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It's still by far the best of the sequels, because it's actually trying to do something. Rian Johnson has heard of themes before, and some of his movies have them, which is more than I can say for JJ Abrams. Plus Star Wars has always had problems with its starships just being WW2 era navy battles, it's just more obvious here.
its also the only Star Wars to like, interrogate the world at all? like hey guys maybe these Jedi guys kinda sucked and blew it at their ONE JOB?
They're better than the sequels. Interesting ideas explored badly are still way better than 7 or 9.
They hardly even have that interesting of ideas.
7 is better than every prequel. Craft matters. Nothing saves the atrocious dialogue, camera work, editing, etc of the prequels. 7 is a retread and a simple adventure, but it's at least well made, acted, paced, and shot. There's nothing wrong with simple adventures, especially when the prequels aren't exactly arthouse.
9 is the only one that gets prequel bad because of the rushed editing of the opening and the comic book level plot. Even then, it's only about as bad as ROTS and I'd still probably watch that garbage over AOTC.
I can respect preferring 7 to the prequels, but 9 is worse than the prequels in almost every aspect. The pacing in the prequels feels Oscar-worthy compared to 9. Even though AOTC has the worst individual moments in the series, the movie manages to hold itself together better than 9.
Been a while, only saw it in theaters. What themes did 8 have? There was one scene that had absolutely zero effect where Benicio del Toro says "weapons dealers sell to both side." Rose's line about saving what we love instead of fighting?
I thought the stuff with Luke and Rey was interesting, about how you have to let go of the past and all that. I don't think the themes of 8 are amazingly complex or impressively told, but they still make it better than 7 and especially 9.
See that theme could have been effecive, if it wasn't undermined by the end of the movie. Rey and Luke went back to being Jedi (Rey even keeps the sacred texts) and Kylo Ren became a sith lord. "Let go of the past" but still end up recreating the exact scenario that the movie began in, except worse off.
Here's one that's gonna piss you off: If the giant enemy ship can track them through hyperspace, why don't they all just fly off in a different direction? The enemy dreadnought can chase down one of them, but you can save 95% of your fleet - compared to the "until we run out of gas" plan which ends up getting 95% of the fleet destroyed.
I like TLJ's themes and the Rey/Kylo/Luke stuff but the script needed to be reworked from scratch. Oh and the bombers thing was almost fine - Star Wars space battles are just WW2 dogfights, so the concept of strategic bombers in space fits, but the way they all blow each other up is extremely stupid and the fact that they apparently only needed one of the twenty bombers they sent out to actually destroy the enemy ship negates the sacrifice of everyone else (and is your first indication that the Resistance's command is hilariously incompetent).
I DEMAND HYPERREALISM IN MY SPACE OPERA WHERE X-WINGS AND TIE FIGHTERS HAVE MADE AEROBATIC MANEUVERS IN A VACUUM SINCE THE VERY FIRST MOVIE
See, this is why I prefaced by saying "Star Wars space battles are just WW2 dogfights", because of course they're not realistic. But the space battles in the sequel trilogy are bad depictions of WW2 dogfights.
star wars space battle is so entirely devoid of consisentcy and logic you really just have to take it at its face and not think about it. star wars ships are literally like napoleonic sailing ships transposed to space with 'lightspeed' being the maguffin that lets the plot traverse wide distances
in this case they were doing like a master & commander ship pursuit shtick
doing like a master & commander ship pursuit shtick
But doing it poorly.
Man a Star Wars movie or episode of a show that actually rips off Master and Commander well would be so cool. Imagine seeing the gritty daily life onboard a Republic cruiser, with 1970s computers filling up entire rooms, droids beeping at each other and naval officers doing complicated star chart navigation, and engineers doing maintenance in tight industrial corridors. There's a subplot about a reactor leak that takes a few lives midway through the story, there's tension between the officers and the crew who are clearly from different socioeconomic backgrounds, and it all ends with a climactic engagement against a Star Destroyer. Throw in a POV character who has a bit of a spiritualistic point of view (maybe a force using culture that isn't the Jedi) and you've got a perfect Star Wars story.
as a reformed star wars nerd who grew up before the prequels and read a ridiculous amount of the sw universe books, the prospect of a star wars show/movie that doesn't include ANY of the canon characters and just gets into some interesting corner of the universe is the only thing that keeps me checking in on star wars at all. I'd love some gritty noir detective thing, and if disney has to do callbacks let news or chatter around the characters refer to big events in the canon.
Mandalorian felt like such a breath of fresh air for this reason. Plenty of callbacks to the movies but they were all incidental to the main characters and plots. Then they started putting shit in from The Clone Wars, and it started getting worse.
I'm on the same page with you, mandalorian was fun that slowly decreased the more it got dragged back into the main "story" of star wars
mandalorian was fun shit, I’ve heard the new boba fett is also not bad
they turned star trek into star wars, so they might as well turn star wars into star trek, it’s only fair
The difference between Star Trek and Star Wars is that Star Trek shouldn't kill the Gorn, while Star Wars should have the main character learn a dark truth about themselves and overcome it to become powerful enough to kill the Gorn.
So what you want is like, Battlestar Galactica if they maintained the old 70's sets and charms lol
Or at least until the new show shat the bed with the plot
Also that just plays into my favourite pet theory on Star Wars, which is that it gets more interesting the fewer Jedi are actually involved with the plot
it gets more interesting the fewer Jedi are actually involved with the plot
fuck yes. thats what made star wars galaxies so fun to play before they made it too easy to be a jedi. its much better when a force user showing up somewhere borders on coming across an eldritch horror or some shit
Basically yeah.
My theory on great Star Wars media is this: take a "Genre" plot, add a sci-fi coat of paint, and give it just a little bit of mysticism. The OT is a hero's journey with some cool force bits. The Mandalorian is a western with the cool Mandalorian culture/religion. The good episodes of Star Wars Visions are just Shounen Anime and/or Samurai movies with the force, and the same could be said of the good plotlines from The Clone Wars.
The prequels and sequels all fall apart because despite the billions of dollars dumped into their special effects, bad writing is bad writing. Seriously every single one of those movies feels like a first draft, I have no idea how they kept making this mistake over and over again after Episode I George Lucas should have had his typewriter taken away from him and Disney should have found somebody to write the sequels that wasn't involved with Batman v Superman.
it gets more interesting the fewer Jedi are actually involved with the plot
One of my favorite pieces of star wars anything is the one where a zombie outbreak happens aboard an imperial prison ship. It was gripping, violent and there wasn't a single jedi around to nerd it up. Also zombie wookies
gritty
imagine a zach "not a single theme in alan moore's watchmen penetrated my thick skull" snyder star wars movie
[ancient lamentation music]
pump have you ever watched a star wars movie everything is literally covered in grit and it is gritty pump
Yeah it doesn’t have to be consistent or logical. It just has to be fun to watch, which it mostly wasn’t.
The suicide bombing part was fucking tight though. I loved that. They should have let admiral ackbar do that though and not the random general they introduced.
TLJ elicits this weird contrarianism where people hype it up as good and clever because it does something different from the usual Star Wars movies, but actually it's just dogshit from beginning to end and all tropes are subverted in the laziest, most nonsensical ways possible.
I remember someone doing a quick review of the space battle in the opening scene where they pointed out that a small change in the First Order's formation or a change in the dreadnought's first target would've ended the movie right then and there with the Resistance crushed, followed by pointing out that the video author could've made the same argument for about half the movie with ease. The plot literally only works if every single person in the movie grabs hold of the Idiot Ball from the title sequence onwards.
Edit: As if to prove my point, here's a thread full of people going "IT'S THE ONLY GUD STAR WARS MOVIE!!!1" as if tESB isn't sitting right there being better in every way.
It’s literally people just being contrarian about the initial contrarianism… the chuds who blamed “disnay sjws wokescold boss-moms” for it not fufilling their weird fantasies should all be shot, but that doesn’t mean TLJ was a good movie.
The opening with the heroes doing Tony Stark banter with one of the main villains followed in quick succession by a sad dramatic scene of a character sacrificing themselves gave me such tonal whiplash
the fucking bathos in that movie gave me an ulcer and made me spit up a viscus mixture of bile and blood
The entire rebel subplot is by far the worst part of that movie. I remember reading some early leaks (probably just 4chan bullshit) about the chase taking place in some kind of nebula where everyone’s ships would be flying blindly and it would’ve been some kind of cat and mouse submarine deal.
Instead we get this goofy extended pursuit that appears to last like a week given Rey spends several nights on that ocean planet lol. No wonder folks got antsy and mutinied.
I'll give it this, I can see what they were going for. Give that script a few rewrites a d polish it down and have it make sense and there is a good movie in there.
Right? The war profiteering shit was great. They should have made benecio del toros character more of an antihero after the betrayal and there was a cool class warfare dynamic for the casino planet that went totally untapped.
Imagine if the heros wound up meeting a resistance group on the planet that set off bombs in the casino right as they were trying to escape.
A New Hope is the only good star wars movie. 5, 6, and 7 have nothing to say except "heroic action! in space!" 1, 2, 3, and 8 have interesting themes buried deep where a contrarian can find them, but are poorly plotted, acted, directed, and otherwise just messy films. I have not seen the 9th one but I assume it achieves synthesis by being bad in both of those ways.
I don't have any deep attachment to this position, I'm just here to sate your appetite for hot takes.
Empire Strikes Back is better because Lucas didn’t direct it.
Return of the Jedi is pretty solid once I realized the Ewoks are basically furry swamp Maoists.
5 and 6 do the heroic stuff well, and while they aren't exactly original they at least had something in mind other than 'what if I did a new hope again, the exact same way, but with cgi.' And the 9th film manages to be bad in a totally new and unique way, where it simultaneously tries to undo everything even slightly interesting about the Last Jedi while padding the runtime with the most inane bullshit I've ever seen in a movie.
The slow bombers are cool because it shows they’re even more fucked than the original rebel alliance.
Anyway, yeah, that movie is really bad, just for different reasons than the chuds shit their diapers over.
I mean even beside the secret superpower empire hiding out somwhere why are they even more fucked. You won, what happened
They had to really stretch it to make episode 7 a remake of A New Hope. The Galactic Republic only exists in one scene, where it gets wiped out.
Just imagine if instead the chase was on foot and different rebels had information or macguffins. There could've been a different world and then there would be reasons for the groups splitting up. And the bombing run at the beginning could make more sense. Dropping bombs in the setting doesn't make sense at all, but still.
I mean think about it. They could have the a b and c plots going as normal for the most part, but all on different parts of the planet. It would better highlight the class differences and politics they were going for. But the whole war profiteering thing is such a late addition to the movie canon. I mean Kotor has the Czerka Corporation, and their bullshit is explored throughout both games.
I like the backstory Rey got, but I'm annoyed what the next movie does with it.
I have friends who are amazing writers and I'd love to see them at the helm of such large projects. I know they could do a lot better than the insulated nepotism movie industry.
After watching Clone Wars, Rebels, Mandolorian, and Book of Boba Fett, I’m convinced that Star Wars works better as tv shows than movies.
The original three are pretty good movies but that's because they didn't and didn't need to try to worldbuild beyond implication that there's more. And they do this very, very well.
Every subsequent movie barring Rogue One falters because of the need to explain everything and how it relates back to the establishing trilogy and that can work pretty well on a longer TV series format but 3 movies just ain't enough
Han Solo was also like 80% “lucas tier pulp” good and 20% “claw your eyes out and fill the bleeding sockets with glass shards” bad.
Watching Donald Glover play Lando was some of the most fun I’ve ever had publicly drunk in a movie theater without getting arrested.
The film offhandedly mentions he is pan/omnisexual, that he’s been fucking a communist robot, and he flirts with han when they first meet. It gives zero fucks about trying to wink at queer-coding, Lando is just queer. It’s fucking tight.
spoiler
The addition of Darth Maul at the end was clutch and I wish they’d done even more with it. Ron Howard had to fight Disney to let him add the amount he did, though.
It’s also impressive the movie made it to theaters at all since they had originally given the director’s chair to two frat dudes known for literally improvising through all of their movies…
no it was the two frat dudes who made the 21 jump street movies.
such as adding more SA/ SV
I’m sorry they added more? what the fuck
Yeah the movie's pretty much irredeemable garbage. You planning to watch Episode 9 which is somehow much worse?
my brain feels like a fucked apart dead thing
:hillary-disgust:
It’s fucking hilarious. Get drunk and/or microdose lsd if you have any
tldr but counter-point: it's actually the only good star wars movie
The Last Jedi pissed off a bunch of redditors when it came out. These redditors went full on gamergate about it, they were pissed because it didn’t coddle them enough (and also because the movie is garbage).
Instead of spending like 10 minutes thinking through why it didn’t work as a film, their chud brainworms somehow mostly blamed women, sjws, and minorities. Also Rian Johnson, so at least they got that right.
It then became a thing to be reactive against the reaction. The majority of people who said the movie was bad were easy dunk target because most of them were bazingabrains speaking in chud tongues. Also they were debate bros and that made it really to upset them.
TL;DR: Contrarians being contrarian against a different kind of contrarian. More interest from everyone involved in that dynamic than the original media critique that originally set it off.
sorry for my rudeness, i'm on one, a bit.
i don't think any of the synthetic computer battle are interesting, fast or slow; making the ships seem to go faster wouldn't do anything for me at all.
what is interesting to me is a reflection on the themes and values that are part of the star wars films, and star wars fandom, and star wars as a cultural object, continually needing to be refashioned by capital. johnson's movie (and to a lesser extent, abraham's one prior to it (really through the creation of Kylo)) approaches these extratextual issues, and even though last jedi necessarily must end w/ an endorsement of the films and the viewing/consuming participants, it at least poses the question, why are we continuing to engage with this? what is the value in this? why don't we, figuratively, take Rey/join Kylo and breakout of this tired, eternal framework, and go liberate the casino planet?
fwiw, i enjoyed/loved star wars and empire when i was a kid, and still feel those films have artistic value. but baby yoda, baby boba fett: even if it has period accurate space combat, it's for babies.
MASTERBATION IS A VIOLATION OF YOUR VOCEL OATH CITIZEN, PLEASE DESIST IMMEDIATELY! :volcel-vanguard: :spray-bottle:
