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The Last Jedi (Spoilers): Force-Choke or Tour-de-Force?


Bronn Stone

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1 minute ago, Darth Richard II said:

Eh, just about every review of Sith, negative or positive, pointed dout how stylistically similar it was to Ep 4.

Eh??? Did they? They are miles off if they think that. Please observe Darth Egregious or Ben Kenobi jumping around on a big dinosaur, fighting on lava lakes and NOOOOOOO!!

reviews for sith were decent at the time because it wasn’t as flat out awful as AOTC ( I guess mainly from relief) , and even if it has touches that bring it closer to the OT it’s still a cringe worthy cartoon that shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath.

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9 minutes ago, Eggegg said:

Driver is literally the only good thing in the series so far, yet I agree that his character isn’t really much in the way of intimidating villain. Maybe he doesn’t need to be yet,  but Snoke was an empty fart and now he’s dead there is even more need for a villain.

Ren could become a great bad guy, but he would need to much more twisted and messed up, but I suspect he will instead find some sort of redemption by the end, despite never really achieving major league evil status.

I really think he was brutally miscast, I just can't take him seriously on any level.  But, obviously, many like him in the role.

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Just now, Cas Stark said:

I really think he was brutally miscast, I just can't take him seriously on any level.  But, obviously, many like him in the role.

I’m not sure why you think he’s miscast, he seems to perform the role given to him perfectly. His role is the problem if anything 

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9 minutes ago, Eggegg said:

Eh??? Did they? They are miles off if they think that. Please observe Darth Egregious or Ben Kenobi jumping around on a big dinosaur, fighting on lava lakes and NOOOOOOO!!

reviews for sith were decent at the time because it wasn’t as flat out awful as AOTC ( I guess mainly from relief) , and even if it has touches that bring it closer to the OT it’s still a cringe worthy cartoon that shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath.

I don;t know if you are purposefully misunderstanding what I'm saying or not. I'm not talking about if the film is good or not, at all. I'm talking about the way the film was shot, plus the costumes, backgrounds, etc. Not to mention the wipes and certain scenes being shot for shot homages to the originals.

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I like Adam Driver in the role and I think Ren is a very interesting new take on a Star Wars villain. Just a Vader or Emperor knock-off would have been pretty boring, here the villain actually engages with the franchise's legacy and that's a very interesting path to travel in genre fiction. To many times we just get the same rince and repeat villains, but events like the one in the OT have great reprecussions and shape the world around them. Kylo Ren and the First Order are living proof of that and I like that take :)

 

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Just now, Darth Richard II said:

I don;t know if you are purposefully misunderstanding what I'm saying or not. I'm not talking about if the film is good or not, at all. I'm talking about the way the film was shot, plus the costumes, backgrounds, etc. Not to mention the wipes and certain scenes being shot for shot homages to the originals.

I understand. But you are wrong. It looks like a cartoon. Always did.

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51 minutes ago, Rubicante said:

I think I've decided that Poe is the new Jar Jar for me.  Every time he is on screen, and especially when he talks and tries to be funny, is cringe worthy.  I hope the opening crawl for Star Wars Episode 9 starts with "Poe Dameron is dead.  The Resistance executed him for leading a mutiny."

I think they're trying to make him the Tony Stark fearless-high-energy-fast-talking-wise-cracker type but it's not working.

Which is a surprise to me, because I've loved Oscar Isaac in ever other film I've seen him in and pretty much want to be him.

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21 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

I guess because a silly, overpowered man child doesn't seem like much of a villain to me, that's why.  He's not much of a replacement for Vader or Palpatine, IMO, and I can't see him..Driver...ever having the level of gravitas necessary to be taken seriously as a villain.  

That's exactly the thing. SW doesn't need a new Vader or Palpatine, because that would be incredibly repetitive. TFA was in many ways as repetitive as possible, trying to replicate the old storylines and dynamics, including a repetition of the Death Star plot, Snoke as a cheap Emperor knock-off and Hux as a young Tarkin wannabe. The only good thing out of the obviously repetitive stuff was that Kylo Ren was not a new Vader replica, as people may have been led to think initially, but he was shown to be intentionally trying to be Vader, in the most absurd way possible, and failing. In TLJ, they fortunately got rid of most of the repetitive plotlines and dynamics, killing Snoke (good riddance), making fun of Hux, and explicitly pointing out that Kylo Ren is not Vader (after playing with the idea that Rey was going to redeem him like Luke redeemed Vader, and then showing that it really wasn't going to go down "the way you think it is": Kylo kills Snoke, but for completely different reasons than Vader killed the Emperor).

And on the contrary, I think that a silly manchild having too much power can be very scary, both in real life and in fiction.

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2 minutes ago, Davrum said:

I think they're trying to make him the Tony Stark fearless-high-energy-fast-talking-wise-cracker type but it's not working.

Which is a surprise to me, because I've loved Oscar Isaac in ever other film I've seen him in and pretty much want to be him.

Opinions on Poe aside(you monsters!), you liked him in Apocalypse?

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1 hour ago, Davrum said:

The gags which seem to trip fans up the most are "Who talks first?" from TFA

Now that one doesn't bother me; it's more in line with Han's desperate fast-talking. Poe is clearly in a bad situation, and Ren ignores his babbling, instead of being undermined like Hux at the start of TLJ. Most of the comedy in the original trilogy and TFA seems pretty natural and in-character, while in TLJ it feels like it's there to make the audience laugh, breaking the fourth wall. Not just Poe; "page-turners" isn't a term that belongs in the Star Wars universe, for example, and the Porgs showing up to make Chewie feel guilty and then befriending the giant predator that murdered and cooked one of their family and moving into its lair doesn't feel natural at all. The prequels had similar problems with inappropriate comedy, but it wasn't as all-pervasive as in TLJ.

 

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14 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

I'm talking about the way the film was shot, plus the costumes, backgrounds, etc. Not to mention the wipes and certain scenes being shot for shot homages to the originals.

Sure, there's some effort made to match the look, but if someone made a fake trailer using footage from both RotS and ANH, I think it would be fairly obvious to someone not familiar with Star Wars that it was drawing on two different sources.

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21 minutes ago, Veltigar said:

I like Adam Driver in the role and I think Ren is a very interesting new take on a Star Wars villain. Just a Vader or Emperor knock-off would have been pretty boring, here the villain actually engages with the franchise's legacy and that's a very interesting path to travel in genre fiction. To many times we just get the same rince and repeat villains, but events like the one in the OT have great reprecussions and shape the world around them. Kylo Ren and the First Order are living proof of that and I like that take :)

I'm with you.

Kylo Ren's the best-constructed and best-performed villain in cinema since Heath Ledger's Joker. Better than any bad guy in any DC or Marvel film certainly (yes, including my beloved Loki). His emotionally-unhinged, super-powered school-shooter vibe is legitimately terrifying.

Oddly, Snoke was a more boring villain than even the worst of the many, many comic book movies' many, many villainous misfires, so maybe they just got lucky with Kylo Ren.

 

14 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Opinions on Poe aside(you monsters!), you liked him in Apocalypse?

Thankfully I was rescued from the torment of having to get through Apocalypse by heeding the dire warnings of several folks whose opinions I respect more than my own.

The first time I noticed Isaac was in his beautiful small role in Drive, then kind of fell a little bit in love with him in Inside Llewyn Davis.

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2 minutes ago, Davrum said:

The first time I noticed Isaac was in his beautiful small role in Drive, then kind of fell a little bit in love with him in Inside Llewyn Davis.

As another fanboy, I'd recommend Ex Machina -- if you haven't seen it already.

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1 hour ago, Annara Snow said:

That's exactly the thing. SW doesn't need a new Vader or Palpatine, because that would be incredibly repetitive.

It needed a Thrawn-like character.  Named Thrawn.  Who was Thrawn.

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