I don’t know if they called it the same thing, but a device like this was used in a Season 2 SW:Rebels episode “Stealth Strike”.
I think that ship sailed with the Prequels and Clone Wars. You’ve got a bunch of kids out there who think Anakin’s the coolest and the Best Jedi Ever… yeah, about that… maybe you shouldn’t watch ROTS… or TESB…
I think this is where fanwanking is a good thing. The drama worked well, and if it didn’t explain her timing, it’s not that there was no possible explanation for the timing, it’s that the film didn’t decide that an explanation of the timing was the best use of the narrative. So we fanwank an explanation. Maybe the general was seized by doubt? Maybe the hyperspace ramming is a famously discredited strategy, and it took her awhile even to consider it and to realize that the particular circumstances of this space battle made ramming useful? Maybe she’d put some measure in place (a stealth warmup for the hyperdrive or some such), and had to wait for it to be ready before she could engage in the maneuver?
There are a hundred ways to fanwank the specifics of her decision. Some folks don’t want to do that; they want a lot more military genius and exposition in their SF (I bet they hated the Starship Troopers movie too). Me, I’m cool with not having that there. If the story works for me–and it did–I’m willing to fill in the blanks myself.
In general, I agree with the point you are making… if something is left vague in a story, that’s fine. For instance, I’m not at all bothered by having no idea what Yoda did on Degobah while waiting for Luke to show up.
That said, to a certain extent it’s a “feel” question, which is relates to how one feels while watching the movie, which of course depends to a large extent on how the filmmakers put the action on screen.
In this case, you can imagine very small differences in editing that would result in my thought process while watching it being “oh no, the rebel ships are being shot at… and shot at… and shot at, oh this is bad… oh they’re all going to die… and, wait, HOLY SHIT, WHAT IS HOLDOR DOING, OMG SHE WENT OUT LIKE A BADASS”. In which case, I still might be curious as to why there had been that delay, and it might be worth fanwanking. But instead, it was more like “oh, they’re dying… and holdor is sitting in her bridge looking sad… and they’re dying… and holdor is sitting in her bridge looking sad… and they’re dying… oh, and now she’s doing something, I wonder if she’s going to try to ram them, which I thought of what felt like hours ago… and they’re dying… and she’s slowly turning… and they’re dying… and OMG SHE JUMPED TO LIGHT SPEED HOLY FUCK”. If the filmmakers had wanted to leave it mysterious to us what Holdor had been doing that whole time, they could have, instead (as I recall) the timing and editing sure made it seem like she spent an excessive amount of time just sitting there doing nothing.
To put it a different way, there’s a difference between a reaction of “I have no idea what happened between point X and point Y… maybe we can fanwank an explanation” vs “it sure looked like what happened between point X and point Y was stupid… maybe we can fanwank an explanation of why it wasn’t”.
Sure but those of us pointing out the issues associated with the Holdo maneuver are not saying it’s impossible to fanwank an explanation.
We’re just saying it’s not explained in the movie why the maneuver hasn’t been on the table previously yet was devastatingly effective.
The difference between this and fanwanking, I dunno, why a character in a movie wears their cap backwards or something, is that this is kinda critical to understanding the conflict and future space battles. If they don’t cough up an explanation in the next movie, I’ll constantly be questioning “Why don’t they just ram it with something?”, which will obviously affect my enjoyment.
I agree that fanwank is bad when it is used to paper over the flaws in a weak narrative. On the other hand, the difference between a weak narrative and compact, indirect storytelling is in the mind of the beholder.
It’s trite but true that film is a visual medium, that a microexpression on an actor’s face can replace what would be a paragraph of exposition in a novel, and that, while show-don’t-tell isn’t an absolute rule (“Pictures Can’t Say Ain’t”, for one thing) the as-you-know-bob is deadwood and should be replaced with just about anything. Therefore, there’s a sliding scale of explicit and implicit in storytelling, and every time a movie moves towards the implicit side, fans and reviewers alike will complain about plotholes. (To be quite honest, fans complain as a general rule, and reviewers see plotholes every time they take a leak during their screenings.)
So I don’t see the ramming or the delay as plotholes. I think they can both be explained through character arcs, how Holdo and Poe converged to some extent, Poe becoming more aware of broader contexts and Holdo more aware of the importance of looking like a hero to inspire people. Her pause was a stubborn person coming to terms with a serious past error, and her ram maneuver was an attempt to rectify that error in a way which was dramatic in-Universe.
If you don’t analyze the characters the way I do, that’s a plothole. If you don’t think in terms of character arcs, that’s a plothole. If you were taking a leak when they did the character development, congratulations on your career writing move reviews.
My complaint about the Holdo maneuver relates to the art of story telling.
It’s not that she was taking her time, or deciding, instead it’s that it isn’t clear to the audience what she was thinking. Because the scene takes soooo looong to develop, the audience has time to ponder these things. A lingering camera shot of Holdo planning her course of action looks exactly like a lingering shot of Holdo standing there doing nothing. “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.”
Taking so long to do nothing before ramming makes her look bad. If she was busy doing…something, then deciding to ram, then it would make storytelling sense. Think of Kirk at the helm of the Constellation in The Doomsday Machine. That is an incredibly tense scene. Very well done. The Holdo maneuver scene was not.
Plus, it also is bad storytelling that Holdo stayed on the cruiser after everyone left. Why? It isn’t like she had to fly it. She had no fuel, no weapons. She was just sacrificing herself for…what? Nothing. If she was needed to fly it, to keep her foot on the deadman’s switch, sure. but she didn’t. So that makes one ask, was she planning from the beginning to ram? If so, then what took her the fuck so long??
Firstly I haven’t used the term “plot hole”. Nor do I expect movies to explain everything, an impossible task in finite time.
What I’m simply saying is that understanding why this maneuver has never been on the table previously, yet was game-winning, is important to understanding the space battles which are key to the whole “Wars…in the Stars” thing.
When we next see a battle with / near some First Order uber-ship, there really needs to be an explanation why they can’t just press the instant win button and hyper-ram it, otherwise it’s the elephant in the room. That’s all I’m saying.
In regards to the questions about the lack of military discipline of Poe, is the Resistance a professional military? I know in *A New Hope *, Luke was pretty much accepted as an X-Wing pilot without any formal instruction or training. If they are just an informal resistance against the First Order, they would be recruiting in same manner taking all comers. It would explain a lot about the lack of military discipline and strategies.
The Resistance is an unofficial offshoot of the New Republic, which was essentially wiped out by Starkiller Base in The Force Awakens.
The difference between the defenses offered by fans of this movie seems to mostly boil down to ignoring all the problems because it’s a movie they wanted to like. My problem with the film is that I can’t ignore all the problems regardless that it was a movie I wanted very badly to like. It reminds a lot of The Dark Knight Rises: a ponderous film filled with numerous minor inconsistencies, rough pacing, and highly questionable internal logic that was largely excused at the time because everyone wanted a follow-up to The Dark Knight.
I find three major issues with The Last Jedi. This doesn’t take away from the better aspects, but these three seriously damage the movie.
First, the pacing is awful. In the case of this movie, it jumps around way too much and tries to squeeze in far too many plot threads. It needed very badly to trim down and really focus. This is not helped by the movie wasting a shocking amount of time and plot on completely irrelevant events.
Second, there are dozens of minor plot holes and questionable script moments that follow one after another. This is one of the issues in critiquing the movie - almost any of these could be defended, but it’s extremely hard to overlook all of them without completely turning off my brain. Any movie can overcome a few problems. But TLJ raises too many questions, while insisting you ignore them, which is not a good sign for any movie.
Third, the movie blatantly sides with a highly questionable points of view taken by some characters, and insists those are correct even if it doesn’t make sense. It’s not that the characters in question couldn’t be right, but the movie doesn’t back it up. This gets really weird when the movie tries to have a big message, but also wants to have another contradictory message. And apparently doesn’t even realize the conflict.
There are a lot of other, somewhat less serious issues but have no great desire to run through them all. It’s pretty obvious that somebody - maybe Disney or the director, Rian Johnson, was trying to really twist up the Star Wars formula, but it came at the expense of the finished movie.
That’s incorrect. I didn’t “want” to like it, I “liked” it. It holds the top spot in the Star Wars pantheon for me, because it did so many things that I liked. I didn’t expect that going in, after having a lukewarm appreciation of every previous Star Wars movie of the past quarter century. If you can’t wrap your mind around someone genuinely liking this movie, you’re never going to understand the reasons people give for genuinely liking it.
Is it flawless? Nope. But it is, in my opinion, a damn sight better than TFA, and significantly more interesting than Rogue One.
Oh, I consider it interesting all right. I haven’t seen a movie with quite this much to unpack in a long time. I can’t agree that it was good.
Fair enough; I believe you :). I hope you believe that I genuinely do think it was good and genuinely did like it, not just wanted to.
Of course. I’m talking generally, not about specific individuals. I just don’t think this movie would have been received so positively if it hadn’t been a Star Wars movie, with all the hype it received. If it helps, I’m on the record for liking Hudson Hawk.
That being said, while I’'m rather unlikely to change my opinion, I do think there are some very good aspects of the movie that deserve real credit.
*Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher just crush it.
*I love Adam Driver and Oscar Isaac’s performances. Domnhall Gleeson seems to steal almost any scene he’s in. While I don’t think Benicio del Toro’s DJ was used very well, he’s still great to watch. Andy Serkis’ Snoke (entertainingly) chews so much scenery in his brief appearance that I’d surprised his throne didn’t have tooth marks on it. His bright red random guard dudes set up the best action scene by far.
*The CGI may have been overused, but it was generally gorgeous. Actually, all the scenes were intricately designed and there’s quite a lot of imaginative flair shown. They could have shown me about 150 minutes of the background scenery and I’d have probably been happy.
*While I don’t think the story had room to spend like it did on Canto Bight, but I love it because it feels like a thoroughly real place in the Star Wars universe. It’s just made for neat stories and I wanted to see more of it.
And, for the record, I’ve been someone bringing up and hammering away at many of the “plot holes” in this thread… and I also genuinely liked TLJ. I went into it expecting/hoping to like it, and I did like it. But that’s because the highs were so high that they far more than overcame the plot holes, not because I feel like the plot holes are easily dismissable, or wouldn’t be an issue if I just watched things in a more sophisticated fashion.
After looking at other reviews from the film-going public (not official critics), it seems to me that most of the negatives are different for everyone, which says something in itself, and if you think about those things for long enough, the answers and explanations are there, on screen, both from a filmmaking standpoint, and an in-universe standpoint, as this thread demonstrates, amongst other places. We’re just not used to a Star Wars movie approached in this way.
It’s a shame that so many people will dismiss The Last Jedi as bad, in this knee-jerk way, and not give it any more thought.
I think it’s a layered, deeply considered movie, that tries to take its audience seriously, that they don’t need every detail spoonfed and they can fill in the gaps, such as they are, themselves, like they would for a regular drama or more cerebral science fiction movie.
YouTuber Jenny Nicholson is just an ordinary viewer, and she may be young and a bit eccentric, but her take on this jibes with mine.
That’s a good point. But it also doesn’t shine much hope on their future prospects, given that all they seem to have left are the undisciplined rogues.
The Last Jedi is far from bad. That’s the problem. If it were bad, I could dismiss it with the same sort of unrequited passion as I did the prequels. The problem is that it’s disappointing, a letdown from what it could be with just a few changes. And the problems aren’t the plot holes, the problems are thematic inconsistency. Themes that are driven home by powerful characters more than once in that directorial way that tells us “this person is wise, listen to them.” Then that same person does just the opposite and it’s considered the right thing. It’s not that people can’t do bad and good the same day one second later, it’s the movie forgetting the lesson it was trying to tell.
That was great. She does raise, near the end, an extremely valid criticism of the movie, and if I ever watch it again, this major plot hole is gonna ruin it for me.
I’m just not seeing that. There are multiple versions of the idea, “The past is jacked, focus on the present.” Kylo Ren has one take: “Forget the past.” Luke has another: “Run away from the past.” Finn has another: “Run away from the past, and keep running.” Holdo has another: “Hold grudges based on the past.” Yoda has another: “Everything’s jacked, and it’s gonna keep being jacked, and you can maybe learn from the past, and that’s kind of wonderful, but you should still focus on the present.”
And people–especially Luke, and maybe also Holdo, and definitely Finn–change their attitudes over the film.
These different takes don’t contradict each other, because they’re different characters at different points in their arcs. The only one that spoke (IMO) with directorial authority is Yoda, and I don’t think his “learn from the past but don’t cling to it” take gets contradicted ever.
What specifically are you thinking of?