeder. And Finn comes up with this clever way to kill him,

where they throw like a hook on a rope that attaches to his speeder. They draw him close, and then Poe makes a really sharp turn, and it swings the stormtrooper on his speeder right into a rock and explodes. And there's no, the stormtrooper got out. That guy died. And died in like a very pointed way. And the whole crew afterward goes like, ha ha. Like they have their biggest yell of excitement. Like, we really got that guy.

He is so dead. Not that I care about stormtroopers even though i am subscribed to r slash empire did nothing wrong but i guess killing stormtroopers eventually becomes like killing zombies in walking dead you just like become immune to it okay i would become immune to it except for other things that happen later in the movie so one of the things that the new trilogy has established and that was established right away in the JJ Abrams one is stormtroopers aren't clones anymore, which I enjoyed because that was dumb. Stormtroopers are impressed children from conquered worlds.

That's Finn's whole plot line is like he's questioning his life and he was taken from some other world. Now, when the Emperor offers all of these Star Destroyers, in the first 10 minutes of the movie, there's a quick little conversation about, oh, we're going to need to start impressing more children from planets for soldiers. I missed that. Yeah, it's a very quick little line, but it's clearly put in there as, aren't these the bad guys? But it starts to frame all of the stormtrooper murder in this little way. And so then this one guy brutally bites it, and they're super happy about it. And then I had to listen again on the second watch because I thought, I think I must have misheard this. They didn't do this. But this whole scene where the main gang is on one of the Star Destroyers

and they're like saving Chewie and blah, blah, blah. They're running down a hallway and they're shooting a bunch of stormtroopers. And one of them yells out and it's clearly a woman's voice. Yes, I noticed that. I thought, no, that couldn't have been the case. But not only that, the next three stormtroopers are women. Like a woman yells and someone shoots her and she dies. There's a second one who yells, someone shoots her and she dies.

And then they get captured. And the stormtrooper who captures them is slightly ambiguous, but probably a woman's voice. And it's like, okay, cool. I get, you know,

impressed children, you know, there will be girls. So women can be storm troopers too, but it's just a little brutal. Like, like, are we going to run past a storm trooper nursery where there's a bunch of

toddlers, like in storm trooper outfits and you shoot them too like it's the only time i've ever felt like i kind of want these stormtroopers to be more just anonymous or maybe kill fewer of them but it's just like it just struck a strange yeah note to me and then like but this is why all of this stuff i thought i can kind of get over it until they quadruple down on finn's new girlfriend is a former stormtrooper and all of these people are like they explicitly say they were captured as children and then they deserted the empire it's like oh i'm getting really uncomfortable here, guys. Like, I really don't

like the way this is going. Like, you can have this, I kind of like it, but you have to have the heroes not be merciless murder machines everywhere they go, if this is also the case. Can I get your quick rundown of what you thought about the cameos of Lando Calrissian, Han Solo, and Luke Skywalker. Okay, okay. Let's do that in reverse order. Luke was fine. I had no problem with Luke.

You? Yeah, I mean, it was... I'm always a bit shocked by how scruffy he looks, but it was all right. And it was like your Ben Kenobi point of view moment, wasn't it? Except being able to catch a lightsaber was interesting. I would have thought the lightsabers would just go straight through his hand. Look, man, after Yoda burned down the Jedi archive and did a little jig of joy, like, Force ghosts can interact with the world, don't ask questions. I mean, does this bring up the possibility that when Luke blew up the first Death Star,

like, Ben Kenobi just reached out with his hand and threw those torpedoes down the tube? Look, this opens up many questions of many situations where a force ghost would be super useful, right? Like perhaps the most useful ally you could possibly have. You know, like I think if I was a Jedi in that scene where they're being chased by stormtroopers. Okay, so let's say stormtrooper murder is on the table. Fine, whatever.

Why is Rey shooting at any of these guys? Like if I was a Jedi, I would just crush their hearts with my hand at Force powers, right? Like, why would you do anything else? Maybe moving targets are harder, but I do like that you're crushing their heart. What do you think of the Harrison Ford cameo? That is the exact way to describe it. I didn't like it because he just seemed like Harrison Ford.

I don't know what it was. It was shoehorned in. It didn't feel right. It didn't like it because he just seemed like Harrison Ford. I don't know what it was. It was shoehorned in. It didn't feel right. It didn't feel like it belonged. Maybe it's because he wasn't a force ghost. He was supposed to just be a memory. Yeah. Because he's not allowed to be a force ghost, is he? No, he's not. He's dead. He's just dead forever, right? I would like to have seen Harrison Ford as a force ghost. I would have liked the blue shimmer, but I get why he couldn't be. But I guess you needed something to turn Ben. I mean, Rey's mercy could have turned him, but we had to have it explained, didn't we, for idiots. Yeah. I don't mind it on a plot level of, you know, he murdered

his father in the first movie and now he's turning back into Ben. that's fine. I don't mind that. It just really felt like it was Harrison Ford showing up in the movie. Like, maybe it was something about his hair. I couldn't, it just, it didn't feel like I am seeing Han Solo. He looked very made up. He looked like an old man wearing powder. Maybe that's what it was. Whereas when he was in the first movie, you know, he's Harrison Ford, but I felt like this is Han Solo older. I did have problems in the first movie, he's Harrison Ford, but I felt like this is Han

Solo older. I did have problems in the first movie too, to be honest. Now, I know you're asking me because this is the saddest thing in the world for me. This is like... I've always loved Lando. Lando's so cool. When I rewatch those movies, part of the reason I like Lando so much is because I really sympathize with him. It's like, Lando, he kind of doesn't want to have anything to do with any of these people. And he's getting caught in the tangle of their lives. And he's just like this guy in the crossfire of the empires there. It's like, I just really feel for Lando.

And he's cool. And I just love him. And in this movie, I didn't want to see him in the movie. And I wasn't wrong to have that feeling. It's like, please, Billy Dee Williams. He's not, he doesn't feel like Lando at all. I don't want to see old Lando. For me, that was the worst part. He has grown old as others have grown old.

Yeah. Time has taken its toll in a Lando way. The three things I will say about Lando in the film, Billy Dee Williams. A, it was embarrassingly short for how much he was promoted as being part of the film. Two, it was really awkwardly uncomfortable when they first met him and they were all like fanboying over him. Of course, we know who you are. Like, it felt like it was outside the film.

Like, oh my God, Lando's in this film. That's cool. And the third thing is that interaction he has with that character, Jana, at the end, like Finn's girlfriend, where she says, oh, I don't know where I came from. Very weird. Was he being creepy and sleazy? Or was he being like, what was the dynamic there? I completely couldn't read it.

I couldn't read that dynamic. I choose to interpret it as like, she's his daughter or something. Like they're related but how could that be where did that come from and how would he know there was nothing that led up to it it felt like a like a scene was cut somewhere because he's all that oh let's see if we can do something about that did have a kind of also like kind of sleazy innuendo-y feel to it yeah it was which I know probably wasn't the intent, but God, it felt weird. If I was an editor and someone said, you can cut two lines of dialogue from this movie,

100% those are the two I would cut. And if they said, you can cut two more, they would also be Lando lines, which is also really uncomfortable when they first meet him and Ray's about to leave. And he says, give Leah my love. But he says it in a way that's just way too much. And Ray's response is also really uncomfortable where she says, give it to her yourself. And it's like, oh, God, why? You know, those are tough line reads, but they also have really bad takes for both of them,

which makes it sound like this is part of the creepy part of the internet where Rule 42 exists. I don't need this. Please get rid of this. So Lando made me really sad. I didn't want to see him. But he's also, towards the end of the movie, perhaps the most pivotal character in the final battle in a way that I also find really frustrating. So, yeah, two thumbs down for Lando. Did not want. Please no more Lando. Let's talk a bit more about the end of the film and the big battle at the end.

Let's talk about, well, before we talk about the kissy kiss. Oh, right. Yeah. Who were all those Sith people in the stadium watching the battle, like, you know, like, surrounding the Emperor? Who were they? Are they, like, Sith? Are they, like, you know, bad Jedis?

Or are they just, like, are they- what are they? Who are they? It was never explained. There's a lot of them. Yeah. If they're Sith, have they got Sith powers? If they've got Sith powers, couldn't they have, like, intervened in what was going on in any way rather than just watching?

Or I'm so baffled. Yeah, it is bizarre. Rey goes to find the Emperor and she walks in and she finds his throne room. And in a kind of camera move that you would see in a parody movie, the camera turns around and yeah, there's like a whole stadium of a thousand or more people in black hoods just watching her, right? You know, quietly. They were just waiting. They were all sitting there in the stadium just waiting for her to show up in the throne room.

It's very odd. And like, I know this is dumb, but I find myself thinking, this is a totally barren planet. Where did those guys get lunch? Like, where were they before everyone shuffled into the theater for the big show? Like, what are the logistics of this? Who are they? Do they ever lie on a sofa? At first, I thought they were ghosts.

Like, oh, they can't be real. Like, these are the ghosts of all of the Sith watching or something. But later on, when the whole base is crumbling, they very clearly established, no, they're real. They're getting crushed to death now, whoever they were. And it's like, okay, you know, hooded dudes, hardly knew ye, and now you're gone. You're another new thing introduced to be dispatched with within minutes. You know, I have no idea. Also, why does the Emperor die when she gets a second lightsaber?

Like, what is it about two lightsabers that made her more able to bounce his bolts back at him? And yet when she had one, like, it was a pretty even battle. Do lightsabers have, like, power that I'm unaware of? Like, if she'd had one of those double lightsabers that Darth Maul had, would she have been able to win right from the start? Okay. Again, like Brady, you're asking questions there are no answers for.

And, you know, that's your fault. The movie has clearly told you at this point, don't worry about any of this. But the final death has to have a payoff. No, no. But look, no, it doesn't. And you skipped all the way. She just tried a bit harder. She just tried that bit harder and won.

Look, you've skipped all the way to the end because you can't deal with what is the dumbest thing in the movie, which is Rey has shown up. The Rebel fleet, which we previously saw was composed of two dozen people, now has like a bunch of ships and is maybe a hundred people. You know, who knows where where don't worry about it. They warp into the Sith planets and they are going to take on, I don't know, a million star destroyers. Like the whole, like, you know, if for some reason you're listening to this and you haven't seen this movie, you are given the impression that the entire surface of a planet has been turned into star destroyers. Every one of these star destroyers, by the way,

has on it a cannon which can destroy an entire planet. And at this point in the movie, I thought, you son of a bitch, J.J. Abrams, you did it. You made a bigger star destroyer, even bigger, by making a million star destroyers. This was a thing people had joked about on the internet for years. Yeah, could there be another Death Star? Yeah, like after Starkiller Base, what are you going to do? Are you going to turn a gas giant

into a Star Destroyer? It's so dumb. But they still did it. That joke was real, it just had a hilarious punchline, which is, we're going to make a million Death Stars, so it is bigger. They're really doing well with the miniaturization, aren't they? Like, it used to be you needed like a whole planet or at least something the size of a moon to make a weapon big enough to destroy a planet. Now they're just on the undercarriage of a Star Destroyer, like just a big cannon. Their miniaturization technology, aside from force technology, may be the only example in the entire Star Wars universe of technology developing, right?

Of things really changing. If they made a 10th film, you'd be able to blow up a planet with your iPhone. There's an app for that. Yeah, exactly. But so the rebels show up and they are fighting a million Star Destroyers. That is the implication. And now this is like such a trope in movies, and I hate it. All of the million Star Destroyers, for reasons that are never made clear, cannot fly up.

Like, again, we have seen these Star Destroyers literally come up out of the ground and shake off the rock that they have been crafted from. But that's because the emperor did it with his magic, didn't he? Yeah. But again, I'm thinking of the Uruk-hai in Lord of the Rings. These things have just been forged from nothing through evilness. And the emperor lifted them up. But now that they're up in the air, they can't fly up any further. Could the emperor push them up? No,

no, he can't put, he can lift them out of the rock, but he can't, he just can't push them out of the gravity well. And so every single one of these million star destroyers depends on a single antenna on the ground that tells them which way is up. And it's like, it's so dumb. You can't conceive of this. That was stupid. And it wasn't even a cool looking antenna that was like going to be hard to get, like going, doing a trench run. Yeah. It was like a flower. Just sitting on its own, unfortified, just like a little, like a mobile phone mast.

Yeah. And again, it's also weird. It's like, okay, so the emperor built all of these Star Destroyers, but he also built this beautiful flower radio on the ground too. He just made one of those, but he made a million Star Destroyers. Okay, maybe you'd want to have some redundancy. Nope. That one's really hard. Except there is redundancy because one and only one of the other Star Destroyers also has a little navigation tower. Also conveniently shaped like a flower. Yeah, also shaped like a flower, also on the outside of the ship. And so, when the Rebels... I don't want to nitpick, but when the Rebel forces first warp into this planet, again, no exaggeration, all million Star Destroyers open fire immediately. Not a single Rebel ship is taken down. And there have been many dumb space battles, but this is just beyond belief that nobody got hit from a million Star Destroyers and you warped in right above them.

All facing in the same direction and you warped in looking right at them in the face as well. What were the odds of that? I think of like a high school football field and the bleachers that everybody sits in. Now imagine if you have one of those bleachers and it's filled with 100 people, and every single one of them has a shotgun, and you warp in five feet in front of those bleachers, and every single person fires at you and they all miss. It's got to be one of the dumbest things. But so anyway, they fly under this huge fleet.

They go for the radar. And I did quite like it. They're like, oh, well, let's just turn that radar off. We've got another one on this other ship. We'll use this one instead. Yeah. this one instead yeah and so then in the culmination of all nine films is a bunch of space horses landing on the surface of a star destroyer to fight ground to freaking ground combat on top of a Star Destroyer to destroy an antenna. It is so dumb.

You cannot believe it. It's kind of not even in my memory. Like I know it happened, but like. But this, yeah, this is where like you forgot about it until I mentioned it. Like, remember the space horses? It's so stupid. But so like I'm watching this and I'm thinking, okay, these are spaceships, right? They must have artificial gravity in them. Can't you turn the ship upside down? Can't you just

flip upside down and knock all the space horses off? So, I know you have to send out stormtroopers onto the surface of your Star Destroyer. Yeah. I mean, those big space battles now, I don't even watch them anymore. They're just a big mess on the screen as far as I'm concerned it's not like the good old days where there's luke skywalker there's the trench there's the hole that he has to shoot yeah there's darth vader behind him now it's just like what the yeah i just wanted them to cut back to the throne room so that was the business end of the film wasn't it the throne room is the business end which i'll get to in a second but like this is one of the laziest tropes in movies, which is there's an undefeatable army

that has one weakness, which will kill all of them. Like it's just, it's so terrible. I'm going to say this is now maybe the worst example of this I have ever seen of an undefeatable army where if you kill one thing, you kill absolutely all of them. I think this takes the crown. Worse than Independence Day when they put a computer virus, a human computer virus. I am going to say it is worse than Independence Day. Because in Independence Day, at least we have the concept of a computer virus that can spread to all of the ships. Yeah, fair enough.

This is the emperor only built one tower, and he also can't push the ships up himself, even though he could lift them out of the ground. Like there's so many other ways. Yeah. So many of them. Also, why were they just sitting? They were sitting there to wait for Kylo Ren, weren't they? But they sent one out to go and blow up a planet.

Why were they all just sitting in one place like that? Don't think about that. The rebels are totally going to lose this fight. And then Lando shows up out of the middle of nowhere with apparently the whole galaxy has decided to join this fight. There's a million Star Destroyers. Well, guess what? 10 million rebel ships show up. And it's supposed to be like a rah, rah, rah moment.

But again, the previous movie established that when the rebels asked for help nobody came like of an entire universe nobody came and what has changed on screen in this movie since that moment sort of nothing yeah like the implication is what lando pulled in favors that he'd earned up in the previous 30 years with everyone in the whole universe, and they decided to risk their lives. You made a lot of people when you're mining to burn a gas. Yeah, I guess. It's crazy. And then what is the Emperor's reaction to this fleet showing up? up a hole above his head and shoots force lightning that doesn't destroy, but disables

every single one of the rebel ships now that have appeared. Okay. In terms of new powers, the Emperor's lightning, which I never even really thought of as a thing, like I just thought of it's something he's using to torture Luke, is also capable of on its own disabling an entire fleet. Okay, cool. I guess that's the thing he can do now. That's super useful.

Yeah. So that's my final thing. Now we can get back into the heart of the matter, which is the Emperor versus Rey. And yes, you're right. Rey uses two lightsabers and she's able to make him lightening himself in the face. That's all it took, right. But she died in the process for some reason, which is not explained either, but she's just fallen over dead.

But Kylo, who should be dead from falling down the hole, is not dead because he, what did he do? Just catch a ledge or something? Or was there a bunch of pillows at the bottom of that hole? I don't know. But anyway, he comes up. He brings her back to life because they can heal each other now. But he uses too many life points.

Yeah. So, he has to die. He dies. But before he does, she gives him what I think is a love smooch. Yeah. Like, it's a sexual kiss. So, she has fancied him all along. Fair enough.

She did have a fascination with him. I'll pay that, but he dies anyway. Why doesn't she use some of her life force to bring him back? No, because Brady- And just like go 50-50. Brady, this is the phone wireless charging thing, right? That you have such inefficiencies with each transfer that if she then brought him back, because we know from the emperor, the inefficiency rate is 50%. So, he gives up his entire life to give her half a life. And then she could give half of her life to give him a quarter of a life. What have we lost now

at this point? We're at like 80% life loss for these two transfers back and forth. So that's why his sacrifice is so noble because he knows she doesn't have enough life, you know, plus with the snake and everything. Like she's really running low. She could have done one more and they could have had just like a couple of happy years. Well, you know, maybe, but maybe she didn't like him that much. So what did you think of the kiss though? Well, I thought they were going to play, because Star Wars is always a pretty asexual film anyway, except for Han and Leia really. They were the only ones that ever had any like real chemistry.

Yeah. I was surprised by it. I don't know if I mind it or not. I'm undecided, but I was surprised by it. It came out of left field and then he died straight away, which also then surprised me. Like I thought, oh, they're going to be a thing. Okay, nice. Happy live.

Oh, no. Dead. Although we now know from the Emperor, dead doesn't really mean dead in Star Wars. But yeah, so everyone was left with no one. Yeah. They go back and have a party, right, in the forest. And that was where there was one of the only funny things in the film I liked. When, what's his name?

Poe looks at his Kerry Russell bounty hunter criminal girl again and like, gives her a look like, you know, am I going to get a kiss? And she just goes, nah, I did like that. Just to go back to the actual, like the main kiss of the movie for a second. So my reaction to that kiss, the reason I didn't want to mention it before is that it brings up the critical piece of information, which is so pointless, neither of us have mentioned it, which is Rey is the granddaughter of the Emperor. Which it makes the universe feel so incredibly small.

And this is another example of trying to undo the previous movie. And they try to back this one up, but they can't do it completely. Because Kylo Ren's line in the previous movie is, your parents are no one. You're nobody in this story. You have no place in this story. Like, they really double down on that. And in this one, he's like, well, yeah, your parents are nobody, but you're the granddaughter of Palpatine.

So I didn't technically lie. I was like, yeah, you didn't technically lie if everyone just ignores the second part of that, which couldn't be a stronger statement. I also think making her Palpatine's granddaughter, there are two things I have to say about that. One is, obviously, they wanted to make her related to someone that no one had guessed and everyone was guessing Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and Leia. So, they wanted to surprise us and he was the only one left. I think it was a surprise. Yeah, but I also like, I didn't care. Like, I was like, oh, really? But the other thing it raises is that the Emperor at some stage-

I know. Had sex with someone. I know. That was the exact same thought. I was like- He doesn't seem like someone that would do that. Yes, yes. He's too preoccupied with other things to, like, have sex and a baby.

I know, I know. Maybe he did it with the force. And his kids, the ones they showed, like, the parents in the flashbacks, seem like, you know, just like nice, normal people. You know? Yeah, so it's his son is ray's father and he's you know he's barely in the movie but i agree he just seems like a normal dude it's like yeah like you are the child of you know what can be argued as perhaps the most powerful force character who exists in this whole franchise.

Like, you just casually brush off death like it's nothing. You've controlled the minds of everyone for 40 years. And his son is just like, I don't know, like an accountant or something. Yeah, it's so odd. It just doesn't fit. And that's why I think people just didn't guess it because it raises all of these questions that in a final movie, you can't possibly deal with or answer of like, when did he have a family? Or like, was this when he was pretending to be like just a normal senator years ago? Maybe he's still got a wife and she doesn't know. And he just goes home and she's like, how was your day?

And he just says, I don't want to talk about it. Got thrown down a massive shaft. Yeah, exactly. But the other thing is it really makes the world feel small because, you know, a couple of things I like,

I did like the idea that Ray isn't related to anybody special. I like, I thought that's actually a pretty good way to go. And so this undoes that and it just, it shrinks the universe back down. But it also gives you this feeling in your brain of everyone's related. And so when that key kiss happened, I had a real aversion of like, ah, and then I had to do the genealogy in my head and be like, oh no, wait, no, but they're not related. The Palpatine line doesn't cross over with the Skywalker line anywhere.

Yeah. It's like, Ben is so clearly associated in the movies with the bad guys that in your head, you sort of muddle it up and you have to like think it through. This again is where you don't want in your movie, somebody has to be looking at the charts and going uh you know like that app in iceland of oh it's we're good like we're distantly connected enough that we can be romantically involved but also every interaction she's ever had with him like they've had some interactions that have been like talky but always on a quite a hostile suspicious level yeah and they've had many many interactions where they've been like, basically trying to smash the crap out of each other with lightsabers and kill each other. In

fact, one of them has killed the other one in the past. Even under such an intense time, it was a real gear shift to give him a big snog at that time. The thing that I liked the most, all of their communication through the force, this overlap of the worlds, it had a weird feeling to it, but I never really got the impression of like, oh, there's sexual chemistry here. Like the force is a sort of asexual sort of thing. And it is why I genuinely like this idea of these two characters have this special connection. Like you said, other characters are reacting in a confused way. All of this is maybe one of the better things to come out of the subsequent movies.

But it feels weird to turn it romantic. I did kind of see it because it did always feel like they had this force bond, which they were a little bit hostile towards. But because they're both quite young people and like, you know, at that age, they did kind of seem to have this like fascination with each other that went beyond just what they were supposed to be doing, like, you know, killing stuff and ruling the universe. They did have this like, there's something about you I find interesting. I kind of saw it, but it just felt like the wrong time to be having that kiss. And I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't think it was necessary. And then it's like the Emperor coming back. It retroactively colors the previous interactions that have occurred. And yeah, so here we are at the end of the movie. So this is where I'll say like things I liked. And the thing that I liked the most was based on this force interaction that was built up in the previous movie.

They established that their worlds are connected when they're communicating. And you see it in the previous movie where it's raining where Rey is and then Kylo's hands are wet after having spoken to her. They really earned this one. The fact that they're connected is a critical plot point in this one where Kylo is able to find out where she is because of a necklace that she's wearing that he's able to grab. So they establish that they can move objects back and forth. I think it's a perfect example of building something up. And after Kylo has become Ben and he's racing to the final planet to save Rey, he has given up his evil lightsaber and he's getting his ass handed to him in a fight with a bunch of like Sith dudes or whatever. And they use this moment to transfer a lightsaber from Rey to Kylo. And I think that's the best thing in the movie by far. Like it's really earned.

It's super satisfying. And like I said, in both viewings, it's the only time I heard people in the theater go like, yeah, like people were pumped about it because it was well done. And I'm also going to take this moment to say that by far and away, the MVP of all three films is Adam Driver playing Kylo Ren. And I was really aware of it because his turn to being Ben at the end, he has almost no dialogue in the last 30 minutes of the movie. But he does a really good job of seeming like Han Solo's son through his actions

entirely. Even the way he runs down the hall, when he gets the lightsaber, he does a little shrug. His whole physicality changed. And looking on the series from a big perspective now that it's all done, Kylo Ren, I think, was the best new thing in the series. And Adam Driver did a great job with him. He's the most interesting character over all three and has a kind of arc in the end. So, those are the things I liked. Yeah, I agree. Definite MVP. This wasn't her best of the three, but I did think Daisy Ridley or whatever as- She was great in the first one. She was great in the first.

And she did have to carry all three films on her shoulders. And she did manage it. She had a lot to do. And the only times that wasn't great, she wasn't really good, I thought, was in this film when she was doing chemistry with Finn and Poe and all them. I think for some reason that just didn't land, the interaction between them. But I thought she was good too. The things I liked about this film were pretty much nothing. I like when he asked the girl for a kiss, like I said at the end, and she said no.

Right. I thought the final, final scene of the film, back on Tantwe, when she goes to Luke's old home and we see the twin sons, still wasn't executed properly, but that was a good ending. And I did feel a little bit of emotion when she was watching the sunset at the end. I thought that was a good ending. I thought the mistake was so overtly introducing that character in the last 10 seconds some woman with a weird animal saying who I know and they just lingered on her for so long and there was that weird distracting animal with all those eyes that it did kind of yank me out of the moment and I was also thinking did she see her bury the lightsabers like it like right after I think

did she do that I don't know no she it before. She finishes burying the lightsabers, and then this lady's like, hey, what are you doing here? It's like, oh, no, right? Yeah, did she not see, with all her force powers, did she not see her coming? She was, like, doing a lightsaber hot drop, wasn't she? Yeah, she was. But other than that, other than that mishandling of having that weird animal there and the woman getting too much screen time, I did like the end, ending it there.

It's a bit weird that she's taking the Skywalker name. Like, I know she got the okay from Luke and Leia, but it is a bit weird that she's Palpatine and she's just going to go around calling herself a Skywalker now. But they had to justify the name of the film though, didn't they? Yeah. And it's weird that Leia says, oh, never be afraid of who you are. And they explicitly say that Leia knows, like Leia knows that Rey is Palpatine's granddaughter, which also, again, if you can't just say the force makes everything happen the way that it's supposed to, really calls into question some of Leia's decisions about how to handle Rey. I mean, in this universe, family lines are supposed to be really important. Maybe don't have Palpatine's granddaughter hanging around. I'm not sure I would really do that.

The film does leave a completely open-ended as to how the galaxy is to be run now. Yeah. Well, the original trilogy does that too, because this is the point where you want to stop the story, because you don't want to have to deal with the politics of, so do we all agree? Like all the rebels just agree on what voting system we should use and what level of power belongs to which federally delegated entity. You don't want to deal with that. What side of the road you drive on? Oh, I just realized there was one thing that, one tiny thing that I did like, but that also made me sad in the way the movie actually ended, is the thing that I liked about Rey being Palpatine's granddaughter is I thought, she would make an awesome Empress Palpatine though. They only have the evil version of her for two seconds.

And it's like, she uses the Darth Maul double lightsaber thing. And like, if there is any character who should use a double lightsaber Darth Maul stick, it is Rey by a million miles. Yeah, because she's good with a stick and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And I thought, if I had to go back and redo stuff, Rey becoming the Empress should have been the second movie.

You know, have a turn and her come back at the end or whatever. Like, you know, do something like that. But I love the idea of her being the Empress. And it sort of fits. And I think Daisy Ridley could do a good job of it. Like, it explains why she's so incredibly super powerful. You haven't watched Game of Thrones yet, have you? I never will.

I don't care. People don't like their hero ladies becoming a baddie at the end. Yeah, well, you know what? F*** people. Sometimes that's a great story. And you can't do it now because it's like the end of the trilogy. But I honestly thought like, man, it just feels right. It feels like a really good move.

And I think Daisy Ridley could have done a great job. And like the double lightsaber thing and everything. It's like, this is why she's so powerful. Make her Palpatine's granddaughter then. Like it all fits. It all fits. Like I demand Empress Rey. Like that was great.

Do you think the very final shot should have had BBA in it with her looking at the suns? It felt like giving BBA a a lot of, like, being in that shot, like, that's the killer shot. Yeah. I thought it was a bit weird having BB-8 in that. I had this problem where I kept forgetting that BB-8 is supposed to be Poe's droid. Like, he's really angry about the damage to BB-8 at that stupid, that really awkward scene. I was like, why does he care so much? Oh, right. He's post-droid? Which I agree, then makes that final scene even a little bit stranger. I found that strange. Also, you talk about

J.J. Abrams giving the finger to Rian Johnson with a few of the moments. Was he giving the finger to George Lucas by letting Chewie have have that medal i think that was fine letting chewy have the medal on the second viewing i did notice that when leia lies down to die before she whispers her final word to ben before she she enables the murder of her son she is holding the medal in her hands right like that's where that comes from so i'm totally fine with that like whatever give chewy the metal it's a bit of fan service you know i don't love it it is kind of conceding a mistake though isn't it it's like saying we got it wrong i also really don't love that once again it's maz kanata who does it of like jesus christ she's got a lot to do in this

movie i know there's a yeah i don't feel that bond to her that yeah she's that important but no but the the thing that i thought you were going to say is i think it's really interesting that they choose to end the whole series on a shot from the original trilogy and it is a little bit of like we all know where the story really started don't we right like yeah that's the way that feels and i did like that shot when we walked right out of the movie, but the half-life of that was within minutes. And even on the taxi ride home, I thought, oh, wait a minute, you tricked me. Like, you took a thing that I had good feelings about and you haven't yet used in this parade of nostalgia and you picked an excellent time to

use it. But I was up for that. Going into the film, I was up for being milked emotionally. Like, that's kind of what I wanted. You know, I wanted that music from the trailer to basically just play for two hours and me think how great Star Wars was when I was a kid. And instead, I got a film I didn't really feel much for. Whatever you can say about any of the individual movies, John Williams broke his back carrying all of these films. Yeah. He's good. He's good. So, Grey, can you believe we've done this to people on Christmas?

Well, you know, look, we're at the end of this series. This is you and me staring off in the distance at two setting suns. We've done it. We've made it to the end. We're free, Brady. We're finally free.