MaxTheVool, awesome post (#677).
Fiendish Astronaut, I agree with almost all of your post, but I don’t remember Yoda almost collapsing after lifting the X-Wing. I thought his whole point was how easy it is if you don’t let the size psych you out.
That isn’t a Plot Hole, it’s an Important Lesson.
She was a bad leader. She wasn’t a traitor, or an outright incompetent, but she wasn’t as good as she should have been, and her imperfection had consequences.
It breaks down into a little three-part sequence:
[list=#]
[li]She didn’t have to explain herself to a random pilot.[/li][li]She didn’t see that, maybe, explaining herself a little bit to this random pilot might have a positive outcome.[/li][li]The pilot she refused to explain herself to does the obviously heroic thing (his major flaw) and they both have to deal with the consequences.[/li][/list]
If you think an almost-good leader having a consequential flaw is a plot hole, well, you’re probably in good company, given how many people refuse to accept arrogant megalomaniacs acting like arrogant megalomaniacs in Bond films, for example.
On review, (and I don’t know if this has been mentioned here) but the movie is less a Star Wars film and feels much more like a Marvel Film.
Re: Rose saving Finn. People seem to keep examining this in terms of whether Finn’s plan would’ve worked, what she would’ve known as an engineer, etc, etc, and so forth, as if her action should have been based on a purely logical risk-reward analysis of the situation.
People in life-or-death situations don’t necessarily make logical decisions.
Her friend was about to die. She saved him. In the moment, that was all that mattered to her. It’s not a “plot hole”. It’s not something that makes her ignorant or foolish. It’s something that makes her human. And it’s OK for human beings to have flaws and make mistakes. Which is kind of the entire point of the movie.
Yabbut it has parallels to our own history. After all, NASCAR got its start from bootleggers who would stuff big engines in their piece of junk cars to be able to out-run the revenuers.
Sure. But she didn’t just save him, she saved him at the possible expense of the entire rebellion and then said “Oh, this is how we’ll win the war…” No, you just needlessly endangered the rebellion’s very slim chances of living until tomorrow, much less winning any wars.
It was stupid. I don’t mean “People can’t act stupidly in films”, I mean “Her character acted in a criminally stupid way that could have single-handedly resigned the galaxy to First Order rule because of puppy love for a guy she’s known maybe twenty-four hours and she deserves to be called out for it rather than have it hand-waved away just because a couple space wizards unexpectedly saved them”. And at least the other failed gambits in the film had a point – there was something to be potentially gained by their actions in the beginning or the whole tracker thing, etc. This was just “Fuck those other people, I think you’re cute.”
It’s okay for humans to “have flaws”. It’s not ok for them to snuff out the last spark of hope in the galaxy because of some naive and Pollyanna tripe.
Edit: There’s also the amusing notion of “saving” someone by ramming your old and rickety metal box into their old and rickety metal box at high speeds.
If that’s how it had been handled in the movie, sure. But it wasn’t. After she prevented Finn’s run on the cannon, she made a little speech before passing out about that was how they would win the war, not killing what they hated but saving what they loved. That wasn’t incidental, not someone confessing they did something stupid, that was inserted in that spot specifically by the writer/director to show us that SHE DID THE RIGHT THING. It was NOT meant to show she failed or acted stupidly, it was put in there to deliver a message to the audience, one that was repeated at least one other time in the movie.
That’s not a plot hole, not showing the heroes are human and can fail, not having a good guy do something stupid, that’s the writer saying “Pay attention! This is a central theme of the movie.”
It’s just a really fucking STUPID theme, particularly given that Rian Johnson goes on to contradict it twice in his own movie.
Rik and Jophiel: co-signed.
I kind of want to see a fan edit where she passes out after making a declaration of love after slamming her speeder into the side of Laura Dern’s ship.
ROFL!
Again, that’s a plausible interpretation and makes perfectly consistent sense. Maybe if we asked Rian Johnson why she didn’t tell Poe about her plan, his response would be “Oh, obviously she should have, the character is flawed, you didn’t get it?”. But the way it plays out in the movie, to me, feels far more like the kind of thing that happened in Lost all the time where people didn’t tell each other important information because… reasons. That is, she didn’t say she had a plan just so the audience wouldn’t know. I hope I’m wrong, I’d like to think that the movie was better thought out than it seems. But nothing in the way the movie is presented, to me, suggests that she was at fault in any way.
It feels a bit ironic that, while a big spotlight part of the plot was Poe (and Finn) doing rash stuff with bad consequences, two of the stupidest and most pointless decisions in the movie came from Holdo & Rose: Holdo inciting a mutiny simply because she was in a pissing match and Rose risking the fate of the remaining rebellion.
I agree that Holdo was a bad leader and wonder about the organizational structure of the rebellion. In the original trilogy, I assumed people had their military ranks from the remains of the Republic or allied states. Ole Admiral Ackbar had gone to Space Academy to learn how to broadside space frigates with laser cannons and stuff. I don’t know about today’s crop. But then Holdo was old enough that she could have had bona fide training versus “Good news, the old vice admiral died…”
The frigate ram didn’t bother me. I assumed that:
(a) This wasn’t done often because the rebels only have so many ships and this isn’t a good use of them
(b) this was a special circumstance where the frigate was shields-down engaged in shooting the escape shuttles and ignoring the presumed helpless ship. Had they been paying attention to Holdo’s ship, they would have blown it apart before it could do its thing.
© The results were very bad for the frigate but not really “got hit by a massive object going near-light speed” bad. Like that ship hitting the Earth at that speed would have been an extinction level event in the real world but here it can plow through an item of roughly equal mass and people on the rammed ship have time to run around and fight chrome Storm Troopers and make it to the escape pods and stuff. The only real thing the “hyperspace” aspect did was remove the frigate’s chance to respond and fire upon a ship lumbering towards them. So you wouldn’t just hyperspace an X-Wing fighter into the Death Star because it wouldn’t be much more useful than just crashing an X-Wing fighter at traditional speeds. It doesn’t make real-world sense but it makes sufficient Star Wars sense to me.
There are plenty of grease monkeys and backyard mechanics today driving around in souped up hot rods and lifted trucks they modded themselves without understanding the underlying physics of automotive and mechanical engineering. Remember Luke referred to The Falcon as a piece of junk. That implies to me that Han probably refitted it with a lot of parts from a star ship junkyard. So I really don’t see it as being as ridiculous as you make it seem.
I hated this movie. One big mess. No coherent story arc, just hyperactive flitting from one event to another. Zero convincing performances. No authentic moments. A mess of extraneous action.
This movie was as bad as the prequels. Absolute garbage.
Wow, I’m shocked. I thought Adam Driver’s acting in this one was the best of the entire series, and almost everyone else was among the best.
I re-watched Episodes I and II this summer after many years. They are far, far worse than Episode VIII.
Thank you for mentioning this. Until now, I honestly thought I had dozed off and missed a scene.
Let me be clear… I think it makes perfect sense in the Star Wars universe, precisely for the reasons you are explaining. It “feels” reasonable, just the way WWII physics “feel” reasonable.
Would it make “real world” or “hard sci-fi” sense? I doubt it… but, as I’ve said, I don’t really care, because I’m happy to evaluate Star Wars by its own rules.
I suppose it depends on whether technology development of Starships is more comparable to cars/boats versus airplanes. I can’t imagine a cocky rogue in the real world building an airplane that could outrun the fastest fighter planes in the US Air Force, but for a car or a boat outrunning the cops or the coast guard, it’s far more plausible.
[Moderator Warning]
RikWriter, if you believe that another poster is trolling, report the post, and leave it to us. Do not accuse posters of trolling, outside of the Pit.
I also note your claim that Airbeck is attacking you personally. On a quick read-through, I’m not seeing it, though I haven’t read through the whole thread yet. Again, if you think that someone is making personal attacks against you, then report it.
Sorry fans. I shoulda stayed outta here. I think I posted something similar after the last one (pre Rogue 1). Part of it is, I really liked the original trilogy as something groundbreaking and a part of my youth. Something I shared with my kids in their youth. (Still have the boxed VHS.) I never got into the prequels, and by now, perhaps the time is just past for me.
I tend not to like films (or stories) that I need to study up on (or remember so closely) to enjoy.
It is also weird, that something that was once the province of nerds, now sees such popularity. I was never a crazy fan, but I was a fan. And my kids were WAY into SW AND ST. Just different, when something you were sorta looked down on for loving, is mass marketed. Similar to the way I never jumped onto to the LOTR bandwagon - and couldn’t even watch the 2d (was there a 3d?) Hobbit…
Also, back then, there was nothing like SW. As someone said, this struck me like the ST reboot, any Marvel film, or any other JJ Abrams vehicle. Which is not the type of film I personally prefer. It is yet another instance where I see that my tastes are out of step with so much of the public.
But none of that is enough reason for me to come in and yuck your yum. I had told my wife I was not interested in seeing it, but allowed her to drag me along to a matinee on a cold day. Maybe next year I’ll stay home, or just waste a couple bucks/hours and keep my mouth shut.