Hi Jon. I just don't think you have a good grasp on storytelling. You seem to be very annoyed at "mystery" without accepting that a new writer may benefit from not having things set in stone. Not too sure what line of dialogue you want me to quote to support that, although I can point you to interviews where people discuss that!

I do think there's a level of this "backlash" that is mad that TLJ was not the EU. People were mad that TFA was like ANH. People are mad that TLJ isn't "like Star Wars." The best thing TLJ did was try to be its own thing.

Also, feel free to drop the "creative" jabs. I'm attempting to engage in conversation and you're continuing to be petulant about this.

Am I the only one who found the multitude of homages to ESB to be heavy handed? And even more jarring when they set up the homage, and break the fourth wall to make an inside joke with the audience about reversing violating the expectations that the homage set up?

I actually can't remember an example of the latter off the top of my head, but I remember feeling it.

TFA does more than a few things that aren't great from a marketing perspective.

The first big one is that, yeah, it's really really dark. There's some jokey jokes, like BB-8 giving a blowtorch thumbs up, or Han Solo saying "that's not how the force works", but there's nothing at all absurd or incredible about the situations the characters are in. The space nazis are more space nazi than ever. The threats are more dire than ever. Even the thrust of the story, the call to adventure, is darker and bleaker and sadder than it ever was before, a starving scavenger on a dead planet teaming up with a runaway child soldier. Is this supposed to be ****ing funny? Because it's not. It's a huge stylistic departure from the OT. Even the prequels suffered from this problem in retrospect, although not nearly to the same degree.

The second big one is that they've taken away the "happily ever after". Star Wars is a space fairy tale, and the "happily ever after" is an important part of that. It's riskier and more interesting to subvert this, but not exactly something that'll appease an invested ("entitled") audience. Basically you can imagine if Disney made Aladdin 4, set 30 years after the previous one, where Aladdin and Jasmine went through a nasty divorce after their kid finds Jafar's lamp and uses it to murder a bunch of his classmates and become an evil sultan. That's risky, I'm sure someone would have a lot of fun writing that fan fic, but is it something Disney should do? Would little girls still want to dress up as Jasmine knowing she becomes a bitter, regretful divorcee? Are people going to enjoy the original movie the same way, knowing that what they used to consider a heroic triumph was actually leading toward greater darkness and misery? Because that's basically where we are, Disney has basically done this, just to a different franchise.

The third is that there's no table stakes. I mean it this way: you aren't invested in the conflict you see on the screen, you aren't ever given any reason to be attached to the minor characters or the planets you see, so why would you ever want to re-enact any of the battles at home? I'm not really talking about the little kids Hasbro playset stuff, which mostly don't seem to be targeted at the ~cool~ market so much as the ^cute^ :3 market. I mean the video games, Lego sets, models, board games, stuff like that. The expensive stuff, the high margin stuff, mostly purchased by or for older kids and even adults. The only Episode 7 video game was the Lego one. Everywhere else, if there's prequel or sequel content at all, it plays a distinct and distant second fiddle to the OT and even the original, excised-from-canon EU. Licensees really don't seem to care as much about the new stuff, and that says a lot about how much they think it's resonating with audiences. Both today and in the longer term.

But hey, huge corporations are super competent and infallible and I'm sure Disney knows what they're doing.

Multitudes? The only one I can think of is the guys getting in the trench and even that felt like Rian was simply inspired by previous movies. When do they break the 4th wall?

Zinged again! It's almost like 1 movie is only part of a series! oh no!

Cuz the new Star Wars is Marvel-fied. The bad guys come across much like how they're presented in comic book series.

That guy really is 38, so it's an autobiographical tweet, not a mischaracterization of old people, haha.

I think the point is not so much that the movies are above criticism, but that certain issues from older fans (mainly that the movies don't "feel right," or that the canon/worldbuilding aspects are weak) are coming from a very nostalgic & rose-tinted memory of what the films actually were. And that there's no perfect cocktail of production design and music and characterization and plot that will make older fans truly feel like kids again.

E.g.--The Phantom Menace feels (to me) as much like Star Wars as anything I've ever seen, b/c I was ten when it came out and podracing was awesome and no amount of yelling from adults on Massassi and LucasForums was going to change my mind 8)

kylo ren had more depth out of the gate than darth vader

Right in the beginning of the movie: they essentially copy the setup from the beginning of ESB, and then snoke appears to reprimand Hux for letting them escape. But based on our knowledge of ESB, we ought to expect him to be executed for his incompetence. I really feel that the panic at the visage of smoke was meant to evoke an "oh ****, this guy's about to bite the dust" feeling in no uncertain terms. And then he is spared because he is actually tracking them (wow, an homage within an homage!)... plot twist!

Comic books can have plenty of depth, tho. I mean more the pacing and how they choose to build the bad guys up

I have an easy time imagining the Hux Nazi speech being two pages in a comic book. In fact, much of the new SW feels that way. Course I could just be imagining things but iunno.

TLJ very blatantly tried to invert the story of ESB and RotJ. Rey's goal was to convert Kylo, but failed. She also fought the Sith as a rookie and won. You're on Hoth, but oops it's salt. The Jedi training went the opposite.

It didn't turn out well IMO because I feel the inversion was poorly thought out so that it contradicted basic premises of SW itself.

I would have loved the new movies if they were shot in the style of a movie with circa 1980 special effects, hired a really brilliant composer like John Williams in his prime, designed a bunch of costumes and matte paintings and scale models, and spent a large amount of screen time /music romanticizing the life of hammy actors, and just plain limiting the amount of fighting, chaos, and happenstance as a substitute for driving forward the plot in a meaningful way. In other words, keep it simple.

They could have taken any single alien from the cantina scene in ANH, and made up a story about his life on a some distant planet of the outer rim and I'd be more interested. Let me point out that this is exactly what TPM does, and frankly I think that movie is miles ahead of the new ones in terms of creating a coherent stage for us to give a damn about the characters or even just have an idea about what's going on it where we're headed.

The new movies simply try too hard. Star Wars was a pretty straightforward movie.

Between the constant fighting and dependence on the OT for its basic storytelling vocabulary, the movie felt too cramped to flourish a unique sense of place.

I get that they are trying to mirror what happened in ESB with the rebels always on the run. But thinking that making an homage to the story structure of ESB makes an important mistaken assumption about why people love that movie so much: we don't give a damn about the screenplay if we don't feel anything toward the characters on the screen, so making a movie with the same structure but not much more is going to ring hollow.

Give me something to care about and I'll get involved as an audience member with your various plot twists and action sequences.

In some ways, I think the new directors are terrified of repeating the mistakes of TPM. But the truth is, because of their cheesiness, the prequels strike a tone closer to the OT than the new movies do.

Hi mb. You don't need to be an expert at something to dislike it, not even for specific reasons. Saying that your opinion is more correct because you are better at storytelling impresses exactly nobody and will change exactly zero opinions. At least about the work.

Yeah, but, okay. You say you care about story, right? But you really don't seem to be paying much attention to what TLJ's reveals and subversions did to TFA.

Like, TLJ isn't the story, it's part of the story. How does that part fit in with what's already been told? In TFA, Kylo Ren acts like he's scared because some nobody gets involved. Han Solo acts like he's known some nobody for years. Some random force sensitive touches Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber and sees visions of his life and her own childhood which, by the accounts I've heard, is quite different from what was revealed in the new movie. When they made TFA, the intention was absolutely for Rey to have a significant origin, or at least a significant heritage, and without that there are huge chunks of TFA that just plain don't make sense anymore. And that's just Rey.

I'm not saying you're wrong about the risks TLJ has taken. I've never seen it. Maybe TLJ really is the story that should be told, a story that eschews heredity and adopts a new, democratic, anybody-can-be-hero perspective. But accepting that means TFA was the wrong story, and the more JJ's Mystery Box gets torn open, the worse that movie is going to play.

And I already ****ing hated that movie.

Interesting that you saw this in yourself. Contrary to your belief, I was being sincere. Example from Wired:



or any of the limitless number of essays floating around in the vein of "TLJ is a great movie, you just aren't smart enough to understand it".

If I was thinking about anybody I personally know, it would be a friend who recently insisted to me that Star Trek Discovery's design is actually great. Apparently I only consider it ugly it because I'm not a "creative type".

It's sure a good thing this didn't happen to Luke in ANH! Otherwise ESB would have been... er,... somewhat shorter.

Ooh, read it wrong then :X



Oh, that's fine - I mean, like, there are definitely going to be people who romanticize the old films, and that's definitely worth criticizing. Fortunately, on Massassi, I see plenty of deserved criticism for the old trilogy, so I think most of us are at least attempting to be more on the objective side when comparing these films.

Also, the prequels were fine for some of the action they produced. I don't think that's the locus of criticism, though.

Yeah, that scene felt very out of place to me. It felt like a scene I had seen in many different movies already, but I couldn't think of any particular examples, and felt like lazy storytelling, but I wasn't sure why.

Now that you mention that though it makes more sense why it's silly.

Cramped is right, and cramped with a bunch of ****ing stuff that didn't ****ing matter.

I heard one person make a comment that I liked. They said that, they wish during the scene where Finn tries to commit suicide to save the resistance should have happened. Why? Because at least some ****ing development or anything interesting at all would have happened to one of the main characters.

Even Kylo Ren, the only character with a modicum of interesting development, isn't really all that different at the end of TLJ.

Course, don't mention this to the Star Wars defeners. To them, a single scene which tells the audience "this means x for character y!" is character development, even if the character continues to act in the same way they always did.

I just realized "defener" is a pretty obscure reference so if you don't know what I'm talking about, here. Though I suppose defener would work better for "OT is flawless" mythical person than for people who insist the sequels are above criticism.


I think it's just this meta self-consciousness that's pervasive in so much media today. Writers need to get the **** off Twitter, because they spend so much time now "playing with audiences expectations", rather than writing a solid plot and sticking with it.

It's exhausting. I'm not watching Star Wars to relive the past, I'm not watching Star Wars for something new, I'm watching Star Wars to see a film, and all of this work they do to dredge up the past and go "Are we doing it again? Are we? OOOH not this time! Gotcha audience :-)" needs to end. Just make the movie, ****.

But.

But!

If Rey had been, for example, a reincarnation of Anakin Skywalker. A new chosen one, which is an actual canonical thing, then it might, might make some sense that she could see visions of Anakin Skywalker's life when touching his lightsaber.

Probably doesn't make any sense if she's just a rando tho.

Maybe Kylo Ren was lying and gaslighting her. Or maybe not. Who knows? It's a mystery, are you on the edge of your seat? Did Rian play with your expectations? Are you totally trapped in the web of meta-narrative 3d chess?

This is good writing damnit, if you disagree then you're just an old hack who can't get over the past.

Donate to my cartoon ICO and let's fix it. It's about a space witch and a greyhound that used to be a cowboy wizard trying to turn the great basin into a spaceship.

Will you attempt something creative instead of using whatever popular movie cliches you think will popularize your film?

Blade Runner 2049 best film of 2017.

Also: I'm surprised at the amount of people who take the statements of Mark Hamill so seriously. People read way too much into an early interview to claim he hated TLJ, which was itself pretty dumb. OTOH, people seem to think that people actually always give their opinions on Twitter and never say anything for PR purposes.

Anyone whose ever done any work in anything knows you don't publicly badmouth projects and people you worked with if you want to maintain friends in the business. Of course Mark Hamill isn't going to badmouth TLJ, no matter how he feels about the final project. It's all just people projecting exactly what they want to see on his words.

You know, thinking over what we discussed here tonight, I think I'm glad that I watched TLJ, and I don't mean this as a snide retort: thinking about why they didn't resonates with me really made me realize just what it was about the OT that I liked so much.

And no, it wasn't just nostolgia for something I liked because I was a kid when I was exposed to it. If that were true, i'd have the same level of nostolgia for the power rangers movie.

This thread is pretty dumb. In fact, it almost makes me want to see this film out of spite to you all.

Alas.

Hey buddy. Just because I can't type well and have no original thoughts, don't make me no dumb person. My IQ test was officially a B-, 83/100.

I'm going to call FGR out here. I know this was sort of the joke, but... at least I went and saw the movie that I'm supposedly hating on!

Looper was cool tho

The only issue I have with even seeing this film (or anything, for that matter) is that the first company credit title card will never be "NIKUMUBEKI PRESENTS: A FASTGAMERR PROJECT".

(Yeah, I'll try to get over that in 2018, but for these last 5 days of the year it's OG KOOBIE time!)

IIRC you liked rogue one if for no other reason than Vader's TODOA-esque rampage. Heh.

Yeah, it had plenty of good scenes.

I didn't say that.



TFA is only a part of the story too. To Kylo, she's an unknown and that's scary to him. To Han - I dunno, I haven't seen it in a while, but he trusted her. She sees a vision of her childhood. Where in the other movies does this mean shes related to someone important? She gets shown her past, that's all. It doesn't invalidate TFA.



It's not the wrong story, it's just a part of the story.



I know you were being sincere. In that and this:

I think it's still jarring that the Fox fanfare doesn't play right before the first chord of the main theme

I like to think so. There's going to be zeppelins and hallucinations.

I have a project to nail down the production pathway called the persistence of melody about a guy who falls into a river and experiences his dna as music too if you want to give me money for that

After having seen this film once, and replying to this thread, then reading this thread and having seen the film a second time, I've come to this conclusion:

This is the second (by a close margin) best film in the series.

My favoritist part was when Princess Leaiagh, gets blown up on the ship, but says 'Nah bro i used the force' And flies from space all the way into the rebel ship. I used to play lightsabers with my friend Zacharaiah in my backyard and we used to talk about being blown up or die and I say BLOCKED by the force.

Then I liked how the last Jedi broke new GROUND, and I applaud it for being DIFFERENT. Because that weak sauce OT had its rules and now Rian Johnson REFUSES to play by the rules. Now we know that with the force you can:
- Facetime
- Control the Weather
- Project yourself across the Galaxy
- Control yourself in space.

Also I enjoyed how Purple hair did NOT reveal her plan to everyone, even though they were all on the ship, and the fact even if you doubted Poe, he just blew up the death star in TFA -- Becuase who SAYS this woman should bow to men or speak to men if she doesnt want to. And even if it would have negated the entire Ms Schrek/Finn sub plot. Or even the entire character herself. YOU GO GIRL. I applaud Rian AGAIN for being different. Also when Finn says 'Alteast we hurt them' - He hurt their expensive casino furnature and setups and hurt those (not at all deliberately cast white weapons-owners) evil men. That would not be covered by insurance and actually HURT the white supremacists.
Also the way Plasma decided to wait to kill them, till the ship blew up, then lost her gun and died unceremoniously. How dare you assume all storm troopers should have her blaster-proof armor. She was a WOMAN and deserved the bestest.

Also liked how 'Rose' and Finn both not being blown up, then Rose being able to 'pick off' Finn from Kamakazi'ing without either of them being harmed. So she could deliver one of the most epic-lines in any movie EVER. And if you disagree you are SEXIST.

Also now we know that lightsabers can be triggered remotely AND ships can use light travel to BLOW UP other ships. But its never been used before becuase women were not leading the pack. And thats Why we wont have lightsabers being used by themselves to fight ground troops, nor do we have ships being directed to the empire to use the light-speed method to blow them up.

Also who says Kylo ren is not LYING and that he has an elaborate backstory for Reys parents and for snoke that (J̶J̶ ̶A̶b̶r̶a̶m̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶w̶ ̶h̶a̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶f̶i̶x̶) Rian wrote and created and just didnt include, and was not more (bad) Good writing? Are you judging this movie? Are you also a Trump supporter? #Bestmovieever #Wherearehistaxreturns

11/10 A++++++

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8qUDJ8Lv3E