Star Wars VIII : The Last Jedi [WARNING: SPOILERS]

mid_gen · 24 Sep 2018 at 16:17

VincentHanna said:
Rogue one actually explained that 38 year old plot-hole with some ret-conning

But yeah, it's a silly space opera really.

Exactly, the cheesy and hamfisted good vs evil 'plot' in these films has never been more than a vehicle to string together sequences of spaceships shooting at each other, and people waving silly laser swords around.

If you apply any kind of critical analysis (or artistic analysis for that matter) to any of the films, you're going to be disappointed. Just sit back and enjoy the pew pew...

Rroff · 24 Sep 2018 at 16:24

mid_gen said:
If you apply any kind of critical analysis (or artistic analysis for that matter) to any of the films, you're going to be disappointed. Just sit back and enjoy the pew pew...

Well that is the thing - some of them are wrote and directed well enough that the stupidity isn't in your face or so obvious (for most viewers) - you can sit back and not have threads of the movie bothering you because they are so absurd at face value* (some you might pick apart in hindsight) - with TLJ not a chance every aspect is so obviously stupid you don't have a chance to turn it off - unless you are easily amused maybe.

EDIT: And there are probably some people whose brains work in such a way they can't even switch it off in movies that do like 90% by cold hard logic and reasoning but get say 10% wrong. But the vast majority of people sit somewhere inbetween.

* Obviously most of them have some stupid scenes but mostly they are enough in isolation that it is easy to get past individual occurrences.

aardvark · 24 Sep 2018 at 16:31

Rroff said:
Well that is the thing - some of them are wrote and directed well enough that the stupidity isn't in your face or so obvious - you can sit back and not have threads of the movie bothering you because they are so absurd at face value* (some you might pick apart in hindsight) - with TLJ not a chance every aspect is so obviously stupid you don't have a chance to turn it off - unless you are easily amused maybe.

EDIT: And there are probably some people whose brains work in such a way they can't even switch it off in movies that do like 90% by cold hard logic and reasoning but get say 10% wrong. But the vast majority of people sit somewhere inbetween.

* Obviously most of them have some stupid scenes but mostly they are enough in isolation that it is easy to get past individual occurrences.

this - a lot of fantasy is stupid if you really think about it but well written fantasy makes you suspend your disbelief - its the foundation of good story telling, no matter the genre.
The originals did this pretty well - the last jedi did not.
A shared universe also has to be logically consistent within the rules it has established, again, something all good fiction must do. This is something the last jedi failed to do.
If it was a stand alone film fine, but it wasn't.

Rroff · 24 Sep 2018 at 16:35

aardvark said:
If it was a stand alone film fine, but it wasn't.

I have to say, though I'm probably in a smaller exception here, I wouldn't find it any more watchable as a stand alone film though the fact it rubs against so many established "rules" is a lot of what breaks it. I found it a stupid movie at every level - it is obviously a bunch of "cool" scenes the developer has slapped together that are almost all borrowing from or tributes to other movies, etc. without any care as to the details.

It is one thing I liked about Solo in comparison - they took just enough time with the small details to make the world seem a bit lived in and connected.

aardvark said:
a lot of fantasy is stupid if you really think about it but well written fantasy makes you suspend your disbelief

As per my heavily edited post - it is something that is a bit subjective - but the problem with TLJ is that for a lot of people it doesn't hit that threshold for suspending your disbelief while the older movies mostly (just about) do. It is pretty obvious from the reviews that it lost the larger mass of its audience both those who watch this kind of stuff for escapism and those who are invested in the Star Wars universe and at the end of the day whether it is a good movie or not in its own right that is what matters.

aardvark · 24 Sep 2018 at 16:41

Rroff said:
I have to say, though I'm probably in a smaller exception here, I wouldn't find it any more watchable as a stand alone film though the fact it rubs against so many established "rules" is a lot of what breaks it. I found it a stupid movie at every level - it is obviously a bunch of "cool" scenes the developer has slapped together that are almost all borrowing from or tributes to other movies, etc. without any care as to the details.

It is one thing I liked about Solo in comparison - they took just enough time with the small details to make the world seem a bit lived in and connected.

As per my heavily edited post - it is something that is a bit subjective - but the problem with TLJ is that for a lot of people it doesn't hit that threshold for suspending your disbelief while the older movies mostly (just about) do. It is pretty obvious from the reviews that it lost the larger mass of its audience both those who watch this kind of stuff for escapism and those who are invested in the Star Wars universe and at the end of the day whether it is a good movie or not in its own right that is what matters.

true, it would still be a bad film for other reasons - the disregard it has for the previous lore just makes it even worse.

Rroff · 24 Sep 2018 at 16:43

Developer LOL I meant director - trying to post game development related stuff at the same time as talking about movies doesn't help.

mid_gen · 24 Sep 2018 at 17:01

Rroff said:
Well that is the thing - some of them are wrote and directed well enough that the stupidity isn't in your face or so obvious (for most viewers) - you can sit back and not have threads of the movie bothering you because they are so absurd at face value* (some you might pick apart in hindsight) - with TLJ not a chance every aspect is so obviously stupid you don't have a chance to turn it off - unless you are easily amused maybe.

EDIT: And there are probably some people whose brains work in such a way they can't even switch it off in movies that do like 90% by cold hard logic and reasoning but get say 10% wrong. But the vast majority of people sit somewhere inbetween.

* Obviously most of them have some stupid scenes but mostly they are enough in isolation that it is easy to get past individual occurrences.

Have to say that I don't recall anything in TLJ that stands out as stupid in the context of a very silly space opera film series. I don't think the film was particularly better or worse than any of the previous? Again, I've never thought the 'lore' of SW was ever anymore than a bit of weak filler to string together the big action set pieces. The characters have always been paper-thin one-dimensional walking cliches

I've tended to just switch off when people start raging about TLJ because the 'critique' is usually littered with phrases like SJW that cause me to immediately discount anything being said.

Rroff · 24 Sep 2018 at 18:18

mid_gen said:
Have to say that I don't recall anything in TLJ that stands out as stupid in the context of a very silly space opera film series. I don't think the film was particularly better or worse than any of the previous? Again, I've never thought the 'lore' of SW was ever anymore than a bit of weak filler to string together the big action set pieces. The characters have always been paper-thin one-dimensional walking cliches

I've tended to just switch off when people start raging about TLJ because the 'critique' is usually littered with phrases like SJW that cause me to immediately discount anything being said.

The older movies gave an illusion of there being rules to how things worked albeit it broke down a bit with the 4th movie onwards - in TLJ they threw that out the window - it makes a difference - if you can't see it for yourself I can't really "make" you see it and as I said above it is somewhat subjective but fairly evident from the reviews that it went over the threshold for the bulk of the audience.

PS Not many people are complaining about the movie from the SJW angle (though there are some) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Star-Wars-...r&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar it is mostly the producers trying to use that as a deflection.

EDIT: As before I wish I had screenshot the Amazon page before someone did a PR job and paid for 100s of 5 star reviews LOL.

JBod · 24 Sep 2018 at 22:32

mid_gen said:
Have to say that I don't recall anything in TLJ that stands out as stupid in the context of a very silly space opera film series. I don't think the film was particularly better or worse than any of the previous? Again, I've never thought the 'lore' of SW was ever anymore than a bit of weak filler to string together the big action set pieces. The characters have always been paper-thin one-dimensional walking cliches

I've tended to just switch off when people start raging about TLJ because the 'critique' is usually littered with phrases like SJW that cause me to immediately discount anything being said.

Without reading hundreds of pages (so possibly repeating what has already said). For me, the biggest issue with lore breakage in TLJ is simply the idea that a ship going into hyperspace can do that damage. If that was known why has no one done that before to win every space battle?

aardvark · 24 Sep 2018 at 22:58

i and lots of people don't like the movie and it has nothing to do with sjw garbage

mid_gen · 25 Sep 2018 at 08:10

JBod said:
Without reading hundreds of pages (so possibly repeating what has already said). For me, the biggest issue with lore breakage in TLJ is simply the idea that a ship going into hyperspace can do that damage. If that was known why has no one done that before to win every space battle?

A New Hope established the fact that collisions at light speed are a thing, when Han warns Luke of the perils of going to light speed without preparing properly. It makes a complete nonsense of the whole premise of episode IV.

Why is it OK for ANH to be totally logically inconsistent, yet not for ANH? There is no reasoning that holds together the SW films, they are totally fantastic, every scene is a logical disaster, but that's OK because it's not supposed to make sense, it's just supposed to be an excuse to put fancy set pieces together.

I mean AT-ATs? Utter cows testicles. They're completely ridiculous. It's well established that star destroyers are capable of atmospheric flight, every single ground attack scene in ALL of the films would be settled by a star destroyer cruising in and splattering the target to oblivion.

They don't do that though, because having giant four-legged walking machines that little crappy skimmers can tie up in knots and trip up makes for great cinema.

uncle_rufus · 25 Sep 2018 at 08:19

JBod said:
Without reading hundreds of pages (so possibly repeating what has already said). For me, the biggest issue with lore breakage in TLJ is simply the idea that a ship going into hyperspace can do that damage. If that was known why has no one done that before to win every space battle?

This is by far the most common argument that I've heard people make against the logic of the movie... to some extent I agree but at the same time there are various ways you can justify/excuse it:

- Perhaps nobody really knew what it would do until it happened in TLJ?

- Perhaps the leading theorists had predicted that two ships colliding at light-speed would create a black hole or a catastrophic explosion destroying everything in a very wide area (and hence too dangerous/self defeating to be a valid tactic)?... in TLJ it looked like the Resistance ships were done-for anyway so Holdo decided to risk it and at least take some of them out too... (and it turned out the theories were slightly off)

- Perhaps the relative mass of the 2 ships involved plays a huge part? - if your ship is too small relative to the one it is crashing into it acts more like a very heavy blaster shot and is simply wasted against their shields... So why not just build a huge empty ship to act as your kamikaze ship then? Getting something that huge up to light speed is no mean feat and requires an extortionate amount of resources, certainly not something the Resistance would be willing (or able) to produce with any regularity, or risk wasting on a failed attempt, and the First Order would likely see it as a waste as well when they could just build a re-usable superweapon like the Death Star instead...

gettothechopper · 25 Sep 2018 at 08:29

the sjw and omg space physics angles are red herrings that people get stuck on

tlj is bad because the stuff the old fans want to see, luke being a hero, ackbar not just dying off screen etc didnt happen
and the stuff the new fans were excited about, rey parents, snoke backstory etc all got deadended
so you dissapointed everyone

you can have a few "subverting expetations" moments but you cant make a whole film trying to avoid them - and if you dont eventually please the audience - what are you even trying to do with a star wars film?
it could have got away with some of this if the rey / kylo moment after the fight had gone in a new direction, they teased something interesting at that moment but then backed away

mid_gen · 25 Sep 2018 at 08:36

Agree the weakest part of the new films was Snoke. He's just a cardboard cutout villain with no motivation or justification at all....generic bad guy #1.

The scenes with Mark Hamill just make me cry with laughter though, particularly the closing scene of TFA, he's such a terrible actor, it kinda worked with his whole naive kid act in the first films but it's cringe-tastic now he's trying to play a wise old crusty.

IvanDobskey · 25 Sep 2018 at 10:28

mid_gen said:
Agree the weakest part of the new films was Snoke. He's just a cardboard cutout villain with no motivation or justification at all....generic bad guy #1.

The scenes with Mark Hamill just make me cry with laughter though, particularly the closing scene of TFA, he's such a terrible actor, it kinda worked with his whole naive kid act in the first films but it's cringe-tastic now he's trying to play a wise old crusty.

Snoke was indeed a total waste of time. Pointless baddie.

I don't think mark hammil is that bad an actor to be fair to him. I just don't think his heart was really in it for the last Jedi. Poor choices made for his character coupled with shocking writing didn't help him at all.

Julian Jones · 25 Sep 2018 at 10:31

IvanDobskey said:
Snoke was indeed a total waste of time. Pointless baddie.

I don't think mark hammil is that bad an actor to be fair to him. I just don't think his heart was really in it for the last Jedi. Poor choices made for his character coupled with shocking writing didn't help him at all.

There was a lot of friction between Mark Hamill and Rian Johnson about what was to become of Luke, I would imagine that will have had a bearing on Hamill's performance a bit.

IvanDobskey · 25 Sep 2018 at 10:34

Julian Jones said:
There was a lot of friction between Mark Hamill and Rian Johnson about what was to become of Luke, I would imagine that will have had a bearing on Hamill's performance a bit.

Exactly. I've heard hamill say that he didn't agree with what they did to Luke's character. I think he just phoned in that performance. Probably from the moment they had him milking a space cow.....

aardvark · 25 Sep 2018 at 12:34

Hamil has been very vocal about how this isn't the luke he knows, and that jedi don't act that way.
He was pulling his punches but i am surprised how candid he has been.

Grandmaster Fap! · 29 Sep 2018 at 13:25

So Kennedy's contract at Disney has been....extended!?

Yeah im done....

eggyoke · 29 Sep 2018 at 20:10

Grandmaster Fap! said:
So Kennedy's contract at Disney has been....extended!?

Yeah im done....

Elites protecting elites. I wouldn't read too much into yet, it's a highly calculated decision. She's a major player in the industry, very close to the bigwigs at Disney, has a history of great success and is a woman of power in an industry dominated by men. If they fired her it would just invite an absolute ****-storm of criticism and attention.

I don't think we'll see her at all over the next 3 years except in highly scripted internal interviews. As for what she'll do, we'll have to wait and see if she continues to stick her nose into the creative decisions of the people she employs.