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Author Topic: Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi  (Read 248181 times)
Khaldun
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Reply #770 on: April 04, 2018, 07:52:12 AM

I'm just pointing out that if someone really really needs an explanation beyond "that was cool", they can come up with it if they're willing to do a bit of nerdwork. As nerds and geeks famously do. If you don't want to, it's not the fault of Star Wars or Rian Johnson or whatever. It's that you don't want to, for whatever reason.

I can see people saying, "That's not my Luke Skywalker". It isn't quite what I expected either, but it makes a ton of sense to me and makes him a much more interesting character to me. It ages him in a way that feels more evocative than just "boyish hero becomes wise old sage". I can see people saying, "I'm not sure I liked Leia using the Force like that." I can see people saying, "I didn't care for some of the humor". I totally see people saying, "I didn't like the casino planet sidequest, it was clumsy". I don't agree, except on the last one, and even there I understand narratively what was going on with that.

I find the "well, it was visually and narratively cool to crash the capital ship into Snoke's flagship, but I hate it because the entire Star Wars world should routinely feature suicide hyperspeed ramming for this to be credible" really really sad. That's looking for a reason to hate something rather than looking for a way to explain something cool as fitting into the established universe.

I find the "wait where's the backstory on Snoke, wait he was supposed to be important" really really sad. I find the "wait where's the conventionally evil dark-suited dangerous villain that I'm used to" really really sad. I find the "wait why can't Poe be a conventional dashing scoundrel who saves the day" really really sad. etc.
Threash
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Reply #771 on: April 04, 2018, 07:59:51 AM

When the entire argument is how dumb it is to bring in hard sci-fi technical shit into Star Wars, which you guys are doing endlessly to defend this scene, again missing the point of why it was off.

The entire argument is that it doesn't need explaining, none of the cool looking bullshit in any star wars movie has ever needed explaining and the fact that so many people are going insane over this particular movie is entirely about them and not any inherent flaws the movie might or might not have.

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Reply #772 on: April 04, 2018, 08:38:50 AM

All the coolshit in star wars was consistent with the themes and tone established in the previous movies. You don't watch gundam and suddenly the power rangers are fighting godzillas. Is it cool yes? Does it belong? No. So what people are really articulating is that your "cool" thing doesn't matter if it doesn't belong in star wars. Because consistency matters. Or it doesn't and we're all five year old pretending the lone ranger and spider man are in the same universe.
Threash
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Reply #773 on: April 04, 2018, 08:49:30 AM

That's just you trying to justify why this movie gets held up to a massively different standard.

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BobtheSomething
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Reply #774 on: April 04, 2018, 09:07:31 AM

This reminds me a lot of the people defending Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.  "The original movies did it!"  "It's for kids!"  "You don't understand storytelling!"  "You want everything explained!"

As someone who liked TLJ enough to see it three times in the theater and buy it on amazon, I will never understand the defenders who can't see the film's flaws or won't even try to understand the opposing point of view.  It's one thing to acknowledge the opposition's points and disagree/love the film anyway, but some of you are just denying reality.  I'll side with the people who can't get past the minor nitpicks over the people who dismiss the entire idea that consistency of setting matters.
satael
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Reply #775 on: April 04, 2018, 09:17:28 AM

I think Crystal Skull is a good comparison. You can start by having Indiana steal an idol and running from a rolling boulder or you can have him hiding from a nuke in a fridge. Both make no sense but one is a classic while the other is not (and the "hold for the general"-shtick is certainly the latter type in my opinion).
Khaldun
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Reply #776 on: April 04, 2018, 09:30:46 AM

Consistency of setting absolutely matters.

Using a hyperdrive ramming to blow up another ship is not the level of consistency that matters. That's the nitpick level.

Consistency of setting is something like:

You're watching Lord of the Rings and suddenly Aragorn starts worrying about complicated factional in-fighting within Gondor that involves disagreements about the rights of bourgeois merchants in relationship to taxation levels set by the lower ministerial bureaucracy in the smaller cities west of Minas Tirith.

You're watching Fury Road and suddenly jet fighters crewed by highly trained pilots drop small atomic weapons on all of the cars except for the truck that Max and the women are in and they drive off into the sunset towards a fully-functioning city that has all the amenities of civilization.

You're watching Pacific Rim and suddenly superpowered psychic mutants show up and insta-kill all the mechs and the kaiju and the world is restored to peace.

You're watching Beauty and the Beast and suddenly Belle gets an invitation for a fully-paid scholarship at a university and realizes that the Beast is just an immature teenager who needs a mother, not a lover, and so packs up her dad and hops in a carriage and leaves everybody behind.

You're watching Star Wars and suddenly Princess Leia announces that the Resistance is going to follow the Prime Directive and stop interfering with more primitive cultures. And also that the Force is not midichloreans or the lifeforce of the galaxy but is actually small nanobots randomly seeded by a progenitor race several billion years ago.

==============

There are also complaints you can make about all sorts of things that aren't best put as "consistency" but are simply bad narrative moves. Arguably the nuke-fridge moment is like that.

In some sense the traps in the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark are just as physically improbable as surviving a nuke by hiding in a fridge--preindustrial technology that involves that kind of sensitivity to the weight of an object? A stone pillar that descends and destroys an entire underground complex? A perfectly round multiton boulder that's got a diameter of 20 meters or more on a track where it has been poised to roll down for centuries, but where nothing has decayed to the point of the trap collapsing? Or how about a Lost Ark that can melt Nazis with the will of God if they're dumb enough to open it, but where that same God is completely ignoring the murder of millions of his chosen people?

It's easier to say that the nuke-fridge is just bad storytelling without worrying about whether it's physically probable or inconsistent with the physical improbabilities that practically define the entire series. Or to think about consistency in terms of *tonality*.
eldaec
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Reply #777 on: April 04, 2018, 02:36:11 PM

"wait why can't Poe be a conventional dashing scoundrel who saves the day" really really sad. etc.

I've always found this complaint especially weird, both now and around tFA, because Poe is fairly obviously the Princess Leia analogue.

I don't agree btw, that star wars should be held purely to the 'is it cool' standard. It also has to make sense in story/character terms - and Admiral Dern suiciding the cruiser did make story sense. That is what the 'opera' bit means in space opera.

But it doesn't ever have to make any tactical or scientific sense whatsoever. Or we'd have turned off when parsecs were a measure of time, and when the trench run was ridiculous, and when the space geography in Empire makes no sense whatsoever, and when ewoks.

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Teleku
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Reply #778 on: April 04, 2018, 08:39:27 PM

When the entire argument is how dumb it is to bring in hard sci-fi technical shit into Star Wars, which you guys are doing endlessly to defend this scene, again missing the point of why it was off.

The entire argument is that it doesn't need explaining, none of the cool looking bullshit in any star wars movie has ever needed explaining and the fact that so many people are going insane over this particular movie is entirely about them and not any inherent flaws the movie might or might not have.
Maybe, possibly, instead of just going with the "it's every single other person that's crazy, I'm not the one that's crazy" argument, you could think on why this scene and others like it struck so many people the wrong way.  People who've watched all the Star Wars up to this point, and have not had this sort of reaction so something like that till now.  It's not because we are holding it to a different standard, its because we're holding it to the same standard.  It stood out to everybody.  You can disagree with that and like it for your own reasons, that's fine.  But you have to acknowledge that there is some reason why this scene, and many others like it, have stood out so much to long standing fans as inherent flaws in the movie.  And just blaming it on people magically attacking this movie specifically for some reason makes no sense. 

The Force Awakens and Rogue One had little issues you could nit pick (well in the case of TFA, some big ones), but they did not get the level of backlash this movie did for breaking in world consistency, so its not a matter of nostalgia and length of time between the last batch of movies.

Also, see Rogue one for battlefield ship ramming done right.   why so serious?

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TheWalrus
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Reply #779 on: April 04, 2018, 09:53:15 PM

parsecs were a measure of time

This one's been explained fairly well I thought.

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SurfD
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Reply #780 on: April 04, 2018, 09:53:52 PM

I think Crystal Skull is a good comparison. You can start by having Indiana steal an idol and running from a rolling boulder or you can have him hiding from a nuke in a fridge. Both make no sense but one is a classic while the other is not (and the "hold for the general"-shtick is certainly the latter type in my opinion).
except that running from a rolling boulder is an orders of magnitude more believable kind of "makes no sense" than "Hiding from a Nuke in a Fridge".   It is slightly plausible that a physically fit adventurer type could maybe outrun a giant rolling rock.  It is literally impossible to believe that you wouldn't be scraping Dr Jones out of the inside of that fridge with a spatula after watching that scene.

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Sky
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Reply #781 on: April 04, 2018, 09:54:32 PM

I'ma be honest here: I love this movie more with every page this thread generates.
BobtheSomething
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Reply #782 on: April 04, 2018, 10:35:41 PM

Consistency of setting absolutely matters.

Using a hyperdrive ramming to blow up another ship is not the level of consistency that matters. That's the nitpick level.

Consistency of setting is something like:

You're watching Lord of the Rings and suddenly Aragorn starts worrying about complicated factional in-fighting within Gondor that involves disagreements about the rights of bourgeois merchants in relationship to taxation levels set by the lower ministerial bureaucracy in the smaller cities west of Minas Tirith.

You're watching Fury Road and suddenly jet fighters crewed by highly trained pilots drop small atomic weapons on all of the cars except for the truck that Max and the women are in and they drive off into the sunset towards a fully-functioning city that has all the amenities of civilization.

You're watching Pacific Rim and suddenly superpowered psychic mutants show up and insta-kill all the mechs and the kaiju and the world is restored to peace.

You're watching Beauty and the Beast and suddenly Belle gets an invitation for a fully-paid scholarship at a university and realizes that the Beast is just an immature teenager who needs a mother, not a lover, and so packs up her dad and hops in a carriage and leaves everybody behind.

You're watching Star Wars and suddenly Princess Leia announces that the Resistance is going to follow the Prime Directive and stop interfering with more primitive cultures. And also that the Force is not midichloreans or the lifeforce of the galaxy but is actually small nanobots randomly seeded by a progenitor race several billion years ago.

==============

There are also complaints you can make about all sorts of things that aren't best put as "consistency" but are simply bad narrative moves. Arguably the nuke-fridge moment is like that.

In some sense the traps in the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark are just as physically improbable as surviving a nuke by hiding in a fridge--preindustrial technology that involves that kind of sensitivity to the weight of an object? A stone pillar that descends and destroys an entire underground complex? A perfectly round multiton boulder that's got a diameter of 20 meters or more on a track where it has been poised to roll down for centuries, but where nothing has decayed to the point of the trap collapsing? Or how about a Lost Ark that can melt Nazis with the will of God if they're dumb enough to open it, but where that same God is completely ignoring the murder of millions of his chosen people?

It's easier to say that the nuke-fridge is just bad storytelling without worrying about whether it's physically probable or inconsistent with the physical improbabilities that practically define the entire series. Or to think about consistency in terms of *tonality*.


And hyperspace ramming is bad storytelling because it is a solution to a problem that would and should have been used before on screen.  The fact that no one previously used this obvious solution either means it was never really viable (the natural assumption based on all previous space battles and requiring an explanation for why it suddenly is viable) or all the previous characters were unable to grasp the obvious.   

To use Pacific Rim, it's like the scene where Gypsy Danger's crew remembered it hey had a sword, only if Pacific Rim was the eighth film and Gypsy Danger had never been upgraded, implying the unused sword had always been there.

Heck, Pacific Rim Uprising managed a Holdo-style fake-out better than TLJ, which is kind of embarrassing. 

eldaec
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Reply #783 on: April 04, 2018, 10:42:16 PM

Out of interest would people still have issues if the ramming had happened without hyperdrive involvement?

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SurfD
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Reply #784 on: April 04, 2018, 10:52:43 PM

Out of interest would people still have issues if the ramming had happened without hyperdrive involvement?
no.  Cause nobody had any problem at all with the ramming scene in Rogue One.  Which predates TLJ by a year.

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BobtheSomething
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Reply #785 on: April 04, 2018, 11:57:03 PM

Out of interest would people still have issues if the ramming had happened without hyperdrive involvement?

Fewer issues.  It really was a culmination of incompetence from every quarter, so there would always be issues with how stupid Hux was or why didn't Holdo use an autopilot, or why did she not even admit there was a plan, or why did Poe give out sensitive info, or whatever, but at least it wouldn't retroactively make Ackbar or Leia seem stupid.   

I mean, how many people complained about the ramming in Rogue 1.  Fewer, right?
Threash
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Reply #786 on: April 05, 2018, 02:16:17 AM


Maybe, possibly, instead of just going with the "it's every single other person that's crazy, I'm not the one that's crazy" argument, you could think on why this scene and others like it struck so many people the wrong way. 

But it's actually "It's the tiny irrelevant minority that's crazy, not the tens of millions who enjoyed the movie".

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Khaldun
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Reply #787 on: April 05, 2018, 04:30:52 AM

Seriously. This is the same thing that aggrieved fans do all the time in message boards. If I had a nickel for every time I've read a particular small faction of players in an MMO declare that the latest change to a class is OBVIOUSLY the OBJECTIVELY WORST THING EVER and EVERYONE is AGAINST IT and ABOUT TO CANCEL THEIR SUBSCRIPTION and JUST WAIT UNTIL NEXT MONTH'S SUB FIGURES COME OUT YOU'LL SEE, I'd be a rich man. In this case, of course, people are draping their own idiosyncratic reaction to various things with the claim that they and only they have been true Star Wars fans since even before 1977, that they actually dreamed of the Platonically-perfect version of Star Wars even before the movie came out, unlike all these latter-day half-fans who clearly don't understand what Star Wars really is.

Some of you didn't like it. That's fine. Some of what you didn't like is a significant departure from the obvious, lowest-common-denominator expectation about how characters would develop. I get that. I was also spinning theories about how Rey would be Obi-Wan Kenobi's grand-daughter and thinking myself very clever; I was also expecting Luke to have become the conventional wise old sage. But that's what I love most about the film: it did things I didn't expect that were exciting and plausible and made me realize what a cramped narrative space Star Wars was becoming. A protagonist who isn't biologically related to everyone else? A story that isn't just the story of one family? Great! A hero who discovers that a pure spirit and a quick hand with a lightsaber aren't enough by themselves to save the whole galaxy and who is actually bitter and self-loathing about it? Great! That's a new turn, an emotionally plausible one, that makes a conventional pulp hero into something richer and more interesting. A derring-do pilot whose derring-do involves an inordinate amount of unwarranted self-confidence and who doesn't get his vanity validated by the script? That's a nice touch. A desperate situation where there's no way to win, only to survive, but which reveals that resistance might be more than having more pew-pew than the bad guys? Good! A mystical Force made more mysterious once again? A bad guy who isn't just a reprise of the last bad guy? An ultimate evil guy who turns out to be a red herring? All fun!

I can see you preferring the version you had in your head instead. Different strokes. But I would still say you could appreciate why many of us just as true fans of the series love all those moves.

I can see not liking the humor. I liked it mostly but a few things didn't quite work for me. I can see being annoyed by the structure of the plot: the chase could have been much smarter, the casino planet sidequest better handled. Those are enough to interfere with a complete enjoyment of the movie if they got under your skin more than they did for me.

I cannot see getting nerd-obsessed with something like "why haven't they done hyperdrive ramming before?" and letting that be a major part of your dislike.
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Reply #788 on: April 05, 2018, 05:25:59 AM

The bigger issue is not really  'why haven't they done that before', more, for me, why the hell didn't they do that on the first place.  Forget your daft rant against nowt for a second :  The film wasn't even consistent  in and of itself.


Bad film was bad dude. Soooo boring.   even the awordfight we should have loved was just pretty silly really, so much so that it actually works better to  'Toxic' by Spiers.

Bad.

The rest of the stuff you mention?  Big who cares.

I mean, sure if you liked it, shine on. But don't try and say its objectively a really good film or even a really good Star Wars film, because, you know, big pile of meh.


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HaemishM
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Reply #789 on: April 05, 2018, 08:24:39 AM

I think one big example of why this film rubs so many people including me the wrong way can be summed up in the whole premise of "we can be tracked in hyperspace now." One thing that has been consistent throughout the movies, even going back to the prequels, is the sense that the technology in this universe is fairly static, almost stagnant. Now, it's likely just because the filmmakers involved haven't been all that creative when it comes to the tech. They have pew pew and zoom and they haven't really needed much before. The hyperspace tracking thing felt more like a Star Trek plot point than a Star Wars one, the kind of tech Mcguffin that entire episodes of Trek are built around (before being completely forgotten the next episode). I mean, the Empire builds a Death Star that does the job in the first movie, it gets blown up and they just build another one and in TFA, the First Order planet is just a larger and more implausible version of that. So for them to suddenly come up with a new technology that drives the plot for 3/4 of the way through feels out of place. It doesn't feel like a Star Wars film.

And that was true throughout the whole movie. The casino scene. The hyperspace ramming. Not to mention the pissing upon the sacred cow of Jedi white knighthood. Had this not been a Star Wars movie, I still think it would have been a mediocre film because its structural flaws are still there, but it wouldn't have drawn as much vehement backlash either.

TheWalrus
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Reply #790 on: April 05, 2018, 09:58:05 AM

Why Jedi gotta be white?


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Goumindong
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Reply #791 on: April 05, 2018, 01:29:34 PM

Good thing they never were able to get a significantly sized ship near the second Deathstar or the Starkillerbase.

They were not. Like... did you watch RotJ?

They jumped a dang fleet adjacent to the thing.  Once the shield was down, the easiest way to destoy that thing would have been to jump a sizeable ship into it.

Full of personnel? Through a star destroyer? Before they could get enough velocity to make an impact? Before trying their original much cheaper plan involving fewer people and less resources?

Yea ok

Yes u guys must have liked the midichlorian scene. “But the movies never told me what exactly the force was and I cannot I fed anything on my own unless it’s explained to me in as if it were science”
Actually, no.  I am pretty sure that the Midichlorian scene was almost universally shit on by pretty much every starwars fan out there. 

Dot dot dot

Re: The fridge

This is actually an interesting observation about why the fridge didn’t work. The short answer was that it wasn’t just the fridge.  Lucas has always had a thing for pulp adventures. He did the original trilogy as pulp. He did the original Indy as pulp. When he did the prequel trilogy he did them as 1920s pulp, whereas the OT was 1970s pulp. This transition did not work. He also changed the Indy series from 1940s pulp to 1950s pulp. These transitions simply do not work because each era is tonally and thematically separate in ways that break the fundamental assumptions.
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Reply #792 on: April 06, 2018, 12:27:24 AM

Clearly I dread to think what goes on in the heads of some of you fuckers. But. Is it possible that rather than the problem being tech and tactics consistency, some of you got turned off by the FO's comedy stylings and the casino planet, then were too far out of the film to roll with what is fairly normal star wars 'operatic' loose physics and tactics?

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Reply #793 on: April 06, 2018, 05:29:50 AM

That's likely but I don't think it was the casino planet, that was just bad but not jarring me out of the film bad.

I think it was just everything about the First Order / Hux in the entire movie but extra super duper especially the whole Poe rings them up and stalls thing into BB8 plugging the electricity dam shit. Just right from the jump I was struggling with the movie and could feel myself watching a movie wondering why I was watching it.

I mean we don't expect much from Star Wars villains, they don't get a lot of range time etc. but this was a straight up kid's movie. You know the type, where any type of perceived menace would be too terrifying for the lil guys so we have to remind them how bumbling and non threatening the bad guys are every 20min.

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Khaldun
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Reply #794 on: April 06, 2018, 05:47:39 AM

So, speaking of tonality, Star Wars villains have in their time routinely murdered billions of people in a cold and distant way; burned the flesh off of Uncle Ben and Aunt Owen; sacrificed slave women to a giant monster; choked their own subordinates; etc. But of those villains, the only ones who never really get a moment of incompetence that's faintly or not so faintly ridiculous are...Darth Vader. That's about it. Maybe the Emperor, though his gloating to Luke in ROTJ is basically a classic villain monologue that gives away the evil plan. Darth Maul is pretty badass in the three or four scenes that he's central to but looks kind of stupid when he gets cut in half by an apprentice Jedi. There's one or two Imperial officers who don't seem incompetent; the rest are routinely shown being hapless or easily foiled by simple trickery or Rebel/Resistance tactics. Let's not even get started on Stormtroopers, who are routinely portrayed as useless. 

I suppose the unusual thing in TLJ is that they are largely focused just on murdering the Resistance.

So when someone says, "I don't want villains who bumble or who are not threatening in my Star Wars", I am at a loss. First, because even the bumblers are killers and torturers who wear all black and have English accents or are in dehumanizing armor. I mean, they're not Team Rocket, they're not kiddie villains who never do anything particularly harmful. Second, what would a non-bumbling, non-threatening and yet Star Warsy villain who was not just a reprise of Darth Vader be? What would satisfy? This goes back to tonality here. Star Wars is if nothing else a reworking of old pulp serial films; the kinds of villains it works with are descendants of Ming of Mongo. Villains who are not bumblers and are deeply threatening and frightening in a non-kiddie way come from some other family tree. Having an Anton Chigurh or Hannibal Lecter in Star Wars seems like an unambiguous tonal mistake. I suppose you could have a Khan Noonian Singh, but that's basically Darth Maul, an angry vengeance machine who is operatically over the top--and yet in the end (like Khan) kind of incompetent precisely because he's so operatic.
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Reply #795 on: April 06, 2018, 05:50:07 AM

That's likely but I don't think it was the casino planet, that was just bad but not jarring me out of the film bad.

I think it was just everything about the First Order / Hux in the entire movie but extra super duper especially the whole Poe rings them up and stalls thing into BB8 plugging the electricity dam shit. Just right from the jump I was struggling with the movie and could feel myself watching a movie wondering why I was watching it.

I mean we don't expect much from Star Wars villains, they don't get a lot of range time etc. but this was a straight up kid's movie. You know the type, where any type of perceived menace would be too terrifying for the lil guys so we have to remind them how bumbling and non threatening the bad guys are every 20min.

That does seem fair enough. I think the reason that didn't take me out of the film is that this movie was more about main characters (including Kylo) overcoming their own shit. The FO just weren't important enough to spoil the film for me.

But hard to argue they were anything like as watchable as OT vader, R1 Krennic or even prequel palpatine & co.


I do wonder if I'll find the bad parts drag on a second viewing. But I liked Luke Skywalker, I liked rey & kylo working shit out and I liked the  throne room, I liked Poe and Finn getting an actual arc. I liked that unlike the second and third act of tFA the film felt like it told its own story.


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HaemishM
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Reply #796 on: April 06, 2018, 08:15:37 AM

So when someone says, "I don't want villains who bumble or who are not threatening in my Star Wars", I am at a loss.

I think of it like this when I'm considering why Hux is so bothersome to me.

I imagine Tarkin talking to Vader right before they blow up Alderan with the Death Star. Right as they give the order to commit genocide, right as Leia is watching, Tarkin rips a loud, old man fart. Leia, rather than being distraught at the deaths of billions, quips something along the lines of "perhaps the Admiral would like an antacid?" or something similarly quippy and stupid.

That's Hux in a nutshell, only the actor himself doesn't even have the gravitas and age to compare to Peter Cushing, he just looks like a teenager trying to impress a girl, who is completely repulsed by his Nazi-ism. And rather than having the stoic, opaque menace of Darth Vader next to Hux, we have the whiny Kylo Ren. The only First Order character to exude any menace whatsoever was Snoke (perhaps because he was both alien looking and mysterious) and he went out like a punk bitch. We're told that the First Order is dangerous and kicking the shit out of the Resistance, but nothing on screen has given us any reason to believe that's true.

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Reply #797 on: April 06, 2018, 11:44:16 AM

So, speaking of tonality, Star Wars villains have in their time routinely murdered billions of people in a cold and distant way; burned the flesh off of Uncle Ben and Aunt Owen; sacrificed slave women to a giant monster; choked their own subordinates; etc. But of those villains, the only ones who never really get a moment of incompetence that's faintly or not so faintly ridiculous are...Darth Vader. That's about it. Maybe the Emperor, though his gloating to Luke in ROTJ is basically a classic villain monologue that gives away the evil plan. Darth Maul is pretty badass in the three or four scenes that he's central to but looks kind of stupid when he gets cut in half by an apprentice Jedi. There's one or two Imperial officers who don't seem incompetent; the rest are routinely shown being hapless or easily foiled by simple trickery or Rebel/Resistance tactics. Let's not even get started on Stormtroopers, who are routinely portrayed as useless. 

I suppose the unusual thing in TLJ is that they are largely focused just on murdering the Resistance.

So when someone says, "I don't want villains who bumble or who are not threatening in my Star Wars", I am at a loss. First, because even the bumblers are killers and torturers who wear all black and have English accents or are in dehumanizing armor. I mean, they're not Team Rocket, they're not kiddie villains who never do anything particularly harmful. Second, what would a non-bumbling, non-threatening and yet Star Warsy villain who was not just a reprise of Darth Vader be? What would satisfy? This goes back to tonality here. Star Wars is if nothing else a reworking of old pulp serial films; the kinds of villains it works with are descendants of Ming of Mongo. Villains who are not bumblers and are deeply threatening and frightening in a non-kiddie way come from some other family tree. Having an Anton Chigurh or Hannibal Lecter in Star Wars seems like an unambiguous tonal mistake. I suppose you could have a Khan Noonian Singh, but that's basically Darth Maul, an angry vengeance machine who is operatically over the top--and yet in the end (like Khan) kind of incompetent precisely because he's so operatic.

Vader was incompetent. He kept murdering anyone who made a mistake. Which meant that no one smart climbed the chain of command and that if you did perchance get one they would likely get murdered.
MediumHigh
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Reply #798 on: April 06, 2018, 12:13:03 PM

Some people are clearly invested in these movies not being shit. Anf while I'm completely invested in this movie being shit, the utter denial of any problems this movie has is rather hilarious. Anyway this proves that the marvel movies were a fluke.
TheWalrus
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Reply #799 on: April 06, 2018, 12:26:34 PM

That's Hux in a nutshell, only the actor himself doesn't even have the gravitas and age to compare to Peter Cushing, he just looks like a teenager trying to impress a girl, who is completely repulsed by his Nazi-ism. And rather than having the stoic, opaque menace of Darth Vader next to Hux, we have the whiny Kylo Ren. The only First Order character to exude any menace whatsoever was Snoke (perhaps because he was both alien looking and mysterious) and he went out like a punk bitch. We're told that the First Order is dangerous and kicking the shit out of the Resistance, but nothing on screen has given us any reason to believe that's true.

I guess I could understand this if you hadn't watched any previous SW film. But you're talking about an organization that took the reins of power from the old Empire. So you've got guys who are opportunistic, not necessarily skilled, and completely drunk with power. Huxs largest fault as far as I go is, he consistently underestimates Kylo. Kylo is a damn strong force user, seems barely out of his teens, and recognizes his own potential. Yeah, he's a whiny bitch, Snoke is the only one we've seen so far who wasn't. As far as the First Order being dangerous, you may have noticed them eradicate a village at the beginning of TFA, and the ridiculously small rebel fleet they were chasing. There's definitely been some trimming going on.
« Last Edit: April 06, 2018, 01:37:33 PM by TheWalrus »

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Khaldun
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Reply #800 on: April 06, 2018, 02:26:36 PM

Exactly. This is the point of the First Order: they're alt-right wannabees trying to imitate the fascists of days gone by, but underneath it all they know they're kind of shit. Hux and Kylo are Mencius Moldbug and Dylann Roof: poseurs, phonies, trying to talk themselves into believing they're the conquerors of the galaxy and the dark lords of the Sith.

You might say: I don't like villains who seem like the shitty villains of our times. But you know, most of the people you think of as seriously evil in the past were generally just as bogus or overwrought when you were actually living through their reigns of terror. You might also ask yourself: why do I want my fascists to be appealingly badass rather than shitty, phony fuckfaces?
Sir T
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Reply #801 on: April 06, 2018, 03:45:49 PM

Let's not even get started on Stormtroopers, who are routinely portrayed as useless. 

Lets be somewhat fair, in the first movie they were missing on purpose on order to let the Heroes go.

In the other movies there really was no excuse...

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HaemishM
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Reply #802 on: April 06, 2018, 07:06:59 PM

The village slaughter scene at the beginning of TFA was the first and last time the First Order seemed genuinely menacing (also the first and last time for Kylo Ren with the stopping the blaster bolt in mid-air). Even the destruction of five planets in TFA felt underwhelming - probably because it just felt like an echo of the Death Star. Despite getting their asses handed to them in the end, the Empire always seemed genuinely menacing. The First Order has shown no onscreen capability to even turn on a light switch.

Riggswolfe
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Reply #803 on: April 06, 2018, 11:14:14 PM

I think one big example of why this film rubs so many people including me the wrong way can be summed up in the whole premise of "we can be tracked in hyperspace now." One thing that has been consistent throughout the movies, even going back to the prequels, is the sense that the technology in this universe is fairly static, almost stagnant. Now, it's likely just because the filmmakers involved haven't been all that creative when it comes to the tech. They have pew pew and zoom and they haven't really needed much before. The hyperspace tracking thing felt more like a Star Trek plot point than a Star Wars one, the kind of tech Mcguffin that entire episodes of Trek are built around (before being completely forgotten the next episode). I mean, the Empire builds a Death Star that does the job in the first movie, it gets blown up and they just build another one and in TFA, the First Order planet is just a larger and more implausible version of that. So for them to suddenly come up with a new technology that drives the plot for 3/4 of the way through feels out of place. It doesn't feel like a Star Wars film.

And that was true throughout the whole movie. The casino scene. The hyperspace ramming. Not to mention the pissing upon the sacred cow of Jedi white knighthood. Had this not been a Star Wars movie, I still think it would have been a mediocre film because its structural flaws are still there, but it wouldn't have drawn as much vehement backlash either.

When I first saw the movie I honestly thought "Ok, so the stuff on the fleet is going to be about them looking for the traitor who planted the tracking device." I then imagined "Ok, we know they go to a casino planet, so maybe they're going looking for proof before they accuse this new Admiral they introduced?"

Nope. Out of all the plot points in the movie this one bugs me the most. Followed a distant second by Rian Johnson being like "You know all that stuff JJ set up in VII? Totally tossing it aside because fuck you, that's why." I'm not claiming JJ is a master storyteller or anything but when you totally cast away things that were set up in a previous movie in a trilogy it just causes tonal whiplash.

Finally, about the hyperspace ramming. Much like the parsecs thing this is apparently "fixed" in the novelization. It seems that that specific cruiser had some kind of new shield on it. When she went to hyperspace the ship actually stopped when it contacted the First Order Cruiser and that shield is what caused the damage or something. I don't know, I don't have the book but saw a Youtube video in passing that said something like "Why wasn't Hyperspace ramming used before in Star Wars?" and I was like "Well, i have 5 minutes to spare...."

"We live in a country, where John Lennon takes six bullets in the chest, Yoko Ono was standing right next to him and not one fucking bullet! Explain that to me! Explain that to me, God! Explain it to me, God!" - Denis Leary summing up my feelings about the nature of the universe.
Malakili
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Reply #804 on: April 07, 2018, 04:53:41 AM

The First Order has shown no onscreen capability to even turn on a light switch.

Am I the one who remembers they blew up like 8 planets in one go (in a scene that is far worse than any scene in TLJ, I might add)?
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