Yes. Everything Is Rubbish.

Trying to watch a TV show in this day and age without having it be spoiled is about as difficult as getting meaningful financial support from the government in the midst of a pandemic. We are in a day and age where you can't just watch some shit when you want to watch it. Instead, you find yourself forced to watch it out of fear of it being spoiled, because God forbid you don't watch the damn thing within an hour of it airing. All of this to say that I wanted to wait until every chapter of season 2 of The Mandalorian was out before watching it, just as I did season 1. But there were so many damn spoilers on my Twitter timeline that I was forced to watch it beforehand. I got close though. Chapter 13's release was when I dove in. But I'm not here to talk about spoilers on the timeline. Or even season 2 of The Mandalorian a whole, although knowing me I'll end up getting into that. I'm here to talk about a moment in season 2 which seems to have divided the Internet,...

The Rise of Skywalker is not a direct sequel to The Last Jedi that many of us saw back in 2017. Let's just start there. The Rise of Skywalker is a sequel to a version of The Last Jedi that we didn't see. When I heard that J.J Abrams was back for the wrapping up of this trilogy, I knew he was going to look at Episode IX as damage control for the backlash that The Last Jedi had received. And herein is the issue with The Rise of Skywalker right off the bat. It services its need to be what it thinks fans want from a Star Wars film following the loudest reception to The Last Jedi, which takes priority over delivering a good story. And as a result, what J.J ended up doing is making the weakest film amongst the three. This isn't exclusively because it disregards so much of The Last Jedi, but this plays a huge part which impacts so much of how this film became what it became. I should warn you at this point that this is a spoiler filled review. So only proceed if you have wa...

The last Jedi had me torn in a way that no Star Wars film had done before. During the screening I felt, dare I say it...bored and confused. I walked out of the cinema not wholeheartedly liking it the way in which I did The force awakens. Maybe the rose tinted glasses of The force awakens being such a return to form following the derailment of episodes I to III made the film out to be better than what it actually was. But I couldn't help but feel that The last Jedi wasn't quite right and that the experience as a whole felt uneven. Let's start with the obvious and the one thing that I feel everybody can agree on. The last Jedi is not what you expect it to be. At all. Given that The force awakens was by all intents and purposes a complete retread of 1977's A new hope, much seemed to be pointing towards The last Jedi following in the footsteps of The Empire strikes back. And whilst there are elements of the story which bear similarities to the retrospectively criti...