Star Wars: The Last Jedi - seen it thread

Cafe Society
821

IANA soldier or veteran, but isn’t following orders critically important to the workings of any military? Insubordination sometimes can be tolerated, but a soldier who routinely ignores orders, does things of strategic importance without telling his superiors, and even mutinies, is not a soldier; he’s worse than useless.

That said, this is a standard conceit for fiction, so I don’t personally take exception to his actions, or Holdo’s. I just find the suggestion that it’s all on her because IRL some soldiers are stupid absurd.

822

That’s pretty hilarious :smiley:

823

Old Luke is a spitting image of Zizek, and his world view wasn’t too far off. “Heroic blood lines? Warrior monks safe guarding the force? This is pure ideology. sniff The light and dark sides are fascism for children, the force belongs to everyone, and so on…”

This movie was meta. The old hero is bitter he can’t live up to his old legend, just like the movies can’t live up to the past, and the new heroes are blindly grasping towards an unsure future while emulating the past. Luke the man can’t save the day, but he can use his image to inspire others.

Not sure if Rey and/or Kylo will form a Hegelian synthesis like people expect. Didn’t the video games do that with gray Jedis? Never played them.

Finn and Rose got betrayed by a character no one cares about, but Finn got to fight Phasma, who conveniently fell into a pit of fire so Finn didn’t have to make any morally dubious decisions like killing a defeated foe. Okay then.

I was digging the lefty themes in this one, especially with Rose and the casino place (overthrowing the money tables, a bit on the nose), the focus on the working class victims of empire, the military industrial complex arming both sides, and Luke’s diatribe about the elitist Jedi order giving rise to the Empire and how he wanted to stop the cycle. It’s amusing how so many of the complaints are that it’s not reactionary enough, like people are deeply offended the fascists are portrayed as incompetent backbiting assholes, or that Kylo is a failson LARPer, or that Rey doesn’t have super special blood.

The gender politics felt weird. The movie spent a lot of time subverting the typical masculine bullshit about charging in and saving the day – great, two thumbs up – but the commanding rebel women seemed incompetent, cagey, or barely had a plan. No one came to Leia’s aid. They were in constant retreat. They seem to have somehow suffered a catastrophic loss between movies. Not sure what to make of that.

The plot was clunky as hell and there were so many contradictory moments, but there’s a great movie in here, somewhere, it’s just buried under a whole lot of nonsense. The best scene, clearly, was Luke maintaining eye contact while chugging that fresh alien milk. It does a body good.

824

Apparently we do. Different management degrees too, I expect.

In general, if someone who has proven themselves untrustworthy demands need-to-know information he does not need, managing them is not the same as coddling them. One does not give them the information to mollify them or in the hopes that they’ll not mutiny or disobey orders again.

What Poes behaviour shows, is that he has been very badly managed previously, to the point of developing behavioural issues you’d normally only see in unfirables. Oh well, Leia came by it honestly. Falling for a handsome, overconfident maverick pilot much younger than her is exactly what her mother did, and it did not work out then either.

It kind of relied on Hux being overconfident and not allowing initiative in his underlings. Of course, what are the odds of a plan coming off if the critical issue is Hux being overconfident?

Personally, I would guess that this is why Holdo deliberately cultivated an aura of hopelessness. If there was a spy and that got back to Hux, it would increase the odds of the plan working.

Yes, pretty much. I’ve been involved as a witness in one court martial, and I don’t think Poe would have had much of a leg to stand on.

825

They’re not nothing, but they’re characters in what’s sold to us as a ginormous good-v.-evil conflict against the First Order as basically space Nazis who’ve almost entirely conquered the galaxy.

If it’s not like that, if it doesn’t make that much difference in the lives of the actual people of the galaxy if the First Order runs things or the rebellion manages to defeat them, then the whole conflict is bullshit, and we have no reason to be invested in it, and the characters that we’re rooting for are all living a lie. They’re going out and killing the ‘bad guys’ who aren’t particularly bad, and don’t need killing, which is a rather evil thing to be doing when you come right down to it. They should lay down their arms and ‘work within the system’ as the saying goes.

826

Well, that’s really the thing, isn’t it? That lack of grey makes the story and characters inherently LESS interesting. Especially because we already know the basics. Rebels = good. Dark side = bad. It becomes dull and predictable.

But Rey and Ren as sides of an artificial dichotomy brought about by an fundamental misunderstanding of the Force? That’s interesting. A Ben Solo who makes a poor choice (“Join with me to rule!”)? That can break the viewers heart when it’s clear he could have chosen elsewise and had a chance to fundamentally change things for the better.

A primary folk hero, Luke Skywalker, who has truly broker through in his understanding of the central conflict? That’s a radical change from Episode’s 4-6 and shows growth in the character and storyline. It’s interesting whereas one more ‘scrappy underdog takes on evil empire’ just isn’t anymore.

Is the First Order evil? Of course it is. They’re portrayed as Space Nazis. No way around that. But is everyone working within it evil? There’s been a significant attempt in the first three movies to humanize stormtroopers, for Heaven’s sake. From Finn revealing that Stormtroopers are essentially drafted as children - bringing a Beasts of No Nation vibe to things - to just the one stormtrooper in Rogue One (early on before Jyn is rescued one stormtrooper, dirty and tired, strikes a classic ‘man, that was a rough day’ pose while sitting) - and even the troopers deciding they DIDN’T need to patrol need Kylo Ren having a hissy fit, we’re shown them as more relatable than before. That’s a good thing.

827

I haven’t read the whole thread, so my apologies if this is previously mentioned.

I guess I am no longer a Star Wars fan, but my wife dragged me to see this, which reinforced my lack of Star-Wars-Fanhood. Too many examples of “Good triumphs over Evil because Evil is mind-bogglingly stupid”. Right at the beginning - the Evil Fleet has the rebel base in their sights, and are ready to fire. But they hold off to hear what Poe says. Why?

“General, we are ready to destroy the base, but there is a rebel ship who wants to talk to you.”

“Open fire on the base. OK, destroyed? Put the rebel on the speaker and let’s hear what he has to say.”

Or the fleet is following the rebels so that they cannot escape. But they can get a ship down to the casino planet undetected and un-fired on. WTF?

And Poe is an idiot, and would have been court-martialed and shot for disobeying orders in any decently-run military. Plus, the instant I saw both a black character, and an Asian character, and saw that the black character was prettier, I knew the Asian chick was going to get it in the end. I couldn’t get interested enough in the rest of the film to fan-wank the other plot holes.

Mark Hamill does a good job, but when he dies at the end, I kept thinking “sorry, Carrie Fisher beat you to it, dude”.

I got the same feeling with this one that I did with The Empire Strikes Back, that it was mostly a filler to get you to come back for the next one, but I didn’t expect anything else so I didn’t care, and I didn’t much try to keep up with the back stories (I didn’t see Rogue One, and don’t intend to), but I could just say “fine, this is Darth Vader v2.0.” and it doesn’t matter whose son it was. The politics of the Jedi being a proto-fascist organization were marginally interesting, but Luke obviously didn’t take it seriously enough to not train the female character into another Jedi and thus recreate the whole problem.

Yet another franchise that was too successful for its own good. It’ll make a bazillion dollars, so will the next one, so will the next one, and the next, and the next, until it finally peters out.

Regards,
Shodan

828

Too bad you didn’t finish the movie. She didn’t “get it”.

829

Speaking of “what does Snoke do in that room when there aren’t people visiting”, what does Yoda do with his time? Once they’ve merged with the force, maybe all the dead Jedis sit around (figuratively speaking) and philosophize? Do they keep track of what is going on back in the galaxy? Yoda seemed to be pretty up-to-date on current events.

830

And how well does Vader fit in with that lot? Everyone else had to meditate for decades to learn how to become a force ghost, he just got yoinked in for one good deed after decades of horrifying crimes.

831

I get annoyed at ludicrously incompetent bad guys because it cheapens the actions and stakes of the good guys. Kylo Ren & Hux spend the first movie slap-fighting one another like two bored kids on a road trip. In the second, Hux loses the fleet because he’s dicking around and ignoring what the big rebel ship is doing and Ren lets the remaining rebels escape because he throws a laser temper tantrum at a hologram. It’s hard to imagine these two idiots pulling off a liquor store robbery, much less keeping a galaxy oppressed in an iron fist. If there was a scene of Kylo Ren walking into a glass door, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

All the while, we’re being asked to understand that this is the sleek, battle-ready death machine that crushes opposition and holds hundreds or thousands (or tens of thousands) of worlds under its might. I’m not offended on the behalf of the series, I’m offended on the behalf of my own senses. This isn’t totally new – jokes about comicly inept Stormtroopers go back to the 70s. But at least Vader had the panache to pull off being a stone cold bad-ass even if the white armored guys around him didn’t know how to hold a blaster rifle.

832

She didn’t have to tell him the plan if she thought he was untrustworthy; she could have, as has been suggested earlier, just reassured him that there was one, and done so in a way that made her seemed competent and him feel ashamed of himself for doubting her. But that’s real life, and as some have pointed out, it’s a trope (and an overused one.)
This a poorly written movie, and the real point is, if it was better written and more engaging, no one would care that Holdo was a fool and Poe was an idiot. The whole sequence with Poe and Holdo and Finn and Rose brings up such conversations because it’s unnecessary and should have been cut from the movie or truncated severely. It drags down what could have been an incredible story centering on Rey and Kylo Ren.

833

Three things. One, I’m not sure you would have been able to sell that to the audience that has a problem with what they actually did. Two, if she were afraid of a spy, she wouldn’t want to give information to someone who has a discipline problem and runs his mouth. Three, as I said upthread, I think it’s more effective to upend the trope by making people think it will be true. In that case, you don’t want to convince the audience that she’s right at that point. You want that to come later, after the trope is firmly established and anticipated.

834

Which doesn’t make sense to me. Why would the Order need to cut a deal when they were already caught? What’s in it for them?

835

I think the idea was he had information, I assume that the cloaked transports were getting away.

Although, I’m not sure how he’d possibly know that, unless he somehow figured it out while hacking the door, or maybe as their yacht was dropping out of hyperspace.

My big problem with the film is that you can just hyperspace through an enemy ship. If that were the case, they’d have X-Wings on autopilot slamming into capital ships like nothing.

Or at the least, when there is one person on a capital ship, and it spins up it’s hyperdrive, you’d as a matter of course take evasive maneuvers. Like it would be someone’s job on the bridge to scream, “Hyperdrive spinning up, brace for emergency evasives!”

The idea that there is a single button that you can press that erases a capital ship, and nearly every ship in the fleet has one, is asinine. Almost as bad as the Falcon just flying through a planetary shield like it’s nothing in the last film.

836

As has been pointed out - he was standing right to Finn when Poe was radioing about it.

That was actually explained - the shield didn’t block hyperspace, and only Han was crazy enough to jump straight into an atmosphere. It violates everything that had previously been canon about gravity wells & hyperspace, though.

837

Ah, I’ve seen it twice and missed that.

I get that it was rationalized like that. But if it were possible they would rig up drones with hyperdrives and send them through shields to orbital bombard planets. The hard part appeared to be stopping before striking the ground. Since we’ve established in this movie that the result of hitting something in hyperspace is catastrophic.

In Empire Strikes Back, they could have just bombarded the base with a hundred drone hyperdrive bombs and let the walker pilots sleep in late.

838

I believe that the existence of interdictors is cannon in the movies. They are ships that could put up a big gravity well and prevent ships from escaping in hyperspace, or even dropping them out of it if they passed close by.

In that case, it is actually an easier explanation. At the battle of endor, the empire had interdictors, preventing the rebels from going to hyperspace to either escape or ram.

It seems in normal operation, a fleet would have an interdictor around, if only to prevent this precise maneuver.

If interdictors are a usual part of fleet combat, then lightspeed ramming wouldn’t be a tactic that comes up often.

For whatever reason the first order was not running interdiction, whether it was because their fleet didn’t have the capability, it would have interfered with their tracking, or they were just toying with the rebels, daring them to run again so that they can be tracked to their base.

Hold may have realized that the lack of interdiction, a common feature in battles, opened up a rare opportunity.

As far as damage done, it obviously did not do the damage that something going the speed of light would have done, as that is kindof by definition an infinite amount of energy. Obviously, lightspeed doesn’t work by actually propelling ships at that speed through normal space, but through hyperspace instead. There would be quite a bit of energy involved, but not relativistic energies.

Han also had a heavily modified ship that could have pulled that maneuver when other ships may not have.

839

Yeah, I know about them. If they exist in the movie-verse, then not having them means you need to act as if every single hyperspace capable vehicle is capable of destroying your ship with seconds of prep time.

Sure, but there is no way that a professional military wouldn’t have a plan for this. If your Interdictor went down, they’d have detailed drills for how to handle the fleet. The very idea undercuts much of what we’ve been shown until now.

I don’t mind if it’s possible, I just mind them being amazingly stupid about it.

Yeah, but a much smaller ship makes a channel at least the size of it’s hull, it’s still a huge effect.

Sure. It would be nice if they established that. And a professional military could probably handle recreating it if it were tactically that valuable.

840

The only thing I will say on this is that it is the First Order, not a professional military.

The commanders and staff seemed picked based on their ability to curry favor with Snoke, not necessarily on their competence.

That’s assuming that mass and inertia are not important. I assume that the rebel cruiser was destroyed entirely in the collision, but still had enough mass to push its way all the way through. The energies of the impact were probably very similar to if they had just used sub-light engines to ram them, the lightspeed just put them into a better position, and maybe added a little something to the damage.

It’d be interesting to see what would have happened if they had used a cruiser to ram a planet. Would it have gone straight through, or would it leave a crater that would be predictable based on its velocity prior to initiating hyperdrive.

I see the lightspeed ram as more of a maneuver, not a weapon in and of itself. X-Wings and missiles would just be splatting against the hull.

It has been established that the MF is a heavily modified freighter. As far as recreating, well, the black market can have some more creative and desperate engineering than the mainstream.
ETA: IANASWP, so all of this is based on movies, a little bit of playing the RPG, some discussion amongst friends who are more into the physics of star wars, and a few youtube videos about the subject I watch sometimes when feeling especially bored.