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Post by Pharozonk on Dec 18, 2017 16:05:47 GMT -5
Here's a thread where you can discuss the latest film without fear of spoiling for those who haven't seen it. Please keep any spoiler related thoughts to this thread.
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Post by impulse on Dec 19, 2017 13:42:06 GMT -5
Well, since I am the one who opened my mouth and got this tread created, I figured I would start things off! By some miracle despite having small kids at home, both my wife and I managed to see the film opening weekend. Our desire to avoid being unwillingly spoiled was strong, and we got it done. We both enjoyed it. I can see why some people would not, but I don't agree. While I did like most of what I saw, I do have a few nitpicks/things I would have preferred, and only one plot hole I can't really explain. Those and some comments below!
As the title says, SPOILERS BELOW.
Plot hole - how did the hacker guy know the resistance were flying cloaked ships to the planet? Was it ever explained? I assume he would have had to overhear Poe telling Finn, but did that happen in time while they were together? I thought Poe didn't find out until he was already on the escape pod. Maybe I am off on my timeline.
Ren doing the twist with Snoke was fun.
Here is my big wish list. Luke's feat at the end where used the Force to convincingly project himself into the minds of all of those people as if he were there however he did it was really cool and powerful....that said, it was NOT what I was hoping to see. I wanted to see Jedi Master Luke Skywalker, who had been built up as Force Messiah of the super Jedi bloodline, actually show up after having regained his confidence and gotten himself back on track, and I wanted to see him WRECK STUFF. Put the young arrogant upstart apprentice back in his place and remind him who was actually boss. Not in a vindictive way, but to see some At-Ats go toppling over like dominoes I would have crapped myself. At first I thought he had deflected all of those lasers himself, and man, was I ready for some action. I still could have seen him becoming one with the force ,and would have liked him to do it on his own terms. That was the big missed opportunity IMO. As a friend put it, he's been built up for 40 years. Let's see him do something visually impressive with the force before he goes.
I wish they had developed and paid off his arc more, though I do not take issue with what his arc was like a lot of the complaints seem to be. I can buy Jedi Master Luke succumbing to self-doubt and being broken after his beloved nephew and star pupil was consumed by the dark side and killed all of his students, his work, the Jedi order, his destiny. I can buy Luke getting low, but I would also love the payoff of him getting his faith restored, coming to terms with what happened and taking Yoda's point that the apprentice does outgrow the master in that you can't be responsible for his choices anymore, he did what he did. Then Luke can reconnect to the force, actually go to the planet and we can see just what Jedi Master Luke Skywalker has been up to and learning how to do in the last 40 years. It would have fit nicely even with the theme of out with the old, in with the new having Luke obliterate the First Order. Ah well.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Dec 19, 2017 13:58:47 GMT -5
I've been seeing so many complaints, and with half of them all I can say is 'where were you two years ago when The Force Awakens created these problems?' It's just something that annoys me about the Star Wars fandom when people slam movies for having the same problems they refuse to acknowledge in other movies.
I liked the subversion of expectations with Luke and especially with Kylo. I would have preferred to have gotten some backstory on Snoke before they offed him, but everything about that scene was great.
My biggest problem with the film was the Finn and Rose subplot. They scenes in the casino and the jail could easily have been cut down without losing anything. And Rose deciding that she loved Finn at the end seemed out of the blue and hurt the chemistry they had had up till that point.
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Post by impulse on Dec 19, 2017 15:41:25 GMT -5
I've been seeing so many complaints, and with half of them all I can say is 'where were you two years ago when The Force Awakens created these problems?' It's just something that annoys me about the Star Wars fandom when people slam movies for having the same problems they refuse to acknowledge in other movies. I liked the subversion of expectations with Luke and especially with Kylo. I would have preferred to have gotten some backstory on Snoke before they offed him, but everything about that scene was great. My biggest problem with the film was the Finn and Rose subplot. They scenes in the casino and the jail could easily have been cut down without losing anything. And Rose deciding that she loved Finn at the end seemed out of the blue and hurt the chemistry they had had up till that point. Yeah, I didn't mind that they subverted and changed from the formula so it wasn't just another Star Wars movie. They were maybe a little heavy-handed with the "KILL THE PAST, MOVE FORWARD!!" theme, but I get it, and it does set them up to move on from the Skywalkers. |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 19, 2017 22:20:03 GMT -5
Here's a Star Wars spoiler...   -M |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Dec 19, 2017 23:15:23 GMT -5
Just came back from the movie... There were some issues, but I really liked it, and I have solid hope for the future. More importantly, my 17 year old LOVED it.
My comments:
- The hacker dude knowing the plan was fine to me.. I'm sure not everything Finn and Poe said was on camera, and the guy was there, he could have overheard easily. There were 3 things that made my geek-hackles rise though. First was the absolutely ridiculous scene where Leia prevents herself from dying in vacuum, then becomes intangible and zooms into the ship again. Dude, if you want to clear out the rebellion but leave her, have her go to the bathroom. Second was the lack of physics.. ships moving forward in space don't doing into a tain spin and stop moving if they stop accelerating, they just stope accererating. Would it have been so hard to just have the ships slow down and get caught? Third, how the heck did Rey get from being unconscious on a wrecked Star Destroyer to in the Falcon's gunner chair?
- Those bits aside, I really enjoyed the movie. I didn't mind the Finn/Rose stuff, I like them, and Rose was really fun.
- I think Mark Hamill was mostly playing himself instead of Luke.. alot of it seemed meta to me. I totally loved it. While I get the desire of to see hiim kick butt... what they did made more sense.. after all, he cut himself off from the Force, so he was out of practice.
- Glad they got read of Snoke... in my head he was the weird creepy guy from the Chuck Wendig books that left the Galaxy (Gallius Rex was it?).. that's good enough for me.
- I would have liked Rey's parents addressed for real, but I can wait I suppose.
- after all the build up, Phasma was super disappointing... at least have her do something!
- I liked that Lu'lo got screen time, but where was the rest of Black Squadron? Perhaps they had blink and you miss it cameos that I missed.
This really felt like progress.. 'Force Awakens' was essential a rerun to remind people Star Wars is cool.. this was an actual new movie that things up for the future of the franchise.
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Post by Pharozonk on Dec 19, 2017 23:26:06 GMT -5
Man, I was honestly really let down by that. As someone who was indifferent to The Force Awakens, this felt like neither a step forward or backward, but a jump off the map completely and not in a way that was some artistic stroke of brilliance. - The Snoke twist felt like a cop out. Rather than admitting they had created a thin Palpatine replacement, they just opted to kill him off and stick Kylo in as his replacement. Unfortunately, Kylo is still annoying, so it feels like a downgrade. - Captain Phasma was clearly being built up as the new Boba Fett, but probably went down faster than he did. What a disappointment. - I actually like that Rey's parents are nobodies who don't matter at all, kind of the same way Anakin's parents did. For all the series' pontificating of the "great man" and the "chosen one", she's still a nobody rising to the occasion. That's pretty cool. - The editing in this is a nightmare. I had no idea when each subplot was happening in relation to each other, especially during that scene in which Kylo and Rey were in Snoke's throne room. Heck, unless I zoned out, how did Rey get off that ship? One minute she gets blown across the room and the next time we see her, she's down on the planet with Chewie in the Falcon?? The Rose and Finn plot was completely uninteresting, and while Planet Las Vegas was neat visually, it felt totally perfunctory by the end of the film once you realize nothing has really happened throughout the whole movie. Rey is still barely trained, Luke might as well have stayed on Planet New Zealand, and Kylo's still evil. Snoke's dead, so I guess that's a plus. - Bless Mark Hamill for really giving his all in this role. His performance is where I was almost being hooked back into this every time the movie made me zone out again. I like the grumpy hermit Jedi Master angle in contrast to Obi Wan and Yoda's quirky kook personalities, something that I felt Hamill nailed. Unfortunately, the revelation of his contemplation to kill Kylo smacks of out of character writing. In Return of the Jedi, it's clear that Luke believed in seeing the good in people and his appealing to Vader's lost humanity is what ultimately defeats the Emperor, not Luke's strength as a Jedi. Now, I'm supposed to believe that he would just kill Kylo in his sleep rather than talk to him about his concerns? Sorry, I don't buy it at all. People are going to say that this is the series taking risks and people who disliked it just want the same old stuff. What I would argue is that this film takes a torch to the sacred cows of the series, but builds nothing new in its place. The new characters continue to range from bland (Rey) to annoying (Rose and Kylo), with the exception of Finn, so what am I supposed to latch on to? Snoke felt like he could have been interesting, but now they don't even have that to work with anymore. I hate to sound like a contrarian guys, but I just did not like this at all. Maybe I'm the weirdo here.  |
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Post by Pharozonk on Dec 20, 2017 12:43:02 GMT -5
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Post by impulse on Dec 20, 2017 13:31:25 GMT -5
Unfortunately, the revelation of his contemplation to kill Kylo smacks of out of character writing. In Return of the Jedi, it's clear that Luke believed in seeing the good in people and his appealing to Vader's lost humanity is what ultimately defeats the Emperor, not Luke's strength as a Jedi. Now, I'm supposed to believe that he would just kill Kylo in his sleep rather than talk to him about his concerns? Sorry, I don't buy it at all. Sorry to hear you didn't like it! I did want to touch on this point, though. I think the point isn't that Luke intended to sneak into his tent and murder him in his sleep. They didn't spend a lot of time showing the past, but I think it's clear he would have talked about the light and the dark with Ben many, many times before this. This seems like it was after worrying about the concern for quit some time, he went in to check and was just so shocked and overwhelmed by how absolute depth and scale being so far beyond what he ever thought. Knowing how dark that could go, he had a momentary instant of thinking he could end it which he even said immediately passed. For Ren's next move to not be "WTF Master Luke??" or defending himself and asking something shows Luke was right. Dude jumped straight to slaughtering the other kids who didn't join him, so I think it's pretty clear this wasn't out of the blue. I think this was kind of the point and consistent with the "burn the past" theme. Snoke seemed like he could have been a new force threat/Palpatine stand-in, so they just wasted the guy to say "yeah, we're not doing that again." It was heavy-handed, sure, and whether one likes or not is surely up for interpretation, but it worked for me. Maybe it will grow on you over time? I still think not having Luke get to kick some ass first was a huge missed opportunity, and if they changed nothing else but that I would be thrilled. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Dec 20, 2017 22:08:13 GMT -5
I get wanting to see Luke do Jedi stuff, but the story is such that he basically gave up being a jedi, so that wouldn't have made alot of sense.... what we got was pretty good, I thought. To me, Leia Force-ing her way THROUGH the ship when she was in vacuum, and somehow surviving, when we have no indication before that she ever done any Jedi training was really far more heinous, IMO.
I agree Kylo is boring, and Rey is worse (she just has that one expression that seems to mean 'I'm acting'), but Finn and Poe are cool, and I actually really liked Rose. I agree their adventure was kinda pointless, but it was fun, and was it really more pointless than the trip to Cloud City in ESB?
I think I mentioned the Rey magically getting back to the Falcon thing.. that really bugged me, but in the grand scheme that's pretty minor... I mean, they can add another 5 minutes of her getting to a life pod and Chewie picking her up in the extended edition.
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Post by impulse on Dec 21, 2017 11:55:07 GMT -5
I disagree on Luke. Convincingly Force projecting himself to fool the entire resistance and First Order simultaneously without blue blurry glowing halo seems like a pretty incredible Force feat in and of itself. We've never seen anything like that. And just because he shut himself off in his despair I don't think that means he loses all of his skills and abilities. I would think once he allowed himself to reconnect, if he could do super Force vision he could do anything else he had done. Why else show the X-Wing underwater callback to Empire if he wasn't going to fly in it eventually, too, you know? I guess maybe that was to subvert the expectations we were just copying Empire again.
I think this movie assumed the viewer would pick up a lot of stuff happened off camera. I assume Luke would have of course done some training with Leia in the last 30 years. Was phasing through a ship from vacuum the best way to introduce it, though? Well, maybe not.
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Post by String on Dec 23, 2017 12:27:14 GMT -5
This was an okay film for what it was, a 2+ hour long chase scene....*sigh*
This film did nothing to sooth my qualms over TFA and I can probably write 2 or more pages worth of critiques I have for these new characters. However, upon further reflection, I feel that I am not a part of the target audience for these particular films. Abrams, Johnson, the Mouse, they've made clear their intentions on expanding the franchise past the saga of the Skywalkers and into new directions. I find no fault with those goals but I do have to question the method in which they are doing so.
Abrams ripped off ANH for Force Awakens and Last Jedi has more than a few passing similarities to ESB. Canto Blight as a 'new' Cloud City, DJ as a 'new' Lando, the chasing and eluding of enemy forces, Jedi training (to a degree), dark side caves in place of trees, and a battle scene on a white salt plain with the same type of forces and tactics similar to a battle long ago on a ice planet.
But it was Kylo's offer to Rei to join him that almost made me giggle aloud in the theater. He makes these large protestations about the past needing to BURN, all of it to become who we are meant to be and then makes that type of offer, almost word for word as the same offer Vader made to Luke. How is this new? How is borrowing/lifting story beats from the Original Trilogy 'new and different'? This film started with the First Order chasing the Rebellion from a rebel base and it ended with the First Order chasing the Rebellion from a rebel base. The only solid thing this film did was put their new characters into positions of power previously held by the former cast. That's it. Otherwise, it's the same themes and beats being played out as before.
As for the characters I do care about, the two best moments were with Luke; his reunion with Leia, when he pressed the space dice into her hand, almost brought a tear to my eye, it was heartfelt, warm, and tender. And his final fate, a beautiful passing of a legend.
I have my reservations about what was revealed in his moments with young Ben though. I too believe that Luke would never succumb to such a measure, even for a moment. He went to such lengths to save his father from the darkness yet felt here that he could not do the same for his sister's only son?? That is what is so bothersome about Ren's story. Lucas spent three prequels showing how Palpatine seized power and his corruptive influence upon Anakin. In this trilogy though, it's like I'm being spoon-fed the same deal with Snoke and Ren with little history of drama nor emotion to form a large enough context for me to actually care if he turns or not.
But as I said, I gather that I'm not among the target audience. I've been a fan of the EU for over 20 years and it's very hard to overlook the wonderful stories and characters that have formed the fabric of the EU in lieu of this trilogy especially since they seem intent on merely swiping and repeating the same story beats.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 23, 2017 18:35:03 GMT -5
Because spoilers for Last Jedi could possibly be extrapolated from this, I am putting it here instead of the general Star Wars thread...  -M |
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Post by spoon on Dec 23, 2017 21:30:51 GMT -5
I've resigned myself to accept that no Star Wars film will ever be as good as the Original Trilogy. I judge subsequent films in comparison to each other; by that standard, I consider The Last Jedi to be a success. The Force Awakens so slavishly strip-mined the Original Trilogy, it felt like the characters were caught in a time loop. While The Last Jedi had elements that felt inconsistent with what Star Wars is, at least it felt original. There were truly unexpected moments and an expansion of the world.
Many people seem to fear that Disney's purchases of Lucasfilm, Marvel, and now the Marvel properties Fox has the rights to, will lead to an aversion to risk and uniformity of storytelling. But that didn't see like an issue with The Last Jedi. For both good and ill, Rian Johnson seemed willing to change course from what J.J. Abrams did in The Force Awakens. I like that Johnson was willing to kill off characters that Abrams seemingly intended to last throughout the trilogy. That led to genuine surprises and acknowledged that the films shouldn't be locked into things that aren't working.
On the other hand, that led to inconsistencies. In The Force Awakens, I thought the First Order was depicted to be a nascent revival of the Empire that's taken over portions of the Republic. The Republic is still in control of most of the galaxy. The Resistance is merely the armed force trying to defeat the First Order in the areas it has taken over. But even though The Last Jedi starts soon after The Force Awakens, Johnson changes the situation to essential replicate the Original Trilogy's politics. It seems like Resistance is supposed to be the last remnants of the Republic and the First Order runs most of the galaxy. That leads to my main problem with The Last Jedi - its bleakness. It feels like the accomplishment of overthrowing the Empire in Return of the Jedi was all for nought. There's also so much death. Even though The Last Jedi was cool, surprising, and creative, I don't know that it will lend itself to rewatching like the Original Trilogy does. Those films are so fun; I think the suffering in The Last Jedi will make re-watching hard. The Original Trilogy made even deaths hopeless. Obi-Wan's sacrifice in A New Hope was a key victory, and he came back as a ghost who told Luke to turn off his targeting computer!
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Dec 24, 2017 13:25:01 GMT -5
This is a reposting of something I just wrote in The Last Jedi spoiler thread on CBR.
The more I think about it, the more I find TLJ to be similar in many respects to Star Trek Generations, except TLJ is a good movie while Generations is one of the worst movies ever made.
Both are a transition from an older cast to a younger cast.
Both have the previous hero of the franchise as a jaded old man who doesn't want to be involved any more.
Both kill off said previous hero in the climax.
Both received complaints about their humor.
Both have been seen as insulting by segments of the fandom.
Both depict most of their heroes as miserable failures.
Both tried to do 'things the fans wouldn't expect.'
The similarities just makes Generations look that much worse in comparison. Luke got to be badass and sacrifice himself to save the resistance while showing how much stronger he is than Kylo Ren. Kirk dies 'on the bridge' to save a random planet we never even see. The heroes are intentionally shown to fail in TLJ to drive home certain messages, while the heroes in Generations are unintentional failures resulting from terrible writing. Many of the jokes and twists in TLJ do work, while none of them work in Generations.
I guess this shows what could have been if they killed Kirk and destroyed the Enterprise D in a good movie rather than a terrible one.
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