Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Part 5 - The Review

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I think I'm pretty much done writing about The Last Jedi. I've already gone through the film scene by scene and now I'm just going to put down a few final thoughts. Well, maybe a lot of final thoughts. It's The Last Jedi, there's a fair bit to talk about.

Click PART ONE, PART TWO, PART THREE or PART FOUR if you want to revisit an earlier chapter.

One last bit of trivia for you: The Last Jedi was released in 2017, just in time for a couple of major anniversaries. It was the 40th anniversary of the original Star Wars, which started this whole franchise, and the 30th anniversary of Spaceballs, the second Star Wars film I ever saw (after Return of the Jedi).

40 years is a ruby anniversary, so maybe that explains all the red in the movie and the marketing. It's like how Doctor Who switched back to the classic diamond logo for its 60 year diamond anniversary last year. I've been trying to remember if Star Trek did anything similar for its 50th anniversary in 2016, but there's not much evidence anyone was even aware of it. In fact, the way Star Trek Beyond was marketed, it's more likely they would've been celebrating 15 years of The Fast and the Furious.

There will be SPOILERS below as I'm giving the whole movie a bit of a review. Maybe I'll still like it after 7 years of reflection and watching YouTube videos hating on it, maybe I won't. You'll have to keep reading to find out.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Part 4

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the last quarter of The Last Jedi. I'm going to leave the overall review for a separate article this time, that'll be Part Five, but this article will bring you to the end of the movie.

Click PART ONE, PART TWO or PART THREE, if you want to jump back to an earlier page.

The Last Jedi was the highest grossing movie of 2017, which is interesting as if it really wasn't connecting with people it would've dropped right off after its opening weekend. I mean it did have the largest drop of any of the movies so far, clearly it was not winning everyone over, but it was still topping the charts.

It ultimately brought in $1.334 billion, putting it between the other two sequel trilogy episodes in success. But it was apparently the cheapest of the three movies by a significant amount, so it made a suitable amount of bank. It's still the 12th most expensive film of all time though. Incidentally, The Force Awakens is still considered to be 1st most expensive movie ever made after almost a decade, which is kind of crazy to me.

There will be SPOILERS below as I go scene by scene and wrap this film up.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I am yet to stop writing about The Last Jedi.

You've found part three, so if you want to return to PART ONE or PART TWO, click the links.

When Disney bought Lucasfilm and the Star Wars rights in 2012 for $4 billion, the plan seemed to be that they'd have a new hit movie out every single year, which is exactly what happened... for a while. We had The Force Awakens, Rogue One, The Last Jedi, Solo, The Rise of Skywalker, and that was it. Despite all their best efforts, Lucasfilm haven't been able to get a Star Wars movie into cinemas since 2019.

The funny thing is, Rise of Skywalker was a huge hit and passed a billion dollars at the box office. Sure that was only half the take of The Force Awakens, but Star Wars got off the blockbuster bus long before big film franchises started seriously bombing at the cinema and people started watching Barbie and Mario instead. Either Lucasfilm has learned their lessons and are taking the time to do it right... or all of their movie ideas have been getting turned into TV series to feed Disney+.

There are going to be SPOILERS if you continue reading any further, but I won't say a thing about anything that happens in things that were released later. So I can't go into detail about why the last season of The Bad Batch was so good, but I'll totally give away the endings to earlier stories when they're relevant.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I am continuing to write about Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

You're reading part two (of five), but if you'd rather jump back and read PART ONE, just click the text.

It's a bit of a shame I reckon that this isn't called Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi, to match the earlier films. Sure it says 'Episode VIII' in the scrolling text at the start of the movie, but it's not on the poster or the Blu-ray cover. They could've at least stuck the number on the spine!

To be fair, the Star Wars movies only started to put emphasis on the episode numbers when the prequels came out. Before The Phantom Menace's name was finally revealed the movie was just called Episode I. You can get Episode I: The Visual Dictionary and Episode I: Racer. Companies only like numbers in their titles when they're low, that's why comics keep getting rebooted to a new issue #1. Funny thing is, in the rare cases when sequels do get high numbers in the title, they seem to sell just fine. Star Trek VI and Furious 7 did well enough, and the Final Fantasy games didn't truly take off until Final Fantasy VII.

Okay, I'll be going through another 50 minutes of this movie scene by scene, so with any luck I will be hitting the film's halfway point this time. It'll be close though. Also, there will be SPOILERS.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Part 1

Written by:

Rian Johnson

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Directed by:

Rian Johnson

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Release Date:

2017

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Hey, they got the logo right. So far so good!

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the first part of my review of the most divisive Star Wars movie: Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi. And it really is his movie as he was both director and writer (with a little help from Carrie Fisher). He brought his style to the Star Wars universe here in a way that a lot of fans... responded to.

If you organise all the Star Wars episodes by their user rating on sites like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, etc. there's always one movie that ends up right at the bottom, and that is... The Rise of Skywalker (except on Metacritic where TROS came second to The Phantom Menace). The Last Jedi is even higher up the rankings when you look at critic scores, and I've seen plenty of positivity from fans on podcasts and YouTube. But when people talk about "the movie that ruined Star Wars", it's usually this one they're referring to. There's so much hate for this film out there you'd think it was on the level of franchise killers like Batman & Robin, Jaws: The Revenge, or Alien: Resurrection.

Though to be honest, I actually liked Alien: Resurrection, and I enjoyed the The Last Jedi as well. At least I think I did... it's been a while. I don't know if this rewatch is going to turn me against the film, but I'll definitely see if I can pinpoint where other people's frustration is coming from. I'll be going through the movie scene by scene, so there will be SPOILERS below for this and any of the Star Wars episodes up to this point.

Babylon 5: A Call to Arms - Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching the final third of the 5th Babylon 5 movie, A Call to Arms.

I'm getting really close to the end of the Babylon 5 franchise now, with only 13 episodes of Crusade, one more pilot movie and two Lost Tales left to go before it's all over. Oh, plus an animated movie that came out of nowhere recently. And there is always the threat of that reboot series actually getting made, along with more animated films. But after all that I'll be done.

I suppose it could be worse. I could be working my way through Doctor Who or Star Trek...

This is the third and final part of my A Call to Arms review, so if you want to go back to PART ONE or PART TWO click the appropriate text. This is going to include big SPOILERS for the movie and the rest of Babylon 5, but I'll not spoil anything about Crusade.

Babylon 5: A Call to Arms - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching the middle third of the Babylon 5 movie A Call to Arms, which is basically the pilot for the short-lived spin-off series Crusade. Or the prologue to it at least. It lays the groundwork.

The film aired on TNT right at the start of 1999, just 7 weeks after the previous movie, The River of Souls... which was arguably a bit too soon. Especially considering that it had only been a month since viewers had said an emotional goodbye to the characters in Sleeping in Light. It's like when half the Star Trek cast came back for the movie Star Trek: Generations right after wrapping their era up with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, except worse because those guys at least waited three years!

This is part two (of three) so if you want to go back to PART ONE, click that text. This will include big SPOILERS for the movie and the rest of Babylon 5, so be aware of that. I'll not spoil anything about Crusade, however.

Babylon 5: A Call to Arms - Part 1

Written By:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Directed By:

Mike Vejar

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Release Date:

1999

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the first part of my three-part review of the Babylon 5 TV movie A Call to Arms! Here's a fun fact for you straight away: this is one of only two Babylon 5 stories to share its name with a Deep Space Nine episode (the other being Chrysalis). 

A Call to Arms is the last of the four Babylon 5 TV movies made for TNT, as The Legend of the Rangers was actually made for the Sci Fi Channel. Legend of the Rangers features a new cast and new sets, and it goes off doing its own things. Call to Arms, on the other hand, is a proper Babylon 5 movie, featuring the station and the lead characters and everything. A Call to Arms and The Legend of the Rangers are similar in some ways though, as they were both designed to function as a pilot movie and both of their spin-offs got cancelled before a single episode had aired. At least Call to Arms' series, Crusade, was able to get 13 episodes filmed before being shut down.

Call to Arms also had the proper Babylon 5 production team behind it, with J. Michael Straczynski writing and Mike Vejar returning to direct. They didn't bring back composer Christopher Franke however, making this the first B5 story to be missing his music since the original pilot (and they eventually went back and rescored that to match the rest of the series). Instead, this features a soundtrack by Evan Chen, who'd continue to work on the Crusade series.

Alright, I'm going to go through the whole film scene by scene sharing my reactions and observations, so there will be huge SPOILERS here for the movie and perhaps the rest of Babylon 5. I won't spoil a thing about Crusade or Legend of the Rangers, however.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace - Part 5

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the epic finale to my Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace article! Part five of five. You can jump to one of the earlier parts by clicking the text: PART ONE, PART TWO, PART THREE, PART FOUR.

It's hard to say what disappointed or confused fans the most about The Phantom Menace, but you could claim that the first thing to really trigger a wave of negativity was the title. From what I can tell, internet polls at the time showed that roughly 25% of people didn't entirely hate it! Fans had been hoping for something that sounded epic and cool, something like Balance of the Force, or Guardians of the Force, or Children of the Force ('the Force' seemed to show up a lot in rumoured titles).

By comparison, The Phantom Menace sounded cheesy, childish, hokey, and old-fashioned. Some people loved it because it sounded like a chapter in a Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers serial from the 30s, others hated it for the same reason. Some were even convinced that a title that bad had to be a hoax, maybe caused by someone hacking the Star Wars website, maybe planted by George Lucas himself as part of a cunning deception!

Personally, I have no idea what I thought of the name when I first saw it. At this point, it's just the title of the film for me and I wouldn't want it to be called anything else. And I have a feeling most of the people who hated the name eventually accepted it and moved on... to complaining about Episode II being called Attack of the Clones.

SPOILER WARNING: I'm going to write about the ending of the film and then share my thoughts about the movie overall. I'll also be spoiling things about the Original Trilogy films, but nothing about the Sequel Trilogy, the cartoons or the TV series. I won't spoil anything about the Ewoks movies either, but that's just because I don't actually know anything about the Ewoks movies.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace - Part 4

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the penultimate part of my Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace article! If you'd like to read one of the earlier parts instead, click the appropriate text: PART ONE, PART TWO, PART THREE.

One thing I can appreciate about the Star Wars movies is that they're still using the same logo as the first film, even though it was introduced way back in 1977. Sometimes you want things to change, I like it when TV series get different opening titles each season for instance, but this logo is exactly what people wanted to see on screen in 1999 and they were just as happy to see it when The Force Awakens came out in 2015. I can't think of another movie series that's been so consistent with its typography, certainly not Star Trek. It helps to bind the films together as one complete saga.

Okay, I'm about an hour and a quarter in at this point, and I'm going to be writing about a half-hour chunk of the movie in detail, so there will be SPOILERS. I'll almost certainly end up spoiling something that happens in the Original Trilogy as well, because I can't help it. I know some people start with Episode I, but I want to compare things to other things!

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace - Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still writing about The Phantom Menace, the first chapter of the Star Wars saga. Or the fourth, depending on your point of view.

This is unambiguously the third part of my article, so CLICK HERE for part one and CLICK HERE for part two. No part four yet, sorry. I'm still working on it. Writing takes forever, especially for a two-hour movie. At 133 minutes this is longer than any of the Original Trilogy films, though it's actually one of the shorter movies overall. Later films hit the 140-minute mark and The Last Jedi is 152 minutes long. That's close to 700 hours!

There'll probably be a couple of SPOILERS here for the Original Trilogy, and I'll be going through Phantom Menace scene by scene so I'm definitely going to be spoiling that. I'll not be spoiling The Clone Wars or The Mandalorian or anything like that however. Actually I've changed my mind, I'll spoil that they're good and you should watch them. Maybe get a watch list for Clone Wars though.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures it's the second part of my epic five-part article about Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace! If you want to go back to part one, CLICK HERE.

You might be wondering why I'm covering the film in five parts instead of four, or three, or one. Well, I did start off with one part, but then I just kept finding more and more to write about. George Lucas had a similar problem when he was coming up with the first Star Wars, as he found that he had enough story for a trilogy. Or a trilogy of trilogies in fact. I mean he didn't have the whole Prequel Trilogy written down in 1976, but he had backstory figured out that could be used as a foundation for more movies. Plus he called Empire Strikes Back 'Episode V', which was a definite hint that he had prequel episodes in mind.

I get the impression that people have gotten a bit wary of prequels, the shine's worn off the idea a bit, but I don't think they were much of a thing back in the 90s when this came out. In fact, I have a suspicion that The Phantom Menace is what really kicked off the trend and it's probably not a coincidence that a couple of years later Star Trek suddenly came up with its own prequel, Enterprise. The thing about Star Wars though, is so much of the story was still untold. We'd never gotten any hint about the origins of Darth Vader or the Empire, or who Luke's mother was etc. So unlike a lot of prequels, this trilogy was far from redundant. But was it any good? I'll let you know what I think, and you can me know what you think afterwards.

There will be SPOILERS here for Episode IV, Episode V, Episode VI and Episode I. Like major revelations about a character's identity you might not want to know.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace - Part 1

Written By:

George Lucas

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Directed By:

George Lucas

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Release Date:

1999

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. I've already written about A New Hope and The Force Awakens, so it's only fair that I give the prequel trilogy a turn. In an epic four-part article five-part article!

The Phantom Menace isn't the highest-grossing movie of all time and it's certainly not the most critically acclaimed of all films, but it's got a definite claim to being the most hyped movie ever made. The original Star Wars trilogy was one of the biggest events in cinema history, but then after 1983 it just stopped. Well okay, there were the Ewoks movies etc, but creator George Lucas basically just stood aside and let Star Trek take over as the biggest sci-fi movie series.

But the Star Wars franchise had been kept alive in books, games, and the Special Edition re-releases, so a 16-year break between movies only made fans more anxious to see some actual new Star Wars. People went to see it in droves and when they came back they had opinions, and those opinions were... generally positive I think. It took a while for people to really process what they'd seen.

In fact, it's taken me 24 years to get around to typing up what I think about The Phantom Menace. I could've waited another year for its 25th anniversary and honestly, it was tempting, but I need to get this done already so I can move on... to other stuff that also needs writing about.

The Star Wars movies are a little bit weird with SPOILERS due to the different orders you can watch them in, so I had to make a choice and I've decided that anything that came out before 1999 is fair game. So if you want to avoid knowing anything about A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, you probably shouldn't be reading this.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 4

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've finally finished watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. And it only took me three weeks. This is the fourth and final part of this review, but if you want to check out PART ONE, PART TWO or PART THREE, you can click one of those links.

I'm really running low on trivia to pad out this intro text now. Uh, the title font looks mostly the same as the one used in Star Trek 1 and Star Trek 3, so they'd pretty much settled on a style by this point.

It also got brought back for the Deep Space Nine and Voyager logos, but they got bored with it after that. Which is a shame I reckon as it looks great. It's not an obviously sci-fi looking typeface but not quite fantasy either. The current TV series have gone back to the equally iconic Original Series logo, so maybe there's hope that the movie logo will also make a comeback someday.

Okay, please be aware that there will be lots of pictures underneath this writing and underneath each of those pictures will be even more writing. And that writing will be 90% SPOILERS. I'll not be spoiling any Trek that comes afterwards however. Well, unless stuff like logo fonts counts as a spoiler for you, in which case I've already given away too much.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm still writing about Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. 

I keep thinking that I should apologise for writing so much about this film and dragging this on for so long. It wasn't the original plan, I'm not working towards a word count goal, it's just how it worked out. On the plus side you're basically getting a free book out of me here. A free book without an editor!

This is the third part of four, so if you want to go back to PART ONE or PART TWO click the text.

SPOILER WARNING: I'll be spoiling everything that happens in the film and any Star Trek movie or episode that came before it is also fair game.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm continuing through the fourth of the original Star Trek movies, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I like roman numerals, they make titles seem classier.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation movies also made it to film #4, but only just, and they didn't put any kind of numerals in its title. It's just called Star Trek: Nemesis. The Kelvin Timeline films don't use numbers either (they don't even use colons) so there's no danger of another Star Trek IV coming out any time soon. I mean seriously, it's been seven years since Star Trek Beyond and they still haven't made a fourth movie yet.

This is the second part of four, so if you want to go back to PART ONE click the text.

I'll be writing about the whole movie scene by scene, so there will be SPOILERS. Though I won't spoil anything from later Star Trek stories, even when there's something really obvious I should mention.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 1

Writer:

Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Nicholas Meyer, Harve Bennett

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Director:

Leonard Nimoy

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Release Date:

1986

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the film I have to describe as 'The One With the Whales' for SEO purposes: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.  

It's weird to say that the fourth movie is the third in the trilogy, but that's how it kind of worked out, as this continues on from the events in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, two films I wrote about back in 2016. You might be wondering why I jumped ahead to Star Trek VI and never came back to this, especially considering it was the film's 30th anniversary at the time... well, it's never been a favourite of mine. It's all about whales instead of spaceships, and the music sounds like it's from a Christmas movie, and Spock's weird, and etc. Though to be fair I was really young when I formed my first impression.

Speaking of anniversaries, the film was released on Star Trek's 20th anniversary, though I don't think they made a big deal out of it. Not compared to when Star Trek 6 came out on its 25th anniversary. In fact in some countries the posters called it The Voyage Home: Star Trek IV, with the Star Trek part in tiny writing, to not put people off. (The franchise hadn't been doing so well outside of the US).

Alright, I'm going to split this review into four parts, because films are long, and I'm going to split the parts over three weeks, because they take ages to write about. Well they do when you write about every bloody scene at least. The way I see it, I'm only ever writing about this film once so I might as well say everything I want to say now. This means that there will be huge SPOILERS here, but only for Star Trek stories up to November 1986.

Babylon 5: The River of Souls - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still making my way through the 1998 Babylon 5 TV movie, The River of Souls. This is part 2 of 2, so if you want to go back to part 1, click HERE.

There are actually six Babylon 5 movies, kind of:

• The Gathering (1993) - The original pilot movie.
• In the Beginning (1998) - A prequel about the Earth-Minbari War.
  
• Thirdspace (1998) - Lovecraftian weirdness during season 4.
  
• The River of Souls (1998) - You are here.
  
• A Call to Arms (1999) - A lead-in to the Crusade spin-off.
  
• The Legend of the Rangers (2002) - The pilot for a spin-off that never made it to a series.
  

So even though I'm in the final stretch now there's plenty left for me to write about. In another timeline I'd be going straight into writing about the Babylon 5 reboot series afterwards, but that's seeming less than likely at this point. Still, at least I can write about a couple of episodes of Crusade. Yay.

SPOILER WARNING: I'll be writing about this whole movie and mentioning things that happened during the series. I'll not spoil a thing about Crusade or Legend of the Rangers however.

Babylon 5: The River of Souls - Part 1

Written By:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Directed By:

Janet Greek

|

Release Date:

1998

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching the third of the Babylon 5 TV movies made for the TNT network: The River of Souls. I keep wanting to call it River of Souls but there's definitely a 'the' at the start.

The first two TNT movies, Thirdspace and In the Beginning, were filmed before season 5, in May-June 1997, but this was filmed after the series had wrapped, between 1st-21st April 1998. It's a film about the Soul Hunters, from one of B5's least-loved early episodes, so I wonder how many people showed up for work on that first day wondering if it was an amazingly elaborate April Fool's prank. The series was over, writer J. Michael Straczynski could've told a story about anything, but he decided give the Soul Hunters another shot!

At least the film's got a good director: Janet Greek. She had directed stories like Signs and Portents, Chrysalis, The Coming of Shadows and The Fall of Night. Plus it features some real stars in the cast, including The West Wing's Martin Sheen and Deadwood's Ian McShane. No seriously.

Chronologically the movie should come about halfway into a season 6 that doesn't exist, but it actually aired with three episodes of season 5 left to go. They moved it up a couple of weeks so that the finale wasn't overshadowed by it (or vice versa), messing up the order. I'm watching it after Objects in Motion and Objects at Rest however, so there may be SPOILERS here for the two episodes... in addition to all the stories that came before them. I'll not be saying a word about anything that comes after though, so this is first-time viewer safe.

Babylon 5: Thirdspace - Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm finally going to shut up talking about the Babylon 5 movie Thirdspace. I just have to write about what happens in the ending and then I'm done. Though if you want more words you can check out PART ONE and PART TWO and read how the story got to this point.

This review will contain SPOILERS for the movie and the first half of season 4, but I don't intend to give away any more than that, for the sake of people watching the series for the first time. There should always be people watching this series for the first time.