Yeah fair! I hope 9 does take it somewhere. It's a really interesting thread.



No, they havent said anything about what his trilogy will be. Im sure thatll be a while from now.

:hypnotoad:

Not that it's particularly surprising, but...

what if this is actually the best star wars movie? and also Poe is the bad guy?

Well, he did get a lot of the Resistance killed...

Holy necromice!

So I work nights and when I saw TLJ the first time I deliberately went to see it during the day the day it came out to avoid the cinema being full of kids on their christmas holidays. At the time I was in the middle of about 5 months of full blown sleep deprivation so I wasn't exactly invested in the film, and knew I'd made a mistake when the crawl started and I felt absolutely nothing whatsoever [this is compared to seeing TFA and I was grinning like an idiot when the fanfare kicked in].

Anyway, I saw it again last weekend and I actually really enjoyed it. It's not without it's issues; some of the tone of the humour felt a wee bit off, wasn't overly keen on how flying Leia was done, the rock bit at the end felt v Force Unleashed, and the Michael Bay effects in the ship hanger were like Michael Bay effects. Overall I'd say it's pretty solid.

Relevant: https://news.avclub.com/here-s-a-good-take-in-the-ongoing-war-over-luke-skywalk-1827546398

As you said, there were some very bad parts (the space casino and racing llama-rabbits, Mary Poppins Leia, and my personal favorite, the four-teated space-walrus milk), but overall, it wasn't bad for a children's movie. I really didn't care for the mechanic girl at all. They were going for a cute, spunky, Firefly Kaylee type character, but this one was just flat and annoying.

I don't really think they were going for that, they just dress similarly.

My wife made me watch it a few days ago.

My wife loudly criticized the choreography in the Rey/Kylo fight. She's a martial artist. I'm not. I won't try to reproduce her criticisms here, but apparently the fight choreography was a disaster unlike anything she's ever seen before.

The main problem I had with the movie was its... well, to be frank, its script. I haven't seen many movies written as sloppily as this one. I really liked the broad strokes, even a lot of the things the "fans" complained about. The force gettin' weird was good, the parentage stuff worked, Kylo's repaired backstory as a sympathetic non-ideological outraged social reject worked, the 'kill the past' / break with the OT stuff was a surprisingly enjoyable theme. It's a much better written movie than TFA for sure, if nothing else because the story was driven by the deliberate actions of its participants instead of by accident. I could say a lot of nice things about this movie. However, for every good moment, there were at least two of slop.

The most interesting character in the entire movie was Holdo, who they killed. I bet they regretted that choice a lot after Carrie Fisher died. They should have regretted that choice for other reasons but I'm sure they don't. With shockingly minor changes to the script, the movie would have been a great leadership hand-off story from Leia to Holdo. The mutiny was a perfect opportunity to vindicate Holdo's leadership despite the concerns of established characters. Instead, they killed off Holdo (undermining the 'let the past die' thing) and let Leia survive (even though she doesn't do much of anything for the rest of the movie, not even helping Rey with the boulders despite also having superpowers).

Poe is a dick, and making him the ringleader of an attempted mutiny that turned out to be an asinine mistake was good. At least it would have been if he wasn't always right. Remember how he disobeyed orders to sustain his attack on a ship with a doom cannon that could pick off capital ships in one shot? It was, at the moment he was fighting it, picking off capital ships in one shot. The resistance fleet had minimal fuel and could be tracked through hyperspace, so even if they had gotten away, that dreadnaught would have still obliterated them. Disobeying orders was the only reason the fleet lasted as long as it did. Maybe they were going after the "smart jerk" archetype - saying that being right doesn't make up for being an *******? But if so, that point was also undermined by the fact that Holdo apparently didn't tell anybody about the real plan, leaving her officers no recourse but to remove her from command.

"only the lead ship can track us through hyperspace" - Why? How would Rose know that, given this technology is apparently unheard-of?
Rose's job is to guard the escape pods to stop deserters, but after stunning Finn she appears to have abandoned her post?
If Rose was willing to sacrifice herself to save Finn, and flying fast enough to catch up with him, why didn't she just fly into the laser cannon herself instead of crashing into him?
I get that the cracker knew there'd be cloaked ships, but how did he know how to let the First Order detect them?

lol, most people I talked to were annoyed with Holdo and her seeming "I told you so" role in the plot.

Of all of the things in the movie, I think these criticisms to be most lasting. I feel in more than just these two ways the movie undermines its own themes.

In fact, the 'let the past die' theme just exists in dialogue, but nowhere else in the film. What, really, do we move past from in The Last Jedi? Other than Luke Skywalker existing, of course.

It's a "passing of the baton to the next generation." That's... everything.

From a certain point of view.

I could kind of see that, but I feel there's a disconnect between that message and what was hinted on the screen.

There were two big interesting things going on in the first half of the film: the theme about moving on from the past, and the connection between Kylo Ren and Rey. If you put these two together, what it suggests is a divergence from the classical Jedi/Sith good vs. evil thing, some sort of new thing. But the movie clearly didn't want to do that. It still wants a really obvious good vs. bad guy narrative. But what was the payoff from this buildup? Well, Rey and Kylo work together for a bit, and she refuses to join him at the most peak moment. Then.. next scene, we see he was overpowered and Rey was gone and.. that's it. The rest of the movie is just Kylo being bad, Rey being good, and Luke Skywalker pronouncing Rey is the last jedi.

That wasn't a very good payoff for what they were building up. There was no big confrontation, no interesting dialogue, we literally aren't even shown the big moment, the movie just goes "yeah so all that character development we did before? irrelevant for the rest of the film, kk bye". Okay? If it's relevant in Episode 9 it might work, but just in context of TLJ it felt really lacking.

If you just want to kill of old characters whose actors are too expensive, and keep a basic good vs. evil narrative, great! Don't make half of your movie tease towards another conclusion with zero payoff, because people won't like it.

It's exactly like what they did in BBC's Sherlock. You can only build up cool plot points and shut them down with zero payoff so many times before the audience realizes how shallow the narrative actually is, and is annoyed they put any effort into caring about your story.

Destroying that dumb Jedi tree and the dumb sacred Jedi texts only to dumbly reveal later that they weren't actually destroyed was super duper dumb

Looper was excellent too, so I know Rian Johnson can write and film a decent movie.

Yeah, exactly. "We're moving on from the past this film, goodbye old Jedi order". Oh, wait, you mean that's not actually what's going to happen? Thanks for wasting my time.

I still have zero interest in seeing the film. And, as opposed to whatever I might've said before, I'm not going to get it on Blu-Ray either anytime soon (maybe one day when it's in the bargain bin for 2bux, who knows).

Yet I'm still quite certain that I'd have 100% nothing to complain about the film itself, and that my only gripe* with it would be that it doesn't open with, well, this:

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Alas.

All these .. opportunities, are lost... in time..

.. like tears ... in snow.

Time to die.














* = Then again, I'm still not keen on the name Snoke. "This guy looks kinda like a snake HEY I KNOW LET'S NAME HIM SNOKE"

Hence

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Have you even tried contacting Disney? I'm sure they'd let you produce the rest of Episode 9

Ah, yes. They said that the minute Yoda's House: A Pugler Story enters production, they'll be in touch.

I wouldn't mind if Episode 9 didn't pick up anything that's happened in episodes 1-8 and instead was an homage to various JK mods

You know, it took 14 years after The Room (2003) for the Tommy Wiseau biopic to be released... so with that math, my biopic should see release next year! Due to the inaugural burgerboy post being from 2005

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One day...

The more I think about TLJ the more I hate it. There is no plan for the trilogy, these films aren't built to last, and despite Lucasfilm saying they want to pass the torch, they sure teased the hell out of the old characters, even ending TFA without dialogue from Luke. Even at the end of TLJ we've got the same situation from the OT, where a scrappy rebellion is fighting against an evil galactic empire. Except this time the evil empire is rich for no explained reasons, and super influential despite just coming out of isolation.
There are a 1,000 other ideas they could have explored for these films, but nope, it's all about the bare minimum of effort for the maximum profit.

Know what would have been really subversive?
If Rey was Luke's daughter, (because it is the Skywalker sage) but she is completely unable to use the force. She self exiles because she is ashamed she cant meet the huge expectations placed on her. And the big twist in the end is you don't need powers be a badass and to make a difference in the galaxy.

Having an overpowered person with vague ambitions isn't really doing it for me. I have no plans to see Episode 9 because the field I grow my ****s in is barren and salted at this point.

I still think it was a storytelling mistake failing to include a scene with Rey considering killing Kylo Ren while he was unconscious after the lightspeed attack/lightsaber explosion. She could have had the same realization as Luke and it would have been a great character development moment.

Do they even have time to write a decent script?

Probably not, but I'm betting the lack of time isn't the biggest squeeze on quality.

That really would have helped show some kind of conflict and ethical struggle on her part, something human.
She could have at least stolen his lightsaber. Then he is forced to make another, and no one is surprised when he shows up with a double bladed, double cross-guarded lightsaber.

I'm actually surprised this isn't brought up more, but why/how does Rose have the entire schematic of Snokes ship? Doesn't getting something like that cost the lives of an entire films cast, or at least many Bothans?

i have seen the error in my ways and now I can't wait to see the twitter remake of TLJ because all scripts should be crowdsourced

It's on Netflix. Haven't been able to bring myself to watch it again. I will, one of these days. Maybe. There have been many high profile "flops" lately and I see all these discussions about what's to blame. To me, The Last Jedi and the cost of going to the cinema are to blame. The Last Jedi was a "Fool me twice, shame on me" moment. We've seen one movie in the theater since then, Infinity War. Then there are other films I totally would see but I'm not interested in shelling out a minimum of $30 for each of them when a few months later I can watch them in more comfort on an adequate home theater setup.

Oh, and The Rock. Putting him in a movie is a pretty sure way to make sure I don't go see it in the theater and I like much of his earlier work.

On a related note, I saw Bladerunner 2049 and enjoyed much of it.

I liked it but something felt a little off in some parts. Almost like it was too clean and shiny at times. I would like to watch that one again. I had borrowed someone's bluray and it had some included vignettes that were created during the filming that were nice additions to the story. If you've seen the film but not these other extra scenes I recommend checking them out.

I can't remember the last "good" new movie I've seen. There are movies I enjoyed and that entertained me, so in that sense there are lots of good movies. I'm referring more to movies that tell an excellent story, make me think, are well written and well acted, don't have lots of useless filler or childish moments, rely on cheap theatrics or lean heavily big name stars (like every The Rock movie), and aren't clearly meant to be merchandise generators (star wars, avengers, jurassic park).

Saving Private Ryan, I guess?

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I liked Casino Royale (with Daniel Craig), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (without Daniel Craig), Munich (with Daniel Craig), There Will Be Blood, Slow West, True Grit (2010), and The Road (all without Daniel Craig).

[Edit: my kids really love that stupid Woodpecker movie. It's loud and annoying but it keeps them quiet and occupied for 90 minutes]

there are no good movies

, only good screenplays

Do you like old ****?

Absolutely, they're my favorites. I am especially fond of noir, westerns, the so-called "hardboiled" films, "screwballs," and the more comedic dramas.

The only movie I like is Stuart Little 3.

I was reminded of Captain America: The Winter Soldier the other day, what I consider to probably be the best MCU film, and we watched it again. There's an overhead shot showing Cap running down the deck of a ship, crushing hostiles and that's when I noticed a similarity between this film and the Nolan Batman films. It would be an interesting movie to further analyze and it is really interesting that the hyper-successful Marvel films are owned by the same people that don't seem to have a clue how to replicate that success with what was already one of the most beloved film franchises of all time. Maybe Star Wars under Lucas or Disney control just never had anywhere to go but down.