Category Archives: Ramblings

Spark

Posted by Ross Harrison on

I tried another one. Technically this is the third one, but I gave up the second as a lost cause learning opportunity.

Instead, I tried a photomanipulation more on topic, about reading and imagination. And I shoved my characters in it. This was also a simpler one, with only four images, other than my character/ship concept art (mostly from Arianne), and a couple of custom brushes.

Here, again because I don’t know what else to do with, is a photomanipulation I’ve cleverly named ‘Reading’, and even more cleverly thought of as ‘learning’ so I don’t have to address all the issues with it:

Perhaps next time, I’ll…write a book.

What Waits Below

Posted by Ross Harrison on

I was thinking about one of The X-Files films the other day for no reason. The film starts with a child falling through the ground into a cave system, getting alien’d up, and then the Smoking Man and his people cover it all up with grass and a children’s play area. Being a writer with books to get on with, I obviously decided to make a photomanipulation along the same lines.

Now…here it is, because I don’t know what else to do with it.

I’ve never done one of these before, because I’ve only really worked with 3D except do very mildly edit my book covers, and took some additional inspiration and tips from Nemanja Sekulic. I can see plenty that should be improved and corrected, but I’ve done enough that my brain will let me go back to writing now.

Obligatory Update

Posted by Ross Harrison on

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a useless blog-writer must still update their blog at least once every year. As it is approaching the one-year anniversary of Church of the Assassin releasing (already), and I’ve written nothing here since…here is that update.

Ahem. Let’s see… What’s in the news… Well, never mind.

Although this was never supposed to be any kind of review blog, I have babbled about films and even games here and there, and yet I haven’t even returned to talk about the dreaded/fawned-over Snyder Cut. I do have a half-finished review of it written, but I couldn’t be bothered to finish. The gist is that I grudgingly like it a lot more than Whedon’s nonsense, but it’s still terrible.

More importantly, I am currently just over 90,000 words into my next book, which will see the return of Archer and Juni, the two who are supposed to be the overall main protagonists of my series, and yet haven’t been seen for 9 years. I’m glad no one was around to take a picture of the stupid smile on my face while I was writing their first scene together since 2012. It will be the first of a trilogy of sorts, alternating with the trilogy that Church of the Assassin kicked off.

In the meantime, I’m working on hardbacks of all the books, which will be available soon! And because I wanted it, the artist who has done the last three covers is doing some art for both Archer and Juni, so I should have that to share soon too.

I’m also considering writing some more of the Writer’s Guides, as they seem to be the most popular thing on this site. But you can see how infrequently I write anything here, and judge for yourself how likely that is to happen.

So there’s my annual update.

Bye.

2020 and the Heat Death of the Universe

Posted by Ross Harrison on

We are minute specks in the unfathomable immensity of the cosmos, living a fraction of a second in universal time. We exist on a tiny dot travelling at 67,000 mph through a solar system that is moving at 490,000 mph through a galaxy that is moving at 1.3 million mph through the universe, pulled by an unknown entity we call the Great Attractor, powerful enough to drag a hundred thousand galaxies towards it. But the important thing is that we’re about to complete one more spin round the sun.

Once again, the end of the year has arrived and we’re supposed to share messages of hope. Comic geniuses this time are able to swap their calls of ‘see you next year’ with calls of ‘see you next decade’, and then guffaw with delight at their hilarity, cleverness and, above all, originality. It’s time to pretend that the world will magically improve overnight because our calendars are new. It’s 2020. It’s the future. We’re supposed to have world peace, a utopian society, hoverboards. Instead we have war and terrorism, hate crimes, and glorified plastic skateboards with batteries that catch fire.

What are we ushering in the new year with? With fireworks while Australia burns, an area bigger than entire countries devoured by flame, leaving people dead, millions of animals dead, homes destroyed. While the men and women we sent to fight, to kill, to die in a war we’ve quietly agreed to forget was started because of the lies of warmongers try to cope with that gunfire in the sky, because of course our right to see pretty lights is more important than the PTSD we gave them. With news that, despite these unprecedented wildfires in Australia and California, environmental policies won’t be changed, because what does science know. With grown adults attacking teenagers for caring about their future. With an increase in bigotry, hate-fuelled attacks and murders, school shootings, and the devastating lies that cause and encourage it all. With the election of world leaders who will put children in cages, strip citizens of rights and basic medical care, assassinate foreign citizens in their own countries. With savage brutality against civilians and journalists by Hong Kong police while Western media stays as quiet as possible. With the assurance to our children that we don’t give a shit about them or their future. With the assurance to women, minorities, and those underrepresented in every walk of life that we still don’t give a shit about them.

As always, people will do whatever they want, but perhaps instead of hiding behind warm and fuzzy feelings that everything will be okay because it’s a new year, instead of burying our heads in the sand, we’ll pull them out and look. And perhaps looking will lead to seeing. And perhaps seeing will lead to doing.

Or perhaps all our tiny dot’s latest spin round the sun will change is the number on the calendar.

pale-blue-dot

The Rise of Skywalker

Posted by Ross Harrison on

ReyKylo

Continuing my fine tradition of filling my author blog with ramblings about films, here’s some ramblings about the ninth and final (until Disney wants to cash in again) film in the Skywalker saga.

I won’t be writing too much about it for now, as I haven’t had time for it all to sink in (and I left the cinema actually liking The Last Jedi, so I’ve learned to think for longer before giving much of an opinion). So there won’t be spoilers.

JJ Abrams was left with an absolute mess to try to tidy up and bring into order in just one film, whilst simultaneously delivering a finale to a more than forty-year-old saga. He did okay. He could have done better in some areas, but he could have done a lot worse. It seems like he went into it with the resolution to just ignore TLJ where he could and flippantly dismiss it where he couldn’t ignore it. This resulted in a film that didn’t entirely feel like it was a follow on, but did feel like a return to what the trilogy was originally supposed to be.

The downside to this is that it seems painfully obvious that Emperor Palpatine was never meant to return, and only did so because a certain director wanted so desperately to ‘subvert expectations’ that he off’d the main villain without thought for the next writers and director. Sidious does little and never feels like a threat. If anything, it weakens his character overall to have him back just for this.

Because of the time jump between the two films, Rey has actually had time to train and learn from the Jedi texts, so when she uses the Force, it actually seems like she has done something to earn it, and it makes sense. This is welcome departure from how, in The Force Awakens, she goes from not knowing for sure that the Jedi are real to suddenly doing a Jedi Mind Trick on James Bond out of nowhere. Revelations regarding her are a little weak and predictable, but I would almost say that doesn’t matter if it weren’t for the fact that it is at the core of the story. She is less two-dimensional this time, and actually feels more like she is driving the story rather than just sitting in for the ride while stuff happens.

rey

There were more surprises in terms of what wasn’t in the film that what was. Expected scenes, characters, and lines not being there was a minor disappointment, but by the end of the film, any unanswered questions and issues I had were mild and pretty unimportant. Only one thing happened that I was certain I did not want to happen, and that will remain a black mark on the film/trilogy. But it wasn’t enough to make me unhappy with the film overall. And, for me, the final line in the film is perfect (even if the character it’s delivered to makes no sense).

So, while I need to think about it more to really form an opinion, I think overall the trilogy and the saga ended pretty well. You could say it rises to the occasion…if you want people to roll their eyes at you. Not as well as Star Wars deserves, but well enough.

(EDIT: My brain was obviously thinking about it while I slept, because I woke up with a lot more questions starting with ‘why the hell’. A lot more issues came to mind, and things that happened just for story convenience, typical Abrams style. But nothing (yet) has changed my mind overall.)

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Also my book is out, so…there’s my authorly duty.

Uplifting of Starkiller

Posted by Ross Harrison on

I didn’t intend to stay up until 3am to watch the new Star Wars trailer, but when Twitter was full of ‘only 2 minutes until the trailer’ for an hour, it just happened. And it was good. Ticket sales already beat out everything including Endgame (although they opened at a more reasonable time of day than Endgame’s, so there’s that), and The Last Jedi -prompted boycott of Star Wars seems to be going well…

Rey exudes a goodness that can’t be turned to the Dark side, Kylo Ren still looks like a moody teenager with an unstable lightsaber, and the others are also there. C-3PO’s line is beaten by Carrie Fisher’s single word as the biggest punch to the heart, and Po says some stuff also.

TLJ

The Last Jedi was bad. Objectively, bad film-makingly bad as well as subjectively, bad writingly bad. Rian Johnson’s need to ‘subvert expectations’ at any cost subverted our expectations of a great Star Wars film and left many hurdles for JJ Abrams to clamber over. There’s no telling if he is up to it. Force Awakens was very good (I thought), but not without its own problems. Not least of all R2D2 waking up at the end just…because. Abrams couldn’t be bothered to think up an actual reason for it, so it just happened out of convenience. That kind of lazy writing will not save this trilogy, so who knows. I look forward to it, anyway.

Aside from the unknowable issues that may arise in the film, there are only two things I know for sure I don’t want to happen. I don’t want Rey to turn to the Dark side, and I don’t want the teen girl ‘Reylo’ obsession to come about. Both would be awful writing, and the former would be insulting to the other characters and to the whole ‘I won’t be the last Jedi’ thing.

But the latter would be real-world problematic. Kylo Ren is a mass murderer. He killed Han Solo, whom I argue became a surrogate father of sorts to Rey in the short time they were together in TFA. He tortured Po. He abducted Rey, invaded her mind, tried to kill her. He emotionally abuses her. And that’s the issue. Kylo Ren is Rey’s abuser. Disney wants this trilogy to appeal to a younger, female audience. ‘Shipping’ ‘Reylo’, as the young, hip people say, and the message of ‘sure, he’s your literal abuser, but he’s troubled and you liked him without his shirt, so it’s fine’ would be extremely problematic and irresponsible far beyond the fictional world.

Also, you heard it here first: Palpatine stole Anakin’s body and fused it to AT-ST legs and now they are a zombified horror. Definitely, no question.

December!

The Writening IV…With A Vengeance

Posted by Ross Harrison on

It makes me cringe every time I check my site and see that the last time I wrote a blog post was in…wait, I need to check, which you don’t need to know because we’re not writing and reading in real time, but now you do know and you feel more engaged in the whole process…June last year. So here’s that update you’ve all been clamouring for (don’t check my social media for proof of this).

Fountain PenI have a mostly finished novel waiting for a last edit, which will come after I finish the novel I’m nearing the end of now. These will be, respectively, novels 5 and 4 of NEXUS. Yes, I wrote them in the wrong order. Book 4 is more space opera like the existing books, but book 5 will be a little more grounded with a thriller-ish feel, while still being part of the series. And also I want to do more of the Writer’s Guide articles. They amuse me – probably more than they do anyone else.

As well as that, I’m writing two screenplays, holding myself back from writing a thriller series, continuing notes for a fantasy series, and wondering how long I can stay away from my short story series before the government declares it dead.

The writing of book 4 seems to be speeding up as I near the end, so I think it will probably be ready for a summer release, with book 5 coming reasonably soon after, rather than the years of waiting we had between books 2 and 3. I’m looking forward to putting these out as they are the best things I’ve written, and book 5 in particular has led me on to something compelling I want to get on with.

Playtime is over for the NEXUS characters and the galaxy is getting a lot darker.

Not Dead Yet

Posted by Ross Harrison on

You may once again be forgiven for thinking that I might have finally succumbed to the enticing pull of the hereafter. But I haven’t. I just haven’t written anything. Which is different.

After writing about too much Star Wars, I ran out of things to write about. Infinity War? Iron Man and Captain America will die. And Loki. Cyberpunk 2077? We’ll see it at E3. And…done.

If you’re in need of any more Hero’s guides, let me know. God forbid you find yourself out in the deep blue sea, surrounded by super-intelligent sharks that can swim backwards and you haven’t read a guide on how to handle the situation.

In terms of proper writing, I have just crossed the 85,000-word mark of my fifth novel today. Which will, when released be my sixth. And it will be book five of the NEXUS series. Yes.

If you read my books and can count, you may wonder what happened to book four (which should be my fifth novel but will actually be my sixth, except in terms of release, in which case it will indeed be my fifth. Just to clarify). I haven’t written it. My books do have slightly different tones, and some are too different to write from the same mindset. These two, to, have two too different tones. It’s true. So I’ve been unable to get myself in the right mood to write book four, but book five has been going fine. It is, if you are curious, taking a pinch of the noir from my thriller, Acts of Violence, and adding it into the mix. Not so much as to bring it out of the NEXUS series, but enough that I can’t write it and a lighter, more space opera-ish one at the same time (which is entirely in the style of Blades).

Aside from this I have been doing entirely pointless things like painting garden statues. I walked into Homebase just after Christmas and came face to face with a load of Star Wars characters. Naturally, I thought: I should paint those. So I did. Well, I (badly) painted Yoda and R2 and then lost the urge.

Yoda & R2D2 unpainted Yoda & R2 Painted

Then I decided to sculpt stuff out of polymer clay, which is the natural progression of painting polystone garden statues. I made Superman. Kind of. I am now working on a full figure of the main character of my current book. So if it looks wrong…well, it’s you who’s wrong. It’s going okay, except that I have no idea what I’m doing.

 Superman head sculpt   Figure sculpt

I also have a three-legged cat now. His name is Hop.

No doubt Thanos will demand that I return to say I told you so when dust is bitten, but hopefully I’ll think of something to say before then. So…bye. Bye then.

Bye.

My Last Jedi Questions

Posted by Ross Harrison on

I’ve written my non-spoiler review, my spoiler review, and now I’ll cover the things I didn’t mention in some questions left over from the hole-filled The Last Jedi. These are all SPOILERS!

TLJ

Who are Rey’s parents?

People are saying that they think Kylo might be lying about Rey’s parents being nobodies. First, I hope not. Second, I don’t think so. For one thing, I’m nearly certain she’s the one who actually says it. She already knows, and Kylo just wants her to be the one to say it. He tells her ‘Say it’, and she says ‘They were nobody’. He then elaborates a little. But isn’t the point that he took that information from her own mind?

Where are the Knights of Ren?

When Kylo Ren burned down Luke’s academy, he took some other students with him. We’re led to assume that these became the Knights of Ren. Whether this is correct or not, we know that Kylo is the master of the Knights of Ren, so where the hell are they? Are they the Praetorian guards? Are they all dead or otherwise gone? Are they just not in TLJ? Hopefully, we’ll see them in Episode 9. I’d like to see Rey take them all on, her success – or perhaps near-success – maybe even scaring Kylo a little.

Why does a certain someone lie to Luke?

Trying to keep spoilers out of the bolded sub-headings… Yoda lets Luke believe that he burned all the Jedi texts, knowing – I presume – that Rey had already taken them. Why? Just because he’s a tricksy little thing? Was it somehow in Luke’s best interests? Was it to help startle Luke back to Jedi-dom? He does, after all, change his mind at the last moment, and then is horrified when Yoda magics a lighting strike out of the sky to do it instead.

Where did hyperspace tracking come from?

Well, this one I actually have the answer to. It wasn’t just conveniently pulled out of thin air for TLJ. In Rogue One, Jyn reads out the different technologies in the Empire’s database, data store thing. Hyperspace tracking is one of them.

What were the deleted scenes?

We know there were scenes deleted – such as a whole training sequence with Luke and Rey. Would these have added more substance to the film? One of the shots we saw in promos was of Rey charging, apparently into battle, with her lightsaber ignited. Was she originally supposed to be heading to help Luke fight Kylo? Was she therefore originally meant to fight Kylo? Was Luke meant to be there in person and die? Am I reading into it too much?

What kind of lightsaber will Rey build?

The colour is an interesting question – blue, green, purple? Green might mirror Luke, while purple would be a nod to Jaina Solo. But what type of lightsaber will she build now that Luke’s is destroyed? The most obvious choice might be a staff/pike or double-bladed one, since she originally fights with a staff. I’d rather not see that. Perhaps just a normal one, or even a rebuild of the destroyed lightsaber, which will crackle and fizz like Kylo’s. Or, since she now has two pieces of the lightsaber, perhaps she’ll even build and wield two? That might be a stretch.

How is the story going to be finished in just one film?

One thing that struck me was that, to me, The Last Jedi felt more like an opening chapter than a middle one (or a closing one as people are saying). It doesn’t feel as though one more film is going to be enough time to expand on and satisfactorily resolve everything that arose from TLJ. We’ll see.

Will we ever know who or what Snoke is?

And will we care? If he stays dead, I certainly won’t – it’ll be too late. They’ll have thought they could get away with not bothering fleshing him out because they were just going to off him. That’s lazy and bad writing. But if he does somehow come back – which wouldn’t be too surprising, since he’s supposed to be so ancient that it’s a bit odd that he just dies so easily – then we’ll still need to know more about him. But I don’t think he will. There’ll be a book that covers it, stupidly.

Temple

I’m sure there are plenty of questions that I’ve forgotten I have, and I might even update this after I’ve seen it again.

What were your biggest questions either not answered by TLJ or raised by it?

The Last Jedi – Good or Bad?

Posted by Ross Harrison on

SPOILERS!

If you want to know what I thought of TLJ without spoilers – and who wouldn’t? – read this. Even if you don’t think you care about spoilers, some of the things that happen in the film are better off seen without prior knowledge.

I have still only seen the film once, so some things aren’t as strong in my memory as they could be and I may have forgotten things entirely. That said, the more time passes, the more small and big issues I think of. So, as usual, this isn’t really a review – because I don’t know how to do those – it’s just a mess of thoughts thrown at the screen.

TLJ

Humour

The humour is made apparent from the very first scene. The conversation between Poe and Hux is simultaneously very funny and concerning. Poe’s side of this conversation is fine – it makes sense to his character and helps us to continue liking him right away, just like the ‘Who talks first’ bit in TFA. Hux’s side, however, is too slapstick stupid. You can imagine he’ll next throw his hat on the ground and jump up and down on it while shaking his fist at Poe’s retreating X-Wing. It doesn’t fit the character – set up to be genocidal and almost Hitler-like – the dangerous and soon-to-be tragic situation, or Star Wars as a whole.

Porg

This humour continues to go too far. Chewbacca about to bite into the roasted porg when he spots a group of porgs watching him, their little faces horrified. Very funny. The close-up of the last porg with its lip quivering, stupid. Funny again, but something that should be in Shrek, not Star Wars. And what was that with Snoke redirecting Rey’s lightsaber (yes, I consider it hers now, not Luke’s) and hitting her in the back of the head with it? Was that meant to be funny? It didn’t hit her hard enough for it to be serious, surely? If it is meant to be funny, it’s totally out of place and wrecks the tension and drama of the scene.

It’s like the filmmakers watched Guardians of the Galaxy and thought ‘we should do that’. No, you shouldn’t. That’s not to say there weren’t times when the humour worked. The caretakers and their dislike of Rey worked well. And…other stuff…probably.

Luke Skywalker and Rey

Mark-Hamill-as-Luke-and-Daisy-Ridley-as-Rey-in-Star-Wars-The-Last-Jedi

These two worked well together, but when you look past the humour of Luke throwing the lightsaber away, the caretakers, the porgs, etc., the scenes on the island were actually fairly pointless. Luke didn’t teach her a damn thing. He just felt sorry for himself the whole time and then she left. He didn’t teach her to use the Force, he didn’t teach her to use the lightsaber (it’s fine that she could already use it well enough to surprise-defeat a wounded and distracted Kylo Ren in TFA, but now she needs to know how to wield it properly, like a Jedi – luckily she…just does), he didn’t teach her any Jedi principles.

Just as she randomly knows to use a Jedi mind trick on James Bond in TFA and how to pull the lightsaber to her, in TLJ she uses the Force without any training. All Luke teaches her is to reach out with her feelings, and then suddenly she can lift a dozen giant boulders with no problem. Even Luke struggled to lift the X-Wing in the swamp, and he had the most powerful Jedi Grand Master teaching him. I was looking forward to Rey lifting his X-Wing out of the ocean, too.

Rey

This part of the film needed so much more time. As I predicted, the film starts with Luke being the last Jedi, and ends with Rey being the last Jedi. The problem is, she in no way earned that title. How can she be a Jedi when Luke didn’t teach her to be a Jedi. She’s just a Force-wielder. There is apparently a whole training sequence cut from the film, but given that his first two ‘lessons’ didn’t really teach her all that much, who knows how much good the third would have been?

As for Luke’s final redemption, in a sense, it felt very much as though the only reason he was projecting himself there rather than being there in person was to surprise the audience. Okay, his X-Wing might be wrecked now after being underwater for so long, so maybe he doesn’t have a way off the island, but really it felt like it was just there to be unexpected. When they opened fire on him and he survived, I thought we were witnessing the power that a true Master can wield – despite the fact that technically, he never moved beyond being a Padawan and has been cut off from the Force for a long time. When Kylo’s foot scrapes the ground and reveals the red sand but Luke’s doesn’t, I thought it was just a nice visual thing because Kylo is a damaging, heavy-handed dark sider, while Luke is a harmonious blah blah blah…it wasn’t that at all.

The other problem is why the hell did he just randomly die afterwards? Kylo says that Rey can’t be linking the two of them because the effort would kill her, so I assume that is foreshadowing and letting us know in advance that the effort of projecting himself like that is not something that even Luke Skywalker can survive, but it just felt out of nowhere. I genuinely didn’t expect him to suddenly disappear like that. I thought that was his part done for TLJ and he’d go out with Leia in the next film.

Leia

Leia

Leia’s role in this was fairly small, as she spends half the film in a coma. She’s too accepting of everything. She no longer seems bothered by Han’s death, she gives up on their allies answering their call for help too easily, she admits that her son is gone too casually, and appears to have no problem with Luke dying. Perhaps we’re meant to think it’s because of all of the trauma she’s gone through since the originals, starting with Alderaan, and with each death – many of them the deaths of the people under her command – she has grown more emotionless, but it doesn’t come across well.

Then she dies. Except she doesn’t! In a throwaway scene that’s never mentioned again, she uses the Force to survive the explosion, the decompression, and the exposure, and Mary Poppinses her way back onto the ship. It’s quite good, and is more Force use than I expected to see from her (I expected some, but more in line with sensing Luke and Kylo than this), but it needed something more. No one even mentions it. All it needed was for someone watching to say ‘Well, I guess she IS the sister of a Jedi Master…’ and that would have been enough. I honestly think some newcomers and people who aren’t that into Star Wars won’t even understand what happened. This would, of course have led to the question of why didn’t she train as a Jedi, but all that would have taken was for her to respond with ‘Because my father was Darth Vader’, and everyone would have understood.

Finn, Rose, and Poe

Finn+Rose+Poe

This was a mess. Poe’s part in the film was perhaps the strongest of the three, but they really felt as though they were only there because they had to be. The film desperately wanted to be about Rey, Luke, and Kylo, but knew that these other characters had been introduced in the last film, and still had to be utilised somehow. The result is a completely pointless storyline where Finn and Rose go to a casino to find a hacker that will board the First Order flagship and stop them being able to track the Resistance through hyperspace.

And it is literally pointless. They find a hacker, go back, don’t manage to do the hacking, and the Resistance is nearly wiped out. Almost exactly what would have happened if they had never left. The only difference is that Benicio del Toro betrays them and tells the First Order how to detect all the little ships taking the Resistance down to the planet. This is not something that was worth all of that screen time. So much of that time could have been given to Luke and Rey so that there could have been some actual training going on.

The Rose/Finn romance is completely out of the blue and stupid. And now Rey is going to be jealous of her. Which I hate, because I’m sick of the idea that a male character and female character must automatically have some kind of romantic interest in each other. Why can’t Rey and Finn just be damn good friends, like Luke and Han? Oh, because their genders aren’t compatible in that way? Okay, sure.

Poe meanwhile has a hostile relationship with an admiral who takes Leia’s place. I think we’re meant to suspect that she’s working for the First Order, because they make a big deal out of Snoke laughing approvingly of how Hux is able to keep up with them as they try to flee, when it’s actually nothing special at all. They can just…track them. That’s all. So she refuses to tell Poe her plans, he mutinies, finds that she was actually in the right, then she dies heroically.

First, all of that could have been easily avoided by her not being a moron and actually letting Poe in on the plan – it’s only because that would have been inconvenient to the ‘story’ that she didn’t. Second, they killed of Admiral Ackbar in the blink of an eye – I didn’t even realise he had been one of the ones killed until it was mentioned – instead of giving him the heroic ending, which would have been more fitting. Third, that scene was one of the best in the film. It was visually stunning. The use of silence for it was perfect. I wouldn’t argue with anyone using the word ‘spectacular’.

Snoke

Snoke

Snoke is dead. This did not come as a shock to me at all. I think it was meant to be the biggest twist in the film, but really it was the only thing they could have done to keep it feeling fresh and not just working off the original trilogy template. I don’t have a problem with it; however, I do have a problem with the fact that Snoke seems to have been built up only so that we’d be surprised when he’s killed.

We don’t know anything about him. Background doesn’t really matter for someone like Rey or Poe or Rose, because what they are currently doing is more important, but we’re talking about a powerful dark side Force-user who seems to have been unknown by both the Jedi and Sidious. If he was a Jedi back then, why didn’t he get wiped out by Order 66? Is that why he has the facial damage? It’s unlikely, because he’s supposedly ancient (which only makes it more absurd that he’s now just suddenly dead). If he was a Sith or other dark sider all along, why didn’t Sidious know about him? Why didn’t he try to kill him – there should be only two, after all. Where the hell has he been hiding all this time. WHAT is he? We’ve been told before that he’s not Sith.

He’s dead now and we’ll either never know, or only know now that it doesn’t matter. I suspect a book will appear that will explain it, which is not okay at all. Don’t leave giant plot holes and missing information and the like because you know a completely different medium will take care of it. Most of us aren’t going to bother with any tie-in novels.

Rey and Kylo

Rey+Kylo

Again, it felt like the film desperately wanted to concentrate on this stuff and ignore the Resistance. Rey and Kylo are done well individually and together. I was very pleased that Kylo stays bad and Rey stays good. Those were two of my biggest concerns going in. I also like that there was something there for those who wanted to see Kylo redemption. He wasn’t evil; he just wasn’t light side. He helps Rey arguably more than Luke does. You could say that it was manipulation to get her to come to him and Snoke so that he could kill Snoke, but I don’t think it was wholly that. It seemed a little more genuine – especially since Kylo invited her to rule with him.

I don’t think it would have suited either character to change sides, but it worked to have them connect with each other and actually begin to care a little about each other. There was no ‘Reylo’ rubbish, which also pleased me. They had a connection, and everything worked on that, but it wasn’t – or at least didn’t seem to be – a romantic thing. Which it shouldn’t have been. She hates him for murdering her surrogate father, Han, but is good enough to look past that and know that there is still some good in him, and try to bring him back to the light.

Drama

There isn’t much. The most obvious omission is any kind of dark side temptation for Rey. She senses the dark side, and Luke says that both sides are strong on the island. Then when she goes looking at the dark side pit, he claims that she went straight for it and so he won’t teach her. Well, that means nothing. She doesn’t understand about the light side and dark side – there’s no reason she wouldn’t go and have a look. No reason she would know to resist. It doesn’t mean her eyes will instantly turn yellow and her lightsaber will magically turn red.

Luke Vader

When she physically goes into the pit, there’s nothing. Some mirror thing that seems utterly pointless. There’s nothing she has to face like Luke had to face Luke Vader in the cave. Nothing meaningful down there to teach her about the Force or herself.

The only drama, I think, comes from Luke vs Kylo. Except eagle-eyed fans, we didn’t know what was going to happen there. Luke couldn’t have won, but it didn’t feel like the time to kill him either. Those eagle-eyed fans would have spotted that he was holding the lightsaber that had just been destroyed, he looked younger because of more than just a hair cut and beard trim, his feet didn’t disturb the ground, and he’d already said to Rey something along the lines of “What do you expect me to do, walk out with a laser sword and face down the First Order?”. Everything else just tried to shock and surprise, and mostly failed.

Luke almost killing Kylo is a point of contention, I think. A lot of people don’t like that. But to me, it was a knee-jerk reaction to suddenly sensing Snoke’s dark side influence. Almost like he would have grabbed and ignited his lightsaber if he’d spotted Snoke peering in the window. I don’t think it makes Luke bad.

The Force

The Force in TLJ is almost a character in its own right. But only the light side. If it is strong enough to just turn Rey into a Jedi without any input from…an actual Jedi, lightning-strike a tree and destroy it, and so on, shouldn’t the dark side have been stronger too? I like that Rey isn’t at all tempted by the dark, as for me, that suits her character. However, if there’s not going to be that kind of temptation, couldn’t the dark side have whispered to her, tried harder to lure her or trick her down in the pit? Something?

And there’s Yoda. He was good. He was a puppet. That was nice.

The-Last-Jedi-spoiler-review

And this has kind of fizzled out now. It’s too long, so the remaining stuff (before I watch it a second time and come up with more), I will put in a ‘questions I have‘ post.

Overall, I feel like The Last Jedi has far more problems than The Force Awakens did, yet I think I like it more. Rey remains my favourite Star Wars character. What did you think of it? What were your favourite bits, worst bits, biggest questions…?

Also Star Warsy:

The Force is with Leia – But Which Side?
The Force is Awake
My 11 Force Awakens Questions
Dawn of the Jedi
The Galaxy Needs KOTOR III