Tru dat. But your thesis that this Big War hardly matters at all, is worse than merely dull and predictable. ‘Good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ alike are invested in committing mass murder, and for nothing.
Maybe, but that’s a totally different argument than the one you made that I’ve been pointing out the consequences of.
Are Rey and Ren going to join together to stop the fighting? Emo Boy had a chance there, but it didn’t have any interest to him. He’s a mass murderer. If that came about because he thought Luke was trying to kill him, well, that should be between him and Luke, not between him and the freakin’ galaxy. I’m sure that in Ep 9 (cue last verse of Weird Al’s “Yoda”) he’ll see the light, but fuck him anyway.
I thought that, too. Maybe I can understand that they’d let him go as part of a deal. But pay him? When minutes ago he was hacking into your system? I don’t think so. It’s not a plot hole or anything, just a bit of an oddity.
A new question: When Luke is watching the twin suns setting, and the music swells in the Luke Theme, making a perfect echo back to the famous scene in Star Wars - are there actually two suns in that system? Or is is just in Luke’s imagination? Is the shot meant to represent Luke thinking back on how his whole adventure started? Both shots would bookend his life.
I assumed there were two suns on that planet too, but I saw a theory posited that, just as he can Force Project himself across the galaxy, maybe he can envision the suns of Tatooine at will too.
Apparently the Visual Dictionary says it has two suns (Wookieepedia), but it’s hard to imagine a watery planet surviving very well under their heat.
Interdictors of either class are not canon in the movies. They were EU only, being mentioned first in the Thrawn trilogy and first visualized in Star Wars: X-Wing. Of course, before the Disney acquisition all EU was also considered canon, so the possibility of something along a No-Prize was there. Now, with the de-canonization of the EU under Disney, there is no proof of hyperspace interdiction being a thing until shown in another movie.
Thrawn was great at tactical use of Interdictors, along with the rest of his tactical genius. It’s a shame the new movies haven’t had a leader of his caliber in charge and instead have given us incompetent whiners.
I’ve never watched clone wars, which I believe is canon, so I thought that maybe interdictors had come up there. Still, they are not not-canon, just not confirmed to be.
Anyway, just a fanwank thought on why that tactic would be very rarely used.
I know Star Wars is escapism, but that doesn’t excuse it from trying to be thoughtful and challenging the audience. Making a simple good/bad dichotomy is both too simplistic and been done already. War makes killers of both sides? Sure does. Star Wars would benefit from some version of our real world debate about Dresden or Hiroshima. Was it worth the cost to defeat evil? If the good guys are resolutely good and have no doubts we end up with one-dimensional fanatics. “If God be for us, who can be against us?” is a recipe for fanaticism. We’ve seen a bit of that in Star Wars: Rebels - and Rogue One - with Saw Guerrera but little of it in the Episodic movies. Saw is clearly a terrorist without regard for the lives he ends. But he’s fighting the empire and that makes him a good guy? What’s the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? As my oh so cynical 80s - Contras, Sandinistas and so forth - upbringing taught me, the difference is whether you agree with their aims.
Everything is shades of grey. That’s where the interesting stories come in. For all of me, the prime example of this is the recent Ex Machina. Depending on the day and one’s point of view any of the three leads could be the good guy or the bad guy. That makes for something interesting.
Or The Race, from Turtledove’s WorldWar novels - which I’d really like to be a movie or TV series or something - and their all around decency. Yes, they’re invading the Earth. That makes them bad. No doubt about it. But once the reader can get into their heads a bit, they’re just outright decent people. They work hard, they keep their word, they try to do the right thing as they see it. And they spend a great deal of time trying to cut a deal with the various human governments who have no intention of keeping to their agreements. So yes, the humans are the good guys. But they’re also lying bastards who will kill without remorse or even just for the hell of it at some points.
I wouldn’t count on him seeing the light. I think he’s playing out a classic tragedy narrative and not a redemptive one. Ren’s arc seems set against Rey’s. Ren is overreacting to his own insecurities by lashing out…especially based on the revelations of Luke’s failure at the training temple. Rey, on the other hand, is persuing a much more personally driven arc. She’s got a lot more agency. After years in the Jakku desert waiting for her parents to return she finds herself finally driving her own story and figuring out who she is. She’s defining herself whereas Ren has been allowing others to define him. It might just be interesting, now that Ren is getting some agency of his own, to see how the two resolve their conflict in Episode IX.
Or, of course, it’ll be lightsaber duels and explosions. Either way, really.
Sure. There is no doubt that Episode IX will have starships and starbases and big walking robots and characters wearing new and awesome costumes and droids and whatnot, which will blow each other up. But that doesn’t mean it can’t also have legitimately interesting moral questions. There’s probably some limit, in that you don’t want 5-year-olds seeing a Star Wars movie in the theater for the first time to walk out crying and confused because they don’t know who the good guys are. And clearly the whole movie isn’t going to just be people in rooms talking about philosophy. But even within the broad constraints of “needs to be extremely marketable” and “needs to appeal to children”, there is a LOT of room for complexity and ambiguity.
(In fact, I think people have a tendency to blame anything they dislike about Star Wars movies on a need to sell toys. The weird and not-well-liked diversion to the casino planet? Disney forced that on Rian Johnson because they wanted to sell more toys? Waaaa? Does that even make sense? Are the best selling TLJ toys going to be casino employees and those little horse things? If there’s ever a scene that is purely designed to sell more toys it will be a big space battle with lots and lots of different starships, big and small, from lots of different planets, all of them awesome looking, but which has no storyline relevance at all, or something like that.)
She’s a plot device that help’s Poe’s character arc in this movie.
We, the audience, are initially being led to believe, as seen through the eyes of Poe, that the rebel leadership apparently is in disarray, and that they really don’t have a plan. This, incidentally, encourages us to support Poe’s insubordinate attitude, and taking actions outside of the chain of command. But… surprise! After Poe/Finn/Rose’s actions derail, we learn that the leadership had a plan after all, and Poe (and the audience along with him) learns a life lesson from the consequences of their actions.
TLDR version: The reason the Admiral doesn’t explain her plans to a recently demoted pilot is to protect a Surprise! moment later in the movie, and gives the audience a “shared experience” in character growth with one of the main characters.
Is a plot device necessarily a plot hole? We report, you decide.
That’s what I was thinking. And a much better (and more connected to the main plot) sub-mission for Finn and Rose would have been to find Rey and lead her back after the wristwatch thingy had to be destroyed.
I still believe she didn’t have a plan, why let all those transport ships full of people get blown up if she was just going to hyperspace-ram the First Order ship anyway? Why wait to call for help from allies when they are in an underground bunker? They should have called for help early in the OJ chase. Maybe they did, but the movie didn’t show they did.
Her ramming wasn’t part of the original plan. It’s her taking a page from Poe and doing the obviously, visibly heroic thing for once in her life. It’s proof that her character changed as well, and that she wasn’t entirely correct in her actions to that point, and that she needed to take something from the other side of the quietly heroic/visibly heroic spectrum.
And as far as letting the transports get blown up… they couldn’t have prevented that, really. Acceptable losses (or losses you hope are acceptable) are the nature of military plans.
She could have prevented it by ramming the enemy sooner. She waited till about half of them had been blown up before doing it.
And when you have only 400 people in your whole army, no, losing half is not acceptable. George Washington was considered a great general for simply not losing most of his army.