It was truly something.
Babe, time for your bi-weekly struggle session over TLJ! :yes-honey-left:
It's a bad movie. All the sequel trilogy are bad movies, and I will admit that TLJ is the best one out of the lot, but that's kind of like saying I'd prefer catching syphilis over ebola. The only points in its favor are that it's not written/directed by JJ 'Magic Box' Abrams and that it didn't just blatantly copy+paste an existing Star Wars movie. Neither of those points are high praise.
The plot is driven entirely by Every. Single. Character. grabbing a hold of the Idiot Ball at the very beginning and holding on for dear life for the full runtime of the film, and not in a fun "look at how incompetent all these characters are, haha!" way but rather a "this movie should be 5 minutes long and end with the First Order using their BFG to blow up the lone enemy ship instead of the entirely stationary planetary base because literally anyone in their command structure had two braincells to rub together" way.
The plot boils down to a nonsensical and extremely contrived low-speed car chase with multiple B-plots that plod along and accomplish nothing. Like, literally nothing. At no point should you be engaged with it, because it goes out of its way to waste an hour of your time on the world's most hamfisted "war profiteers are bad, actually" side plot that just ends with absolutely nothing being accomplished other than some racehorse stand-ins getting released into the wild (which, given they're racehorses, will end about an hour later with all of them having been eaten by something or starving because they've never had to fend for themselves before. Good job, space PETA!)
I am also one of those nerds who will forever ignore that the film introduced the concept that you can just ram your spaceship into a fleet at lightspeed in a kamikaze attack, because the worldbuilder in my head goes into a frothing rage thinking about how that completely invalidates all warfare forever if any random nation-state can just fling automated asteroids-with-engines-attached at their enemies from afar and nuke their navies/planets/moon-sized superweapons into oblivion at a fraction of the cost of an actual military. The worldbuilding of the sequel trilogy is absolute fucking dogshit in general, but at least the nonsensicality of the First Order going from random terrorist cult to galaxy-spanning empire in the span of a few days between the first and second films doesn't invalidate shit in literally every other era of Star Wars.
Rogue One had a one dimensional cast and pacing issues, and it still manages to be an infinitely better film because at least the plot actually makes sense and goes somewhere.
I am also one of those nerds who will forever ignore that the film introduced the concept that you can just ram your spaceship into a fleet at lightspeed in a kamikaze attack, because the worldbuilder in my head goes into a frothing rage thinking about how that completely invalidates all warfare forever if any random nation-state can just fling automated asteroids-with-engines-attached at their enemies from afar and nuke their navies/planets/moon-sized superweapons into oblivion at a fraction of the cost of an actual military.
hahah yeah I just posted the same, like, it always bothered me that they never did that. Death star? uhhh okay, put an engine on a big rock and lightspeed into it, done deal, good bye. If it's not possible, like hyperspace is separate from realspace and you just go through things (which wouldn't make sense in other ways i.e. Han's Kessel Run would be super easy just hyperspacin' through black holes (or nebula or whatever the fuck they retconned it into)) then it's forgivable, but by demonstrating that it is possible... it's just so stupid.
especially when literally any of the support cruisers that just "run out of gas" could have made a similar attack, saving everyone else, instead of just dying for no fucking reason
I think the part where they got took to a jailcell with a hacker that broke them out and had the skills they needed was point I gave up on the movie. Like, its full of dumb moment, but that one takes the cake.
Haters may disagree, but the Last Jedi was definitely one of the Star Wars movies of all time
Look, I'm just going to say it: The traumatized Luke Skywalker we got was much more interesting than the Infallible Luke Skywalker the nerds wanted.
Also, the fact that he did the thing he said he wasn't going to do ("Face down the entire First Order with a laser sword") while still keeping true to himself (not actually fighting) was awesome. And kissing off Kylo with a very Han Solo "See you around, kid" was the chef's kiss.
He got basically the prequel trilogy treatment: not too bad if you write it out with a kind shading, but poorly executed when you actually watch it.
It was the only star wars film that had things to say. Mainly complaining about the burden of the franchise history. But it accidentally has interesting ideas being explored. Not something any other Star Wars film has. For all its flaws, it was a great film because of that
Why doesn't the resistance, upon seeing that they can be followed through hyperspace, not simply turn their ships in ten different directions and scatter? They can't follow all of you.
The Luke/Kylo/Rey stuff in the film was good, but everything else needed a big rewrite. Holdo needs to not exist so that Poe can take command after Leia is killed and get a character arc. Finn and Rose need to do something that is connected to either Poe or Rey, not run off on their own into a plot cul de sac. Disney's handling of the sequel trilogy is truly appalling, if they had spent just one year in pre production getting a director and a writer together to write all three films at one time they would have been a thousand times better.
Having Holdo/internal dissent within the rebels (or whatever they were called this time around) could have been interesting. She just had a bad plan, kept it secret from basically everyone else on a flimsy premise and with little explanation, and whatever the hell Poe was going to do wasn't a good plan either.
A rewrite that could have made the film a lot more interesting would be if, instead of the hyperspace tracker being the result of some new technology, it was instead the work of a spy. So Holdo can't tell anyone what's going on, and Poe takes it upon himself to go on a mole hunt (possibly because his friend Finn has been implicated and he wants to clear his name). None of the Star Wars films have ever really dealt with spies, so it would have been a new scenario for the franchise which would also have been nice.
It's the Dark Souls II of Star Wars (:so-true:): Seriously flawed in many ways but also refreshing, innovative, and distinct in its identity, with the following sequel not learning from it and pretending it doesn't exist.
That being said I'd replay DS2 before I'd rewatch TLJ any day
I loved DS2. The Fume Knight and Sinh the Slumbering Dragon are amazing fights
Rogue One was alright but god damn
You could tell the original screenplay was a BANGER about what it's actually like to be a guerilla fighter against a fascist empire. Really rewriting the subtext of the whole original trilogy
Like the fucking whole hook of the trailer was the "what will you become?" speech and that got CUT OUT.
They rewrote it into a more genetic star wars formula
Me too. The robot from that is my favorite Star Wars character
My brain switched the Alan Tudyk Rogue One robot and the Phoebe Waller-Bridge Solo robot for a minute. I :blocky-wat:'d until I figured it out.
Rogue One is the only Star Wars movie since Return of the Jedi that i actually liked
x wings are lightspeed capable
the fact that you can hyperspace into another ship and blow it up means that for all of this time, they could have simply hyperspaced a single x wing into a star destroyer and blown it up as the energy carried by it would be immense (you know, going faster than fucking light)
I've always been bothered by the physics at hand and how they don't take advantage of that, but seeing them do it once and then never again bothers me even more
but seeing them do it once and then never again bothers me even more
This is always my pet peeve. Like, I can gloss over a bunch of things for the sake of the story but once something has been introduced it becomes stupid to completely forget about it. This one really takes the cake. Just have a droid program an X-Wing on a collision course and you don't even need the dead pilot part.
I'm starting to worry that the upcoming Taika Waititi directed Star Wars movie might end up being bantha poo-doo. :(
hopefully how hot he is right now gives him some leeway, the wiki page does mention that he doesn't think they should keep getting bogged down with prequels and origin stories and stuff. Maybe we'll finally get the fabled Something New out of the Star Wars universe?
We'll see, but Star Wars is very much built on nostalgia and iconic designs but little else. They'll have to jam X-Wings, Milleniums Falcon, lightsabers, etc into it. The movie that (imo) got the furthest from being a "typical star wars movie" was Solo, and that still had fucking Darth Maul show up.
Darth Maul show up
which was really weird imo but I guess they want to use that Nostalgia Factor to get people in theaters for Solo 2: more backstory, ugh
Haven't seen it yet, but I've heard mixed reviews on Thor Love and Thunder. I'm hoping the Disney checks and mountains of coke haven't gone to his head :(
idk I'll have to watch it, the last thing I saw from him was Our Flag Means Death which was great
I loved it
Without writing too much about a movie I saw once a long time ago,
It certainly did have awkward pacing but what really got me excited was the direction it showed the series was about to go. Episode 7 was the safe movie that proved they could make a competent if totally unambitious Star Wars again. Last Jedi threw a curveball.
That of course was all deleted when they made the next movie. Completely deleted,
