The worst thing: the trailers were spot on to what I wanted. They were dark, intriguing, flashing to deep conflict and a complicated plot (that presumably needed a LOTR-like 2.5 run time). It was as if Disney knew what fans wanted, but delivered the opposite. The plot was one long, slow, boring chase scene with an unneeded sidebar mission that added nothing. There was zero character development other than to tear down Luke Skywalker. All the prior answers I wanted (who is Snoke, what is Rey’s backstory? etc.) were disposed without a thought.
Luke as a petulant child was great when Luke was petulant child in A New Hope, but it does not work for what should be a deeply conflicted but older and wizened character. I’ll admit I laughed at many of the humorous moments but now feel they were forced and completely out of context in most scenes. Most of the plot was just plain stupid - I cringed when Leia flew herself back to the ship after being spaced. Part of me was happy that was not her (Carrie Fisher’s) ending, but her character served no purpose for the rest of the film. It should have been her and not Laura Dern sacrificing herself (and that could have been reshot even after her death - there was uncertainty when they parted ways with “May the Force be with you”, and would have been a noble send off for Leia/Fisher.
So many missed opportunities to be a great film, and they blew it despite having a good feel for what people wanted. Rian Johnson should have listened to Mark Hamill regarding his fundamental opposition to how Luke was written. No one else would have a sense for the franchise, story, and fan base.
This movie disrespects the legacy of Star Wars on just about every level. They even killed Admiral Ackbar, in a trap. One of several examples of how both old and new characters were simply disposed of without honor or purpose. You didn’t even see his death and he only had a brief cameo, it was just “they blew up the bridge and took out all the leadership, including Admiral Ackbar”).
Leia’s ability to survive in space is not a function of her being a Force user. It’s a function of her being a baseline human being, and hard vacuum not being as deadly as popular media tends to present it. You don’t instantly freeze solid. You don’t explode. You can’t get sucked through a pinhole. It’ll kill you, sure, because there’s no air, and there’s a wealth of other side effects, but being sucked out of a spaceship is completely survivable without wizard powers.
Granted, this explanation relies on physics in SW acting the same way they do on Earth, which almost never happens. But at least in my head canon, the only Force ability Leia exhibited there was a gentle tug on the cruiser - which, being much more massive than she is, mostly stayed put while she pulled herself towards it.
Saw it Friday and still can’t make up my mind about it; there were many things to like and just as many things, upon reflection, that weren’t so hot (unlike many, I didn’t mind the Casino scenes). Mostly it was a chase film with cuts to the Casino and Island, and we did that already in the Empire Strikes Back.
I will say it does have one of the best scenes in the history, when Luke Skywalker, the wholesome kid-next-door, golly gee Mr. Kenobi, gets his moment of badass. (flicks dust particle off of shoulder). For that one or two seconds of film, I am willing to forgive much.
It will be interesting to see where they go in the final film, as they seem to have reduced the rebellion to a small handful against a Galaxy that doesn’t seem interested any more in rebellions and an opposition the builds 60-mile wide warships for kicks. I have my own hunches (I call it the CotL theory), but guess we’ll have to wait 2 more years to see.
Wow, I disagree on almost every point you made, that’s a rare one :eek:
Don’t confuse what “fans” want with what you want. This entire movie was light on plot because it focused solely on character development. Practically every character fundamentally changed from how they were in the last movie, and how they were at the beginning of this one. And just because YOU wanted more backstory on Snoke and Rey doesn’t mean the fans do, or that’ what the story is about. The story isn’t about what happened between RotJ and TFA, it’s about what’s happening between Rey and Kylo right now.
It works perfectly fine because he’s being annoyed by an annoying teenage (teenage? I think?) girl asking him to do something he doesn’t want to do. And not only does he not want to do it, it’s asking him to do the proverbial “thing I swore I’d never do again.” While we’re on the subject, did Mark Hamill actually say what he WANTED his character to be?
I guess we don’t disagree on everything because Super Leia was indeed terrible. But her purpose was that she lead the resistance and was responsible for Poe’s character arc of realizing that not every problem is solved by being reckless. I’ll also use this opportunity to talk about Ackbar who died when the bridge blew up. Sometimes things get blown up and people…or…fish things…die. Not every old character needs some magical send off. It’s not Disney’s job to give a Spock-level funeral to every character from the past. Half of the movie’s lesson is “forget the past” and it’s part of what this new story is about. I said in my mini-review that part of what I like about these movies is the Game of Thrones “anyone can die” mindset. You think Snoke is the big bad? Boom. Dead. You think Phasma means something? Boom. Dead. It’s part of the fun of this new series.
I’m eager to see where they’re taking these characters next. What exactly IS Kylo’s motivation? Who comes to help the resistance and what’s their next move? Does Finn ever actually not run away at some point? I don’t need a romantic ending to all the old characters to accomplish this
You know, this installment just showed that the ultra-rich (a) are just as happy to supply warships to the rebs as they are to the other side, and (b) gamble, for stakes that presumably interest 'em, at the casino – where, like I’d just said upthread, our heroes learned that multiple folks capable of hacking their way past cutting-edge bad-guy security wait around to get asked for help.
Is that of any use to some guy who used to be a stormtrooper? Well, not really, no. How about to a hotshot pilot? Again, I don’t see why. But can you imagine what that would mean if they knew somebody who could, like, move stuff with her mind, and maybe hypnotize people just as easy?
I don’t know where this will sit in my rankings of the other films, but I enjoyed watching it in the theater as an experience. It was loud and you could feel the rumblings. No one talked or coughed or played on their phones. So just being immersive and engaged gives it extra bonus points for me.
I loved parts of it. It was too long, but it didn’t feel like “omg when’s it over; get me out of here.” I don’t know I disliked anything specifically other than Benicio’s Max Headroom impression. Man, I thought he was hard to understand in The Usual Suspects…
I think Phasma’s ending was ambiguous enough that if we never see her again, it makes sense and if she pops up later, well, we never saw the body. It did take me out of the movie for a bit seeing her eye. All I could see was Brienne.
The real codebreaker was Justin Theroux. I was kind of disappointed he didn’t pop back up. I recently got into the leftovers and he’s so good.
I didn’t HATE the whole casino thing, but it was ridiculous. The leprechaun thing feeding the coins into BB8 was hilarious, but I loved how it paid out (PUN INTENDED) later. BB8 was just so over the top in every way but it worked for me.
But like… I can’t imagine going to see it again right away. And it satisfied me enough that I’m not like “I NEED MORE NOW” like I felt at the end of TFA.
And I’m disappointed again there was no Lando. I don’t want to have every character and plot point revisited, but I do want some Billy Dee. I hope he heard the SOS.
Apropos of nothing, before the movie, there was a trailer for the upcoming Alpha, apparently a movie about the domestication of the dog, showing some kid from an ancient warrior tribe being isolated, injured, capturing a wolf (who up to then had been his tribe’s mortal enemies) and caring for it until he and it work as a team…
Very dramatic and such, but I thought about what a movie about the domestication of the cat would look like, and figured it’d be some guy in ancient Egypt dangling a sting for five minutes until the cat decided “fair enough, I’ll stay around a while.”
Just got home, and I don’t have the time or energy to unpack everything I liked and disliked. I did have one absolute love in the movie - Vice Admiral Holdo’s ramming of Snoke’s flagship. It took me straight back to Episode IV, where Solo was explaining to young Luke Skywalker why it was taking so long to jump to FTL. The almost-still-shot of the damage afterwards was awe-inspiring, and definitely felt more real to what I’d imagine the results of space combat to be - massive devastation, visually, but utterly silent. It was a pretty stark shot, and one of the few parts in the movie that just made me giddy (not for the destruction, but for the excellence of the cinematography).
I loved the scene. Loved, loved, loved it. Since it is extremely characteristic of Leia. She is strong willed and extremely calm and collected under pressure. Pretty much since her first appearance that (along with her abrasiveness) has been her definding characteristic. She is always looking for a way to achieve her goal. When Vader captured her, when shewas dealing with Tarkin, the whole chase from Hoth to Bespin, Bespin itself, Endor. Her force ability was not the only reason or the main reason she survived. She stayed calm, analysed her options and found and implemented her solution. Which was to use the Force to get to an airlock.
Its inline with whats she’s done previously. Be it loading the plans onto R2D2, seconds before she was caputured, or seeing her chance to kill Jaaba while chained.
Rose only told you the whole point of the movie. No big whoop? “This is how we’ll beat them . . . by saving what we love.” That wasn’t just romantic dreck.
I don’t get Luke’s death either. Why did he die/dissolve?
Pogs: it seems to me that any creature capable of making the connection between the charred meat in someone’s hand and their old friend, is also going to continue being angry about said friend being killed, skinned, and cooked, regardless of whether the murderous chef is too chagrined to eat the corpse. And yeah, the merch placement was too obvious, but expected, just like I generally look at Disney’s children’s movies watching to see where the new theme park ride has been worked in.
The first twitch of it made me think of the poppies in “Flander’s field.” I felt like it was too good of foreshadowing about the massacre about to happen.
It was a deliberate callback to Obi-Wan vaporizing when Vader killed him. Right down to what Luke tells Kylo - “Strike me down in anger, and I will always be with you.”
Re: Kylo, it seems to me that he had to do what he did. If he’d turned just then and walked away, Hutt (Hux? Hutts?*) would have taken over the First Order. You can’t just take down the supreme leader and put no one in the place. Power vacuums tend to suck in the worst of the worst.
I thought it rather dumb of Rey not to see that.
*The names in SW are starting to feel like a Russian novel. Ren? Ben? Kylo? Solo?
I loved it. Leia Poppins didn’t bother me, casino planet didn’t bother me, no Snoke backstory didn’t bother me.
Just about the only thing that did was Luke’s projection. Since he died anyway, I would have loved it if he were really there, force deflected every laserblast, maybe force wound cables around the legs of the AT-ATs (would’ve been a nice callback), and then once he sensed Leia et al fly away in the Falcon, let Kylo kill him like Obi-Wan. Pan over to Luke’s X-Wing with seaweed on it or whatever as the Falcon gets underway.
But the whole idea is that now Kylo doesn’t have the satisfaction of killing him, nor will he ever truly be sure that Luke i dead. Think how frustrating that may be to him.
(Plus, I doubt any Jedi master could have deflected that bombardment).
Anyone remember the episode from the first Clone Wars cartoon series (the short one) where Mace Windy pretty much took out a droid army single-handedly? And there was an alternate history comic issue where the rebel attack on the first death star failed, and Yoda said “fuck it”, came out of retirement, took over the death star single-handedly, and crashed it into Curisant (sp?)
So yeah, I would have liked to have seen Luke take on the whole first order on his own with just a laser sword.
Some things work better in Genndy Tartakovsky cartoons than they do in live action. I like my Jedi powerful, not godlike. Otherwise, what’s the point of anyone else?
I have to say, Jedis as power fantasies is a very Dark Side way of thinking.
My recollection is that Kenobi doesn’t get mortally wounded either. He just sort of disappears before he is hit. And yoda disappears too. It seems to be what all the cool Jedi are doing so Luke did the same thing. I suppose he could have poofed in person but I like the trickery. It’s basically a mass Jedi mind trick. I vote for New over repeating the old.
Wookieepedia describes the planet as “A thick crust of white-colored salt covered nearly the entire planet surface,[2] with red-colored mineral base underneath.[8]”
While you are correct that the movie doesn’t explicitly say, I definitely had the impression that it was a red dirt surface covered with a crust of white salt and had the impression that the person tasting the salt was tasting the white crust.