The Last Jedi, not the last spoiler thread

[mormont]

Carry on.

Regarding the hyperspace ram, I'm willing to suspend judgement on that and assume that there was some refinement or twist to the entry to lightspeed that doesn't normally occur, like maybe Dern's character aborted the jump at the last second or something, rematerialising in time to cut through the flagship. Maybe it's never been done before because it would inevitably be fatal and/or requires some technical ability. And maybe you have to have a ship of a certain power level, or with certain technology, to do it. Maybe it's relatively easy to develop countermeasures, so the element of surprise is key. You can handwave it away, is what I'm saying. 

On the topic of the film's reception, disappointed fans tend to be louder than happy audiences. If the film's takings hold up on word of mouth, I think we have to conclude that audiences liked what they got. 

[polishgenius]

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I am deeply unimpressed by the trend of denigrating the earlier films to prop up TLJ. It makes me wonder if there was less to the movie than I thought, if this is the route others who liked it feel they have to take to justify their enjoyment.

 

To respond to this at the end of the last thread: but the OT always had problems. They didn't suddenly manifest when TLJ came out, and the point people are making isn't to suddenly look for holes in them to make TLJ seem better, it's that all previous SW films had holes and most enjoyed them well enough, so why are these ones suddenly insurmountable?

[Derfel Cadarn]

The hyperspace ram is explainable.  In Rogue One we see at least one smaller ship jump to hyperspace as the star destroyer arrives, crashing into it, so it's clear there's a transition lag from normal space to hyperspace.  Since the cruiser was still far from the Imperial fleet (it was still out of effective range at first) it's not inconceivable Haldo managed to configure the hyperdrive so that the transition was delayed enough for the ship to still be in normal space long enough to hit the fleet.  Still leaves the question why the rebels before didn't just ram imperial fleets with large freighters, or why Haldo didn't think to do it as soon as the shuttles left (or why the corvette or frigate didn't do it before losing the last of their fuel), but it's star wars.

I don't mind the imperials like Hux generally sucking.  Essentially they're the children/grandchildren of escaped Imperials, raised on stories about how awesome the Empire was - who're only a threat because they inherited Palpatine's contingency resources in the Unknown Regions. 

And I don't mind no big reveal regarding Snoke. He's just a powerful force user, maybe a former inquisitor.  Ironically, just as he derides Kylo as a failed Vader wannabe, he turns out to be a failed Sidious-wannabe. 

There were plot holes, but the earlier films had plenty too, mostly overlooked by nostalgia.  The worm on the asteroid? How did it survive?  The sarlacc - did it have any means of feeding beyond whatever Jabba threw down to it?  Remember how everyone thinks the Imperials hated aliens and the Rebels were more inclusive?  How many aliens did you see on Yavin in A New Hope? Or on Hoth in Empire Strikes Back?  None.  Except Chewie, and he never got a medal or seemed to have any Rebel rank.  Han was a captain, Luke a commander.  Leia seemed to have high rank though was only called princess, but for all we know the rebels just assumed chewie was Han's pet.  Jedi had the Mon Calamari, but that was maybe just because they had a big fleet of cruisers.  Oh, and Lando's co-pilot.  Other than that, all humans.

I did a GOT-cast count; three including Brienne.  Shagga was the dreadnought commander, and Lyse Arryn was an officer on Hux's ship. Did I miss any?

Edit: Also worth noting that while it seems as if they all had crappy lives, it's only been between 5-10 years that things have been bad.  Before that Leia was a senator and Luke had his academy.  IT's not like he's been in exile since Jedi.  For all we know he did all sorts of cool stuff before settling down and trying to train Ben etc.

 

 

 

 

[Ran]

Johnson, and everyone else, simply didn't care about what was established about hyperdrives. It was an awesome visual that gave Holdo a heroic sacrifice and disrupted the execution of Finn and Rose. That's all it was. Attempts to handwave it are fruitless when you're dealing with something that people did not care about. And I suspect that come the final episode, you're never going to see someone doing this again.

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There were plot holes, but the earlier films had plenty too, mostly overlooked by nostalgia.  

Not a single thing you list are actually plot holes. The worm, the sarlacc -- they are introduced as things that exist, and there's nothing stated that says they _shouldn't_ exist. 

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 Remember how everyone thinks the Imperials hated aliens and the Rebels were more inclusive?

I don't recall anyone thinking this in the original series. More an EU thing, no, in particular from Zahn attempting to work out the fact that there were _zero_ aliens among the Imperials, whereas the EU very clearly decided that a key distinction between the Rebellion and the Empire was the latter's xenophobia? I mean, the fact that there were literally no non-humans in the Imperial war machine was suggestive by the time we get to RotJ and we do start, finally, seeing some aliens among the Rebels (FWIW, I've no idea what Lucas and co. have said about this; my assumption is that it was a budgetary decision that was only rectified in RotJ.)

Again, denigrating the original films to prop up this one makes me question what's going on. Is the bar so low for enjoyment of TLJ that people have to defend it by talking about how they think the previous films were bad, rather than just talking about why TLJ is good? 

[Eggegg]

I personally think there is an interesting development here. Taken to its logical conclusion then the rebellion would surely act like most underpowered and overwhelmed rebel fighters and turn to acts of terror and other forms of warfare to succeed. 

Surely the Hyperdrive incident would just lead to the rebellion sending wave after wave of suicide kamikaze fighters into destroyers, factories, bases. 

Its the only logical conclusion, and I'd rather watch a movie where the rebellion actually acts like a real rebellion than one that does seemingly nothing but stand around looking worried and mostly just running away from things.

[mormont]

I agree that nobody's going to do the hyperspace ram again. Handwaving, at least as I'd use the term, is about explaining to ourselves why we can live with it. I can live with that every bit as easily as I can live with other stuff from TLJ or the original trilogy like the worm on the asteroid. (No, it doesn't need the exact same kind of explaining away, but it still needs explaining away.)

And again, nobody here is denigrating the original films, nor are they trying to set the bar low for TLJ. Everyone that remark seems to be directed at appears to love both the original films and this one, and to think that all of them were very good. We could equally be talking about all the stuff in TFA that doesn't make sense, and there's plenty of that. The thing for me is to remind ourselves that Star Wars has always been science fantasy, not science fiction. 

[HexMachina]

3 minutes ago, Eggegg said:

I personally think there is an interesting development here. Taken to its logical conclusion then the rebellion would surely act like most underpowered and overwhelmed rebel fighters and turn to acts of terror and other forms of warfare to succeed. 

Surely the Hyperdrive incident would just lead to the rebellion sending wave after wave of suicide kamikaze fighters into destroyers, factories, bases. 

Its the only logical conclusion, and I'd rather watch a movie where the rebellion actually acts like a real rebellion than one that does seemingly nothing but stand around looking worried and mostly just running away from things.

Where are they getting these fighters from? Sure doubt they are cheap.

it also completely misses the point of Rose’s line about fighting to preserve what they love not destroy what they hate but sure, wonderful idea!

[TheRevanchist]

1 hour ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

And I don't mind no big reveal regarding Snoke. He's just a powerful force user, maybe a former inquisitor.  Ironically, just as he derides Kylo as a failed Vader wannabe, he turns out to be a failed Sidious-wannabe. 

He was shown to be too strong for him to be a former Inquisitor. I have decided that he is Darth Plagueis and still I am staying with that. Johnson did a marvelous job on trolling the fans with Snoke identity. The music in the throne room is the same as the music in Revenge of the Sith when Palps is talking about Plagueis. Physically, they look similar. Johnson also said 'that even if Snoke gave a 30 second speech saying that he is Darth Plagueis, Rey would have just said 'who'.'

I think that eventually we will have a book about Snoke's origin, but in this movie, the main point was to make the ground for Rey and Ren, so revealing Snoke's origin, wouldn't have changed anything about the characters. 

[Rhom]

What if, echoing Rey being the child of nobodies, Snoke was a nobody?  Some force user from the outer rim who kept a low profile and then saw a vacuum to fill?

[Eggegg]

1 hour ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Where are they getting these fighters from? Sure doubt they are cheap.

it also completely misses the point of Rose’s line about fighting to preserve what they love not destroy what they hate but sure, wonderful idea!

I dunno, shove a hyperdrive on any old rust bucket and start flying them into the New Order. 

Anything would be more interesting than the story we are getting right now, so I'd be more than happy if someone in the rebellion spoke up, saying how they need to get involved in more asymetric warfare tactics because their current "plan" was completely terrible, or non existent, and goes off and starts winning the war with far less moral tactics. Throw in some Jedi absolutist fanatics and suddenly your rebellion is a bit more realistic.. and probably more interesting.

I mean, what has annoyed me most about this trilogy is how it has literally thrown away all the potential for a post-empire world, all the possibilities contained with that situation are squashed by the need to simply rehash what JJ Abrams believes made the original movies work in the first place. So anything that adds an actual twist on the tale is welcomed by me, not just the slight nods that Last Jedi gives to original thinking.

[DaveSumm]

Saw it. I generally enjoyed it, but was mildly disappointed I guess. But that's as much to do with my expectations as the film. Won't rehash the main points as I've read through the last thread now, but....

I thought for sure there'd be pages and pages of talk about the set up of Rebel and First Order ships. So ... you can just fly a little bit out of range, and there's nothing a Star Destroyer can do? They have no impulse movement at all? Wasn't the very first thing we ever see in Star Wars a Star Destroyer doing just that? It seems a minor point, but the entire movie lives in this single point; that you can pause a chase through space and go on completely separate mission right in the middle. I thought it was really odd, but nobody else seems to so I guess there's an explanation for this. But the movie is, literally, the Rebellion flees the First Order. It's right in the opening crawl, and it's where we leave them (albeit it on a different ship and mostly dead). Everything of significance that happens is an interruption of the same chase.

All of that makes it sound like not much really happens, but from a different perspective, too much happens. I'm of the same opinion that someone mentioned way back - what exciting things do we have to look forward to in Episode IX? The characters seem to have made their choices, set out their stalls. We'll have a battle between the good guys and the bad guys, and I guess the ending hints at a a new Jedi order that could be set up (strangely, we always thought these episodes were about the Skywalkers, but they could end up being about the Jedi Drought, a brief period where there weren't many Jedi). Rian Johnson seems to have tied things up quite neatly, and handed off to Abrams, a safe pair of hands but hardly someone known for really shaking things up. Episode IX is teed up to be another Return of the Jedi, a tidy and predictable movie where everyone lives happily ever after, good guys win, bad guys lose. 

Some minor points: Hux is awful. Baffled by people who think this is a good performance, it's cartoon villainy and I can't take it seriously. The ridiculous grin he tries to suppress when ordering evil things, like he gets a sexual kick out of being evil for evils sake .....ugh.

Phasma is also awful. Her single character trait ("silver") isn't enough for me to give a shit about her, or see her past with Finn as any kind of vendetta that was worth settling. It was like a tired piece of housekeeping that Johnson felt obliged to deal with, but cared about as much as I do.

Yoda was incredible, and I was so, so, so thrilled that he looked like ESB Yoda. Whether it was actually a puppet (I suspect it was with CG touches), he looked like he had his soul back after the horrible CG version from the prequels. All juddery and shrill and playful but wise, this is my Yoda.

Also wanted to echo the point someone raised about the writing of the overall trilogy, it feels really stupid that Abrams does one thing, then Johnson does whatever he likes and hands it back like a game of Pass the Franchise. We really needed an overall vision here, and if Abrams decides to undo Rey's parentage and switch back to whatever he was thinking, it'll seriously damage this trilogy. 

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Eggegg said:

I dunno, shove a hyperdrive on any old rust bucket and start flying them into the New Order. 

Anything would be more interesting than the story we are getting right now, so I'd be more than happy if someone in the rebellion spoke up, saying how they need to get involved in more asymetric warfare tactics because their current "plan" was completely terrible, or non existent, and goes off and starts winning the war with far less moral tactics. Throw in some Jedi absolutist fanatics and suddenly your rebellion is a bit more realistic.. and probably more interesting.

I mean, what has annoyed me most about this trilogy is how it has literally thrown away all the potential for a post-empire world, all the possibilities contained with that situation are squashed by the need to simply rehash what JJ Abrams believes made the original movies work in the first place. So anything that adds an actual twist on the tale is welcomed by me, not just the slight nods that Last Jedi gives to original thinking.

I strongly recommend playing the board game Star Wars: Rebellion. It's all about the asymmetric warfare between the Empire and Rebels: the Empire can field massive fleets, but the Rebels can bomb the production lines, sabotage planetary defences, launch guerrilla attacks which prevent an Imperial fleet from leaving a system, all whilst Leia and Mon Mothma can use diplomacy to bring wavering systems over to the Rebellion. It's great when the Imperial player rolls off a Super Star Destroyer or Death Star from his production line after half a dozen turns only to realise that he can't really use it without losing five planets to the Rebels (or even better, the Rebels have done the Rogue One mission and can now blow up the Death Star which is the very propaganda victory they need to trigger a mass galactic uprising and win the game for them).

 

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I thought for sure there'd be pages and pages of talk about the set up of Rebel and First Order ships. So ... you can just fly a little bit out of range, and there's nothing a Star Destroyer can do? They have no impulse movement at all? Wasn't the very first thing we ever see in Star Wars a Star Destroyer doing just that? It seems a minor point, but the entire movie lives in this single point; that you can pause a chase through space and go on completely separate mission right in the middle. I thought it was really odd, but nobody else seems to so I guess there's an explanation for this. But the movie is, literally, the Rebellion flees the First Order. It's right in the opening crawl, and it's where we leave them (albeit it on a different ship and mostly dead). Everything of significance that happens is an interruption of the same chase.

Star Wars has always played fast and loose with physics. Correctly, a larger ship with (relatively) large engines and unlimited fuel would be able to burn faster and harder than a smaller ship with smaller engines, especially with artificial gravity counteracting any acceleration effects. So whilst Snoke's ship might drop behind (note: a 60,000-metre-wide ship looks cool but is moronically impractical) the Star Destroyers would easily overhaul the Rebel ships: they're bigger and have more mass to push, but their engines are also insanely bigger relative to their size compared to the Rebel ships.

And you're right, that's how Vader was able to overtake Tantive IV and get it into tractor beam range in Episode IV as well, but precedent and canon don't mean much these days. Y'know, even when you've got an entire department dedicated to doing just that.

[Corvinus85]

3 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I thought for sure there'd be pages and pages of talk about the set up of Rebel and First Order ships. So ... you can just fly a little bit out of range, and there's nothing a Star Destroyer can do? They have no impulse movement at all? Wasn't the very first thing we ever see in Star Wars a Star Destroyer doing just that? It seems a minor point, but the entire movie lives in this single point; that you can pause a chase through space and go on completely separate mission right in the middle. I thought it was really odd, but nobody else seems to so I guess there's an explanation for this. But the movie is, literally, the Rebellion flees the First Order. It's right in the opening crawl, and it's where we leave them (albeit it on a different ship and mostly dead). Everything of significance that happens is an interruption of the same chase.

This is one of the main parts that bothered me. Like I said in my initial comments of the movie, it further constricted the space the story takes place in, leaving behind the fact that this is a galaxy matter. I don't mind that it was a chase, but it could have been a chase across star systems, instead of the slow crawl we got. As to your point about the Star Destroyers, I think the Resistance ships were able to keep out of range of all the destroyers except the main one. Not all ships move at the same speed, after all. This is kinda shown during the lightspeed kamikaze, where the main ship is hit first, and then we see the smaller destroyers breaking up behind it.

Granted, the point has been brought up, why didn't some of those ships just FTL in front of the Resistance cruisers to cut them off. But then, why didn't the cruisers not just use their own jump they still had fuel for to jump right to the planet (it would have been a short jump), had the shuttles prep'ed before that, ready to go, then use the cruisers to fight off the coming enemy ships, while the people got to the base; maybe that way a greater number of people would have made it. Like I said, I'm okay with there being a chase, not okay with how it was done.

10 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Also wanted to echo the point someone raised about the writing of the overall trilogy, it feels really stupid that Abrams does one thing, then Johnson does whatever he likes and hands it back like a game of Pass the Franchise. We really needed an overall vision here, and if Abrams decides to undo Rey's parentage and switch back to whatever he was thinking, it'll seriously damage this trilogy. 

Abrams was still an executive producer on this one. I'm pretty sure both he and Kathleen Kennedy approved Johnson's script before production. So if there isn't an overall vision, that issue is at their doorstep.

[Martini Sigil]

3 hours ago, polishgenius said:

 

To respond to this at the end of the last thread: but the OT always had problems. They didn't suddenly manifest when TLJ came out, and the point people are making isn't to suddenly look for holes in them to make TLJ seem better, it's that all previous SW films had holes and most enjoyed them well enough, so why are these ones suddenly insurmountable?

The best answer I can provide is that as the series went on, rather than fix the holes, the overseers have allowed them to get larger, taking the built-in audience for granted... I have been very critical of this film, but at the end of the day it's friggin Star Wars... so I enjoy it... but you can love things that disappoint you...

.... and after Rogue One --which I loved-- I was expecting something better... 

Here's the thing, and i think *most* Star Wars fans will agree... there are things they've done over the course of these films that received almost universal condemnation... Jar Jar, Ewoks, Baby Anakin, adding the Jabba scene into "A New Hope", Han Shot First....  most of which was viewed by the fandom as cheap money-grabs, and Happy Meal sales... There's a reason why "empire" is widely viewed as "the best" SW film... and that is because it lacked "infused cute-ness"... hackneyed dialogue... and plot points that were even too-excessive for a film universe that allows for space travel and magic... 

[TheRevanchist]

1 hour ago, Rhom said:

What if, echoing Rey being the child of nobodies, Snoke was a nobody?  Some force user from the outer rim who kept a low profile and then saw a vacuum to fill?

It could work like that, I guess.

It just doesn't feel too much Star Wars-y though. In fact, this film did a very good job on shitting on pretty much every part of the Star Wars lore. From making original trilogy totally irrelevant, to Rey being Anakin/Luke++ (as powerful as them but without any training), Ren almost killing Jedi Master Luke Skywalker, and so on. So year, making Snoke a nobody, I guess works in this new Star Wars lore where nothing is consistent.

[Mark Antony]

I really enjoyed the Kylo/Rey/Luke portions of the movie. Thought the Finn/Rose stuff was awful and could have done without it. 

Benicio is like my favorite actor and not even be he could save that part of the movie for me. 

Thought the editing was weird at times. The aftermath of Snokes death where Rey and Kylo were fighting off his henchman was such an awesome moment and they cut to Finn in the middle of it for like a minute only to cut back to the end of the fight, thought that was poorly done. Pretty much anytime they cut to Finn/Rose was a buzzkill for me though.

[Eggegg]

4 hours ago, polishgenius said:

 

To respond to this at the end of the last thread: but the OT always had problems. They didn't suddenly manifest when TLJ came out, and the point people are making isn't to suddenly look for holes in them to make TLJ seem better, it's that all previous SW films had holes and most enjoyed them well enough, so why are these ones suddenly insurmountable?

Is it because the problems in TLJ are far worse.. and mostly that they are contained within a movie that lacks most of the positive aspects contained in the OT. 

For instance I think that Return of the Jedi is 70% fantastic exciting space adventure with some of the most powerful emotional hooks in the series, and 30% stupid 'played for kids' nonsense. But that 70% is so good that I can over look the 30% (doesn't mean I think that movie is as good as Empire or anything)

And some of the issues in the OT can be viewed as products of their time, and can be given a bit of slack. A New Hope is not a perfect movie by modern day standards and I find that most people who watch it for the first time tend to wonder what the fuss was about, but its still a pretty tightly written and simple story that is made in an efficient manner.

What gets me about The Last Jedi, and actually many modern movies, is the lack of efficiency in their storytelling. They seem unable to find a simple solution to get from plot point A to B. TLJ feels like it took the most convoluted, mazey route to get to where it was getting to, and none of it really satisfied. I'm not sure where movies started to really go wrong in this regard, maybe its due to so many commercial commitments instead of storytelling priorities, but I think we are in a dark time for blockbusters.

[denstorebog]

6 hours ago, mormont said:

ey's parentage was thought to be the central mystery only really by people on the internet that are used to these sorts of tropes and expected to see it done again. Little in TFA actually suggests that Rey's parentage is the 'central mystery' of the trilogy. 

You can't be serious about this.

Everything in TFA suggests this. From Rey's endless longing for her unknown parents to come back, to the flashback that makes sure to not show us the face of her parents but makes it clear that they left her on Jakku for a reason, to her unexplained abilities with the Force that allow her to do things other Jedi trained for ages to accomplish, to Luke's lightsaber calling to her of all people, to R2-D2 waking up and revealing the map when Rey is around (hey, another plot hole!), to everyone talking about and apparently knowing who "the girl" is. Seriously, Snoke and Ren are constantly conspiring about "the girl" in TFA and showing a lot of interest in Rey while it's not really clear how they know of her.

Again, you cannot seriously think that Rey's parentage isn't the central mystery set up by TFA. And if it isn't, then why on earth has the internet been so busy speculating on this particular mystery ever since the movie came out?

There are two possibilities here, both of which are damning for the trilogy. Either Rian Johnson didn't get the memo, as the previously posted interview suggests, and/or he didn't care, so he decided to go the non-trope way with Rey's parents, in which case TFA as a movie is rendered fucking useless.

Or it turns out that TLJ is a red herring and that Ren was just pulling stuff out of his ass and Rey's parent are special, in which case this has been an epic mishandling of the payoff.

TFA: "Ooh, wonder who Rey's parents are. They must have been someone special."
2 years later: "They weren't!"
1 year later: "But they were!"
At which point we will give a lot less of a shit about who they were than we did before TLJ.

[polishgenius]

25 minutes ago, Eggegg said:

Is it because the problems in TLJ are far worse.. and mostly that they are contained within a movie that lacks most of the positive aspects contained in the OT. 

Nah. The problems in TLJ are nowhere near as bad as the problems in TFA and about equal at worst to the ones in the OT, and it's better told, crafted, and filmed than either film in the OT that wasn't ESB.

[aceluby]

1 hour ago, Martini Sigil said:

The best answer I can provide is that as the series went on, rather than fix the holes, the overseers have allowed them to get larger, taking the built-in audience for granted... I have been very critical of this film, but at the end of the day it's friggin Star Wars... so I enjoy it... but you can love things that disappoint you...

.... and after Rogue One --which I loved-- I was expecting something better... 

Here's the thing, and i think *most* Star Wars fans will agree... there are things they've done over the course of these films that received almost universal condemnation... Jar Jar, Ewoks, Baby Anakin, adding the Jabba scene into "A New Hope", Han Shot First....  most of which was viewed by the fandom as cheap money-grabs, and Happy Meal sales... There's a reason why "empire" is widely viewed as "the best" SW film... and that is because it lacked "infused cute-ness"... hackneyed dialogue... and plot points that were even too-excessive for a film universe that allows for space travel and magic... 

So. Much. This.

I still watch and enjoy the prequels, even though they aren't very good.  This installment was satisfying, though a bit disappointing at the same time.  Like going to a nice restaurant and getting food that's pretty good, but you were hoping for better.  You still leave full, and it was pretty good, but it might be a while before you go back.