 Welcome to Car Side Reviews, I'm Adam, here with my buddy Chase. We just got out of Star Wars, The Rise of Skywalker, we're going to tell you what we thought. We won't be giving anything away on this. I'll do some spoilery reviews later on my second channel, Adam Olinger. This is just more of an honest reaction to a movie we just saw. If you're in the same boat as Chase and I where you like the Force Awakens, you were really put off by the last Jedi, I mean I really liked it and so did Chase, so you might be with us. If however you loved the last Jedi and all the chances it supposedly took and all these risks, you might hate this. I think for me personally this is kind of like, it hits all the like specific points that it needs to be like a good Star Wars movie. So expand on that. Yeah, no I think that well because obviously you have the fun lightsaber battles that you want to see, you have little nods to the originals and like to possible future things too. You know, I just think it's fun, it's actually a lot of fun, I was laughing quite a bit. It's more nostalgic than what you'd think, but not like too much either. Yeah, there's definitely on the nose moments like there was in the Force Awakens for sure, I mean Billy Dee Williams is back, there's no reason for him to be in this other than to tip the hat one more time, right? Lando, he doesn't look like Lando, he doesn't really sound like him. So many years have passed, this guy's totally different now. I think the Leia stuff, you know, I thought that was actually really good. Visually she looks great in it, I think she looks, sounds, acts like she's in these scenes, but just the dialogue itself kind of comes off a little bit stilted with what's going on, you know, it's not really a conversation so much it is just a few words back and forth and then, you know, the scene ends. The big issue with the last movie wasn't how it looked or how it sounded or the presentation, that was all phenomenal. I think that it arguably has more beautiful shots than this new one does, but I do think, you know, Rise of Skywalker looks great. JJ definitely has that style to him. It doesn't look like the last movie, there's a different camera style, there's different shots that have more of JJ's mark on it, you know, it's a little bit more frantic, the camera's moving around a lot more. And I surprisingly didn't notice very many lens flares though. I did not notice that lens flare. Well, there's lightning, there's lightning, so with lightning comes flares. If you were disappointed with Finn and Poe in the last movie, like I was, then there's good news, they're much better in this one. If you weren't disappointed with them in the last movie, shame on you because they were terribly written. This time around, we get those characters from the first film, they get a little bit of growth, there's a few slower scenes, pretty much for everyone, I think, that this movie is running hot the whole time. I mean, it is definitely exposition heavy, I'd say, for a good chunk of it because there's a lot of shit to clean up. Yeah, it's a lot of it is needed just from the last movie. I do think that JJ probably spent a lot of time on message boards or on Reddit or something, looking at fan theories and complaints from not just the last movie or the movie before, but like the entire series as a whole because there's some really weird, not retcons, but there's some weird, like, look, I fixed this from a new home or I fixed this thing that bothered people for 40 years or whatever, unnecessary cleanups, I guess, still kind of fun, I guess, to see. How'd you feel about the lightsaber battles? Because there were a few. Yeah, yeah, no, I thought that they'd definitely step up from the Force Awakens. Yeah. I don't know, in the Force Awakens to me, which I mean... You only really had, what was there, one in the Force Awakens? This one, it's just, it's wild how just vastly different they are. It's awesome. I thought the lightsaber battles were sweet, there's some cool moves going on, there's some jumping all over the place, there's some throwing of the saber. Nothing, though, completely outlandish. And when things do get nuts, it is actually explained. There is a background to characters, there's mysteries that get solved. JJ, known for his mystery boxes, sets up a lot of things. He set up Lost, didn't have to answer for any of that nonsense later on. He set up the Star Trek films and then walked away from that. He set up Star Wars and then walked away, and so I was very interested to see how he closed this thing out, and I think he did a commendable job. Yeah, I think he definitely just, he aced it, how he did it. Yeah, I, you know, I don't, I don't see, to me, I don't really see any like really big problems in this movie. The big problem is he had to make a second movie that didn't exist. He had to tell a story that wasn't there. So when we see these characters, they're together again, they're on missions together, and they're reminiscing about all the hardships they went through and everything they fought so hard for. But the last entire movie was them just slowly running away from the, you know, the first order in space. We didn't really get to see a lot of adventuring with them together. Here, he's definitely taking some liberty. He's saying, there's been time past. These guys have done a lot of stuff. They've had a lot of struggle. So that's the bittersweet part for me. I do think if he would have just taken this thing from beginning to end, we would have maybe had the same conclusions, but we would have had a vastly different middle and I think it would have made for a great trilogy. Instead, we have a return to form with The Force Awakens. We have Ryan Johnson's incredibly different take on the material. And then we have JJ coming back with a conflicting finale. So we have a hodgepodge of films, a first and third act that I think are, that work together and mesh well with this bizarre middle child that's just throwing shit all over the walls and then mom and dad have to come home and clean it back up. There's a lot of people that don't necessarily like this movie right now. Are there? It seems like it. I mean, all I saw was a percentage. Is that like 50%? No, is that like 56? Okay, and that's just the Ron Tomatoes critic aggregate. Yeah. That doesn't surprise me because 90, what, the last Jedi is at 90% I think on Ron Tomatoes. It's one of the highest ranked Star Wars movies. So yeah, the critics that loved that, like I said, a lot of them are going to hate this and for good reason. That's the reason I love it. Oh, I would have been fine with another hour to be honest. I think it could have used another hour to be honest. Yeah, just for that first act, I think it could have gone a little bit longer. I think, I mean, it moves at a really good clip. There isn't any downtime really where I'm like, okay, let's move on from this. I was enjoying myself from beginning to end, but I think another movie even, if we did a forlige, I'd be fine. We can't now, but if we would have taken another film before we got to where we're at, I think that really could have flushed these characters out, brought them back to the people we knew from the first one, gave us more insight to Finn's backstory as a stormtrooper, gave us a little bit more of a pose background and really just got the camaraderie of this teamwork, this dynamic that we missed a lot of in The Last Jedi. Small gripe, but the trailers had Duel of Fate's Plane, which is, you know, an homage to the prequels, Darth Maul, which is the, I think one of the best songs in the Star Wars franchise, as much as I don't like the prequels, that song is fantastic. I don't think it was played, was it, in the movie? Well, that's kind of crap. Cause I was honestly looking forward to that song being played. I would have loved, I really wanted JJ to just go completely nuts with it, to have Darth Maul there fighting Kylo or fighting Rey, but yeah, just go nuts at this point. Who cares? I joked about that on Twitter last week. I said they should have Rey like force bowl Yoda into a bunch of stormtroopers and just be stupid with it. As it stands, it's, you know, if you're looking for another sub-boss, it's, you know, if you're looking for another subversion of expectations, you're going to be disappointed. This is pretty much exactly how you expect it to play out. And I don't know, as a Star Wars fan, why you would want anything other than that. These movies are not, they end cookie cutter. I'm sorry, but Empire, you know, did some twists. But at the end of the day, the heroes win. Everything's great. There's always a party. There's always, there's always cheering and celebration. There's usually someone looking off into a couple planets or a couple sons. Is it worth the trip for you? Was this a movie you would recommend? People go out to see? Would you stream it at home? Do you think it's a wreck? Obviously you don't, but no, absolutely. Yeah, 100% see it again. I'd see it more than once. This is a theater movie for me too. I cannot wait to take my family to it, especially my son Connor, who really likes the original trilogy. He loves Force Awakens. He could not, he barely got through the last Jedi, but he hated every moment of it. And that's not me. That was not my fault. I didn't corrupt him or anything. My daughter could not get through the last Jedi. She got ticked. And yeah, so, but she wants to see this. She still wants to, you know, just like everybody else. We love and hate Star Wars in tandem. It's a really messy, bad relationship. It's a marriage story. Sorry, Kylo Ren. Yeah, go out and see this. It's worth the trip. I don't have anything else to add right now. So let us know in the comments what you thought about the film. If you absolutely hated it. If you thought it was everything you possibly imagined it could be. And yeah, let's keep it spoiler-free down there too, because this movie's just came out for us, us common peasants. And if you like our commentary, feel free to subscribe, like. There's other stuff here. I promise you may not be disappointed. We'll see you next time in the car.