This film lifts some scenes from RotJ wholesale (e.g. Rey/Snoke/Kylo is basically Luke/Palpatine/Vader only done incompetently). But I agree it blows up the original trilogy, as in, shits all over it.
I’m not sure I get all the hand-wringing over the hyperspace thing. Perhaps it’s a relation of proximity and mass that made it possible here, and why you couldn’t just send a cruiser through the Death Star. So a cruiser at close range can potentially take out a dreadnaught, but given the the Rebellion’s/Resistances lack of resources it’s not a viable long-term strategy. Hell, they were upset by losing their bombers. And with the Death Star, probably unlikely to ever get close enough.
Go, Kevin! That’s a perfect example of the kind of thinking I wish more people would engage in. I’m a creative writer and I generally root for things I like to be good. So if something in a movie strikes me as a logic issue then it’s an opportunity to engage in imaginative thinking to plausibly explain it. It’s a lot more fun than folding ones’ arms in disgust and making absurd claims like it ruins everything that came before. Please.
One might even make a light side/dark side analogy.
So the scriptwriters can write whatever nonsense they want, and it’s the job of the audience to fix it up? Sorry, that just can’t be how it works.
Look, obviously any scifi movie depends on suspending disbelief in the first place. Nobody is complaining about how “well, actually there is no way the hyperdrive could work without breaking causality”. The audience is already on the scriptwriter’s side
All they had to do a token effort to explain all the massive plot holes, and the audience would play along. Have Rose say in passing that there’s only one Stealth Escape Pod on the ship in the scene where Finn is trying to sneak off. Or make the Laura Dern character mutter that “there’s only one chance in the thousand this hits” as she engages the hyperdrive. Have Luke tell the rebels “I don’t know if I can win this, but I’ll hold them off as long as I can. Fly, you fools”.
But they couldn’t bother to even do that.
The seminal question being which of the two new movies shits all over the original trilogy the hardest. My $$$ is still on AFA (hey, that was nice New Republic you had there, too bad we didn’t have the narrative space to bother explaining why it was so easily overthrown, or a few seconds’ worth of frames to let any character show any emotive reaction to its destruction, or even why there is a 1st order or a oh-so-creatively named Resistance (to be uttered always with a bad French accent)).
But, oh my, there’s a spark on that there Falcon, and it’s going to light a fire. Such a shame they called for help and literally no one came but a AWOL Jedi who can’t offer more than acting as a traffic cop for a few minutes before giving up the ghost, literally. Mary Sue will naturally become the greatest Jedi ever, sans training, because of the high midiclorian count she got from her random junker parents. Broomstick kid will probably be the hero of ep9.
30 years from now I expect a new trilogy that shits all over whatever achievements Rey and Finn make possible, and I won’t care because these characters bore the f*ck out of me.
I got to go to a free screening. We have an investment guy who invites all his clients to a movie in December every year. He’s picked Star Wars the last two, Rogue and Last Jedi.
I’m over CG in movies. I just don’t care that much. I did enjoy the action scenes for the most part, but I never really cared much about the characters. I like the new Jedi girl best of all the new ones. “Flyboy,” as he was called, was just stupid. Frankly, after his mutiny, he should have been locked away for good. Instead he’s just running around again being stupid, probably ready to mutiny again at the drop of a hat.
The black guy (sorry, I don’t remember their names) should have sacrificed himself. That would have been interesting. The idea of a high-speed crash as a good way to save him was kind of stupid. Most of the time in Star Wars when two ships collide, they crash and burst into flames.
Overall it was ok for an action film. It was too long. It had multiple climaxes in the last 30 minutes. I kept thinking it was over and then there’d be more. The director seemed to have a fetish for intense closeups. I was watching it on a giant IMAX screen and I could see every detail of the teeth of the characters in the closeups. It was a bit distracting.
It was fun to see del Toro. He provided the best spark in the movie. I kept thinking he was going to help them in the end but he just disappeared after getting his payoff. I imagine we’ll see him again in the next movie.
I’m really just tired of The Force, too. I don’t think I’m the audience for these kinds of movies anymore. I’ll watch a good action flick at home when one is on and I’m in the mood for something mindless, but I like character-driven movies these days. There really wasn’t anyone to care about in this movie.
There you go! You’re doing it! Pretend any of those things were actually said (only it happened off-screen) and then you can go back to liking that movie you really wanted to like! It’s so easy.
Come to the light!
Yeah, I thought that was odd, too. Rather than simply tell them he was going to create a diversion so they could try to get away, they were supposed to figure it out on their own. It was like a Jedi mind game!
The part about Luke not really being there was actually a nice plot device. They still could have had Luke tell them to run and not given it away. It was supposed to be more dramatic for Flyboy to figure it out on his own, I guess.
Yeah, I think there may be something to that.
Well, I’ll let the haters hate while I go to Tosche Station to get some power converters.
So just curious about the flying ships in the final battle that had to trail something in the snow. What was the purpose of that? And if the ships can fly, why not just fly instead of flying 15 feet off the surface? I know, trying to use logic for what is essentially fantasy is never going to go well, but I thought those ships were really odd.
They think they were supposed to be just old hovercraft and used the bar for stabilization - presumably to drive home the fact that the base is supposed to be only equipped with completely outdated tech.
No it wasn’t. It was bullshit and unnecessary. What was the point of Luke not being present in person? Why would he do that? If he was there in person, he could have been killed like Obi-Wan and “become more powerful than you can imagine”. He would have been a martyr to the cause, “sparking the flame of rebellion”, because Luke Skywalker himself died for the rebels. Instead he overexerted himself and had a heart attack across the galaxy where nobody could see it happen. It just didn’t make any fucking sense, and was thematically and emotionally empty, like most of this disappointing movie.
Han Solo’s death had meaning, and resonance. Luke’s, not so much.
anyone mentioned the dumb ass bit when the soldier licked the dirt and told us it was salt? like why the fuck do I care? and in a movie as stupidly long as this…WHY?
Ha ha. I was like who is this bad ass dripping blood and walking forward to take on the empire…errr. First Order. Apparently nobody.
The giant laser ram was bad. Who thinks that kind of stuff up? I was half expecting Finn to fly into it and say “I’m back!” ala Independence Day. That would have been cool. Har har.
But the chase narrative is mind numbingly stupid.
No spy or homing device. Just a Deus Ex Machina McGuffin box that in the end doesn’t end up getting destroyed.
Full speed ahead captain while we send off a secret mission to Casino World to find somebody to help us destroy the McGuffin box. They seriously went on a secret mission during a high speed chase.
Luckily the Imperials were so dumb they didn’t think to hyperspace jump ahead and corner them from multiple vectors.
And luckily Treasure Planet just appears before the fuel runs out.
Oh and just a pro command tip. You might want to tell people about your plans if things look desperate, people think they are going to die and they might you know mutiny.
But it’s not like stupid things happen with unencrypted comms giving out vital info to people with no NTK or goofballs blabbling about stealth transports to guys they just met a few hours ago.
I swear there were some space balls allusions here too…especially from the X-wing fighter pilot guy.
The script writers on this should delete their accounts.
I think the movie is too long and is poorly done,but had a few cool moments. They could have made a much better movie by deleting a lot of unnecesary subplots and editing a reason why many things happens the way they happen.
Ok, lets imagine I forget I have a brain. Would I enjoy the movie? No because is too long.
Yeah, that was crazy. They could have simply had most of the fleet destroyed and then run to the old rebel base without all of other stuff with the bad guys following. It would have made the movie shorter.
Eh, they can just say he died giving time for the remnants of the rebels to escape. He used the Force, etc. As far as I can tell, most of the rebels had no idea he wasn’t really there. The only person who knows he died is Jedi girl – er, I guess Leila knew as well – but they sensed it, didn’t see it.
I liked it because I thought it was a clever twist in a movie that didn’t really have any interesting revelations, other than Princess Leila can fly through outer space with a spacesuit. I didn’t see that one coming.
My main problem with Luke’s death is that it had zero emotional impact on me. Zero. And this is Luke Fucking Skywalker! Guy I freaking grew up with! And it was so poorly done that I was shaking my head in disbelief and confusion instead of wiping tears off my eyes. God dammit this fucking film.
Y’alls’ inner-children are suffocating under the weight of nostalgia and expectations. Also, high cholesterol.
So if he had actually been there in person and pulled an Obi Wan and just let the bad actor guy kill him, would that have been more powerful? I don’t see that as being an improvement.
(I’m sorry he’s gone because he’s a more interesting character than any of the new people. Mark Hamill has a gravitas now that he didn’t have when younger. I read that the director/writer killed him off because the spotlight is supposed to be on the new people, but they aren’t very interesting, sadly.)