Haha yeah now that I read it out loud …
Except that’s not what happened. The ship’s actually began listing backwards like they were taking on water in the ocean. The bow came upward and the stern went down.
I’ve not read all 67 pages but I’m surprised by the acclaim. I thought the entire thing was a catastrophe. The story felt like it was written in one sitting. “And then… and then… and then… and then…”
Why build up Snope just to kill him? What was the point of Phasma? Luke has gone to the island because of… reasons…
I didn’t feel there was much sense of adventure, the joyful and playful interplay between the characters that Star Wars has always been so brilliant at was almost entirely absent, the rebels have been decimated but there was no sense of melancholy whatsoever. Either of these two things alone would have saved it.
The dialogue has always been clunky in Star Wars films but I thought this was epically bad in parts.
A fundamental problem though is that the Force has been ridiculously inflated in this film.
They should really have taken a lot more care over how the Force is used as its so fundamental to the franchise and it is not something they will be able to easily dial back.
Characters can Force Skype now?
Remember when Yoda - the most powerful Jedi that ever lived - almost collapsed after force lifting the X Wing? Rey, after three lessons, effortlessly lifts a landslide and immediately runs up to Finn for a hug.
Leia, no exponent of the Force, revives herself in space and Mary Poppinses herself back into the ship?
Luke, has totally given up the Force but can still leap across a ravine and skewer a massive fish that he can’t see from 100 feet in the air?
Remember, this film was very heavy on the supernatural elements of the Star Wars universe so handling it so irresponsibly was very poor IMO. This was another reason that the mood and tone of the film should have been heavy and at times slightly dark. But nothing. This film had the mood of a coackroach. It just sat there.
And as for the space scenes, I can handwave away most of the terrible physics, but they need to at least be aware that the audience are suspending disbelief and have some respect. This film was brazen in the liberties it took with the audience.
And poor BB8, such a great character in TFA, but used like a character in a kids film this time around.
I loved The Force Awakens and Rogue one was truly awesome. I was not one of those fanboys that show-off hated these Disney efforts and I really wanted to love it.
But this film was a mess.
A ship with multiple engines that ran out of fuel wouldn’t necessarily lose power in all engines simultaneously. Which would look a lot like a list while drifting.
Not that spaceflight physics has ever been one of Star Wars’s strong-suits, but this is fairly minor compared to how the fighters fly like airplanes.
A roomful of Disney Marketing executives wrote those scenes.
You’re right: it shows.
It would be as tho Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote “Good Will Hunting”, instead of William Goldman.
Oh wait…
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And the gravity-field devices in the ships start to malfunction when the fuel runs out, creating forces in random directions. How do fanboys not know this stuff? It ain’t rocket science.
“Fanboy” seems a lot like “bad driver,” “bad lay” or “turd non-flusher.” We all
know they’re out there, but nobody admits to being one.
Although I walk away from the movie with a different impression–this was far and away my favorite Star Wars movie–I think you’re totally right here. If a movie sweeps me along, I’m not going to pay attention to plot holes, and I’m gonna want to find a way to fanwank any that come up. If I’m bored and irritated while watching a movie (which has generally been my reaction to JJ Abrams), I’m gonna amuse myself by looking for plot holes, and be much more interested in prosecuting them than in explaining them.
The big differences between this movie and the others was thematic, especially in the movie’s treatment of the value of tradition and the value of being a plucky, cocky dude. Working within very similar plots and very similar set pieces, the movie upended these themes, and I loved that. The other main difference, for me, was in some of the set pieces, especially in the use of color. Star Wars has always been a very colorful franchise, but I’ve rarely felt that color was used so deliberately, or so beautifully, less like fireworks and more like paint.
Guys,
SRS BSNS.
If someone is saying “Actually, we all know that lightsabers put out a maximum of 3.31 force-watts of power whereas a First Order blast door requires a minimum of 3.57 to permeate it…” then sure, play the fanboy card. If someone is saying “I thought it was kind of lame how originally lightsabers were this this unique thing the Jedis and Vader used and everyone else had lasers and now it’s like everyone has some electric cattle prod they can duel lightsabers with” then resorting to “OMG Fanboy!” just makes it sound like you have no better remark than name calling.
Pretty much every instance of reaching for the “fanboy” card in this thread has been the latter. It’s just people harumphing that others weren’t enamored with the movie and making themselves feel better with “They’re all just mad fanboys who feel entitled anyway…”
For me, it mostly crosses over into unpleasant fanboy status when people criticize the movie because of its relationship to the Expanded Universe. I recognize that not everyone is gonna love the movie as much as I do, and that’s just fine; the irritation of others will lessen my enjoyment not a jot :).
I very much agree with both of these. I should have liked this movie quite a bit, frankly.
Made it 1:30 in before checking my watch. After being bored by Rogue 1 last night, I’m pretty confident that I’m done with this franchise. Sorry for the threadshit, but that was just another blow-em-up CGI film like all the others.
If the Millenium Falco is all that, why doesn’t everyone fly them?
The Millenium Falco, cruising through hyperspace to the song “Rock Me Amadeus.” 
The Falcon is a souped-up hot rod, and ungainly to fly unless you have the knowhow. That’s why Han was weirded out by Rey’s skills with it. But she’s a natural pilot, like Luke was.
No, I don’t remember that at all.
I’m not quite sure I agree with you that it’s just subjective, actually. It’s an interesting side debate.
Here’s a statement that’s obviously 100% subjective: “I personally enjoy Star Trek more than Star Wars”.
Here’s a statement that’s obviously 100% objective: “Return of the Jedi is 123 minutes long, counting credits” (or whatever, number made up)
But “The Last Jedi contains more plot holes than Empire Strikes Back”. Is that just purely subjective? Are plot holes purely matters of opinion?
I dunno… I mean, how much a plot hole bothers you is certainly subjective. And how willing you are to view what others might view as a plot hole as just something consistent but unexplained is at least partly subjective. But I do think that plot holes are in some sense “real”. That is, if we developed a super-intelligent perfect AI and asked it “which has more plot holes… The Wire or Lost” am am entirely certain that it would report that Lost has more plot holes.
That said, I think that part of the confusion here is that various types of things are being conflated together. Here’s a comically over-deep discussion of the most significant things being called “plot holes” in TLJ, imho:
(1) Physics that doesn’t make sense, when viewed compared to real world physics. Ie, the slow motion bombing run, the ships running out of fuel and then seeming to slow down. I don’t think any of that is a plot hole, because it’s already established that in the Star Wars universe, starships don’t really follow real world physics, they just act in dramatic and WW-II air-or-naval-combat esque ways. So, not something I personally would call a plot hole. That said, some of the fankwankish attempts to explain this “plot hole” don’t work at all. For instance, the idea that the starships involved in the weird chase are all constantly accelerating, and the resistance ships that ran out of fuel then stopped accelerating and thus “fell behind”. That would make perfect sense in isolation, except that doesn’t fit at all with the end of the chase, when the resistance ships are more or less stationary with respect to the planet they were going to. So they haven’t been accelerating all along. So we’re better off just going back to “fake WWII physics”. So, whatever that is, I don’t really think it’s a “plot hole”, and it only minorly bothers me, personally.
(2) The light speed ram. This is an interesting one, in that it isn’t obviously a plot hole on a micro level. IE, someone who saw only the TLJ with no knowledge of anything else in the SW canon would say “hey, that was badass”. And it was. But we’ve seen overmatched rebels facing off against star destroyers zillions of times up until now, and no one has even mentioned the possibility of doing anything like this. So while it might not be a “plot hole” if we look up “plot hole” in the dictionary, it’s definitely a, I dunno, decrease-in-consistency-of-universe-requiring-increase-of-suspension-of-disbelief, or something like that. If they’d thrown in a line of technobabble, or maybe Rose and Finn had wandered past the lighspeed prevention shield generator while on the enemy ship and sabotaged it just in case, or something, that would have been fine. But without anything of that sort, this one really bugs me.
(2a) Why it took Admiral Hodor so long to perform the ram, once the baddies started killing her fleet. Again, not sure if this is a “plot hole” per se, but it’s certainly something which, were we to judge the actions of fictional people by real world standards, and assume that everything we see on screen is in approximate real time, would be ludicrous. But this type of thing is SO common in film/TV that I’ve learned to just glaze over it. (This was a particular egregious example of a frequent trope in which someone finally has the chance to flee, or has the chance to kill the baddie at last, and then waits a while for dramatic effect before doing so… whether just a few breaths, or long enough to make a dramatic quip, or just for no obvious reason at all). Bugs-me level: low-to-medium.
(3) The entire “slow speed chase” setup. As initially presented, well, Star Wars physics have never made sense. So it started out at a minor annoyance level. But then, Rose and Finn are able to light speed away from, and back to, the fleet. At which point… wtf? If someone can come up with a consistent explanation for a situation in which the bad guys are trying as hard as they can to catch the good guys, who are trying as hard as they can to escape, but instead the bad guys remain the same distance behind… BUT, small ships can light speed away from, and back to, the rebel fleet… well, I’d like to hear that explanation. This is HUGE one, far bigger than any plot hole I’m aware of in the original trilogy. It’s a situation that starts out making almost no sense, and then immediately undercuts its own rules with what we see right there on screen. (To make a comparison to one of the arguable plot holes raised in the linked article, it would be like if we were told that only an X Wing could blow up the death star by flying down the trench, but NOT given any comments about passing through the magnetic shields, the tricky angle, etc… and then after all that, the rebels just ended up shooting the thermal exhaust port from a zillion miles away after all, or something.)
(4) Finding the codebreaker. So codebreakers good enough to penetrate Imperial shields are so rare that Mazz knows of only one in the galaxy, and sends Rose and Finn there. But they fail. But, fortunately, they end up as cellmates of… a codebreaker good enough to penetrate Imperial shields. This is ludicrous, and bugs me a lot. Sufficiently-contrived-coincidences definitely count as plot holes, imho. (Are there any similar coincidences in the original trilogy? Arguably that Luke’s long-lost sister ends up being the only female character in the series, but that’s much more easily blamed on “The Force”, and is at least the kind of conservation-of-main-characters thing that we’re used to in many works of fiction.)
(4a) And then the Imperials capture this codebreaker, and then let him go with a huge reward and a ship, just because he gives them some useful info. This also bugs me a lot. Discussed up thread. I can’t think of anything particularly comparable in the original trilogy, but I suppose we didn’t actually see what the First Order said or did during their negotiations with him. If he shows up in future movies and continues to screw the First Order for money, it will retroactively make this a much bigger plot hole, with “plot hole” in this case meaning “people acting in ways that just don’t make sense given what we know of human nature and their already-presented personalities”.
(4b) Also, people hanging around in jail with the tools in their pocket to break out of the jail isn’t a thing. Either they should already have broken out of jail or they should have been searched when they were thrown into jail. Minor plot hole, but hard to justify based on human nature.
(5) Rose saving Finn. The amount of arguing about that we’ve already seen in this thread indicates that, if nothing else, whatever point the filmmakers were trying to make didn’t come through clearly. If we asked Rian Johnson “would Finn have had at least a chance of disabling the cannon if Rose hadn’t stopped him from sacrificing himself” what would his answer be? I honestly don’t know. This is a plot hole in that at least the surface point it is trying to make is “sacrificing ones life for one’s comrades is NOT noble or acceptable”, which is, I suppose, not a ridiculous point to make, except that (a) it’s contradicted in this very movie, given that we see multiple other characters sacrifice themselves to save their friends without the movie seeming to disapprove, and (b) there’s no reason for Rose to think that either she or Finn will survive, so she’s not really saving him at all, given the information she has. Muddled message, actions that don’t even make sense given those muddled motivations, definitely plot hole, again bigger than anything I know of in Ep 4 or 5.
(6) Snoke having the previously-unknown power to force-Skype Ren and Rey, Luke having the previously-unknown power to astral project across the galaxy. Neither one of these bug me at all. You might say “hey, but this is like the previously-unknown-lightspeed-ramming-power… shouldn’t we now be upset if we never see either of those powers used again”. But lightspeed ramming is something that anyone with access to a starship ought to be able to do. Force powers, however, are something that vary by individual. Yoda could do things that no one else could. So could the Emperor. Luke has been hanging out on that planet for decades. Why couldn’t he have thought and meditated and learned some skill that no one else ever discovered? (And he did have access to those books.) As for Snoke, well, he’s clearly a mystery, so it’s totally reasonable for him to do something we’ve never seen before. This one doesn’t bother me at all.
So, to sum up, I think (3) and (4) are the most egregious, and both are a fair notch worse than any plot hole in either SW or ESB, and probably RotJ as well. (2) is arguably not a “plot hole” per se, but definitely bad in its own way. And (5) is arguably not a plot hole, in that it does make understandable human sense for Rose to act that way… but it’s certainly a muddled and seemingly contradictory scene.
This is clearly and obviously answered in-universe. Han “made a lot of special modifications”. Now, it’s fairly ridiculous in any hard-sci-fi actual-physics-y sense that a random smuggler and rogue knows so much about physics that he is able to modify a random cheap starship better than people who go to starship-designer-grad-school and have access to the entire industrial and scientific might of the galaxy behind them and are working with military-level-hardware and military-level-funding… but that is a perfect fit for the kind of soft-sci-fi heroes-are-awesome story that Star Wars has always been.
Drat, left out at least one big one in #677, namely, why admiral Hodor was so set on not even hinting at all to Poe that she had an actual plan. Operational Security certainly might explain why she wouldn’t tell him what it was, but her bizarre engimaticness directly and predictably led to his mutiny. So… many… plot… holes… (and, remember, this is coming from someone who genuinely enjoyed the movie, saw it twice in the theater, walked out of both with a smile on my face).
What you are calling plot holes I would call plot contrivances, or conceits. But as you say, it comes down to how much they bother you. Nearly every movie has to have one or two to work, and they usually do it in such a way as to hope you won’t notice, almost like a distraction during a magic trick. It could very convincingly be argued that there were too many, and Rian Johnson failed to distract very successfully. Maybe over time they will bother me more, but for now I’m okay with them.