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STAR WARS: LAST JEDI DISCUSSION (OH SO MANY SPOILERS HERE)


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On 12/20/2017 at 1:49 PM, pipGofern said:

Finally saw this last night. Man was this awful. I had no idea the RT audience numbers were at prequel levels but it makes sense since this was as bad as any of the prequels. 

I hope that's hyperbole because nothing is as bad as Phantom Menace. 

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Saw this tonight and thought it was the best of the new Star Wars movies.  I agree with the sentiments that it seemed really long and a few parts drug, but even then I really enjoyed it as a whole and all the individual plot devices were there for a reason.  Rey's lack of backstory surprised me but on the other hand I think it's kind of interesting that force sensitivity is kind of a recessive gene that random people may have that may require external events to activate.  I'm also surprised they didn't explain more of Snoke's origin, but I guess it didn't really matter.  The only thing I wondered is that I thought they made it clear in Return of the Jedi that Vader, the Emperor, and Luke were pretty much the only force sensitive/Jedi/Sith left.  Snoke is clearly a high tier force user and given his age and how decrepit his body is then surely he should have been one of the Empire's lieutenants during the original trilogy?  Maybe it was because the Empire was such a large organization that he was somewhere else carrying on with their business?

Anyways, I can already tell this will hold up to repeat viewings and look forward to seeing it again.  I liked TLJ but it hasn't proved that re-watchable for me personally.  I'm off to go build a lego AT-AT walker now.

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2 hours ago, Johnny Sorrow said:

I dig the arms dealers stuff. Money has been part of Star Wars since day one. Han owed Jabba money. The Empire hired bounty hunters. 

 

Count me in for digging that stuff. I'd like to see more of that and I like the tinge of moral conflict with Finn and Rose realizing that, yeah, the Resistance is buying their shit from the same folks the First Order buys their shit from.

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17 hours ago, Casey said:

Weren't the Rotten Tomatoes scores altered by a bot from an "alt-right troll" because there were too many female characters in the movie? I read that somewhere last night.

An alt-right group claimed responsibility (and somehow that this was a victory over Disney?) but Rotten Tomatoes say they investigated and found it to be bullshit, plus it has more negative then positive user scores on metacritic.

On the other hand, in person reaction surveys on opening night by cinemascore got an A, the audience score on IMDb is a solid if not spectacular 7.7/10. So.... Who knows?

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The war profiteering head nod is interesting, but I’m not sure they REALLY want to investigate that in a satisfying way, going forward. We’re still going to be shown x-wings wrecking shit, with the expectation that we’re cheering them along. That is, I don’t foresee an episode nine that ends with Kylo and Rey setting aside their lightsabers an sitting down to negotiate peace terms, including mutual disarmament and strict regulations on the military industrial complex.

Also: Snoke’s absence from the original trilogy can be explained if he was “dead”—the Plagueis angle—or from a neighboring galaxy. The new canon Thrawn novel makes it very clear that some threat is out there, and part of the Empire’s war mongering is an attempt to get ready for it. I’d be shocked if that never comes back up.

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That was pretty much Thrawne's thing in the old EU too.  Fan bitching in the next trilogy that they're fighting something that is or isn't the Vong either way will be fun.  Not as fun as the "The main hero is a woman" and "not a remake of the OT" combined bitching is, but still fun.

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3 hours ago, Beech27 said:

The war profiteering head nod is interesting, but I’m not sure they REALLY want to investigate that in a satisfying way, going forward. We’re still going to be shown x-wings wrecking shit, with the expectation that we’re cheering them along. That is, I don’t foresee an episode nine that ends with Kylo and Rey setting aside their lightsabers an sitting down to negotiate peace terms, including mutual disarmament and strict regulations on the military industrial complex.

Yeah, I was surprised they got into it at all. It's definitely not something that one would want to linger on. Even though it's generally taken for granted that war profiteering is bad, we're essentially arms dealers to the rest of the world and no one wants to think about that while they're watching a Star Wars movie 

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Just saw the film. I thought it was really good, much better than I expected. My only complaint was that it was longer than it needed to be. The way they strung together half a dozen desperate last stands at the end led to some serious fatigue.

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Saw it again, and I’m pretty much all in on loving it, having read too many pieces about the movie and committed to carefully and specifically watching only the movie they aimed to make. The teenagers nearby were really into it, and my dad—15 when this all started—liked it a lot too. This is a big generalization, but I wonder if most of the backlash coming from men more or less my age—29–has to do with being what I’ll call the prequel/EU generation. That is, Star Wars was Dark Horse and Thrawn and KOTOR and maligned prequels—and a thousand other things—so we were both skeptical of new canon and paradoxically endlessly aware we could find SOMETHING somewhere we liked. So, we turned reactive and grew very attached to our own private canon. (Of course my demographic also trends regrettably towards being insane online Nazi fetishists, so that has to be factored in.) This is too many words for how insufficiently I've thought about this.

Anyway, a couple things I noticed this time (about which I’m honestly, totally unbothered) and one other thing:

1) When did Rey learn how to swim, growing up as a scavenging desert rat?

2) Why didn’t Kylo force-grab his own lightsaber during the end of the throne room fight? Catching the one Rey tossed him proved he could free his hand. Further, dude didn’t use the Force at all during that fight. I can only conclude he wanted to show he doesn’t actually suck at the dueling part. 

3) One of the teens sitting behind me, when it’s revealed Rey is confessing her depressing spelunking adventure to Kylo, whisper-shouted “Mmmmmm get it girl,” and it was probably the funniest line of the movie to a theater that was pretty generous towards the scripted comedy.

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I think a lot of the criticism falls into two camps, with some overlap as well.  There are the people who dislike how Johnson blew off the two big mysteries (Snoke's origin, Rey's parents) left from TFA, and those who dislike Luke's characterization.

Me, I find mysteries, especially of the JJ Abrams "anything you can think of will be better than the eventual payoff" to be tiresome gimmicks.  Give me a good story and I'll like that better than any contrived "big reveal."  I really enjoyed Rey's parents being nobodies and I definitely liked not knowing Snoke's backstory.  Mistakenly thinking we need badass characters explained away is how we ended up with episodes 1-3.  I really don't need to see young Snoke's dislike for sand, thanks.

Luke not being heroic is fine.  He's a Jedi, but he's human.  He thought he could train Jedi and he failed spectacularly.  That's awesome.  The same people who bitch about Rey being a "Mary Sue" (go fuck yourselves) are bitching because Luke isn't a Larry Sue. 

I like TFA and this movie, for different reasons.  TFA played it safe and, after the prequels, we needed that.  This film subverted tropes and set up something new.  We needed that, too

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12 minutes ago, Technico Support said:

I think a lot of the criticism falls into two camps, with some overlap as well.  There are the people who dislike how Johnson blew off the two big mysteries (Snoke's origin, Rey's parents) left from TFA, and those who dislike Luke's characterization.

My college roommate who is a huge lapsed fan (of a lot of things, comics and wrestling too, who mainly just follows sports now and has for the last 15 years or so) criticized it along those lines, I suppose. I couldn't engage with him on it certainly: 

Quote

I guess you're on that side of the coin, but the more I think about the movie, the more I dislike it.  Too may lazy contrivances, anticlimactic resolution of the big questions from the first movie, a general lack of context behind the actual struggle, and complete misuse of Luke, which I find the most unforgivable part.

A good example of everything is Anakin's/Luke's blue light saber.  They make a huge deal in the Force Awakens about Rey finding, notwithstanding that the thing should never have been found since it fell in the Bespin abyss with Luke's hand.  It basically calls out to Rey, and there seems to be some deep connection between it and her.  But in this movie, she hands it to Luke, he throws it down the hill, and basically being a metaphor that Rian Johnson didn't give a shit about the prior setups.  It then gets split in half.  So this relic that had so much meaning in the first movie, despite being a lazy contrivance, and which meaning looked to be in for a deeper explanation in this movie, is just cast aside.

Then the whole slow space chase and the pointless side plot of Finn and that new character going to the gambling plot, was all just a waste of time.  They couldn't have thought of something better to occupy 2+ hours?

Makes me angry.  I'm done.

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Honestly, the notion that TLJ dropped TFA’s mysteries is weird to me.

1) “Who is Snoke?!?!?” is almost entirely fan driven, insofar as TFA just presents him as this ready made archetype everyone in the film accepts as part of the status quo—so they don’t really discuss or wonder about him. There needs to be a “congratulations, you baited yourself” meme for fandom reactions like this. And I get it! I love lore dives, watched tons of garbage YouTube theory videos, etc. But I think it’s unfair to pretend TFA really asked anyone to respond that way.

2) Rey’s parents got a reveal. If it’s not the one you wanted, fine, but pretending it’s not a valid narrative choice is disingenuous. The lightsaber called out because she’s special on her own, not because of who her parents are. Blood isn’t destiny. That’s basically the entire point. 

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The whole "Snoke is Darth Plageius" thing was just ridiculous.  Having Snoke turn out to be the same Sith Lord that Palpatine mentioned in an anecdote 50 years earlier is as dumb as everything seemingly happening on Tattooine.  It's a very big galaxy and it's ridiculous to have every damn thing be related.  "Oh, we should have heard of Snoke if he was so powerful, like maybe he should have been one of Palpatine's helpers or something.  Where was he during the original trilogy???"   FFS, maybe the guy lived on the other end of the galaxy.  Other things are happening in other places.  Maybe him and Palpatine shared a Scotch at the annual Sith ball at Mar A Lago and that was it.   "Hi Palpatine, my name is Snoke."  "Pleased to meet you, man.  I hear you're doing bigly things out there on the outer rim."  "oh yeah, same here."  "Okay, well, good to meet you."

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I think the original sin of the Snoke thing lies with JJ Abrams.  He got wrong just about as many things as he got right about Star Wars, and his insistence on mystery is one of them.  Star Wars was never about mysteries.  Cliffhangers, yes.  Mysteries, no.  (Lest we forget, one of the things that made the ESB reveal so shocking is because most people didn't know that Vader's identity or what really happened to Luke's father were questions they should even be asking themselves until it happened.)

I forget who to credit this to, but one critic rather saliently pointed out that Abrams, long-time purveyor of genre TV, basically wrote TFA like the pilot for a genre TV show, leaving a number of dangling threads to tantalize the viewer and entice them to come back for the next episode.  The problem is, as Reddit has proven over and over again, once you introduce a few mysteries (Who are Rey's parents? What's Luke's deal?  Why did Ben turn?), people start looking for mysteries EVERYWHERE, even where there aren't supposed to be any.  And so you end up with the Snoke fiasco, where a character who is handled in these movies almost identically to the Emperor in ESB and ROTJ suddenly becomes this grave injustice because he didn't live up to 2 years of fan theorizing based on a thread that wasn't even there.

Of course, in typical JJ fashion, he made sure he was long clear of the blast zone when the fan fury came hurtling down from on high.

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