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.

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 Wars: The Book of Boba Fett - Season 1? Review

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing a bit about the first seven episodes of Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett! This could be season 1 or it could be a one-off miniseries, I have no idea, but I'm pretty sure it's not actually a book.

Boba Fett was first introduced in the Star Wars Holiday Special all the way back in 1978, so he's been waiting a while now to get his own series. There was a Boba Fett movie announced in 2013, but director Josh Trank's issues on Fantastic Four led to him quitting before he could get fired, and it ultimately never happened. In retrospect that might have actually been a good thing, considering that the Star Wars TV series have been getting more love from their viewers than the movies lately.

This is a spin-off from The Mandalorian by the same creator, Iron Man director Jon Favreau, with Desperado and Sin City director Robert Rodriguez directing half the episodes, so there's a fair chance it might be good. Or it could be a massive disaster like the Star Wars: Resistance cartoon. It came out months ago so I guess everyone already knows! All my reviews were written directly after watching each episode though so any apparently cluelessness is genuine.

There will be SPOILERS for The Book of Boba Fett, The Mandalorian and probably lots of other Star Wars below. But I won't spoil anything that comes afterwards, in chronological or production order. In fact I can't spoil anything made after it, as right now this is still the newest Star Wars.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian - Season 2 Review

This week's Sci-Fi Adventures just happens to land on May the 4th so I figured I'd go with something Star Wars flavoured this time.

I wrote about The Mandalorian's first season last year and I generally liked it. There was one small issue I had with it though: I felt like I was missing pieces of the backstory because I hadn't seen The Clone Wars or Rebels and I knew they had a lot of Mandalorian drama in them. I did have a good reason for skipping them though: I was a big fan of the original Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars cartoon and I was kind of put off when it was replaced with ropey-looking CGI series apparently aimed at younger kids. Plus the reviews said that the movie was terrible and they'd given Anakin a teenage sidekick that calls him 'Skyguy'!

Anyway, I decided to try to make an effort to get through The Clone Wars to prepare for The Mandalorian season 2 and it turns out that I was an idiot for writing the series off so quickly. You just have to skip the episodes with Jar Jar Binks in them and it's great! It does a good job of rehabilitating the character of Anakin Skywalker, and his relationship with his apprentice Ahsoka Tano works really well. I'm not surprised she pulled a Harley Quinn and made the jump from making appearances in a cartoon to leading her own live-action series.

Though I'm not writing about The Clone Wars here, I'm writing about more The Mandalorian. Well, to be honest I actually wrote these reviews ages ago, right after watching the episodes. So if I sound like I don't know what's coming next, that's because I actually didn't at the time.

There'll be SPOILERS here for the whole series so far, and maybe a few of the movies and cartoons, so I recommend you stop reading here if that's going to be a problem.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian - Season 1 Review

The week on Sci-Fi Adventures... is going to be the last week for a while I'm afraid. I'll be writing about video games on Super Adventures instead for the next two months so that hopefully I don't go insane. But before that I'm going to be sharing my thoughts about season one of The Mandalorian, the very first live action Star Wars TV series!

Man, it took them bloody long enough. Star Trek made the jump from live action series to movies 13 years after it first premiered, but it took Star Wars 42 years to do the opposite! On the other end of the scale, Doctor Who and Firefly hit cinemas just 3 years after their first episodes aired, which is the same amount of time that Stargate took to evolve into a TV franchise. Even Lost in Space beats Star Wars, as it got a movie after 33 years (then jumped back to TV 20 years later). Plus if you count TV movies, Babylon 5 progressed from pilot movie to series after just a year, Battlestar Galactica got a film after 29 years, and Red Dwarf actually got its promised movie after 32 years. Okay I'm done now.

Wait, Indiana Jones (11 years). Sorry, now I'm done.

The reason a Star Wars series took so long to get made is that they were waiting for the technology to make it possible to produce on a TV schedule and budget. George Lucas actually had something like 40-50 scripts for a show called Star Wars: Underworld (from writers like DS9/BSG's Ronald D. Moore), which was planned to be produced in the late 2000s, but it just wasn't time yet. Lucasfilm apparently took some of the story concepts and ideas and put them into things like Rebels, Rogue One and Solo instead. It turns out the technology they needed was a set made of giant LED walls featuring a resolution high enough for them to be used for both lighting and as the backdrop, with the scenery rendered in real time using Unreal Engine 4 so that the parallax is always correct from the camera's point of view. But they've got that now, so it's cool.

Anyway, I wrote these reviews right after watching the episodes so if I sound like I don't know what's coming next, that's because I actually didn't at the time. There'll be SPOILERS here for the whole first season and maybe a few of the movies, so I recommend you stop reading here if that's going to be a problem.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Part 3

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the final part of my epic three-part Star Wars: The Force Awakens review! If you missed PART ONE or PART TWO, then click the text to jump right there.

It's not a coincidence that I'm writing about the movie now, just before The Rise of Skywalker comes out. I mean I started writing it ages ago, but I realised that this was the ideal deadline to hit. It probably would've made more sense to write about The Last Jedi, seeing as it's the film that actually leads into the new movie, and to be honest I think it'd be more interesting to examine, but I figured I should start at the beginning of the trilogy. This way I get to talk about whether Rey is a Mary Sue or not, and I bet you're dying to read another opinion about that on the internet.

This will contain SPOILERS for the movie, but you know that as I've said it twice already. I say it on all my reviews in fact, even though there's a spoiler warning in the side panel over on the right. Maybe I could change the colour of the warning text next week, add a bit of variety.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Part 2

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still going through J.J. Abrams' Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens!

Actually I don't think the 'Episode VII' part is in the name this time, which is a shame because I like it when films get numbers; they let me keep my stories straight. If I ever decide to watch the Harry Potter movies I'm going to have to find a guide just to know what order to watch them in. Star Wars, on the other hand, has handy episode numbers that... well okay this is actually a bad example, seeing as episodes 1, 2 and 3 came out years after 4, 5, and 6 and everyone's got their own ideas on which order works best.

Fortunately it's easy to figure out what order to read this review in, as you start with PART ONE, then you read this part, then part three finishes it off tomorrow.

I'm going through the movie scene by scene so this will be full of SPOILERS. I'll also be spoiling parts of the earlier Star Wars movies (episodes 1 to 6), but somehow I doubt that's going to be an issue for anyone. I'm just making sure you know what you're in for.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Part 1

Written by:

Lawrence Kasdan & J. J. Abrams and Michael Arndt

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Directed by:

J. J. Abrams

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Release Date:

2015

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm reviewing Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the first Star Wars movie where the film number and the episode number is the same! It's the seventh instalment either way.

It's also the first movie in the final trilogy of the Skywalker Saga. It still blows my mind that they finally made there in the end, as I still (vaguely) remember when there was only one trilogy and no sign that George Lucas was ever going to make the others he had planned. Not that these three films are anything like he'd planned.

I mean I doubt any of them were really, seeing as we're still waiting for Annikin Starkiller to show up, but this trilogy was created after Lucas had sold Star Wars to Disney and his involvement was minimal. His most recent concept for the final trilogy apparently focused on the microbiotic world and midi-chlorians, but Kathleen Kennedy's crew have gone in a different direction and to be honest I'm kind of glad.

Okay, this is going to be the same deal as with my Star Trek Into Darkness review, as I'm splitting it into three parts to save you from having to read too much in one sitting. Though you could just wait a couple of days until all three parts are out and read it that way if you want to climb that mountain of words.

There will be MASSIVE SPOILERS below for The Force Awakens and I'll also be assuming that you've seen the earlier films as well. No spoilers for The Last Jedi or The Rise of Skywalker though, and not just because that last film isn't out for a couple of days at the time I'm posting this. But these are genuine pre-Rise of Skywalker opinions.

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope

Written by:

George Lucas

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Directed by:

George Lucas

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Release Date:

1977

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I've been writing about science fiction for just over a year now, but this week on Sci-Fi Adventures I face my greatest challenge yet: trying to find something even slightly original to say about Rogue One 2: The Star Wars, also known as Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. Or just Star Wars.

The 'Episode IV - A New Hope' bit was added in a theatrical re-release later, but then everyone knows that already. Everyone already knows everything about this bloody movie! There's been essential guides and technical manuals and visual dictionaries and Wookiepedias and Plinketts and podcasts analysing every minute of it, every frame of it, for 40 years now (happy birthday Star Wars!) So it wouldn't come as a huge shock to me if you know more about the movie than I do.

I'm definitely a Star Wars fan, but I've never been obsessed with it to the level that some people are. I've never bought action figures or gone to conventions. I didn't even watch the films in the right order! My introduction to the series was Return of the Jedi, then I watched (some of) Empire Strikes Back, and then Spaceballs. In fact I was probably playing the games before I saw the movie itself. I've put more hours into TIE Fighter and the Jedi Knight series than any of the films.

Though I'm sure I must have seen A New Hope at least of three times by this point. First I rented it on VHS, then I saw the Special Edition in widescreen at the cinema in '97, then I watched the 2004 DVD version a year or so back. So the movie keeps changing every time I see it and that's just weird.

Alright, this is a two hour movie so I'm going to be showing off an absurd amount of screencaps and providing my dumb commentary under each one as I go through the film. Here's something I've noticed already: the Star Wars logo text isn't hollow, the letters are filled in black. Man if I can demonstrate this level of startling insight all the way through maybe there's a chance I can pull this off!

It should be fairly obvious that this will be filled with SPOILERS for Star Wars: Episode IV, but it might come as a surprise that I won't be spoiling anything made after it. So no spoilers for Empire, the prequels, or Rogue One. Some people think that insanely popular 37 year old movies are fair game for spoilers, but that's not how I do things.