Star Wars Thread: I KNOW WHAT THAT IS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Ran]

5 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

It could use a better editor, but it's aight.

Everything FCH writes is like that. He's why auto-summarizers exist.

Thoughtful, as usual, and I do appreciate that he's upfront about the fact that he's friends with Johnson and his family, but he avoids a couple of sticking points: 1) that the Holdo-Poe dynamic could have been kept without creating an idiot plot (it's not like Poe was alone in this -- a whole bunch of people joined him in mutiny! -- so reducing it purely to Poe having problems with Holdo would make sense if Johnson actually presented that; but he chose to make Poe's concern legitimate by showing him with supporters who backed his concern) and 2) It's a little weird to not touch on the fact that Mark Hamill himself was bewildered, and that Hamill had indicated he knew Lucas had planned a different course for the character. And it doesn't change the fact that this, too, could easily have been rectified with some story tweaks. 

The film has a problem on the story-construction level, not so much on the thematic level.

I'll find a good summarizer for when he finally vomits out his BR2049 critique.

[Darth Richard II]

I don’t agree with all of it, but I found it refreshing after the week I’ve had.

[Darth Richard II]

hmmm did Poe have many supporters outside Finn, rose and Fishers daughter? I honestly can’t remember.

the Hamil thing is fascinating to watch though, he still seems like he hasn’t made up his mind.

[HexMachina]

11 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

hmmm did Poe have many supporters outside Finn, rose and Fishers daughter? I honestly can’t remember.

the Hamil thing is fascinating to watch though, he still seems like he hasn’t made up his mind.

I think there are some other unnamed characters join him to arrest Holdo?

[Darth Richard II]

Well I was planning on watching in this weekend, so I’ll report back with my findings. :p

[Jace, Extat]

6 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Liked that a lot.  Helps put a lot of my thoughts on Last Jedi in proper perspective.  I still have some issues with the movie in general, but they're not with the themes and the arcs or most of what's in that article.

 

I found it a well designed argument, but not at all convincing. Of course I'll Spartan Kick anyone who screams 'Mary Sue' or 'SJW!!!' myself, so please keep that in mind when reading this rebuttal.

The film is extremely poorly considered. It is not at all an exercise in hyperbole to suggest that the article we read above had more exacting standards applied to the material than TLJ enjoyed. Even leaving aside the minutiae of what constitutes a plot hole, or bad writing, or the extremely nebulous 'erasing conflict from the movie' charge against people who find fault in the internal logic because I refuse to allow my argument to be constricted no matter how deliberate the trap has been lain. There is an endless supply of technical or structural decisions that are utterly baffling to unbiased mind.

Again, I'll bypass the strong arguments that the author intelligently attempted to neuter via simplification and generalization (a fair argumentative tactic on his/her part) which would tempt a less drug addled mind into the salient of subjectivity (not even that subjective though, but like I said, I'm maneuvering around this strategic morass to engage the undefended liver of the opposition) and instead point out the blatant and undeniably objective litany of improperly affected techniques. A number of these center around the 'comedy' that the author referred to mocking the gentleman who sent a petition regarding the poor quality of film which resulted from these bits, but obviously I'm not entirely insane because I'm just going to point out that structuring your film with Guardians of the Galaxy sequences doesn't really make any sense in a movie where everyone constantly fails and/or dies.

I'm losing interest so I'm gonna fire off a couple of these quickly and can probably be persuaded to elaborate later, but let's run down the list.

1) Poe Dameron 'yo mamma' joke. Because of limitations to shooting in an X-wing cockpit this is shot at a flat angle, directly centered on Poe Dameron. This is a basic comedy shot. It's also hard to do anything else there, but recall how often Luke is always moving around in his cockpit flipping switches or looking behind him in the OT. This is to give you something to look at. Because your brain is bored. Now recall Poe Dameron literally just sitting there pretending to be on hold doing nothing. This is technically fine, as far as the scene construction goes. You lock down the camera like that precisely because you don't want the audience to miss the funnies. This is fine in a vacuum (I mean the joke bit is fucking awful, but it's technically fine), but unlike Poe Dameron's X-wing we're not in a vacuum. See this establishes something called 'tone' which is how a movie chooses to tell its story.

2) Wildly insane/inept bad guys with massive 'splosions that make good guys go boom. I think Stoklasa referred to the Dreadnought captain as 'foaming at the mouth' and that's pretty appropriate for that wildly over the top character while Hux literally looks and acts like a cartoon villain as opposed to the fantastic catty Nazi of the previous film. Bad guys shoot at immobile base instead of ships that can run away.

3) Brilliant action sequence of Poe Dameron destroying every defensive turret at once with ease, removing any and all tension, highlighting bad guys' ineptitude, features a slapstick 'plugging the water' gag with the cute robot. 'CAUSE IT'S GOTTA BE FUNNY!!!! FUNNY FOCUS TESTED WELL!!!!!

4) Dozens of bombers holding at least 4 people each get fucking obliterated while Carrie Fischer acts like a confused old lady who just found out they're turning her into a wax sculpture to use in the prequel/standalone/incoherent-as-a-standalone movie.

5) Self sacrificing lady on ship self sacrifices to destroy other ship in a visually yawn-inducing act of self sacrifice.

6) ULTRA POWERFUL SUPERSHIP DESTROYED!!!!

7) Poe Dameron gets slapped in the goddamn face and demoted for being a hero in a HILARIOUS dialogue sequence where he needs to learn not to be a hero because the Rebellion wants unquestioning obedience to authorities who are in a state of physical and moral disintegration over having just learned that they're being turned into a wax sculpture in the prequel/standalone/abso-fucking-lutely-incoherent-as-a-standalone movie.

 

Read through that little list of shit, which is a snarky but accurate description of the first five minutes of this film, and tell me that the tone isn't all over the fucking map. And it gets worse! It gets SO MUCH WORSE. This is what @Ran means when he says 'story construction level' as opposed to thematic. The film looks absolutely gorgeous, just like Rogue One did. The scenes are set verywell, it's usually clear what's happening in frame, and everything on a technical level is pretty high quality. But it's also all completely wrong. Insanely wrong. "Maaaaster Yodaaaa" I was confused after I first saw this film, literally confused. My brain needed days and weeks to process everything that was wrong about the film, and it all stems from the fucking baffling decision to treat significant portions of the film like a 'Cheaper By the Dozen 2' sequel in the middle of this awful failure and loss.

You can have comedy in a story that carries heavy loss and failure for the characters, in fact you should have shit to lighten the mood. But unless I missed the 'Who's on first anyway' part of Schrodinger's List, I don't think you can cram madcap comedy scenes every other five minutes into a movie where like 380 of the "last 400" members of the Resistance are all systematically murdered while everyone learns that they're a horrible failure and everything is salt. It's tonally absurd.

 

ETA: Typo

[Darth Richard II]

You found the ramming scene visually boring? O.o

(also to be a bit picky Uber nerd technically space in star wars has consistently shown to not be a vacuum)

 

edit: I also strongly disagree with madcap comedy every 5 mins. Either we saw a different film or you definition of comedy is different then mine

[Jace, Extat]

Just now, Darth Richard II said:

You found the ramming scene visually boring? O.o

(also to be a bit picky Uber nerd technically space in star wars has consistently shown to not be a vacuum)

No, I found the whats-her-face's-sister thing where she drops the bombs visually boring. The Holdo one was visually stunning, enough so that the complete disregard for any established in-universe physics doesn't even make my list of criticisms.

[Darth Richard II]

Ahhh ok. I’ll give you that one.

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, Darth Richard II said:

edit: I also strongly disagree with madcap comedy every 5 mins. Either we saw a different film or you definition of comedy is different then mine

There certainly wasn't mad cap comedy every 5 mins. But what comedy exists in the movie, exists at a level I'd describe as childish, the sort of thing I'd expect to see in a Scary Movie, something by the Wayans brothers, not in a Star Wars movie, and that threw me quite a bit. 

Yo Mamma jokes, prank calls and drinking green tit milk are too reminiscent of Jar Jar stepping in doo doo for me to overlook it. And there was definitely a jarring tonal shift in those comedy moments that wasn't well handled, contrasted with what are often darker, more tense parts of the story.

 

[HexMachina]

I generally enjoyed the movie but the Huxcall at the beginning was pretty cringeworthy

[Jaxom 1974]

That felt like a ton of stuff all thrown at the wall at the same time there, Jace...but I don't think I'm disagreeing with you...?  

Personally, I like a lot of the meta subtext and the general commentary that Johnson seems to be going for.  But I'm 100% on board with the idea that the story structure suffers, and as a result, hampers some of that message.

And of course, Poe just still sucks as a character, and even if he truly learned lessons as part of his character arc in TLJ, I fully expect JJ to ignore any of that in Episode IX because he seems to think Poe is simply just "the awesome"...

[kuenjato]

The problem with TLJ is that it's so incredibly clumsy in its execution of its ideology, to say nothing of the nuts and bolts of space opera storytelling. I hate this film, and I hate it as a Star Wars fan from the OT theater days and as a social and economic liberal with considerable distaste toward the concept of championing shitty art and/or shitty people simply because it/they are ideologically correct -- the "requires hate" fallacy. TLJ not only needlessly and incompetently mars the general Star Wars tone developed across decades to score cheap virtue-signaling likes, it does it so, so poorly. To offer a contrast, think of a recent franchise film that did basically the same thing, and generated a small fervor among MRA assholes, but not-really-much and easily-drowned-out because it was an awesome fucking film? Mad Max: Fury Road. And that film is much more explicit in assigning blame for its conflict. There are plenty of other examples of the sci-fi/fantasy medium addressing these issues with nuance and intelligence; I recently completed Horizon Zero Dawn, which delved into male toxicity but also offered perspective and variations of the characters presented, rather than stereotypical identitarian models. TLJ, on the other hand, is the product of a crude, unsophisticated approach to storytelling and thematic development; it is not so much art as it is propaganda--a crap example that should be scorned for its caricatures and general shallowness of what it is trying to represent. A dozen stern editorial passes and perhaps some collaboration, and this might have been a masterpiece. But why expect that from a studio that develops a multimillion-dollar trilogy without even a base structure?

[Kalbear]

Yeah, I think if you believe that TLJ is mostly ideological in our current culture (especially compared to something explicitly so like fury road) you've already bought into what the MRA crowd has been selling. There are a lot of thematic elements and viewpoints in TLJ, but none of them are particularly politically ideological.

So yes, I agree that it did those things badly and clumsily because it wasnt trying to do those at all.

[Darth Richard II]

Yeah, I don’t think you abd I will ever agree on anything Star Wars related Jace. If I remember your opinion on Rebels and the old EU correctly anyway. 

[Jace, Extat]

15 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Yeah, I don’t think you abd I will ever agree on anything Star Wars related Jace. If I remember your opinion on Rebels and the old EU correctly anyway. 

And that's okay we can disagree about Star Wars and both love it or demand more from it in our own way. 

But mine's right.

[Corvinus85]

13 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

That felt like a ton of stuff all thrown at the wall at the same time there, Jace...but I don't think I'm disagreeing with you...?  

Personally, I like a lot of the meta subtext and the general commentary that Johnson seems to be going for.  But I'm 100% on board with the idea that the story structure suffers, and as a result, hampers some of that message.

And of course, Poe just still sucks as a character, and even if he truly learned lessons as part of his character arc in TLJ, I fully expect JJ to ignore any of that in Episode IX because he seems to think Poe is simply just "the awesome"...

Are you talking about the Poe that JJ wanted to kill off and changed his mind after Oscar Isaac begged him not to, and tried to make something with him? That Poe?

[sifth]

Is it weird that the only thing I liked about TLJ was the casino planet.........................alright most of that is a joke, but it did touch on something I really do love in both fiction and non-fction; the war economy. That if you have a series of prolonged wars like the Star Wars universe seems to have, for better or worse you will create an economy based around it. I loved when Benicio Del Toro pretty much shoved Rose's SJW ideology down her hypocritical throat, when he revealed to her that the rebels were getting their weapons from the same people the First Order were. For a briefly moment I was able to see signs of a much better movie, inside the turd that was TLJ...........but only for a moment.

 

It's probably one of my favorite elements of much more interesting sci-fi series, like Babylon 5, Mobile Suit Gundam, and even Star Trek to a certain extent.

[Darth Richard II]

lol, Roses's SJW Ideology. Not sure where to start.

Maybe with the fact you should watch that scene again, since its Finn and DJ, not Rose.

[Varysblackfyre321]

Recently watched solo. Now I’ve seen all the prequel movie. Now I can say I found Rogue one to be the weakest Prequel by far. Note I said prequel here-not movie as a whole. It’s a decent movie imo, but I don’t see it having really added much to my appreciation to the original trilogy as much as the Lucas prequels or even Solo.