So at least I know what a Bothan looks like now!

  1. So as the movie starts, they do a whole thing where they’re emphasizing how this is NOT A REGULAR STAR WARS MOVIE, like there’s no text crawl and the music isn’t all Star Wars Themey at the beginning and all that. Which I applauded at first for not milking franchise cues, but…

  2. The first part of this movie was SUPER FUCKING DULL. Like holy shit boring. I fell asleep. It’s all blah-blah slow character shit, but about characters that we don’t care about inherently, and many of whom we don’t care about any point ever.

  3. So the party in this one feels like something out of KOTOR, where it’s trying to fit into the Star Warsiverse without actually duplicating Star Wars. Oh, we can’t have a Jedi, so we have a… Force Priesty kinda guy. Instead of a smuggler, we have a like… trader dude or something? Instead of a magical princess, we have random lady with revenge on her mind. Etc. It’s clear that they’re less important than the real people will be, but the movie still wants to make you think they’re important enough to give a shit about. It’s a hard line to toe.

  4. Architecture actually seemed like something out of KOTOR, too. When I was awake, it was very pretty in a “Star Wars Calendar” kind of way.

  5. Second half of the movie turned into more of a regular Star Wars movie, with all the bottomless pits and ATATs and squid-face guys commanding Gold Leader to do something and star destroyers smushing into each other and dudes trying to take down the shield and all that. And it was a lot more interesting because of that.

  6. BUT… prequelitis definitely made its presence known. The battle scene wasn’t THAT long, but it felt like it went on forever, because it’s like, WE KNOW IT SUCCEEDS, come on, let’s just jump ahead and not keep putting obstacles that are just time-killers in the way, you know?

  7. All that said, it really nails the landing at the end, and the transition into legacy Star Wars is like… you could stop this movie, start the next one and just continue from there almost uninterrupted. That’d be a super-weird way to first encounter that movie, but it’d work.

  8. Also, the retcon that motivates this whole movie is hilarious in how it’s so deliberately a response to like 40 years of people mocking the Death Star’s designers.

Overall, I guess this is like a decent-but-flawed movie, and they really really really need to quit making goddamn prequels unless they set them in the way-back times like at the founding of the Jedi Order or something.