Skull was just ok. TRoS actually made me angry—and I never get mad about movies, that's just silly. I can't believe they ended a 9 movie saga with that
What was worse? Indiana Jones : Crystal Skull, or Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker
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First walking out of TROS, I would've said Crystal Skull.
A week of thinking and then seeing it a second time: TROS is a worse film. It's an extremely unsatisfying conclusion to a trilogy where the middle film is almost entirely ignored. Although I felt the performances in TROS was stronger than Crystal Skull, Crystal Skull was 100% campy and didn't actively shit on the other movies. I have no desire to watch either movie another time, mind you.
A week of thinking and then seeing it a second time: TROS is a worse film. It's an extremely unsatisfying conclusion to a trilogy where the middle film is almost entirely ignored. Although I felt the performances in TROS was stronger than Crystal Skull, Crystal Skull was 100% campy and didn't actively shit on the other movies. I have no desire to watch either movie another time, mind you.
Crystal skull has bizarre moments, but I still quite enjoy it
The same can't really be said for RoS
The same can't really be said for RoS
Crystal Skull never tried to pander to a toxic, racist, mysoginist fanbase as a response to a previous movie.
Crystal Skull is better by far. It's true to the themes of the adventure serials that the series is based on, it just didn't do it particularly well, and there's some silly shit in there that feels out of place. Rise of Skywalker was a stupid, rushed, incompetent mess of a movie that did not know where it was going and is completely underwhelming as the end of a series. The only positive thing in that movie was that Palps and his clone hype-crew were kinda fun.
Crystal Skull was about 3-4 removed scenes and some tweaks here and there from being a legitimately great Indy film.
The Rise of Skywalker was just complete garbage from beginning to end. Totally irredeemable.
The Rise of Skywalker was just complete garbage from beginning to end. Totally irredeemable.
Crystal Skull isn't even the worst Indiana.
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Rise of Skywalker also isn't lmao but it is still worse than any Indiana Jones film
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Rise of Skywalker also isn't lmao but it is still worse than any Indiana Jones film
Star Wars by a large margin. Crystal Skull was a functional, but bad movie. TROS is just a mess.
Crystal Skull is entirely standalone and can be disregarded, but Rise of Skywalker hitched its wagon to all the preceding films and practically sunk the franchise.
I could at least make thematic sense out of Crystal Skull -- I understand the progression from '40s pulp adventure to '50s sci-fi (which I actually kind of liked), and it has some cool moments and bits, despite being an overall bad movie with lots of bad parts. It's been a while, but I don't remember ever thinking that the script simply didn't function (don't at me about the fridge, it was on-par for Indiana Jones silliness, I mean the actual narrative progression of the movie).
Rise of Skywalker was just rotten to the core. In addition to sinking on the broken foundation of a completely incompetent script -- like shockingly, laughing-in-the-theater incompetent -- what puts it over the edge of badness for me is the meta surrounding the film. J.J. received the ball and he and Disney consciously decided to make a film that overtly coddled and catered to a vocal community of alt-right white male hate while entirely sidelining its bipoc cast, all in favor of making an incomprehensible, dissonant mess. It's fucking gross. That puts it over the edge for me; even compared to the prequels, it may have a much nicer sheen and better base-level performances, but at least those movies weren't quite as deliberately regressive.
Rise of Skywalker was just rotten to the core. In addition to sinking on the broken foundation of a completely incompetent script -- like shockingly, laughing-in-the-theater incompetent -- what puts it over the edge of badness for me is the meta surrounding the film. J.J. received the ball and he and Disney consciously decided to make a film that overtly coddled and catered to a vocal community of alt-right white male hate while entirely sidelining its bipoc cast, all in favor of making an incomprehensible, dissonant mess. It's fucking gross. That puts it over the edge for me; even compared to the prequels, it may have a much nicer sheen and better base-level performances, but at least those movies weren't quite as deliberately regressive.
Two of my worst movie experiences ever were swinging through the trees with the monkeys from Crystal skull, and Princess Leia flying through space in The Last Jedi. Only one of those is on this list, so Crystal Skull. I can never watch those movies again because of those scenes. I'm sure there are worse scenes in the history of cinema, but those two gave me such a strong negative response that I still can't shake them years later.
Remember Crystal Skull as being subpar for the series in a kind of Die Hard 4 way, but still ok overall.
Rise of Skywalker had some ok parts but left me with the feeling that it primarily splurted things on the walls out of unjustified desperation, resulting in a contrived, haphazard, artificial mess by creators that stifled their creative integrity in favor of causing the foundation of the whole trilogy to crumble into a hacky random nonsense singularity where nothing felt like it mattered any longer and I was just waiting for it to end already.
Having enjoyed the first two, it bums me out that this is how the trilogy ended. Probably the worst finale of a trilogy I've seen.
Rise of Skywalker had some ok parts but left me with the feeling that it primarily splurted things on the walls out of unjustified desperation, resulting in a contrived, haphazard, artificial mess by creators that stifled their creative integrity in favor of causing the foundation of the whole trilogy to crumble into a hacky random nonsense singularity where nothing felt like it mattered any longer and I was just waiting for it to end already.
Having enjoyed the first two, it bums me out that this is how the trilogy ended. Probably the worst finale of a trilogy I've seen.
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Crystal Skull was bad.
The Rise of Skywalker was offensive in that it actively fucking pandered to a part of its audience that should have been shut the fuck down and told to shut the fuck up long before the filming even started. So yeah, that movie not only sucks as a movie but on a bunch of other levels too. And this is the end of the saga? Fucks sake...
The Rise of Skywalker was offensive in that it actively fucking pandered to a part of its audience that should have been shut the fuck down and told to shut the fuck up long before the filming even started. So yeah, that movie not only sucks as a movie but on a bunch of other levels too. And this is the end of the saga? Fucks sake...
As a casual fan, I thought the Leia force flying thing was cool.
It's unclear whether the Old Indy segments are even canon anymore. When Lucasfilm re-released the series, they re-edited the stories and removed all the Old Indy segments (original series is titled "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles", re-released version is titled "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones").
Obviously there is no denying that TROS is a highly-reactionary film. But who's reaction were they responding to and why? Critics loved it. Half the people who saw it loved it and a good portion more thought it was fine. The movie made bank. It was praised for its bold choices.
TROS was trying to make course corrections that it didn't need to make. If it had doubled-down on TLJ it would have at least made half the audience happy rather than none. And further more, the solutions they hit on are creatively bankrupt.
And let's examine the film on its own terms. It has problems that are completely unrelated to the previous two films in the franchise. Chewbacca is dead! But five minutes later we learn he's fine. C3PO is going to lose his memories! Oh, no wait, he's fine. That's just two glaring examples of how the film refuses to commit to any stakes.
i could go on, talk about the editing and useless plot detours, the mediocre Williams score that misuses themes, etc, but this isn't the thread
I know, the edited version is the one I've been watching with a friend of mine the last few months.
And re: that series.... My God does it feel very un-Indy. No supernatural stuff, and the episodes with Kid Indy is basically educational programming.
As a concept I really like what they tried to do. But the execution could definitely have been better, yeah...
crystal skull could be redeemed with a few reshoots and cuts. solid script, poor direction.
RoS is a total loss imo.
RoS is a total loss imo.
I like the series for what it is, but it got rather formulaic very quickly, with Indy just happening to bump into random historical people just because, like they were some kind of deus ex machina, so the writers could spin a yarn about Indy meeting <famous historical person>. IIRC Lucas is/was very fond of Tolkien and LotR, so I'm almost surprised they didn't have Indy meet Tolkien during WW1 just because.
Crystal skull has some dumb sequences but it does not single handlely make the original three movies mean absolutely nothing nor does it negate all of Indy's achievements and then force a lamer version of said achievements to Mutt.
"Course correction" doesn't even explain half the shit that was piled onto that plot.
Yeah, for sure. It's a me thing. I'm sure some people were cheering at the monkey scene too.
I think TROS didn't affect me so strongly was because I had already switched off from that trilogy long before it released. My expectations were so low that even a film that bad didn't have the power to make me feel anything.
It kinda does, in the sense that it feel likes Abrams went "well, fuck, my version of Episode VIII would've been COMPLETELY different than TLJ. Hmm, you know what? Fuck it. Let's just combine both my ideas for VIII or IX into one big, long-ass movie while ignoring as much of TLJ as possible. That'll be okay, and won't turn it into an incoherent mess, right?"
The Rise of Skywalker is what happens when JJ Abrams actually has to conclude his mystery boxes instead of leaving so other people have to contend with them. It's especially insulting because it's clear The Last Jedi knew that those mysteries had no real answer so it resolved them and then Rise just brings them right back. It's kind of funny if not a little sad. You can see that people get super invested in them though and they hate how they got resolved in TLJ. It's why the trick has worked so well, people never learn. It was the same shit with Lost too. People will fall for it over and over again and even hate on the dude who tells them its a trick and tries to get them to move on. Nobody wants to admit they got fooled into getting invested in who Rey's parents were when everyone who was familiar with Abrams' prior work knew it was nothing.
TRoS completely undid the legacy of the family in the title, and was the rotten cherry topping of a trilogy that wanted to keep calling back to the originals while rendering the journey through them entirely meaningless. That's all on top of being a disappointing installment.
Crystal Skull was a disappointment only within its own runtime. I can watch the other Indiana Jones films without giving Crystal Skull a second thought.
Crystal Skull was a disappointment only within its own runtime. I can watch the other Indiana Jones films without giving Crystal Skull a second thought.
Yeah, this too. I get it, John Williams is old, but there's like 1 new half-baked theme in RoS, surrounded by generic filler, without even that many callbacks to previous themes. This could've (and should've) been a grand finale to a 40+ year epic, had anyone involved in production given it the time and effort it deserved.
I don't think there was much inspiring him to put any effort into that project. Such a forgettable OST.
Honestly I don't remember the last Indiana Jones movie to be honest. Just bits and pieces (for the best I'm sure). I remember greatly disliking it. Like I remember feeling bad because I enjoyed all the other IJ movies so much and just hated most things about this one. The swinging with the monkeys. The surviving the nuke. The aliens. Just didn't vibe with me at all. I'd have to watch it again to really know where I slot it in comparison. But I'm pretty sure Star Wars would rate worse with me. IJ didn't actively ruin characters retroactively at least.