With enough resources to build the biggest and most expensive weapon the galaxy has ever seen, by far. Not that I mind too much, details aren’t important in the setting.
I do agree that ramming doctrine is a bit bigger than just a detail.
With only a content-free teaser (which is normal, not a criticism), how else are you going to talk about expectations?
The martial art that allows regular people to fight with force users?
And how everyone knows it?
Me, I’m just amazed that even in a galaxy full up on planet destroying weapons and mind-reading space wizards, conflict resolution seems to always come down to Kung Fu.
I would agree with this. Last night I rewatched TLJ and I think I liked it less that I originally did.
if the space-ramming thing was an option why didnt the rebels fling one of the calamari ships at death star 2 and end that whole battle in 2 seconds. get a droid to pilot it.
and someone try to justify the ‘luke skywalker sucking milk from a big blue space walrus’ scene. I dare you. Tell me how thats good.
TLJ ruined the whole franchise for me. I’d rather watch the phantom menace 10 times in a row than sit through 5 minutes of TLJ.
Each movie in the new trilogy features a Jedi eating a weird, green food to establish auteur credibility a la the Cornetto movies. In Episode IX we’ll see Kylo Ren order a green star pretzel from a cantina.
I think the idea is to undercut the highfalutin stuff with earthy humor. Wasn’t exactly Falstaff, though, was it?
I don’t understand this degree of reaction (from anyone). The prequels did more damage to the mythology of the Force than anything TLJ did wrong, and on top of that I think they were artlessly produced. I can still watch them, but I don’t like them and they’re the worst part of the franchise.
I can’t parse it as anything more than strong hyperbole when someone tries to tell me they’d rather watch them than TLJ. No one can literally mean what you’re saying.
I mean, you’re you and I’m me, and I can’t actually say what anyone actually thinks or feels, but I cannot find any common ground on which to discuss TLJ when someone says something like this.
New Testament sucks compared to Old Testament too.
The prequels were artless (great descriptor for them, thanks for that) and largely soulless files in many, many ways. But they didn’t actively, even maliciously, work to undermine the very mythos upon which they sought to build.
Fuck TLJ.
E: okay, I’ll give you (ugh) midichlorians
Adults are the ones I see obsessing over Star Wars. The high school students I teach treat it very similarly to things like Transformers. When a movie comes out its huge for a couple of weeks. The rest of the time it is overwhelmed by Fortnite, Minecraft and so forth because they are always available.
That’s not a bad comparison.
Well, they weren’t dealing with the same characters, for one thing. The only reason TLJ and even TFA had those beloved characters was to bring them out of retirement for us to say “hey, I know those people! Let’s go see this movie!”. There’s no reason Han, Luke and Leia needed to have the kind of meaningless post-Return of the Jedi torture that they endured. They earned their success, and we intuitively knew that the world they’d inhabit post-Return would be a much better one. But because some filmmakers were too creatively bankrupt to figure out how to do Star Wars without a Rebellion and an Empire, as ridiculous as that is, they cast Leia in the Sisyphic role of eternal General, fighting an endless battle against the forces of who-cares, and Han as the aging, pathetic shell of a smuggler next to an un-aging suit of hair.
Then TLJ comes along and has no idea what to do with JJ’s ‘Luke is hidden away’ McGuffin. Rian Johnson describes (I’m not about to dig for the reference) that he had no idea why Luke would run away from everyone, and the only reason he could think of was that he ‘shut himself off from’ the Force. Which is not only antithetical to JJ’s original vision of Luke as a powerful McGuffin to be sought by everyone (who needs a senile old man?), but also disrespectful to the character, as Mark Hamill himself repeatedly told Johnson during filming. And yes, you could reason through that and explain that Luke is hurt and how poignant that is, but by that measure, you could also make a movie about Luke suffering from Alzheimer’s, and that would be just as poignant, just as pathetic, and just as disrespectful to the character and his growth in the previous movies.
Honestly, these movies would have benefited immeasurably from being 200 years in the future given how they treated those old characters. Luke was somehow thought to be a myth anyway, despite having won a massive war only a few years earlier. It would also have served as a much better explanation for how things got as bad as they did in such short time. In fact, that’s the biggest problem with Snoke dying so fast – not just that he displayed incredible power (and yet incredible stupidity in his moment of death) but also as an explanation for WTF happened and how this universe has been so stunted in the very short time since Return. Surely Snoke must have some story for how he grew in power so quickly; some connection to the Emperor; but nope, nothing. Just another idiot, easily dying to the teenage, angsty man-child that is supposed to be the threat in this pathetic trilogy.
The prequels ruined everything that came before the original trilogy, but we never really cared about that anyway. We knew that somehow Vader became Vader, and there was much hope that the prequels would have the same quality as the originals, but once it was seen that they were terrible, there was no impact they could have on the original trilogy. Not so here.
Anakin’s virgin birth? Amidala being 10 years older than Anakin? The rolling around in the grass scene with the least movie chemistry of any couple ever? Anakin being C3PO’s designer, as an 8 year old? Space traders that sound like Archie Bunker’s caricature of a shifty Jew? “Poo doo”? Jar Jar fucking Binks? Baby Boba Fett?
TLJ didn’t actively work to undermine anything. I seriously do not understand how people could think that movie pissed on their childhood when a movie like The Phantom Menace exists. And I’ll share a guilty secret: I think TPM is a worthless, shitty movie that fucked up Star Wars for me. I still enjoyed it while I was watching it. I just don’t understand the TLJ hatred, and it’s really hard for me to untangle it from the MRA idiots and harrassing of Kelly Tran because it seems so non-sensical. I understand not liking the film. That’s totally legit. But thinking it’s the worst film in the franchise, and believing that a film full of fanservice is actively trying to destroy it from within is just hard to parse.
No one has ever been spaced into vacuum in any of the Star Wars movies ever. Leia is the first person in any of the films to even half-way acknowledge that they’re taking place in space. Gravity, vacuum, space-to-surface transfers, etc etc, are all utterly unspace-like. These are air and naval battles with a starfield skybox pasted behind them and always have been. There is no scene of weightlessness anywhere in any of the films. Any energy weapon capable of causing the damage lasers do in these films would generate massive amounts of heat, and yet there are no radiators on any of those vessels. Etc etc etc. You can nitpick that shit for all time, but who cares? It’s space wizards and WWII dogfights. Sit back and enjoy it.
It’s almost as if people were trying to explain it to you!
The idea that because a story has fantasy elements, then therefore anything goes and nobody can critique it when something feels wrong or violates previously established rules, is something that keeps popping up and it has never made sense to me. Actually, the best fantasies are what they are because they adhere to limits of their own world construction. Even in something as relatively improv and whimsical as The Wizard of Oz, there’s a dream logic that works. (For example, it’s central to the story that Dorothy’s acquisition of friends is what saves her, so it’s acceptable that the Scarecrow would be able to kill the Witch with a bucket of water, whereas if Dorothy just wished herself out of the prison chamber it would feel like a cop-out.)
All that said, Space Leia didn’t really bother me that much. She’s supposed to be a child of the Force, and sudden explosive decompression would be a good time for something special to instinctively kick in.
I think TLJ is a hash, but I think it’s partly because Johnson was saddled with a lot of dumb shit from the previous film, including the fact that the entire galactic conflict has just reset to ‘zero’ with a new enemy apparently able to pull an Empire-sized space fleet out of its ass (OK, yes, fine, the Romans pretty much managed the equivalent against Carthage), and that one of the main characters (Finn) is completely without interest. He was also expected to walk this crazy tightwire of “make it TOTALLY NEW but also EXACTLY APPEALING TO WHAT WE WANT” which is really fucking hard to do, especially if you’re just tacking sequels on with no larger scheme to work from. Cameron managed it with Aliens and it was a near-miracle that time.
I can’t believe people are so hung up on this. The reason the tactic is almost never used is that the odds of success are proportional to the mass of the target ship divided by the square of the ratio of the mass of the target to the projectile. You can’t use it against ordinary capital ships or against something like the Death Star. Elementary physics.
How many Joules of kinetic energy do you think it would take for a Mon Calamari cruiser to destroy a Mega-class Star Destroyer by ramming it, exactly?
Are you saying space fuel doesn’t melt Star Destroyer beams?
Fun fact: you could kamikaze your ships into other ships in the original Homeworld game. (It wasn’t quite as spectacular as TLJ.)
This feature was removed in Homeworld 2. I suspected at the time that it was removed because people were still sorta freaked out after 9/11. I think there were several games that were delayed/modified in some way after 9/11. (Mostly flight sims IIRC.)