The Last Jedi, not the last spoiler thread

[TheRevanchist]

6 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I don’t want the next trilogy to fall between eps 6-7.  With the prequels, R1 and the next Han Solo prequel, I’m tired of prequels where we know in advance the outcome of the plot and character arc.

I’d rather see a completely new story in the SW universe and leave behind the Skywalker saga.  There is so much potential to mine.  I’d like to explore the galaxy some more. 

It has already been confirmed that the new trilogy won't be an another Skywalker saga, and it will be set in an another unexplored time.

I was hoping that they will do an Old Republic trilogy, but after watching this movie, God, I hope that doesn't happen. They might be good movies, but will be totally different to what we know from the Old Republic. Essentially, Revan won't go dark, Kreia will save the universe, and Exar Kun will kill Darth Vitiate. Or something similar that makes no sense from the established lore.

[DMC]

Ok I want to ask this before the discussion abates.  Rey's parents being drunk assholes isn't something I have a huge problem with; really like the idea in a vacuum.  But there seems to be dual arguments going on here - is this Johnson subverting (or even "weaponizing") expectations, or is this something viewers should not have had expectations for in the first place?  It seems some are arguing both, which I suppose can be done, but implies some malicious intent on Johnson's behalf in a "hey, I'm going to go out of my way to give a huge middle finger to all these stupid internet theorists" type of way that I don't (want to) believe.  

In my personal experience, I know the first time I walked out of TFA the main topic of discussion with the four people I watched it with was who Rey's parents were.  Hell, even my parents mentioned it unsolicited when I saw it with them, and if they were checking internet theories then...well, I guess I have more to talk about with my parents this weekend.  It may not be the major question coming out of TFA, but it certainly is a major one, intuitively.

[mormont]

Let's approach it from a different angle. What would people who dislike Johnson's approach to Rey's parentage think should have happened instead? 

Because the option he chose, for me, not only fits thematically with what he was trying to do with the movie: it's also the only choice that doesn't simply rehash old tropes and create enormous narrative issues.

None of the alternatives work better than having Rey's parents just be two random people. I've thought that since the first movie. 

[Myrddin]

2 hours ago, Eggegg said:

Do people genuinely have a problem with Luke almost killing Ren? I know I don't. To me, Luke was always someone struggling to control his dark side, his anger, and this just seemed like an extension of that. He also says it was a momentary weakness and he brought it under control. 

I don't want to see Luke as some supremely good superhero with no flaws, and if anything the new trilogy are closer to doing that to their OT characters, with the divine flying Leia and Force projection Luke. I really liked in TFA that Han and Leia didn't stay together and that Han had gone back to his smuggling days, because he's not really a hero either. 

Good point, but I'd hang his dark side tendencies on fear, not anger. He's always been afraid. Of being left on Tatooine. Of not being trained as a Jedi. Of losing his friends. Of having Vader turn Leia.

"I'm not afraid."

"You will be."

Seeing the darkness in Ben amped up his fear of failure.

[red snow]

2 minutes ago, mormont said:

Let's approach it from a different angle. What would people who dislike Johnson's approach to Rey's parentage think should have happened instead? 

Because the option he chose, for me, not only fits thematically with what he was trying to do with the movie: it's also the only choice that doesn't simply rehash old tropes and create enormous narrative issues.

None of the alternatives work better than having Rey's parents just be two random people. I've thought that since the first movie. 

I agree. If the parents weren't someone's personal favourite it would have also been disappointing or, to be even more contrary, "predictable" if it was what you thought.

The issue for me lies within JJ Abrams and his obsession with creating mysteries most of which have no follow through. We should have known Rey was an orphan of unimportant parents from the get go. Even Lucas was upront with anakins heritage irrespective of it being odd rather than multiple films asking who anakin's father was.

I'm starting to warm to the idea that while anticlimactic Rian took a surgical scalpel to remove episode vii concepts that would ultimately weigh the trilogy down. The only problem is that Abrams is back for the next one and could easily undo the undone. Kylo was lying about Rey parents. Snoke isn't dead (sith are pretty good at surviving bisections). Luke didn't die but was merely teleporting to watch a sunset. And that's where the fast and loose approach to the trilogy is a problem. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

5 minutes ago, red snow said:

I agree. If the parents weren't someone's personal favourite it would have also been disappointing or, to be even more contrary, "predictable" if it was what you thought.

The issue for me lies within JJ Abrams and his obsession with creating mysteries most of which have no follow through. We should have known Rey was an orphan of unimportant parents from the get go. Even Lucas was upront with anakins heritage irrespective of it being odd rather than multiple films asking who anakin's father was.

I'm starting to warm to the idea that while anticlimactic Rian took a surgical scalpel to remove episode vii concepts that would ultimately weigh the trilogy down. The only problem is that Abrams is back for the next one and could easily undo the undone. Kylo was lying about Rey parents. Snoke isn't dead (sith are pretty good at surviving bisections). Luke didn't die but was merely teleporting to watch a sunset. And that's where the fast and loose approach to the trilogy is a problem. 

I fully expect episode IX to be a very average film with space seeming very small that has lots of lens flares.

[Ran]

7 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in the visual dictionary that i think could have just been in TLJ in one line, that would have clarified a lot of things.

Ever since the opening of Ep 3 though, I;ve always just assumed Star Wars space has gravity.

I don't think I've watched any of the prequels save TPM from start to finish. Will look up the opener to see what that's about, but I do know that for the most part there's stuff often shown just floating around (asteroids, space junk, the occasional body, etc.).

[red snow]

28 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I fully expect episode IX to be a very average film with space seeming very small that has lots of lens flares.

Instant FTL travel in the opening scene just to make us all wonder what 2/3 of TLJ was about. Maybe with a lens flare effect from what happens when a FTL kamikaze pilot hits an FTL kamikaze shield onboard a star destroyer.

I'm hoping if Luke is a force ghost then he will visit kylo rather than Rey. Maybe he can undo what he did in life? Although he should maybe just convince granda to show up and tell kylo not to emulate him.

[aceluby]

12 hours ago, Kalbear said:

The biggest question was why the fuck Luke was hiding this whole time and what he was going to do. Reys parentage was obviously a question (because otherwise why make it a mystery) but it certainly wasn't the main question. 

It also wasn't necessary to be answered as something special. Rey not knowing what happened to her parents informs her character and how she looks for role models. It is not a requirement that they in turn are amazing, nor does it mean that them being ordinary makes the answer less interesting. 

I never claimed it meant that it had to be someone special, just that it was a pretty major plot point throughout TFA.

ETA: This discussion isn't really going anywhere.  You guys can think nobody cared about it, but it painfully obvious that many did.

[Ferrum Aeternum]

4 hours ago, mormont said:

Hey, nothing wrong with emotional language when we're discussing a scene that's there for emotional reasons. 

Perhaps not, but there is something wrong with talking down to people and marginalizing their opinions of the situation when they disagree with your assessment of the scene.

Taken in a vacuum (see what I did there), the scene wasn't about emotion. It was about Leia grasping onto her Force powers to survive an otherwise unsurvivable situation. I don't care what galaxy you come from, that is first and foremost logical. Obviously what made this scene different was Carrie Fisher's unfortunate passing, which all of us as Star Wars fans deeply felt at the time and I wager still do today. But in the objective context of the film, the scene was about Leia using the Force to ensure her survival and...that's it. Johnson even said that he didn't alter any of her scenes after her death.

(yes, yes, cold dead soul, I get it.  )

No, as Kal points out, the biggest open question left by the film - by a very long chalk - is 'what happened at the Jedi Academy to turn Ben Solo into Kylo Ren, and to drive Luke into exile?'

You and Kal can keep typing this until your fingers fall off but that won't make it any less false. Far and away the biggest source of speculation in the two years since TFA has been Rey's true parentage. It isn't even close. 

I am willing to blame JJA for it because of Rey's visions beneath Maz's cantina, which seem to have been inserted into the film solely to stoke speculation around Rey's (otherwise anonymous) background. But you can't expect that people who watched that scene and derived any meaning from it would be completely satisfied at the reveal in TLJ. 

For the record, I have no issue with Rey being a galactic nobody and like you I do think it's "cleaner" to leave the plot uncomplicated in this manner. But in context, the scene beneath Maz's cantina now feels like a cheap misdirection to a large portion of the fanbase. 

[Corvinus85]

9 hours ago, Ran said:

The bombers were idiotic. I was rewatching Rogue One’s space battle and they proprrly used a barrage of torpedos. The thing is that from the first,  fighters are indeed inspired by dog fighting of WWII, but capital ships (and their countermeasures) are more naval. This film emphasizes it, even, with its slow-motion chase.

I don’t know why Johnson went with the bombers, beyond not thinking it through.

Because bombers were another element of WWII air warfare, so Johnson wanted to bring that in, too. I think they're even called StarFortress bombers, so a definite callback at the American WWII bombers.

I don't know what the explanation for it is, but I suppose you could argue that they were close enough to the planet that there was gravity, or that the Dreadnought was massive enough to have its own gravity. Every little ship in the SW universe has gravity, or at least an up and a down, so maybe the bombs transitioned from the down in the bomber to the down on the Dreadnought, as the two vessels were really close to each other.  

[baxus]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

Let's approach it from a different angle. What would people who dislike Johnson's approach to Rey's parentage think should have happened instead? 

Because the option he chose, for me, not only fits thematically with what he was trying to do with the movie: it's also the only choice that doesn't simply rehash old tropes and create enormous narrative issues.

None of the alternatives work better than having Rey's parents just be two random people. I've thought that since the first movie. 

I liked that the "Rey is Obi-Wan's granddaughter" and other weird theories were put to rest. Also, it's nice to see that Force sensitivity is not hereditary and that anyone can be Force sensitive, which is further drilled home with that orphan/slave boy playing with a broomstick at the end of the movie.

Still, there is no point in having Rey hung up over waiting for her parents to come back and all that if that's a dead end. I mean, they could've given her this "yeah, they left me but I'm over it" attitude (that could've been nothing more than bravado if they wanted to explore the story further). The way it was handled kind of lead one aspect of the story to nothing more than a dead end and waste of time.

[Corvinus85]

The little boy at the end is a hidden Skywalker. Ben Solo's bastard child. 

[mormont]

22 minutes ago, Ferrum Aeternum said:

Perhaps not, but there is something wrong with talking down to people and marginalizing their opinions of the situation when they disagree with your assessment of the scene.

Eh. It's just a teasing way of pointing out that they've missed the point of the scene. 

If you believe that scene wasn't about emotion, yeah, I think you've missed the point. It's first and foremost there to give Leia a moment: a moment that shows she had the option of going Luke's road, that she has the power to be a Jedi, but that she chose a different path, of sacrifice and duty. It shows us that it wasn't lack of ability that led her to forego the Jedi training but that it was a conscious choice she made, and that is definitely an emotional moment, to me. It's also there to give Carrie Fisher a moment, too, and although it clearly existed and was shot before her death, the way it was eventually cut undoubtedly reflects Johnson's wish to give us, the fans, an emotional moment in tribute to her. 

22 minutes ago, Ferrum Aeternum said:

You and Kal can keep typing this until your fingers fall off but that won't make it any less false.

Look, Rey's parentage may have attracted significant discussion among the fanbase, because people felt strongly about the options. But in terms of significance, that issue wasn't within a million miles of being the 'central' one of TFA. The entire plot of TFA is about finding Luke, and Kylo Ren's entire character is predicated on the Jedi academy incident. Meanwhile, you could easily take out all references to Rey's parentage and not one thing about TFA would change one bit. 

22 minutes ago, Ferrum Aeternum said:

But you can't expect that people who watched that scene and derived any meaning from it would be completely satisfied at the reveal in TLJ. 

Well, I am one of those people, and I'm completely satisfied. 

[Werthead]

I'd be down for the entire Star Wars saga to be recast as a musical. This guy gets it.

Even it did take me too long to work out it's Hostiles On The Hill. Groan.

Quote

 

Well... she saw a spacecraft launching, yeah. It does not follow that she saw her parents blasting off in a spacecraft, or that she saw them get into it.  

 

She was 5, she wasn't an idiot. I think she'd know if they'd walked into town with her drunk parents and then someone said, "Oh yeah, they're on that spaceship." Her reaction makes more sense if she'd arrived on the same ship, been dumped and they'd buggered off.

[Rhom]

Maybe the bombs had magnets in them...  that are only attracted to dreadnoughts.   

I said early on in the first thread, but feel it has been lost; I think they lost a natural opportunity to allow Leia to go out gracefully.  With minimal reshoots and a slight story change, Leia could/should have switched places with Holdo for the suicide run.  Heck, you could even take the Luke/Leia scene in the rebel base and with a bit of CGI change it to where the conversation is happening on the deck of the cruiser.   

As it stands, now the only possible exit I can see for General Organa is the opening crawl of Ep IX:  "Tragedy has struck... General Organa has died."

[Eggegg]

1 hour ago, Ferrum Aeternum said:

Perhaps not, but there is something wrong with talking down to people and marginalizing their opinions of the situation when they disagree with your assessment of the scene.

Taken in a vacuum (see what I did there), the scene wasn't about emotion. It was about Leia grasping onto her Force powers to survive an otherwise unsurvivable situation. I don't care what galaxy you come from, that is first and foremost logical. Obviously what made this scene different was Carrie Fisher's unfortunate passing, which all of us as Star Wars fans deeply felt at the time and I wager still do today. But in the objective context of the film, the scene was about Leia using the Force to ensure her survival and...that's it. Johnson even said that he didn't alter any of her scenes after her death.

(yes, yes, cold dead soul, I get it.  )

 

 

You and Kal can keep typing this until your fingers fall off but that won't make it any less false. Far and away the biggest source of speculation in the two years since TFA has been Rey's true parentage. It isn't even close. 

I am willing to blame JJA for it because of Rey's visions beneath Maz's cantina, which seem to have been inserted into the film solely to stoke speculation around Rey's (otherwise anonymous) background. But you can't expect that people who watched that scene and derived any meaning from it would be completely satisfied at the reveal in TLJ. 

For the record, I have no issue with Rey being a galactic nobody and like you I do think it's "cleaner" to leave the plot uncomplicated in this manner. But in context, the scene beneath Maz's cantina now feels like a cheap misdirection to a large portion of the fanbase. 

Completely agree with every word of this 

[Corvinus85]

2 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I'd be down for the entire Star Wars saga to be recast as a musical. This guy gets it.

Even it did take me too long to work out it's Hostiles On The Hill. Groan.

The bad lip read guys are awesome. I, too, did not get the acronym of the words until I saw it in the comments. I would love to see Hammill's reaction to this.

Also, the song's refrain's made me thing of GoT when Jon and his band of merry men go north of the wall. 

[Ferrum Aeternum]

9 minutes ago, Rhom said:

Maybe the bombs had magnets in them...  that are only attracted to dreadnoughts.   

Obligatory...  

I said early on in the first thread, but feel it has been lost; I think they lost a natural opportunity to allow Leia to go out gracefully.  With minimal reshoots and a slight story change, Leia could/should have switched places with Holdo for the suicide run.  Heck, you could even take the Luke/Leia scene in the rebel base and with a bit of CGI change it to where the conversation is happening on the deck of the cruiser.   

That's not a bad idea, but I'm sure people would have griped about that too. And I do understand Johnson's desire to keep Fisher's final performance as-is. I think the way they're going to handle this is with a time jump of some sort, which certainly isn't unprecedented in SW moviedom (fairly significant jumps between films in each of the first two trilogies). It won't exactly be satisfying, but then this situation was never going to be.  

[mormont]

12 minutes ago, Werthead said:

She was 5, she wasn't an idiot. I think she'd know if they'd walked into town with her drunk parents and then someone said, "Oh yeah, they're on that spaceship." Her reaction makes more sense if she'd arrived on the same ship, been dumped and they'd buggered off.

Nobody needs to have said that. She was 5: that's plenty young enough for her to mix up memories or get a wishful imagining, that her parents went away and one day they'll come back, mixed up with a reality that probably nobody told her about anyway. 

10 minutes ago, Rhom said:

I said early on in the first thread, but feel it has been lost; I think they lost a natural opportunity to allow Leia to go out gracefully.  With minimal reshoots and a slight story change, Leia could/should have switched places with Holdo for the suicide run.  Heck, you could even take the Luke/Leia scene in the rebel base and with a bit of CGI change it to where the conversation is happening on the deck of the cruiser.   

Ugh, no. Now Luke has to astral project twice? No, that's clumsy and awful, and I think it needs more CGI work than you think. That would not be how I want to see Carrie Fisher go out at all.

It's a shame they'll have to write Leia out between pictures, but it's the least worst option I can see.