Regardless of the writing that led up to it, Holdo’s light speed jump transfixed the theater more than any other moment in the movie — this was the case every time I went. There’s nothing particularly Star Wars about it, but it does its job.
The obvious hand-wave answer for ramming would be that the Empire had Interdictors. Even though they never actually appeared on film. But that’s too much work for anyone in charge of Star Wars so instead we got TLJ and whatever that was. Apparently the only reason the Empire ever succeeded at all is a combination of cowardice and stupidity on the Rebel side. They’d rather die horribly in a helpless battle than just win outright for the cost of a ship or two.
Yep, I noted that. Doesn’t make the argument any less relevant for what used to be the world’s top-selling toy franchise.
Disney probably cares. And my kids do watch the same episodes of the Disney shows they like 10 times a day, which tends to be quite annoying. They watch nothing at all of Star Wars.
So, two things, before I drop this conversation, since you apparently can’t discuss this without belittling insults. People can appreciate more than one thing, even if they enjoy some things more than others. And whether you like it or not, franchises live or die on whether people buy the products. If a franchise loses the ability to move merchandise, the investment money goes to the franchises that can - and Disney didn’t buy Star Wars to produce ~$400 million movies.
I don’t doubt for a moment that episode IX will make it’s billion, but the big question is: will it be able to stake out a way forward for the franchise? I’m far from convinced, given that JJ Abrams is at the helm - I’m not a particular fan of TLJ, but to give Rian Johnson credit, I’d be more optimistic about the last film if they’d given it to him. JJ Abrams seems unable to deliver on anything but nostalgia (quite telling how the new trailer is pretty much all “see, your fan-favorite old characters are back”), and if he holds to that form, no one but the die-hard fans are going to care when Rian Johnson’s new project comes around.
You noted that but it doesn’t’ seem like you really internalized it to the point where you really appreciate that today’s youth are pulled in a hundred different directions at any given moment.
That’s just your kids. There are lot of kids that are into it. Clone Wars, Rebels, these are highly successful animated series, and not just due to former fans.
You think that’s insults? Take a look around, and after you do that, use Google and look up the target audience for action figures. It’s not an insult. It’s a fact. Action figures are designed for little boys. There a lot of conversations about these toys. It’s not something I just made up. Lack of selling of them can mean that the audience is not just little boys, and that’s fine. The toy industry has had more than a little shake-up itself, not just in what they sell and how they sell it but having one of their most focused sellers actually go belly-up. That’s not a minor freaking thing.
Star Wars survived the Prequels. It has had more than a few failed attempts in the past. I think it will be fine as long as they keep trying and expand their audience, which they have. These movies are not flops. A ton of people are seeing it and going back. A billion dollars might seem crazy not enough for some people with extreme standards but that is not something to easily dismiss. They’re not making billions here because every hates these movies.
This is a great post. Thank you.
This whole conversation reminds me a Larry Niven bit from way back:
“Anything worth doing in space can be turned into a weapon.”
I find myself in this camp as well. Force Awakens has big picture problems, and retreaded too many things.
I think ultimately it was a bad idea having dueling directors negating each others plots tit for tat. Especially now that JJ has the last word now. Reforging the Darth Vader wannabe mask? Really?!
I think that TFA did exactly what it had to do. Lets not forget, Lucas tried to take a very different route in the prequels and got hammered for it. Yes TFA was a rehash of many of the original trilogy’s themes but it provided familiarity for those who know those movies so well and it also provided an well established and successful story line for the newer audience. To some I guess it was playing it too safe but it seemed to me to be the right way to go when re-establishing such an iconic franchise. You can’t please everyone but the box office shows that they definitely please enough. To be fair I am of that group of people who do not put hard sci-fi expectations on the franchise. For me, it is space fantasy and I am fine with that, in spite of the fact that they play a bit loose with physics. If you’re not in that group, that’s fine. They are not making these movies for you.
It can definitely be seen as a ‘safe’ reaction to the disaster that is the prequels. In general, I liked TFA, and I didn’t mind the repeated beats from episode 4 as much as I disliked the unreasonable reset to Empire vs tiny Rebellion.
Unfortunately, nobody from the Marvel side told the guys at Lucasfilm-Disney you need a Kevin Feige to plan things out so that directors don’t just take their individual movie in any direction they want and completely mess up the previous guy’s plans.
I understand it. The prequels were bad. But they were simply clumsy.
They weren’t someone being deliberately iconoclastic and trying to piss on the franchise.
Sometimes, being the guy who wants to shake things up and tear everything down is just being the asshole who pisses on something but doesn’t put anything better in its place. That’s what I think The Last Jedi did.
There’s that old adage, that to wear the mantle of Galileo, it is not sufficient to be oppressed, you must also be right. That’s a little bit of The Last Jedi for me. The Star Wars formula is not “tired” for me. I loved Star Wars. Loved the characters. Loved the dignity and gravitas, combined with the humor. 12 year old boy me loved the sweeping, compelling, good versus evil themes. It’s fine if someone else does not like that. But if you’re going to piss on it, you’d better come up with more than fucking blue milk, stupid jokes about holding on a telephone in space, killing the villain in the middle of the movie for no reason, and some fucking hackneyed allegories about wealth and poverty.
Star Wars can be altered. Rogue One showed a movie that could be darker, grittier, but still Star Wars, and excellent. It didn’t piss on the rest of the movies.
People who want to “burn it all down” get old quickly when they have nothing to offer themselves. It’s easy to destroy. Far harder to provide something meaningful in exchange. And The Last Jedi destroyed something I liked, and provided nothing meaningful in exchange for it.
I think “survives” is the wrong metric—there’s little doubt it will survive. I do wonder if the franchise is growing or contracting in popularity at this point (with international being a key issue that SW has always faced); success or failure here isn’t about doom, it’s about whether the slope is going up or down. TFA made 2.06B in global. TLJ dropped to 1.321B. While a drop was to be expected, given pent up demand for an episode VII, I think that’s probably a lot bigger than what Disney had expected, hence the return of JJ. It will be interesting to see how IX will do, box-office-wise. There is a risk of this being like the Transformers franchise which was huge, box-office-wise, but seriously contracted after reaching a high.
Jesus, talking about Star Wars these days is like talking about politics. The people that enjoyed The Last Jedi just want to tear everything down, and the folks who hated it just want the same old stuff regurgitated to them. Star Wars is just no rock ‘n roll fun anymore.
Episode 3 was watchable. 1 and 2 really weren’t.
MIRV Super Death Star whose explosions could be seen across the galaxy at the same time was the end of the franchise as anything more than summer faff. Getting mad about lightspeed suicide and not that is really missing the forest from the trees. The same way JJ took Trek back to its roots but thought it would be cool if JJ Trek blew up all the Federation ships and ALSO blew up some classic planets as well.
Rian isn’t some anti fan service guy and JJ isn’t some slavish fanboy. JJ very clearly sells his direction on nostalgia and is basically terrified not to recapitulate the original movies, hopefully from his mind, with the original actors. Rian got mad about that and tried to toss JJ’s work away, but clearly also didn’t have a clear idea about what he wanted out of VIII other than a vague millennial angst. Now JJ Wars 2 is going to rush back to the nostalgia train.
I was never into Trek or Wars but i get how frustrating it is for people to watch such apparently unambitions films remake the original films in their own ways. But the level of crazy people take with Wars is nuts.
I liked Episode 1 and 3 - there was only one scene in 2 that was good. Watching CGI Yoda fight vs the Darth Maul guy was stupid. In Episode 1 if you edited out literally everything with Jar Jar and the Toad people you’d improve the film by half. But the near-racist aliens are hard to get past.
Whatever the issues with the prequels at least Lucas had a sense of scale and economy. How did we get an Empire, where did it come from, why did it happen? In the recent films there’s literally 0 interest in explaining anything about anything. JJ doesn’t care about economics or politics, and thinks most Star Wars fans don’t either. What they want to see is tie fighters and x-wings and storm troopers, and that’s what he gave them.
And apparently, that’s what most really want.
Count Dooku? Yoda never fought Maul.
Sorry phrased that to briefly. “Watching CGI Yoda fight in Episode 2 vs watching a real person playing Darth Maul, with more stage and physical presence (if less CGI agility) fight in Episode 1 was a significant step backwards for the prequels.” I just didn’t want to write all that.
Even admitting, let’s be honest, Darth Maul is a stupid antagonist as conceived. Demon horns? C’mon.
Your description of the “scale and economy” of the prequels sounds more like something you’d see in a Wikia or a settings companion book. There’s always a challenging gap between hinting at things, but leaving them largely unexplored (e.g., the original trilogy) and pulling back the curtain and trying to explain it all (as the prequels did; ugh, midicholorians!). Admittedly, it wasn’t the galactic politics that made the prequels suck, it was just the suckiness of it all. The lows are just so low, from racist aliens, bad romance, inept jedi, whiny Anakin, to “I have the high ground!”. The prequels took a great fantasy franchise and tried to make it true SF by revealing that you arrived at the original trilogy, plot-wise, because of general mediocrity.
Ah! That’s a very different sentence! That makes a lot more sense. For what it’s worth, I agree that real people doing choreographed stunt-fighting usually always looks better than CG. Especially a CG frog hopping around while swordfighting.
Well you see a huge planet-city, with manufactures, with a senate, etc. It’s all hinted at. It’s also clear that it takes a long time to build a Death Star, which would make sense because it’s huge. A lot of this is between the lines.
Everything bad in the prequels really congeals in 2 though. Secret clone army of Boba Fett? It really felt like Lucas was telling the obsessive fans to go f!@# themselves because they cared for this apparently disposable character that had 3 lines in the original films.
It’s not the people who enjoyed The Last Jedi who are “tearing things down.” They’re consumers - they can enjoy what they want. I mean the literal theme of much of the movie, and the clear direction of the story, is tear down the old stuff.
I would have more sympathy if it wasn’t clearly, literally, obviously what Rian Johnson was intentionally doing.