Is it a new story though? Because it seems to me like for a new story there were a few things I kinda recognized, like, well, everything, same everything, down to the heroes being the underdogs, Empire being the Empire doing Empire things, etc. A new story at the very least would’ve changed some things…
Which hey, episode VIII is sort of the logical conclusion of episode VII, it just made it clear that your heroes had failed. And a harsh dose of reality, life sucks, you can’t truly beat Nazis, you’ll probably die a failure, there are no real heroes, you’re gonna screw up your kids life, etc, is why I go to SW movies. :D
XCOM games will almost invariably start on the back-foot, because that is the nature of a Strategy Video Game. Each game has its ending, and not everybody even gets that far. It was an excuse to change the setting. The XCOM games have ‘pulp-continuity’. It is filler content.
Xcom games were not about ‘Story’. They were about emergent narrative through strategy gameplay. If anything, XCOM reboot suffered as a result of its linear nature.
The difference is that Films are entirely linear, passive experiences, and so rest on whether or not the narrative and the AV is enjoyable.
This is essentially where I come down on it, too, and in that same vein, to @divedivedive’s point about sequel stories ruining what came before, Logan is one of my least-favorite movies of all time because the base premise of it is “All the hard work and battles the X-Men fought over the preceding 8 films don’t matter, because they all died, anyway, except X, who is senile and responsible for most of their deaths, and Logan, who is an embittered drunk.”
For those that can just divest that from what came before, power to you. But for me, it was a real punch to the gut to think that all those amazing come-from-behind victories and the extraordinary teamwork and relationships it took to achieve them were basically for naught, because anti-mutant serum in the corn syrup, y’all. It basically robbed all of what came before of most of its meaning for me. And mind, yeah, that meaning was “fairy tale good guys win” simplicity.
But that’s what I want out of my fiction, because the real world sucks fucks and I want to escape it sometimes, man.
How so? Because the First Order commander never gave the order to jump a ship ahead or suicide a droid? One character’s decisionmaking doesn’t have anything to do with our understanding of the previously established universe. Neither does heretofore-unheard-of technology or Force powers. The tracking beacon (or whatever tech the First Order has that constrains the rebels) and Luke’s Force projection are also examples of things that don’t contradict the established universe, in my opinion.
Yes, I agree – The value in discussing Poe’s actions is in whether or not it makes sense for him and/or expands on his character and then using examples from the film (or films, I guess) to justify it one way or the other. Simply saying “Holdo made a bad call by not telling Poe the plan” isn’t really valuable – but there’s good discussion to be had in asking “Why did Holdo keep the plan from Poe?” and whether or not the answer makes her an interesting character.
I’m positive that I’m not articulating myself well. I agree that TLJ is weak, but I disagree that it requires some insurmountable suspension of disbelief.
See I don’t think everyone is as divested or invested as implied. I remember your strong reaction to Logan, and I remember some people who tried to explain why it was okay, call it encouragement vs what’s going on here… and then they come over here and have a similar reaction you had but somehow it’s all different now.
The only difference is some people care about one more than the other. It’s a lot easier though to accept flaws in later material when there is acceptance that the original material was deeply flawed too. It’s space wizards, fantasy, with just a hint of reality to make it feel more harmonious than some of the other attempts at space worlds that wound up just hitting the silly mark instead of the magical.j
For me, the new Star Wars movies are still magical, and it’s not because I don’t see flaws. I overlooked the flaws in the old stuff and none of those heroes are less in my eyes than they were before.
I’m fine with the “new” Force powers and tracking tech. As I said consistency is key.
The Holdo thing has been debated a million times before, but it boils down to this: The Holdo hyperspace ram makes no sense as a surprise trick in the Star Wars universe when droids, hyperspace, and ships have existed for decades in the movies. Take any ship, pop a droid into it, and hyperspace ram any enemy you want as a relatively cheap and foolproof win button. It’s ridiculous.
I understand we can’t help how we feel, but I’m fine with Logan for the same reason I’m fine with IW. It’s not going to stay that way, there will be a reset, a new timeline, something.
Also, ‘Warp drives’ are usually about the dangers of materialising inside a physical object upon re-entry; a form of folded-space or inter-dimentional travel. (Ala Nightcrawler from X-men, or Event Horizon).
They aren’t magical space bullets, because they would literally be impractical as a form of Travel. Space-Collision would be almost inevitable if the ships simply ‘went faster’.
Perhaps the writers wanted to get rid of Holdo in order to not have to dwell on the complicated sub-plot they had created.
And make some white celestial-tree visuals while at it.
After giving this some more thought, I can think of a situation where I can relate to this - I haven’t read Go Set a Watchman yet, because I don’t like the thought of Atticus Finch as an embittered old racist. It’s just antithetical to who he was in To Kill a Mockingbird. But I guess I have stronger feelings about that book than I do about the Star Wars movies, and that makes the difference.
They worked for some people and not for others. Personally I think they were a little too cute, but it certainly didn’t ruin the movie for me. (As opposed to, say, “Expert pilot Chewbacca is going to bring Porgs onto his ship so they can chew into the wiring and get in the way while he’s trying to fly.”)
But see, I DON’T know what their intention was! To me, it seemed like the writers said, “We need a way for Rose and Finn to get thrown into jail. How about a parking ticket??” I didn’t get any clear indication that they wanted to say, “Look at how mundane things happen even while a Rebellion is going on!” It just seemed like a plot contrivance. And in a world where ships routinely show up and land wherever they want to land, it seems strange that Rose and Finn would get thrown into jail within minutes of landing on the planet just because they parked in the wrong place.
That brings us back to the “fridging” argument, where writers say, “What’s a good way to motivate this character? I know, let’s kill someone else off!” And yes, the later story should follow from the earlier one, just like Ripley’s behavior in Aliens naturally followed from the events of Alien.
I think there’s a world of possibilities between “Luke wasn’t a master teacher” and “Luke tried to murder his apprentice in his sleep.”
The thing that bothers me most about The Last Jedi wasn’t that it was dull, or that it had a totally moronic and inconsistent plot with more holes than I can remember in any other movie (though both of those were true). Bad movies happen.
It’s that it made it totally clear there is no plan for Star Wars. Hell, there isn’t even a vague vision. It’s just going to be a incoherent sequence of movies, with each director being as likely to take a dump on the the previous movie as to build on it. Not that there’s going to be much to work with after The Last Jedi.
But you’re shown two perspectives on that action - Kylo saw a rage-filled Luke standing over him, while Luke recalled wistfully considering the action and then discarding it. You got Rashomon in my Star Wars!
That at least has been the case from the beginning. Lucas didn’t know Vader was Luke’s father until they started shooting Empire, nor that Leia was his sister until they were into RotJ. They put a second Death Star in Jedi because they couldn’t figure out how to make Coruscant. They’ve been winging it all along.
Edit: hey how did I do that highlighty thing? That’s kind of cool.
Double edit: and now it’s gone!
But it felt like a natural progression. Vader being Luke’s father fit into the existing storylines from Star Wars, Leia being his sister fit into hints from Empire…it felt like a cohesive storyline. It didn’t feel like they set something up in one movie, then completely discarded it in the next movie, like “Luke left a map so we could find him” going into “I came here because I didn’t want to be found.”
But those are examples playing “yes, and”. Accept the premise, and expand on it. It doesn’t matter if Vader was retconned into being Luke’s father, that idea didn’t invalidate A New Hope but spiced it up. So the original trilogy still has a pretty clear vision even if the details changed over time. (Of course it’s easier to maintain that coherence when the same person is in charge of all the movies).
TLJ was Johnson going “no, but”. He clearly thought that basically everything done in that universe, but in particular anything done in Force Awakens, was stupid. He was probably right on a lot of it. But rather than just ignore it, he chose to spend most of his movie on destroying the past rather than telling a good story.
There’s a reason for why improv actors always go with “yes, and” rather than a “no, but”. The latter is just toxic to storytelling.
