Yeah, this is basically where I have to flip a fucking table.
As a card carrying The Last Jedi lover I try to stay away from this thread because somehow this fucking franchise moment has become indelibly embroiled in the a-worryingly-large-part-of-nerds-are-nazis-now garbage, and I want to not tar people by association, but seriously. This it where it breaks for you?
The Last Jedi is a perfectly coherent - utterly gorgeous - chase movie. It’s slightly unconventional in some of its structure, but everything is motivated by character, builds its themes, and if you look at it and think it’s a worse constructed movie compared to the prequels I seriously don’t know what to do with you.
Cool that you love it (I was bored mostly but enjoyed being back in the SW world), but the whatever the hell you mean by the ‘nerd-nazi’ is crap so feel free to take a leap. It’s a poorly constructed (and yes, incoherent) story that thinks being subversive is just doing the opposite. Hints, clues, characterizations pointing towards one thing…Opposite suckas, I’m subversive!!!
As far as the prequals, it’s easier to ignore/forget problems at the beginning of a narrative than the problems with the ongoing continuation of said narrative.
A) look above you. And B) I read them. I wish I hadn’t, but I did. (Well, except preciousgollum1. After the Battlefield thread, my eyes just glaze over when I see his name.)
I guess I don’t just take them seriously? The Last Jedi is a very small, contained period of time. What are its lore implications that could not be solved by an interdictor ship? What the fuck does it do to Star Wars that the prequels didn’t already do?
(I do have answers to those, but they’re really mean,)
But being slightly less mean, I would also put it to you that people are too cinematically illiterate and desperate to be indulged at every moment to understand that this:
I may be wrong, but @lostcawz didn’t say the prequels are better constructed, just that TLJ is badly constructed. Personally, I think TLJ is very well made and overall, I liked it. There were just elements that rubbed me the wrong way.
This is less mean? Jesus dude. Chill out. Maybe they understood it just fine, but didn’t like it? I mean, that’s my stance. It wasn’t particularly complicated. It was just a bummer.
In the battle on Red Salt Planet, Finn and Rey come in with the Millennium Falcon, they shoot three Tie Fighters, and then Finn shouts “Woohoo” and then Rey also shouts “Woohoo” -
Rey then says “I like this!”… which feels very out of place. Is she talking about the Gun? About shooting down Tie Fighters? Is this some sort of Stephen Merchant-esque form of ‘British wit’?
Is she trying to say: “I like these odds”? It is cryptic dialogue at best.
What was established in The Force Awakensin the first minutes of the film? Even in the Trailers…
Stormtroopers are people too, with thoughts and feelings and capability to rebel, which is the whole reason that Finn is supposedly the character that he is.
So, Star Wars tries to be smart, with its fodder, is lauded for its differences, but forgets its theme halfway through TLJ?
Imitating the Hoth battle, Death Star run in Jedi, and the Gunner scene in New Hope all at once.
[quote=“Soren_Hoglund, post:644, topic:128162”]
But being slightly less mean, I would also put it to you that people are too cinematically illiterate and desperate to be indulged at every moment to understand that this:
I’m sure other people are going to have answers that are more in-depth and general, but here are a few specific points that I personally noticed:
The story is one long drawn-out chase that is supposed to build tension because they don’t have enough time or fuel, but apparently they have enough that Rose and Finn can warp to another planet and back in the middle of everything.
The plot is driven by people making terrible decisions, instead of people making good decisions but having bad things happen to them. (Poe leads a mutiny because his commander won’t tell him the plan, the commander won’t tell him the plan because she feels like he’s arrogant, and so on.)
A major plot element is that Rose and Finn are thrown in jail because of a parking ticket.
BB-8 single-handedly incapacitates three guards, including tying them up and putting gags in their mouths.
A movie like Empire is exciting because our heroes are in danger while the Rebel fleet is safe somewhere else. A movie like The Last Jedi is depressing because the heroes survive while 99% of the Rebel fleet is wiped out, just because the heroes have to survive by coincidence. (I believe they had 30 ships escaping to the planet, and 27 of them got blown up? But not the one that Poe and Leia and R2-D2 were on.)
(And I’m not sure where the “nerds are Nazis now” thing comes from either.)
Not that we need to re-hash everything over and over again but a huge point of the little side venture is to show everyone how much the rest of the universe is just… business as usual.
I could park illegally in Beverly Hills and I wouldn’t get thrown in jail for it. Or they could have just parked in a parking space. Or in the bushes or somewhere farther away. But the plot needed them in jail so they could meet Benicio Del Toro.
So we need elements like that in all our adventure movies. Cut-away from a Bond film to the local WalMart, scenes from a family eating dinner mixed in with your Fast and Furious.
It was a waste of time, and was only used to bring the eventual traitor into the plot.
I think a large part of point 2 (plot driven by bad decisions) was kind of the point of Yoda at the end with the whole ‘mistakes are a great teacher’ thing. And that’s true. I’d rather see a movie where the good guys are losing because they’re making dumb mistakes instead of making good decisions, but having things just not go their way. You can overcome making dumb mistakes by, well, learning to not make them. It’s something that we should hopefully see in IX, but the people that are left in the Rebellion need to learn from their mistakes so they can maybe, just maybe, beat the First Order.
And that’s not just mistakes from TLJ either. Should they manage to being the First Order with the dozen or two people they have left, maybe - just maybe - they should work on clearing the galaxy of the entire First Order instead of thinking everything is great just because the Emperor is dead.
Anecdotally, I’ve never seen a movie that so clearly seems to encourage fans to go, “Oh you didn’t like the movie? It must be because you didn’t get it.”
You don’t have to like the way they told the story, I’m just saying the mundane pieces were put there because there they were mundane. it clearly didn’t work for you guys. That’s okay.
But the dumb mistakes just seem to compound on each other. Poe takes a huge risk and loses half of their fleet…so Holdo decides to not share her plan because he needs to learn to follow orders…so Poe decides to mutiny. Finn and Rose decide to leave the ship against orders…which leads them to a failed plan…and the guy they trusted betrays them. Leia and Holdo decide to retreat to the planet…where they are trapped with no way out. Oh, and Poe learns his lesson from his failed attack, so he decides NOT to wipe out the big gun even when that could save them…but then Finn decides to disobey orders and sacrifices himself…but then Rose tries to stop him, dooming the rest of the fleet…
It’s just bad decision after bad decision. I would rather see people acting intelligently, than making bad decisions just to further the plot.
And that’s the kind of thinking that tempted Luke to preemptively kill Kylo Ren, leading to the creation of the First Order! See what I mean about the movie sending contradictory messages?
I agree with this and think that stuff is perfectly cromulent for what it is (or sets out to be). And i liked the space casino stuff just fine, it felt perfectly Star Wars-y to me.
I do disagree with the choice to frame the First Order / Rebellion conflict as business as usual when the First Order was shown to blow up multiple planets and also kill billions (trillion?) of people, which is part of probably my biggest disagreement with how TLJ tried to frame the conflict as both futile and also not that big a deal (and why i keep calling it millennial, fairly or not).
You could psychoanalyze the plot and see it as some kind of “terrorist-adjacent” reaction where younger people just want to “check out” of the state of war on terror and declare both sides to be stupid and that they’re talking their ball and going home. Luke and Rose’s actions amount to essentially opting out of the prisoner’s delimma Kylo is forcing on them; you can’t fire/kill me, I quit! sort of attitude. And which seems to be kind of the ultimate conclusion the rebels come to, that it’s the principle rather than the struggle itself that will win, and that like the Arab Spring or many social media driven movements in the world today, you don’t have to have any army when “the people” rise up against their oppressors (or something similar). I felt like that’s what the movie hinted at, but did not completely reach.
Is the kid with the broom going to rise up and fight the First Order? Or is he going to rise up and throw off his shackles and stop being oppressed by The SpaceMan? And then send the whole system tumbling down? It was the latter outcome the movie hinted at to me.
