Anything would've been better than what we got, really.
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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I just want to see Abram's coke-fueled, batshit crazy first draft of The Rise of Skywalker realized.
The Sequel Trilogy was so poorly executed. I loved the homage to the original Star Wars that the Force Awakens was. I thoroughly enjoyed the rebellion against toxic Star Wars fans that The Last Jedi was. I absolutely hated the utter bullshit the Rise Of Skywalker became. Which in turn soured my feelings about the first two movies. Why they never had an overarching story in the first place is just ridiculous.
absolute worst shit in the world.
And to think they put Timothy Zahn's sequel work aside for this garbage.
They flushed the whole EU. They didn't even pick it's bones for the best bits (until recently), they just messed with the dynamics that worked.
In my opinion, Rey is supposed to be Jaina and Kylo is supposed to be Jacen. Force Awakens has weird moments between the characters that can only make sense if Rey is Han and Leia's daughter. JJ tried to add 'mystery' by hiding this fact, and then Johnson throws it all away to do his own thing.
How was The Last Jedi a rebellion against toxic fans? I thought the movie was fine and has excellent cinematography, but it wasn't anything groundbreaking or controversial in my eyes.
It's a mixture of a few things:
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the film uses certain tropes really badly. Everyone has said something about the whole "subverting expectations" things, and in some places, it's done well but in others, they pretty much 4th wall break. By the middle of the film, you can basically predict when and how the subversions will take place, ironically defeating the point of this trope, and ruining what could have been epic moments.
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certain things flat out make zero sense. The film wants us to believe, literally spelling it out, that Poe is reckless despite his decisions up until this point being pretty good, all things considered, but wants us to consider Holdo a hero despite her causing a panic within her troops by withholding important information, and her plan ending up getting almost all of them killed.
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the casino planet side part of the film feels like it should have been cut by 2/3 and it feels like the only reason for its length was so that Disney could make merchandisable figures from the animals.
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it's a little too reliant on nostalgia. Or rather, when it does its nostalgia hit, the details in question usually aren't there for any particular reason or used for anything. There are a couple of times when it's done really well, such as when R2 persuades Luke to help Rey by playing Leia's message from A New Hope. But other times it's a random Xwing in the water or a two moons hallucination.
Poe was portrayed as being really reckless in TFA as well, though. Like his second ever appearance is stealing a star fighter in a prison break, fighting an entire star destroyer with some guy he literally just met, and then crash landing all while acting like he's on a theme park rollercoaster. His first was him intentionally getting captured in order to pull a fast one on a Sith and his entire army. He's usually doing what needs to be done in TFA, but that's because those situations actually required someone to do exactly what he always wants to do: fly straight at it in the fastest thing he can get his hands on and blow a bunch of stuff up. His arc in TLJ was totally in keeping with what we had already seen of him
But if his actions are necessary, by definition, that's not recklessness. Recklessness involves a complete disregard for other, better options. If those options don't exist, you can't exactly call him reckless for it. What's the guy to do?
If he was doing that shit needlessly, that'd be one thing, but his actions in the beginning of TLJ actually improve the odds of the Rebellion considerably, even factoring in the loss of their bombers.
What he did doesn't show that he wasn't reckless just because it was necessary though. I'm saying he clearly wanted to do those things whether they were the right move or not, it's just fortunate for him that they were generally good moves most of the time
But that's the thing, they were good moves at the time. That speaks far more to his experience as a pilot than his recklessness. At no point is Poe provided a safer, better option for him to disregard in favour of a risky move. So we don't have the information needed to call him reckless, even if he has no qualms about the risky approach.
His enthusiasm for the danger made it pretty clear to me. But even then, what you're describing is just a lack of evidence for recklessness, not evidence against him being reckless. Nothing he did in TFA suggests to me that he wouldn't have done what he did in TLJ, it's just that in TLJ the situation didn't work out so well for him
His enthusiasm for the danger made it pretty clear to me. But even then, what you're describing is just a lack of evidence for recklessness
Exactly. This makes it confusing when the TLJ tries to call him reckless, because there's been no evidence to suggest that, either in this film or the previous. The film tries to point to the bombing run as evidence, but it was clearly necessary and not an example of recklessness. An enthusiasm for danger is not the same thing as needlessly wading into it.
Nothing he did in TFA suggests to me that he wouldn't have done what he did in TLJ, it's just that in TLJ the situation didn't work out so well for him.
In TLJ, he's trying to prevent the entire rebellion from getting smoked by two dreadnoughts. Taking out one of them halves the firepower being aimed at them. The rebellion would have been obliterated had Poe not done what he did, Holdo maneuver or no.
and [Holdo's] plan ending up getting almost all of them killed.
Woah, hang on a second. Holdo's plan would (probably) have worked fine if she hadn't told Poe. It was because he told Finn and Rose over a line he didn't know was secure so he actually also told Benicio Del Toro, who then sold that info to the ~~Discount Empire~~ First Order that everyone died.
And then rather than punish Poe for that, she took responsibility for it, did what she could to save everyone else and sacrificed herself for the cause.
Poe incited a mutiny. Holdo made a command decision about Need To Know. I know who deserves the medal after that all dies down, and it isn't the hotshot that had already been demoted earlier that day for disobeying orders.
You're 100% right about #3. And I can't really disagree with #4 either.
God, I wanted to love this film. I still quite like it, but I can't really bring myself to rewatch it as often as, say Rogue One. I think it's weaker in retrospect after the retcon-fest that was Rise of Skywalker, which is a shame. Rian Johnson had some great ideas that could have reinvigorated the franchise. Instead, it's barely limping on, giving us stuff like Andor as enough of a teaser that we don't just give up on the whole thing.
In general I think there are 4 approximate groups of people when it comes to The Last Jedi. The group that really likes it (i'm in this bucket). The group that thinks its a fun action movie but doesn't push any of its interesting choices enough(you seem to be in this bucket). A group of irate star wars fans who hate it and review bombed the shit out of it. and people that dislike it because its a somewhat basic blockbuster with bad pacing. I think the existence of that third group, and at least in online spaces it isn't remotely small, shows the movie was pushed about as far as it could be for the 8th entry in a big bucket movie franchise.
I guess I'm the fourth. I can't say that I liked the movie, but imo it got more hate than it deserved and it's the best of the trilogy
To be fair, they did have some overarching direction, and even many of the same screenwriters.
I personally think that a lot of the problems come down to Disney rushing the production. It went from four to five years of production time down to two to three and it shows. When you have to go from inception to filming in a few months and to release in 24 months something has to give. Given that there seem to be shot order errors in at least the Last Jedi I do suspect that an extra round of reshoots and editing would have gobe a long way, but there was t time.
Even the you might be able to do a lot in final editing in some films, but when it’s so effects and locations heavy you end up rather limited in what can be changed after finishing shooting. Force Awakens got away with a lot becuse it used a recap of the original trilogy to save time setting things up, but Abrams style of adding in plot hooks without any idea what later films are going to do with them limited the later films a lot more than it might appear on first glance.
I also suspect that the fan reaction to the Prequels played a big part in the way they took it. For fifteen years a lot of the talk about them was people asking why we were spending so much time on trade disputes and senate votes, and the team overcorected to the point that all the basic world building and history got pushed into a book. While Bloodlines may be a good book, a lot of it should have been in the movies themselves and not a tie in novel.
The Force Awakens was ok, but pretty much the same underlying story as A New Hope
The second movie was a woeful middle finger to The Force Awakens which added nothing at all to the story, in fact 1/3 of the movie was pointless. The code breaker / casino arc didn’t impact what happened after the casino
The third movie felt like it was created around cutting room floor footage of Leia, and they turned Kylo into a pussy.
If I am doing a Star Wars marathon, it is Rogue One, 4, 5, 6 and 7
I think that may have been better.
The Last Jedi was a plea to expand the story beyond one family of aristocratic space wizards and remember that Luke was once some rando farmboy with a chip on his shoulder and nothing left to lose.
It's an anti-war film. It is, honest to god, 90% of an anarchist critique of Star Wars, then 10% "nevermind." People shit on the Rose-Finn-... Benicio del Toro subplot. Guys: that is the plot. Rose is the protagonist. The movie opens with her sister's sacrifice, arcs from showing her faith in the cause to losing it, and closes on one of the magic-wielding enslaved children inspired by her unsubtle metaphor of freeing some animals.
Now: how'd that get into a numbered Star Wars film? Fuck me sideways, I don't know. Is it a good movie? Not really, mostly because it's betrayed by the edit and the surprise fourth act veering back toward the status quo. But it's the best of the sequel trilogy by far, and it was a few easy choices away from living up to to the shock and praise of Empire Strikes Back.
One: end Rey's story when Kylo asks her to join him. Leave her allegiance hanging as we go into the last film. To make this work better, give Kylo an aversion to the First Order's militarism, so his beef with Hux is not giving a shit about megalomania. Kylo's lust for power has nothing to do with hierarchy.
Two: have Rose leave. With Finn or without him, depending on how John Boyega felt about being in all three movies. But by the time she's ditching precious materiel to stop him from repeating her sister's sacrifice, why the fuck is she gonna run back to the rebellion? Not like she's in the next movie anyway.
Three: when the rebels escape, it is because of some glorified extra. A soldier who just watched her friends get pulped by AT-AT fire, stumbles back into the dead-end caverns, and finds the native fauna casually brushing aside boulders. When the survivors can no longer hold the entrance, they find her there - arms raised, avalanche floating in midair, staring in disbelief at her own abilities. She doesn't get dialog. She doesn't get a name. Who she is, does not matter. This is the point the movie keeps writing in eight-foot-tall letters: anyone can be a hero. The Force is in all living things. No religious order could ever own it. Nobody needs to hand you a destiny. You can go out and change the universe.
Anyway, the people who say the next movie's first-draft plot-faucet is better are dumb as dirt. Just to pick one fuckup, Palpatine would be a million times more threatening as an immortal ghost, tempting anyone anywhere anytime.