I don’t remember Leia’s support, nor do I remember other characters repeating it. What are you thinking about here?
It was an interesting phenonomen that I would have like to have seen a second or two more of information about. Nothing more. Just kinda leaves me hanging with a little bit of unanswered question, not something that I’ve lost an instant’s sleep over though.
Well, in this part, my statement was a joke. That the theme was to save who they loved, they just didn’t really like 99% of the resistance all that much.
No, she was just speaking for herself. Which is good, as if that were to the general philosophy of the alliance, not much could get done.
As far as Finn, I don’t think he was choosing glory so much as choosing to save his friends in the only way he saw he could. If he had destroyed the ram, it would be the culmination of his story, which started with him running away from the first order to save his own skin.
Makes sense. For me, the amount of time they spent on it was exactly right. I don’t give a wet fart about whether the salt is the red or white part, or whether it’s red until it bleaches, or whatever.
I see them both as pretty immature and grappling with what to do. Finn is trying his damnedest to save the day–but he’s also trying to prove himself, and his model for doing so is the glory-hound Poe. Rose is trying her damnedest to save the day–but having seen everyone she loves die in the service of glory-hounds, she decides that focusing on the person, not the movement, is her best choice. Neither one is telling us what the director wants. There’s some tension there.
In college I had a beautifully nerdy intellectual friend, and one of his favorite stories was Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor. As he described it to me, it was about a conversation between Jesus, returned to earth in Spain, and the Grand Inquisitor, who’d sentenced Jesus to death. What my friend loved so much about it was that Dostoevsky, though he probably sided with the Inquisitor in the story, gave both Jesus and the Inquisitor strong, excellent points in defense of their beliefs; neither got to speak with authorial fiat, and neither presented flimsy straw man arguments.
Rian Johnson is no Dostoevsky, but I think he was doing something along those lines, setting up a tension between different viewpoints that he leaves unresolved.
I saw nothing in the movie to indicate Poe was a glory hound. He’s simply brash and hot-headed. His main problem seemed to be that he has an inflated sense of his own judgment.
I have two issues with your position:
(1) It’s fairly condescending and insulting
(2) I just don’t think it’s true that “the answers and explanations are there, on screen”.
When there’s an apparent plot hole, I think there are several possibilities for what’s going on:
(1) The filmmakers have a consistent explanation in mind for what was going on, and they believe that explanation is clearly and openly explained by the film itself
(2) The filmmakers have a consistent explanation in mind for what was going on, and they believe that the film contains clues that point at that explanation (I suppose this comes in two variations, one in which they deliberately left it vague for some artistic reason, and one in which it just ended up that way, and they would have preferred it to be more clear, had that been possible)
(3) The filmmakers have a consistent explanation in mind for what was going on, but they would admit that there’s no real way for the viewers to guess what it is from what ended up on screen (again, maybe they wanted to make it clear, and the explanation got muddled/removed in editing, or maybe they just never cared to begin with)
(4) The filmmakers made a deliberate artistic choice to leave something unexplained in the film (ie, a murder mystery in which the point of the movie is that neither the characters nor the viewers can ever figure out who the killer was, to help the audience feel the character’s mindset, or something like that) (arguably, at least in some versions, the is-Decker-a-replicant question from Blade Runner falls into this category)
(5) The filmmakers realized that there was an unanswered question there, but didn’t care, it just wasn’t important to them, not part of the story they were trying to tell, just not something they were focusing on
(6) The filmmakers never even noticed the apparent inconsistency at all
You seem to think that most of the so-called “plot holes” are type (1) or (2), I (and many others in the thread) suspect that many of them are (5) or (6).
Now, you might say, so what if it’s (5) or (6), that’s not what the movie is about, can’t you enjoy the characters and their arcs, why are you hung up on nerdly details about starship performance (or whatever)… and the answer, at least for me, is I did enjoy the characters and their arcs. But I would have enjoyed the movie, as a whole, MORE without many of these issues. And you might say, characters are more important than sci fi realism, blah blah blah. But there’s no reason that a good movie can’t have both.
For instance, take what I think is the single most indefensible aspect of the movie, the slow-speed chase where somehow the First Order can’t catch up with the Resistance, and yet Rose and Finn can still zip off to casinoland and back to their fleet.
Does there need to be a slow-speed chase there? Do character arcs demand it? No. What the pacing and character arcs need is a situation in which:
(1) The First Order is trying to find/catch the Resistance
(2) And they clearly will in a somewhat fixed amount of time
(3) And both sides know it
(4) But Rose and Finn can still dash off on a quest to find a maguffin
(5) And Holdor can have a plan for the resistance to escape, which the codebreaker can leak
(6) And there will be a chance at the end of Holdor to nobly and badassly sacrifice herself
It’s trivially easy to come up with situations which fit all those criteria, so that the pacing and character development and character conflicts can all play out the same way, but without the incredible stupidity that decreased the enjoyment of many, many viewers, including myself.
Saying I wish that scene had happened differently doesn’t mean I need things to be spoon fed to me… and if you did NOT have that reaction, that doesn’t make you a more sophisticated viewer.
I’ll take that. It’s what I usually get for not liking things that are unfeasibly popular, like Tarantino movies, Blade Runner, or The Big Lebowski. “Oh, you just don’t get it.” Yeah, whatever, maybe not, but I’m glad to do so because they’re horrible.
My comment wasn’t trying to address legitimate complaints about the movie, and I am not going to change anybody’s minds either. I would normally dismiss a movie I don’t like without further thought too. But my point was that it was interesting how that everyone dislikes a different thing in The Last Jedi, and that even those things that I agree could’ve been handled better still has had great counter-arguments from many sources that I acknowledge are there if you look again.
I think it’s a movie that needs more than one viewing to get a fair judgement. We went in with certain expectations and assumptions that our heroes would succeed and the risks would pay off, because that’s how these kinds of movies always work, but they didn’t. That threw us for a loop, and some of us rallied and some of us rejected.
I guess we’ll see if assessments will mellow as time goes on.
I just saw it; I’m writing the post without reading the thread, to keep my impressions unsullied.
It was a very entertaining action adventure. It captures the tone of the original trilogy. In fact, personal internal conflict is done better, a little less overblown angst. The plot and themes consistent and comprehensible. The internal and external conflicts matched.
The pacing is a bit better than TESB, the Jedi teaching scenes drag less. Character development is about the same (see: Action/Adventure).
I love Laura Dern, but couldn’t really feel her character here - she was too sympathetic for the strategy reveal to have much impact. I was outraged by Rose’s final speaking scene; the dialogue and concept were equally terrible, and it could have been saved by putting more emphasis on the scene where it was revealed she is still alive. Carrie Fisher got shafted, as usual - no internal conflict, no growth, no great lines. Andy Skeris was great, as usual, and, as usual, I had no idea it was he.
Finn is critical to the pacing and tone and development, and is by far my favorite character.
Assuming they don’t really piss me off in Episode IX, this should become a favorite binge trilogy was bad weather days.
Now I am going to read the thread.
To borrow a quote, when you read the thread, things are not going to go the way you think. Having said that, I agree with your review. I suppose they could have given Carrie Fisher a better send off had they known she would be dying so soon after filming.
I’ve worked through the first couple of pages. Most of the criticism seem forced to me. It’s a SciFi action movie, a combination of two genre which one should not expect to be more realistic that your standard romantic comedy. As long as the movie is internally consistent, I don’t care if it violates physics as we understand today.
I think they should have recut the movie to send Leia to her final reward after Carrie Fisher died.
Bolding mine. I don’t think there are a bunch of people that dislike different things. There is a lot of people that dislike a bunch of things, but only talk about certain ones because the other things have already been mentioned.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around what they were trying with Finn’s character. It was a plot point in TFA that he didn’t know how to fly, and yet he is one of the pilots at the end of the movie. He couldn’t have learned to fly during the movie, he was too busy getting captured. Rose caught him trying to escape, he was arrested at the casino, and was captured on Snoke’s ship.
Well, maybe that’s how the Force works.
Show character development. He wasn’t a bad guy in The Force Awakens, but that’s about all you can say. He had no skills and precious few ethics. But he has a good heart, and that enables him to meet ever greater challenges.
He’s not a hero; he’s not even a sidekick. He’s cannon fodder who has happened to be swept into the inner circle, and, because of his ability to feel deep attachments, will be given the opportunity for perform heroic deeds. Possibly getting knocked out and / or captured, but he’s not the Buffoon.
He should be the one to save Rey.
He couldn’t fly a tie-fighter, or whatever space ship that the FO is using, as that is a fighter spaceship and rather complicated.
The speeders were much simpler devices, and he still had a bit of trouble with them.
Compare driving a moped to an F-22. Just because you can’t fly a fighter jet doesn’t mean you can’t drive a speeder.
I don’t know about the first few pages, but in the last few, nobody’s gripes have been the fantasy nature of the physics. Several have been because of things that don’t make sense within the logic of that universe (though not inconsistencies per se).
Agreed, although I can also understand why they didn’t.
They probably would have needed to CG in at least a couple of brief shots to make it work. And they got negative feedback already for using a CG Leia. This time, doing that after she’s dead, the outrage could have been much worse – seen as exploitative rather than giving her a deserved send-off.
That said, I don’t know what scenes they cut. Maybe they did cut something that would have functioned as a send-off without needing any CG.
It was also an “all hands on deck” situation. Rose probably shouldn’t have been piloting one either, but needs must.
In the final closeup shots of Leia, where she’s talking with Luke (?) as the FO tries to blast open the doors, I was dreading her death, figuring they were going to have her taken out by a stray shot or something. But I was also anticipating a bit of CGI, and watching her face closely–and that’s what it took for me to notice how much minute facial expression acting she was doing, acting of a subtlety I’ve never seen CGI duplicate.
Fisher was GREAT, and I really think that replacing her for a moment in this final scene with CGI would’ve robbed her of her final performance.
I got the impression Rose is a technology savant.
I’m confused about Rose, I though she’d be a sidekick - I like & respect sidekicks - but they’re playing with turning her into a love interest? Mmm, not sure if I like that.
Did I mention that I was outraged about her final scene with dialog? I wanted to spit nails. It’s like they had to give on little nod to the other two trilogies watering down the female leads as much as possible. And she definitely deserved more than a minor interruption in a scene to reveal she survived.
Hmm, now that I think, call Rey ‘spunky’ was inverting that trope, wasn’t it? Princess Leia would have been nothing but ‘spunky’ if it weren’t for Carrie Fisher.
I feel for the actor playing Poe. He’s just one bad boy rebellion against authority after another, isn’t he? It must be hard for any actor to make something out of that role. Finn, on the other hand, I’d kill for that role, were I an actor. Rey, not so much, the hero is always a bit boring, though Daisy Ridley brings some heft to the part.
The problem with action films with lots of meaningful characters is that adequate explanations slow the film down to much. Besides, something has to be left for the director’s cuts, now.
And Adam Driver?
This will probably sound weird, but his mouth is wrong for the part.
I think he’s good with Daisy Ridley, but terrible with Mark Hamill. I cannot figure out if it’s the role, the actor, or the director. He was definitely more Anakin than Darth Vader, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. In most of his scenes, I thought of that meme “take note skywalker boys, y’all weak as shit”.
I’m sorry, he just seemed more sulky than tortured. If your defining characteristic comes from weakness rather than rage, you’re just not the best villian
OK, so just to bring up something I mentioned before but was never addressed:
Was, or was not, that scene in the casino where they get zapped with some kind of electrical stun device, supposed to be an homage to the “Cheater’s Justice” scene in Martin Scorsese’s Casino?