I definitely agree, although I saw them in the order they were released, and I also think ROTJ sucked.
The true answer is the same as how the Empire, er, “First Order”, re-formed without showing us how it happened. The corporate bottom line says that the status quo has to reset over and over, just like Jurassic Park, so they can keep recycling the story as long as it prints money for them. This trilogy will end in triumph, and a couple years later the Second Order, or the New New Empire, will again be the Big Bad, with some new guy on the throne and a new Sith Lord reporting to him. And reporting to that guy will be more admirals with British accents who nervously await their Force choking after letting the good guys escape. On and on and on, until the money stops flowing in.
OMG, I forgot about the “bombers”. That was SO dumb.
100% agree. They have to keep the conveyer belt moving.
One of the few? Really? I have trouble imagining that it’s not the opposite, that even those who loved the movie are like “well, yeah: she wasn’t the best”.
I didn’t adore Rose, but I didn’t see anything wrong with her, and I’m not sure what anyone would find annoying about her. I thought it was a nice way to give a face and name and personality to all the grunts we typically see risk their lives for the good guys.
Really?? She and Finn leave a bunch of kids in slavery but “the real victory” was setting free an alien racehorse.
She stops Finn from sacrificing himself to save everyone else for purely selfish reasons and then tries to make it sound like she’s doing something noble. She had no idea Luke’s force ghost would come to save the day, so to “save what she loves” she’s condemning Leia and everyone else to death so far as she knows.
So she should have released the children into the wild, like the horses?
You know, even if they had destroyed the cannon, so what? The First Order would have just brought a new one. It’s not as if they were going anywhere. The whole speeder attack was nothing more than a show of bravado, a way to die fighting. Both Poe and Rose realized that, and decided that living was better.
No, she should have realized that freeing the horses was pointless and stupid since they could be recaptured easily and not made a big deal about it.
No, at the time they believed they were waiting for help from their allies; that was the point of the delaying attack. That didn’t wind up happening, but it was the plan as far as they knew at the time. Going by what they knew and the aims of the attack, she was betraying all of her friends for a guy she had a crush on after knowing him for a day. She was a complete idiot and her declaration that self-sacrifice was pointless was also completely contradicted by Holdo’s self sacrifice (too fucking late for most of the Rebels because she had to be melodramatic) earlier in the film.
Rose had zero reason to believe that, a half second after she knocks Finn off, the base doors weren’t going to be blown apart and the place full of Neo-Empire goons. She also didn’t know that the distress beacon would go unheeded. Her actions weren’t heroic, they were naive and selfish.
Speaking of, and this isn’t really a “This movie sucks” thing but idle musings, my thoughts about the space horse was “Are those indigenous here? Maybe it’ll starve to death” and “Now that social herd animal is going to have no friends”.
the Empire was enormous. it didn’t just cease to exist once the Death Star was destroyed and the emperor bumped off. Someone stepped in and said “we’re in charge now” and that was that.
Rose is a bit interesting because she is naive but sincere and torn between her desire to act on wanting to destroy the things that have hurt her (including her sister’s death) and to act on her wanting to save that which she loves. She wanted to destroy the casino but got more satisfaction from letting the horse thing free … the fact that neither likely did much is besides the point.
And if you believe that Finn’s suicide dive would have worked (rather than vaporized him before he did any damage at that point in the cannon’s cycle) then your beef is more with Poe for ordering him not to, saying it was too late. Rose for her sake heard the same command and knew that Finn was going against an order.
Finn and Rose both had significant character arcs with Finn continuing to slide from hero to self-preservationist and more firmly back to hero in the face of Rose, and Rose as above. The problem was more that the dialogue and the acting did not really deliver on showing the arcs and their conflicts.
I believe that Force Lightning has been presented as something that only people who turn do the Dark Side can use. I don’t recall it being used by any of the Jedi.
And I think that Yoda’s ability to take Force Lightning, restrain it, control it, etc. is probably an indication of his extremely excellent ability as a Jedi knight. Not something you teach to someone easily.
But, of course, the whole idea that Luke somehow becomes a full Jedi is never quite fleshed out in TESB or TRotJ.
You and I have the same opinion on the original movies. I was a kid when they came out, had a lot of the toys, but I haven’t watched them in years. I have really liked the latest three movies. There were some minor parts I didn’t really like, but over all they have been good, fun movies. I hope the last one is just as good as the recent one, which might be my favorite of them all.
My impression was that Poe was saying “there are too many of them, we won’t live to reach the cannon…” rather than “hmm, maybe shooting the cannon or crashing into it won’t do anything”.
Again, unclear.
The second is not a plot hole at all in the original trilogy, because (a) in the original trilogy, on its own, there’s no reason to think that Yoda knows anything about Force Lightning, and (b) Yoda specifically and repeatedly tells Luke not to leave Dagobah because his training is incomplete.
The Ewoks are certainly among the stupider elements of the original trilogy, you won’t get any argument there. That said, I don’t know if “plucky underdogs overcome enormous odds” is a plot hole, per se, although if we get into the semantic dispute of what is and is not a “plot hole” we will be slowly digested over the period of a thousand years.
The extension to the First Order’s rise, and one that I’m not seeing much discussion of, is this:
We’re talking a lot about how the Republic and the Rebel Alliance (or whatever they’re called) have been decapitated and nearly destroyed. Much less hay is made of the First Order’s losses: their super-weapon, a dreadnought (presumably their best ship), their command ship, and, most importantly, the only one of them with a lick of sense. Snoke had two underlings, one of whom seems capable of administering a starfleet but sucks ass at tactics, and the other of whom is a one-man wrecking ball but needs serious direction in where to go. Snoke himself was (at least in his own estimation, and in this case he seems correct) a consummate political player and manipulator. It seems highly likely that without his brains, the whole operation is going to fall apart.
The next movie may open with a galaxy in chaos, as the First Order devolves into warring factions. Indeed, a galaxy with fifty million planets and nothing close to an organizing government would be a terrific playground for a whole buttload of new movies.
This is a bit fan-wanky, but of the three characters–Poe, Finn, and Rose–only one of them is an engineer on a war ship. Poe knows how to fire weapons, but if I wanted to know the capacity and stress tolerance and vulnerability of a particular weapon system, it’d be Rose I’d turn to.
So why didn’t she say to Finn, on her rescue, “You idiot, that plan wasn’t going to work anyway”? Because she has a humongous crush on him and didn’t want to make him feel bad is why.
Yeah, it’s fan-wanky, but it makes sense to me, and it justifies her actions :).
Ooh, an interesting (to me anyway) thought: Hux and Ren have, in some ways, the same vulnerability, one that’s driving people crazy. They’re ridiculously easy to trick, right? Hux falls for that transparent delaying tactic early on; Ren falls for Luke’s delaying tactic later. Their emotional states are too easy to read, and they’re shitty at reading other people, and over and over they fall for tricks.
So why would Snoke put them in charge?
Let me repeat: they’re easy to trick.
Snoke’s rise to power is best explained by his own villain monologue: he’s a master manipulator. He’s really good at figuring out what motivates people and getting them to do what he wants. But his weakness is overconfidence in his own brilliance (thus his murder by his apprentice). This kind of asshole is gonna want to surround himself with people who constantly confirm his own brilliance: he’s never gonna fail in his attempts to manipulate Ren or Hux.
It makes sense that an organization founded by a self-proclaimed master manipulator is going to have, at its highest levels, a couple of people whose primary weakness is the ease with which they’re manipulated.
There’s no real reason to think Rose is some master engineer, she’s a mechanic. Literally no one among the rebels except Finn even knew that the ram-cannon existed so expecting a random mechanic to know what it or isn’t going to damage a piece of First Order weaponry she’d never seen or heard of before is pretty exceptionally wanky.
In fact, the one guy among the rebels vaguely qualified to say what the weak spot was, was the guy flying a collision course into it.