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


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13 minutes ago, Beech27 said:

I totally understand the desire to see Luke wreck some walkers and bad guys, because I was a kid gawking at that page of Dark Empire once, and wanted it too. But it would have been the wrong choice. I’d think this board of all places would understand the danger in focusing too much on old part-timers in the main event, at the expense of younger talent. And they even let Luke go out without losing, so you can imagine he’d have thrashed Kylo, if that’s your preference. Although, the protagonists behind the door don’t seem to assume he would have, which keeps Kylo from looking like a total dork.

Anyway, this metaphor isn’t that great.

The best metaphor is Kylo losing to Rey because of a damaged limb.

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3 hours ago, Matt D said:

This is not the best argument I ever had, but I'm foot in now. Thanks to Abrams, he didn't have to share the screen with Harrison Ford (which, as much as I like Mark Hamill, he can't do. He would have come off as buffoonish with his shoulder dusting and winking if Ford was in the movie). He basically had his own movie instead of having  to share one. 

I think it was to benefit of both films that it played out that way.  

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The one thing about the box office @Beech27 is that many of the overseas markets that Disney wanted to expand in dropped significantly compared to The Force Awakens.  Star Wars will probably always be king here in the states but I'm not sure what to expect in some of these other markets.  It'll be interesting moving forward. 

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Yeah, that’s fair. I can’t speak to Disney’s specific expectations, but eternal expansion is pretty much always—impossibly—the goal. If that’s the case, then TLJ didn’t accomplish that. I just feel like there’s a sizeable element out there trying to be FIRST on a story that doesn’t exist, or to will it into existence. If Disney keeps making in excess of a billion on 200 million budgets, I would hope no one panics. But yeah, we’ll see. I tend to think Solo won’t get the critical kiss TLJ did, and many fans are very ready to label it a bust. Could be we don’t have to wait long to see something much closer to bad box office. Or at least, the Star Wars version.

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According to Bleeding Cool (so take it FWIW), the rumor is that Disney expects Solo to bomb.  I have a hard time believing it won’t have a massive first weekend, but we’ll see how it drops after that.

It will be interesting to see how people react to it since so many people’s issue with TLJ is that Luke wasn’t as cool as it was in the original, and this movie is pretty much set when Han should be at peak coolness.

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11 pages later, some of you have some really interesting takes, a LOT of really good observations (the Jedi books thing I saw but didn't process, and then, "mind blown"), and because of those I want to see this movie again.

Then, some of you perfectly justified your position on my blacklist, because your opinions are shit.

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On 12/28/2017 at 3:39 PM, JonnyLaw said:

According to Bleeding Cool (so take it FWIW), the rumor is that Disney expects Solo to bomb.  I have a hard time believing it won’t have a massive first weekend, but we’ll see how it drops after that.

It will be interesting to see how people react to it since so many people’s issue with TLJ is that Luke wasn’t as cool as it was in the original, and this movie is pretty much set when Han should be at peak coolness.

You shouldn't read Bleeding Cool. The site is trash, and their rumors are trash.  Bleeding Cool reported that an X-Men animated series was happening and going to get announced last year. The source of that story is also a site called Screen Geek.  If it came from a Deadline, THR, or Variety, there might be something there.

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I'm not going through this topic to see if this has been covered but is it safe to say the expanded universe we had to put up with post-OT for so many years gave a lot of people unwarranted expectations about the kind of things Luke could and would do when he showed up in these new films?

Personally I thought his story, while understated in some manner, was really well told. Having watched the whole saga prior to watching Last Jedi it seemed obvious to me that Luke was never supposed to be the most powerful and influential Jedi ever, he was there to learn enough to get by and turn Darth Vader to good again. Everything he said about the hubris of the Jedi and how wrong he was was spot on IMO. That said how can anyone complain about the way Luke went out? He pulled off the most jaw dropping Jedi move we've ever seen and did it in a pacifist way nullifying all those criticisms about the aggressive way the Jedi acted in the PT then came full circle looking out to the twin suns.

My only real criticisms I have with the film were the length, the majority of the Finn subplot, and Snoke getting jobbed out with no backstory (could've really snuck in his influence into Kylo Ren's explaining all the stuff to Rey). I did like how every breadcrumb trail left by JJ in TFA was pretty much either dealt with or swept off the board in TLJ though, gives a nice clean plate for the final instalment (and I hope it is the final instalment of the 'saga').

For all the talk that's reared it's head again about TFA and TLJ ripping off the other films:

And FWIW, the only Star Wars spinoff I want to see is Kevin Garvey: Master Codebreaker in Space

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3 hours ago, CreativeControl said:

I'm not going through this topic to see if this has been covered but is it safe to say the expanded universe we had to put up with post-OT for so many years gave a lot of people unwarranted expectations about the kind of things Luke could and would do when he showed up in these new films?

That was part of it for many (I have to include myself in that population), but I think TFA did a lot to push the narrative that Luke was, by himself, a tide-shifting force. The First Order acts like killing him is important beyond Kylo's petty revenge, and The Resistance seems to think he would, well... walk out and face down all the villains with his laser sword. TFA framed him as sort of an Achilles figure, who dominated a war by his self-imposed absence, and could turn it with his return. And he may well have done so. Probably. In a way. Just not the way people thought he might, both in universe and out.

Aside: Shirtless Kylo becoming such a thing is really weird to me, considering Driver is shirtless pretty much all the time on Girls, and once posed like this in a magazine. (Which the internet had a good laugh about, at the time.) I mean, it's as if Kylo did find Luke on his lonely isle, and decided to adopt a quiet life of farming instead of galactic domination. He even has his uncle's capacity for uncomfortable animal-aided leering.

WTj7CHO.jpg

 

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Something else I keep seeing about Luke is that he is supposed to be super powerful and a badass because he was the one to bring balance to the Force.

And it's like, no. How do you miss something as easy as Luke being the one to bring balance because he's Vader's son and likely the only person to get through to his father, not because he's this tidal wave of power? 

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8 minutes ago, Keep Calm, Akira Hokuto On said:

Adam Driver should never shave his mustache.  Clean-shaven, he looks that emo kid in high school no one wanted to sit by.

He graduated after me, but dated a girl I knew. I can say he didn't have the mustache and was not the emo kid in high school.

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8 hours ago, Craig H said:

He graduated after me, but dated a girl I knew. I can say he didn't have the mustache and was not the emo kid in high school.

Yes yes, but how did his hair look in science class?

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15 hours ago, Craig H said:

Something else I keep seeing about Luke is that he is supposed to be super powerful and a badass because he was the one to bring balance to the Force.

And it's like, no. How do you miss something as easy as Luke being the one to bring balance because he's Vader's son and likely the only person to get through to his father, not because he's this tidal wave of power? 

Great point.  Is it intentionally or unintentionally meta that the Resistance and the fans of the movies both overestimated Luke? 

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2 hours ago, Technico Support said:

Great point.  Is it intentionally or unintentionally meta that the Resistance and the fans of the movies both overestimated Luke? 

I have to think it's on purpose, given how didactic and self-aware the script was at times: Snoke lol'ing at the idea Rey must be a Skywalker, Luke's "laser sword" quip, Kylo's deal about killing the past, he and Rey breaking the lightsaber, Yoda's whole speech, etc. It's not Pygmalion, but by modern blockbuster standards, its very comfortable addressing the audience--and their expectations--pretty directly and seriously, beyond fan-servicey winks. (Though there certainly are those as well.)

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It's certainly grown in the time between/after viewings for me as well, mostly because of the ways it engages with and challenges the mythology. In a paradoxical way, it's led to more discussing Star Wars among friends and acquaintances than I've experienced in 15 years, making it a very Star Wars experience in ways TFA was not, for all that it draped itself in the aesthetic and trappings of the franchise. I do still think there are a few moments where this tendency goes a bit too far, and the script gets too hung up on talking to us or the previous movie rather than doing justice to the characters here and now, but I'm mostly unbothered.

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The only nitpick that comes to mind for me was the humor, which was very un Star Wars.  Prior films had far fewer laughs and of a different style.  The opening sequence between Poe and Hux, for example, was so different in tone, more Guardians of the Galaxy than Star Wars.  Not bad, just different enough as to be somewhat jarring for me.

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Dialing the conversation back a bit, count me among those who think Snokes needed explanation. No, it wasn't a problem in the original trilogy, but that's just it: that was the original trilogy. Those movies were establishing the setting, and if they say that the setting includes an incredibly powerful evil space wizard, then sure, why not. But establishing in the seventh movie that, oh yeah, there's another incredibly powerful evil space wizard we just haven't mentioned before, and he's conveniently stepped into the exact same plot role as the first? That's a much different proposition.

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