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

[Psymonkee]

Movies with Mikey always resonates well with me - thoughts? Certainly makes me want to watch it again!

 

[adam cool dude]

Movies with Mikey always resonates well with me - thoughts? Certainly makes me want to watch it again!

I just did. First time I re-watched it since opening weekend release. I feel even more enraged!

 

[CaptainRAVE]

I just did. First time I re-watched it since opening weekend release. I feel even more enraged!

Agreed, I watched it again on a long haul flight having watched everything else that I wanted to (which says a lot as I would typically watch Star Wars over and over again) and it frustrated me even more. Shockingly poor.

 

[steve5424]

 

[PlacidCasual]

FUEL!

 

[drunkenmaster]

Throwing it out there as an interesting discussion starter

"If you where given the Force Awakens plot from JJ, and had free reign, given his plot lines in TFA, where would you have gone with it"

I've typed the above without pondering it myself, so will edit with my views later

I think a key thing that needed to happen is to make Rey likeable. The people who say she was written as a classic Mary Sue are absolutely right. Kylo was trained by Luke, who took down the empire and the two biggest baddest sith lords ever, yeah he didn't kill the emperor but his strength of will to fight the dark side is what led to the emperor trying to kill or turn him and that led to his death.

Anyway the only way I could see trying to fix TFA by making Rey less of a ridiculous elite jedi having never done half a second of training is to make a storyline where her memory was false. She wasn't abandoned as a kid, really she was a jedi, sith or just someone on her own who trained for years in the way of the jedi but for some story line reason either lost her memory or had her memory erased. Like, hey, maybe she was the sole survivor of Kylo's attack on his training facility, she helped him find the original Jedi place then left and had her memory of it erased. So she was a bad ass jedi but didn't know it, so when she found herself in these situations without her knowing it her training had helped her.

TLJ could have started off with Luke welcoming her back, and then her utter confusion. Then a large part of the rebels beating Snoke becomes that Rey actually had the location of a hidden technology or ship they stashed somewhere that could be used on some suicide mission to kill Snoke and the film revolves around her regaining her memories.

I say that in such a way that I felt the biggest flaw of TFA was that a untrained person who had never used or felt the force was suddenly using the force to fly a ship (why she ever flew or knew anything about the Falcon was completely unexplained... she was working out in the desert and the boss guy showed her no love, when would she be working on, learning about or flying those ships?), use force mind tricks on a highly trained sith and beating a highly trained sith in combat with a lightsabre she'd never once used, nor had she used the force to fly a lightsabre to her. It broke the film, she was unkillable, unmatched, and as good as the best trained jedi/sith who ever lived. IF you don't find a way to write around that you end up with a ridiculous boring and unlikeable character.

Regardless of what I came up with had I been in the position to write this film, snails pace chase in which with an entire fleet at their disposal no one jumped ahead of the slow moving object to block it in would not have been something I came up with.

 

[Rroff]

She wasn't abandoned as a kid, really she was a jedi, sith or just someone on her own who trained for years in the way of the jedi but for some story line reason either lost her memory or had her memory erased. Like, hey, maybe she was the sole survivor of Kylo's attack on his training facility, she helped him find the original Jedi place then left and had her memory of it erased. So she was a bad ass jedi but didn't know it, so when she found herself in these situations without her knowing it her training had helped her.

Leans heavily on KOTR but... it would be a really good way to make her character interesting and rescue the **** show the main movies have become.

 

[Nitefly]

@drunkenmaster I completely get the ‘jump ahead’ criticism but the reasoning is essentially that goofy ginger admiral guy wanted to toy with them before death, in the stupid way that bond villains do and inadvertently let the hero win. Dumb and removed from reality, but I can get over it.

 

[drunkenmaster]

He didn't want to toy with them though, he was just thrown around the floor by his boss in front of everyone, threatened with death. They were supposed to have been ended before that and his only reason for not being killed on the spot was that he could track and still kill them. As soon as they caught up and got in range he was firing on the smaller ships any which could have held the leaders. They went out of their way to explain that they couldn't keep up not that he was doing it for a laugh.

THe other thing being, nothing would stop them sending a couple ships ahead in one direction so the rebels had to move on another heading to avoid the new lot, over and over.

Meh, another thing I really dislike is simply that goofy ginger guy doesn't come across as marginally intimidating and he lost Snoke his deathplanet, in an organisation which is cut throat and kills people who fail, how is he still alive, in charge and screwing up? The fake on hold/phone call thing, jesus christ, it was just embarrassing. The thing that also bugs the hell out of me is, launch into a system, launch tie fighters, over. They made it so if the ginger guy is 'on hold' with Poe, absolutely no one else in the fleet, the commanders of the other dozen ships with hundreds of tie fighters in there, none of them reacted, none of them saw a ship coming and launched tie fighters or opened fire on Poe while he was still at range. I hate writing in which the thing they are showing only works if everyone on the other side is a complete idiot and does't have a single normal reaction amongst in this case dozens of commanders, senior people, etc.

 

[Spit]

Well said Drunkenmaster, I eagerly await your episode 9 script.

The thing that gets me is the films have become silly, TFA, TLJ and Solo have over the top daft things in them and silly humour.

The original trilogy ship battles although complete fantasy had an air of believability about them. Hats off to the guys who made it all happen with special effects 40 years ago. Watching the ESB and ROTJ space battles they are still epic.

 

[JediFragger]

Watching the ESB and ROTJ space battles they are still epic.

/nods head in agreement. Some *damn* talented guys working on these movies back then. The creature effects in RotJ alone are incredible!

 

[Spit]

It really is just amazing what those guys did. The attention to detail on the way the Falcon moves and its inertia against the X-Wing is just art. The Falcon was a fast ship but it wasn't a nimble fighter but on the new films, they have it zipping around all over and crashing into things, so annoying. We felt it when it lost its dish lol now its smashes into things like a dodgem car.

I would rather watch these scenes a 100 times over than watch the new films.

 

[Jokester]

They don’t make em like they used to.

 

[JediFragger]

Maaaaan, I remember playing the RotJ arcade game and completing that level. Yeee-haaaa indeed!!!

 

[JediFragger]

I lip-sync'd virtually every line of that scene. Ford's charisma literally seeps through the celluloid in these movies, their's only one Han Solo imo and always will be. Irreplaceable

 

[JediFragger]

They don’t make em like they used to.

A golden era, we're all privileged to have experienced it the first time around

 

[Spit]

So privileged. Not to derail the thread but the map scene on raiders is just amazing. The music and the way it’s not rushed, we don’t get that anymore.

 

[PlacidCasual]

The passage of time is clearly a big problem for most modern filmmakers it's like they're scared of it. Individual scenes need to be breakneck, all action follows on immediately from previous action no sense that time passed between and everywhere is as close as the corner shop. Although it's not explicit the old Star Wars movies felt like there was time between the scenes, the ways the characters relaxed or changed suggested it. This is no longer the case in Star Wars or anything else. Ready Player One the book explicitly takes place over months and even the finale over days but the film, which I really like btw, gave the feeling its start to finish is a few days at best.

 

[Grandmaster Fap!]

The passage of time is clearly a big problem for most modern filmmakers it's like they're scared of it. Individual scenes need to be breakneck, all action follows on immediately from previous action no sense that time passed between and everywhere is as close as the corner shop. Although it's not explicit the old Star Wars movies felt like there was time between the scenes, the ways the characters relaxed or changed suggested it. This is no longer the case in Star Wars or anything else. Ready Player One the book explicitly takes place over months and even the finale over days but the film, which I really like btw, gave the feeling its start to finish is a few days at best.

I think films now have the 'Michael Bay Effect', this generation need something big happening all the time, big visuals, big sound. Starwars used to have quiet moments, moments even as a kid i enjoyed, it all led to something and the payoff was worth it. Now i feel studios need to have massive openings to appease short attention span millennials, to the detriment of story telling, which is what SW has always been about.

 

[IvanDobskey]

Watching those clips from the original trilogy just makes you realise exactly how much better they were than the junk being churned out by Disney.

I don't know if the directors hired just don't get what made the originals so great, or if they are deliberately being dumbed down for today's moronic masses

The story telling just isn't there, the characters are vacuous and they constantly break the rules and lore laid out by the originals. Even the action scenes have no soul or feel to them, just like eloborate computer game sequences. Sad