I guess I'm in the minority amongst most of my friends. Though I agree that the writing could have been better, I really only took issue with a couple things:

1. Too much comic relief where tension should have continued to grow
2. Plot devices (looking at you hyperspace tracking) that exist solely to make things more difficult / hopeless

Aside from that, I loved the character progression for Kylo Ren. He came off as significantly less whiny though clearly internally conflicted. I was happy to see that Snoke wasn't going to be Palpatine 2 Empire Boogaloo. And most of all I was happy to see a HUGE return to the Force being a mystical entity that strives for balance.

Like everyone else, I think Rey should be hindered more because of her lack of training. That part doesn't make sense, but in a world where the writers decided to add plot devices just to make you fail it makes sense that to fix their errors they had to deus ex machina some master Jedi.

Good post Yecti, I agree with most of your points. I like your 1st point. I don't think gag scenes are bad always, but IMO they're risky because if they don't land, they're doubly as bad. Personally I thought the scene where Luke mocked Rey was a hilarious gag and helped solidify their characters. I thought BB-8 piloting the AT-ST was just silly, and the silliness distracts from the main tension of the scene. So much it made the entire scene feel less important.

You know, I had this detailed write-up ready to go that broke down everything I didn't like about The Last Jedi, but I was jotting down the entire movie. Other than the cinematography — which was utterly gorgeous — I didn't like anything about it.

Nearly every scene in the movie starts out so intriguing, only to be yanked away at the last second by a breathtakingly dumb decision.

I was talking to my brother, and we came to the conclusion that an important scene was missing from this movie. On the movie, after the lightsaber explodes and the ship gets cut in half, we cut to a shot where Rey has vanished and Kylo Ren is on the floor. Hux approaches and pulls his pistol to shoot him, but Kylo wakes up and they have a conversation. They should have done a scene like this, but with Rey. She should have considered killing Kylo Ren while he was unconscious to end his evil, only to realize she was in the same situation as her disgraced master, Luke. Then she makes a decision to spare him and leaves in the escape pod. It would have been a nice growth arc for Rey and shown the humanity of Luke Skywalker and how easy it is to give in to weakness.

Dang. I really wish this had happened.

Make two versions of the movie, just like JK. Offer the 'alternative' plotline in the form of something that you can buy, like a game, or simply streaming video.

Basically a 'Choose your own adventure' in which every branch is monitized (if you repeat the process).

Oh, so it turns out I somehow missed an important scene. I guess there's a shot of all of the Jedi books sitting on the Millenium Falcon near the end. Why were they there? Many think Rey stole them. Maybe, but I think spirit Yoda might notice. Or maybe not, but I'm inclined to think Yoda did it.

In either case, the likely result is, Leia and Rey go through the texts and develop some sort of neo-Jedi reformation movement and devise a plot to save the universe from Kylo Ren.

However Disney should let me write the superior film: instead, Kylo Ren spends vast resources hunting down Rey and the #Resistance, then finally manages to capture the Falcon, and he ends up with the books. The books teach Kylo how to summon past Jedi to speak to him, so he naturally summons Vader. Except Vader totally chastizes him for choosing all the wrong things. So Kylo agrees and decides to transform the First Order into something more like the Old Republic. Rey fights to lead her neo-Jedi hippy cult. Rest of the movie is protestants vs Catholics.

May be dumb but probably less dumb than whatever they'll have Rey do with the texts.

Oh, besides the movie spitting in the face of ESB regarding Rey and her abilities/training, I wanted to point out a few other bothersome things. When Luke attempts to train Rey, he sees her get tempted by the dark side so easily, and mentions something about the last student he saw with such power blah blah, clearly referencing Kylo Ren.

So Luke basically said Rey and Kylo were on equal footing power wise. So, uh, why does he get defeated by her twice again, given he has the training?

The other aspect I was thinking of was how Luke defeats the Sith in RotJ, and how he changed from ESB. In ESB Luke is gung ho and wants to fight Vader. In RotJ he takes the opposite stance! He defeats them by refusing to fight! Being a Jedi is explained in RotJ as having a principled moral code, Luke goes for one purpose: a nonviolent confrontation that will convert Vader. The winning of this battle has nothing to do with lightsabers, it's about Luke's perseverence in turning Vader.

It's a struggle, when Luke loses it and just wails on Vader until he cuts off Vader's hand, revealing their similarities, he appears at his "strongest" in the battle but he's actually at his weakest moment. It's only when he basically relinquishes his sword altogether that Vader acts to save Luke.

But nearly all of that is thrown out in TLJ. Rey sort of believes Kylo Ren can be saved, but it's, like, a total failure. Maybe they wanted the inverse of RotJ too where she fails to convert Kylo but succeeds in battle? I don't know, I'm really grinding my gears to justify the plot of TLJ but I keep coming up short.

I don't want to just say, "it failed to deliver on any promises, wasted our time with a bunch of pointless scenes, undoes the key story of the original trilogy, left many plot holes and made the bad guy far more interesting than the good", but that's pretty much what TLJ did.

It would take some pretty bold writing to make the next movie properly utilize the events of TLJ, and I'd be surprised if they made any choice that didn't boil down to a dumb justification of Marvel-tier pointless lazer battles between innate "good" and "evil" without a shred of story.

Or, maybe, since they showed Hux has clear insubordinate thoughts, maybe Kylo gets overthrown by Hux, then converted to the light by Rey, then "the squad" get together for an hour long battle scene that takes down the First Order, with each character getting plenty of "badass" or gag scenes to correlate with what the analysts think will maximize what percentage of the audience enjoys certain scenes.

Let's just make each new sequal a part of a fractal structure. Bringing back Vader would just be the start. We need to subsume the original three trilogies into a non-linear timeline that references both the future and the past at any given point.

Then there can be infinity Star Wars movies / money, and they will get better each time, as they begin to include more and more content wholesale from the OT (rather than this silly "rhyming" excuse for lazy homages as breathers between CGI fighting).

Maybe Star Wars is getting worse the further it departs from its anime roots.

The Simpsons did it.

Keep on trying, bub!

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Do you know what else The Simpsons did?? Entertain the whole world for 8 years

i still cant believe they cancelled that show after 8 seasons :/

So each person just writes and films their own fanfiction and that's canon for that one person?

I like it, let's do that.

I don't mind if they keep making movies in the Star Wars universe but they need to detach them from the Skywalker family. A Boba Fett movie done well could be awesome (though will in reality probably be awful) and Old Republic era movie could be great.Perhaps it's just because I'm older now but games like TIE Fighter, KotOR and to a lesser extent Jedi Knight felt more starwarsy than any of the movies outside the original trilogy.

And therein lies one of the problems: to us, TIE Fighter, Grand Admiral Thrawn, etc., are more Star Wars-ey, but to George Lucas, all the silly stuff aimed at kids from TPM is more Star Wars-ey. The problem is it just ain't very good.

Asking for further good star wars movies is asking for a repeat of a the freak success of the first two original films. Even RotJ started to be derivative. If all the fans wanted was more in the vein of RotJ, then they can thank the Indiana Jones films for tiring Lucas (or could it have been Ford?) out for a while, and before too long had passed for the whole crew to simply pick up where they left off stylistically.

Either that, or Lucas deliberately wanted to wait two decades to make TPM, because then his CGI dreams could finally come true.

Honestly the only truly good part of RotJ is the final battle between Luke and Vader/Sidious. Much of the rest ranges from decent to iffy.

TLJ is different, though. To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand TLJ. The message is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical writing most of the metaphors will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Kylo Ren's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation - his personal philosophy draws heavily from Nietzshean literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of this characterization, to realize that they're not just cool- they say something deep about LIFE.

Huh, I was wrong, this place did get even more pretentious even though 2017 is almost over.

I think there's a reference you missed

>.<

What I don't understand is how LEC video game cutscenes (even dumb ones like Rebel Assault II) feel more like SW to me than any of the new films. Although maybe that's because it's those very games are the source of what I consider to be SW.

That doesn't surprise me at all. JK's cutscenes are the actual ****.

I mean, that would explain it.

I absolutely hated the film. I don't even want to watch IX anymore. I can't even watch anything Star Wars anymore, not even the ones I like. I'm not going through the best of times right now, so maybe the film rubbed in every way that was incorrect.

It's like this film was designed to ruin Star Wars so it can be completely remade. I feel bad for JJ Abrams having to write a sequel to this.



I really didn't need a film to remind me about this. I am watching everyone around me die in the misery of old age, broken shadows of what I thought they were. I realize that within a few short years, it will only be me.

Then this film comes along.

I am contemplating reaching some of the first two original Star Wars films in order to restore my intuition for what Star Wars 'is', and flush the new films from my mind for the time being.

I will definitely be seeing the final film in the new trilogy, though. I don't think the new movies are terrible by any stretch of the imagination. They certainly aren't works of art that inspire the imagination like the OT, but for Disney to cater to us adult Star Wars fans and not a new generation of kids raised on movies like transformers would decimate their profits.

I'm pretty sure they think they're catering to adult Star Wars fans....

I can see that they might think they are catering to adult Star Wars fans. It's what this apparently entails that made me hesitate to concede that. Star Wars was a really really popular movie when it came out. One possible way to replicate that success is to try to make a movie in the vein of a modern Hollywood blockbuster. But I think that kind of movie is not for adults, or at least not mature adults. Maybe I am wrong to assume that adult Star Wars fans have matured in their tastes since they were kids and would like a movie that stands on its own as a modern space opera. Was the original Star Wars a serious movie? Maybe it wasn't. George Lucas wanted to make something like Flash Gordon (which I am not even remotely familiar with).

What are the new movies then trying to be? Do they stand on their own with audiences who have never seen Star Wars? And do mature audiences consider them to be effective movies in their own right? I like to think that I am just a jaded old nostolgic who is stuck in an outmoded version of the Star Wars universe, but I have a sneaking suspicion take the way Hollywood blockbusters are made today very often produce movies that are just plain bad. Although there have been plenty of good sci-fi movies put out by serious directors in the last decade.

They're quaint, if incompetent by comparison. They're definitely more enjoyable to me than TLJ. The Star Wars feeling is so subjective, but I prefer those cutscenes being Star Wars over TLJ.

boop

I like that the cutscenes are 'quaint'.

In fact, I saw a clip of a fan asking Mark Hamill about what he thought about Spaceballs. His answer was interesting: Hamill said that Mel Brooks was at his best when he was parodying movies that were somewhat serious, and that a problem with Spaceballs was that Star Wars was already kind of funny. But the new films tend to go back and forth between being super dark, and inappropriately funny in a way that kills the tension (as yecti wrote).

It could be for a lot of reasons, some that stand out to me is the visual style feels more consistent and the visual effects are there to enhance the scene, and not be the focus of the scene.

One scene that felt totally wrong is when Finn is in the hangar and all havoc is happening around him. The focus of the scene competes with Finn and Phasma, and the background. You end up splitting your attention and it undercuts whatever emotional payoff should have been there.

We really need good fan films now more than ever.

fwiw I’m not a “movie guy”, but I’ve seen similar patterns play out elsewhere so I can make an educated guess about what’s happening here.

The problem is that nobody has a cogent theory for why Star Wars was initially popular or what the brand even represents. This isn’t unusual; most people don’t plan for success, so they don’t understand it when it happens. Basically, it’s like George Lucas didn’t realize he was making secret sauce, so he didn’t think to write down the recipe. They want to make a new batch but they don’t know what ingredients went into the original. Meanwhile our tastes have changed, so anything even a little different than we’re used to will taste gross.

Write **** down, guys.



Between Save the Cat mania and the fact that Hollywood is trying to create nothing but non-controversial stories that can be trivially translated into every language and culture, and yeah, it’s not exactly easy for them to make a good blockbuster anymore.

The original Star Wars was a B movie. Stop trying to make it out to be anything but, Jones.

George Lucas didn't rape my childhood, he just made it awesome in the first place on accident.

Nietzschean

I haven't looked at this thread until now to avoid spoilers. But I just read the whole thing, and I agree with a lot of things said here.

My overall impression was that it didn't mesh. As has already been pointed out, the humor likely won't age well, and it was highly reminiscent of humor from Marvel movies. But the humor was also strange because it really disrupted the tone of the film. It's a movie that quite obviously is reflecting a lot of the moral relativism of our own time, and, as I watched it, there was something viscerally disturbing about a watching these characters in desperate peril in a world in flux and in transition -- not only politically (with the rise of the New Order and the demise of the Republic), but cosmically (because of an apparent realignment of the force). It felt very timely. It could've been a movie much darker and moodier than Star Wars movies typically are, and at some moments, it was. But the uneasiness that I felt was time and time again broken by efforts to make me laugh that simply didn't. What a messy mishmash of competing ideas and tones. They didn't pull it off.

Is it just me or is it really lame that we're hearing about First Order and Resistance members who are janitors and do other menial labour such as waste disposal? It's as if they took that stupid conversation Kevin Smith has in Clerks about contractors on the Death Star and wrote it into the movie! Barf!

Also, Luke carelessly throwing away the light saber that's being returned to him seemed like a good metaphor for what Rian Johnson was doing at that moment in the movie: just as Luke was discarding that light saber, Johnson was casually discarding the entire build up to Episode VIII, by tossing the idea that Luke had somehow brought Rey to him and there was some reason for her to be there. Guess not! Fake out, we fell for it!! Again: barf!!