Shame about The Last Jedi, eh? (SPOILERS)
Posted: December 15th, 2017, 10:51 am
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I come from the Coen School of Hero Doesn't Always Get Epic, Dignified Death, so I'm not upset about Ackbar's death. War gets people killed--often in a flash, often without ceremony. Besides, it's not like he's Han or somebody. I know he's a beloved character, but he's only had about five minutes of screen time in the movies, and he's mostly just famous for shouting the obvious in a moment of peril.To have Ackbar die, then just mention it in a throwaway line while creating another character to fulfill a purpose he could easily do is just typical of the bloat this movie suffers from.
I see your Space Superman Leia and raise you a Cowtick Surfing Anakin, Tarzan Chewie, and "Now *this* is pod racing!"Space Superman Leia is the dumbest and worst executed thing in 9 movies.
I'm still surprised that Luke's Force projection, in particular, is seen as a "gotcha." The movie establishes beforehand that projections (and even Force Ghosts) are tangible and that matter can transmit. Plus, Luke clearly has the darker beard (bad dye job, by the way) from the flashbacks. Do people really think Luke stopped to dye his beard before going to face down the First Order?Force projection is just a lazy plot device to avoid having to package development neatly by having characters travel to be in the same location, and used as a lazy “gotcha” at the end.
I have a number of things to say about the tracker subplot and the Canto Bight scene--along with a lot of DJ speculation--but I know Ulic is working on a review and that he may cover a lot of the same ground, so I will wait until after he's posted his thing and see if there's anything left to say.The whole tracker subplot makes no contribution to anything other than plot contrivances. Canto Bight and the side mission does nothing, achieves nothing, except for allowing the movie to appear as shit as the Prequels for a while before introducing some weak, ill judged social commentary.
Boba Fett is his own shit Boba Fett. I like it when the seemingly badass character is chumpatized. People often love it when it's done elsewhere (Bond, Indiana Jones, Guy Ritchie movies, Game of Thrones [reportedly; I keep meaning to watch it]), but I gather that people don't want it in Star Wars.Phasma, again, completely fails to do anything of note. Like a shit Boba Fett.
Isn't giving up and heading off to Dagobah more or less exactly what Yoda did? One could argue that Obi-Wan didn't quite do this, since he followed Luke to Tatooine in an apparent silent guardian capacity. Whatever the case, Yoda was arguably the most powerful Jedi in the universe. He took a little more than a year to regroup. Even if he's waiting for the Skywalker twins to grow up, that's pretty defeatist, and it's potentially telling that he didn't personally oversee the development of at least one of them. (He also actively chose a system, if supplementary material is to be believed, with enough negative Force energy to cloak his presence.)"'I said to Rian, I said ‘Jedis don’t give up,’ Hamill explained in an interview currently making the rounds on YouTube. 'I mean even if he had a problem, maybe take a year to try and regroup.'"
I really liked how the final duel was fought. As you said he didn't land a single hit, he wasn't even there. How do we win a fight? by not being hit. How do we not get hit/avoid a fight? By not being there.The Swollen Goiter of God wrote: ↑December 23rd, 2017, 7:31 pm Potential reinforcement for the idea that Luke is serving in a balancing capacity on Crait:
I don't think anybody dies or is injured--on either side of the conflict--after Luke walks out to meet the First Order. He does it without striking a single blow, too, which is pretty neat.
I don't think we're ever told in the movie that Luke created the map, just as we're not told why Luke went to Ahch-To. Abrams and Kasdan may have done this on purpose, either to give the next team as white a card as possible or to underscore their assumed We're-Not-the-Prequels message by keeping things nebulous. ("Look, Ma! No Midi-Chlorians!") Maybe both. It could also just be that they were being sloppy or that they were told to let the book and comics writers fill in the gaps, but I think it's more likely that felt they had some kind of mandate to build mystique.Slartibartfast wrote:If he meant to be found in the event that there was an emergency, then he must have had a change of heart in the time between the map's creation and the time that we see him in VII and VIII.
A moviegoer shouldn't have to read the ancillary material, though, and I don't really think it's necessary in this case. The viewer gathers from watching that Lar San Tekka has some mystic-y ideas about the Force, that he's understood to have some connection to Luke, that he has a key bit of information about Luke's possible whereabouts, and that he, like Leia, appears to think it necessary to track down Luke. "I've traveled too far, and seen too much, to ignore the despair in the galaxy. Without the Jedi, there can be no balance in the Force," he says. Luke, as per Johnson, clearly doesn't agree.After the Battle of Endor, San Tekka helped Luke Skywalker recover secret Jedi lore that the Empire had tried to erase, and Leia Organa hopes the old scout can now help find her brother. Following decades of adventure, San Tekka retired to live simply on Jakku, where he follows the dictates of the once-forbidden Church of the Force.
I got the sense that it wasn't considered seriously as an option because they don't have way to pilot ships remotely in the Resistance. (This is potentially a pretty hard thing to swallow, but I'm sure some goofy explanation could be offered. Star Wars and bizarre apologetics often go hand-in-hand. Maybe it's just this style of ship or just ships of these size. Dunno. Maybe somebody else does.) They didn't want to put self-sacrifice on any specific person's shoulders, maybe, or maybe it didn't seem like an ideal Resistance action to the filmmakers. It could be that they were relying on Westerners having blanched at it as a wartime tactic as practiced by Easterners and Middle Easterners to make it seem unpalatable/the coward's way/culturally inappropriate.Mal Shot First wrote: ↑April 10th, 2018, 1:18 pmAnother thing that bothered me was how late the idea of the kamikaze jump to light speed comes about (which was also mentioned previously in this thread, I think). If they were going to sacrifice that ship anyway by having it either be bombarded to pieces by the Imperial fleet or confiscated by them, the option that does the most damage to the enemy should have come up much sooner. In any case, these types of things weren't all that distracting in the grand scheme of things.