Star Wars Episode VIII

The line about Snoke doesn't have to be in the film.

It's a question the viewers have.

It's a question that has been teased by the makers of the film.

If Snoke was some guy like General Hux than it wouldn't matter. But he's not. He's a force user. Is he Sith? Former Jedi? How is he so powerful as to enable communication between two other people light years away from each other? It's clear he's more powerful in the force than Kylo and Rey. Is he more powerful than Luke? Equal?

Why does he hate Luke so much that the First Order was looking for the map in The Force Awakens to find Luke?

Is he a Luke clone? (That would be a great twist IMHO)

So yes killing him without answering at least some of these questions was stupid.

And no saying go read a book doesn't cut it. If I have to read a book to find something out about what happened in a movie than the movie-maker failed in their job.

 

J.J. Abrams set the stage in The Force Awakens but apparently he left no notes behind on what to do with the characters.

Rian Johnson came in and just changed everything.

Now Abrams is in a box for episode 9. The resistance is all but dead. No one even answered their call. Leia is going to have to be dead when the movie opens up. I can't see them recasting Fisher. So no one in the resistance has the "gravitas" to convince other star systems and people to join up to fight the resistance. Even with Luke's action in the movie at the end. (I do hope someone recorded video of it at the least so the galaxies version of YouTube could see it)

 

That's on them.

 

My theory?
We don't pick right up like TLJ did, we do big time jump, and we pick up with Broom Kid.

 

Lando. Lando will save it all

 

You're really going to pretend that two years of speculation brought about by the fact JJ deliberately created mysteries about these characters didn't happen?

 

The speculation happened.
JJ didn't make it happen.
Any more than Gene Roddenberry made people write slash fanfic.

 

There was enough hinted at and talked about to justify the speculation.

It would be like having a Superman movie and you showed a girl with similar powers as Superman, but we don't see her parents and we don't specifically see her escaping an exploding planet or giant skull ship. Then we see a villain who looks kind of like Braniac, but we get a brief glimpse of him so it could be him or it it could be another Superman villain or it could be a completely new character, but there's just not enough to go off of. Then in interviews you have the director telling us we will learn more about these characters and who they are and where they came from. It would be completely reasonable for fans to speculate that the girl is Kara and the villain is Braniac or another familiar Superman villain.

Then two years later it turns out the girl was just a random Kryptonian (we've never heard of) who's parents also just happened to build a ship just before Krypton blew up and sent their daughter to space, or worse, sold her to some random space asshole and then somehow ended up on Earth. Then the villain, just some guy. Oh and Superman gives up on the Justice League because Superboy went crazy almost because he was getting his first boner so Superman almost kills him. Think about that, just think about it a little.

 

Oh and remember the JL episode when Supergirl did show up and she was going ape shit? Superman didn't give up on her.

 

Ignore the prequels, and just pretend you only saw ROTJ....
Why did the Emperor have wrinkles?
Was it just age, or is it something unnatural?
Why did he have yellow eyes?
Is his lighting power the force, or is he some kind of electric eel alien?
How did he turn Anakin to Vader?
Was it exactly like his attempts to turn Luke, or something different?
What is the Emperor's name?
Is he a Darth?

Now, factor in the prequels, and look at the shit we STILL don't know about Palpatine.
Was he born on Naboo?
Did he have a fucked up childhood?
Was he rich? Was he poor?
Did he have any friends?
Did he love anyone, or was he always a shit?
Did he have hopes and dreams?
How soon did Plagueis sweep him up and corrupt him?
Why did he (Palpy) hate the Jedi so much?
Why did he (Palpy) take up an ancient blood hatred that he had nothing to do with?
Did Jedi once give him a wedgie in gym on top of everything else?
Did Darth Plagueis ever demonstrate he had the power to defeat death?
Was it perfected, or was it like Pet Sematary?

These are fun to speculate on, and they're all things the movies dangle at us...but do we NEED them?
Nope.

 

I remember wondering early on if it was his hand, but on repeat viewings concluded it was not.

For more evidence, the hand is not present in that final chute, whose trap door opens to dump Luke out.

 

I blame Damon lindlof. His fast and loose writing of mysterious shit on the spot without any pre planned endgame has heartily fucked sci-fi.

 

There was a lot of tubes that Luke fell past and into. To say the hand would go into the same tube as him.......

 

No one said we need a biography of Snoke in the movie.

 

No, but for me, this new trilogy seems really disconnected. With the ot, it was obvious enough, there was an empire, the emperor managed to dissolve the Senate, and the rebellion is fighting against the empire. In the sequel trilogy, there's a Senate? The first order, which is an empire remnant, I guess? That was laying low for 30 years despite being a huge military and technological super power? And still for some reason an active rag-tag rebellion that seems to be the only other military force (besides the first order,) which is separate from the Senate, for some reason, which seems to be a neutral third party?

 

Right.

And it's not a rebellion. It's the "Resistance" and apparently it's off the books. The new government doesn't see the First Order as a threat so they don't need a military but Leia does see a threat so she's running around making trouble for the First Order.

First Order blows up a couple planets and than in The Last Jedi we see that the First Order has taken over the whole galaxy again even though their Death Star Version 3 has once again been blown up. What? How the fuck? We don't even get a throwaway line on how the First Order pulled that off to such a magnitude that no one answer Leia's call to rebellion.

Does the First Order really have that many troops and assests that it can conquer the whole galaxy in less than a month? Remember The Last Jedi takes place immediately after The Force Awakens. So it's been less than a month. You'd think the rest of the galaxy would be furious at the First Order for blowing up planets and thankful to Leia and the Resistance for taking out Star Killer Base.

So how in the hell did the First Order take over?

 

Including me.
I'm not saying anyone wants a biography, I'm just saying (IMHO) the shit you and others think we need to know are as unimportant as the examples I gave.

 

Short version lazy writing.

No way in hell would a Senate, after the events of the ot no less, not see the empire remnants, especially a technologically superior and still well organized one like the first order as a threat.

 

That's true. Take a look at how quickly the United States disposed of East Germany after World War II!

Wait a minute....

 

Yeah, US policy in the second half of the 20th century certainly did not consider the Soviet Union to be a threat of any kind. Only a small group of unrecognised Resistance fighters took them seriously, and when Moscow, a place nobody had ever heard of, suddenly nuked Washington, Los Angeles, and New York, and had its remaining nuclear capability destroyed on the same day, the rest of the US acquiesced and learned Russian within a fortnight.

 

The difference with the Emperor is that the galaxy of the OT was a blank slate. There was no established order that introducing a character such as the Emperor was upsetting. He wasn't fully drawn and we could speculate but his existence wasn't at odds with anything else.
In the new trilogy, Snoke arises Ex Nihilo to personally undo virtually all of what was achieved in Return of the Jedi. A giant reset button with no explanation is bad writing.

All of the comments about Snoke not being explained any more than he needs to have been in Last Jedi betrays an understanding of storytelling as being nothing more than an inconvenience needed to move us to the cool bits. But (and this is my problem with modern franchises generally, from Marvel to nuTrek) it ought to be more important than that. Making it such is the difference between throwaway junk and films which stand the test of time.

 

That's a very good point. The New Republic was definitely established after RotJ, but the new trilogy certainly begs the question as to how The First Order was able to become a powerful force (pardon the pun) and build another superweapon. I imagine there was all kinds of Empire war machine stuff lying around, but there should have been a few more throwaway lines in the opening crawls of TFA and TLJ to explain it a bit better.

 

Where are we left after Return Of The Jedi?

Second Death Star destroyed?
They took out the first one in A New Hope, the Empire didn't end then.

The Emperor killed?
America didn't collapse when Lincoln and JFK got shot.

The Empire collapsing during the Ewock song was always a flaw of the movie that I'm glad was fixed by The Force Awakens existing.

Now, how The First Order pulled together all the feuding pieces of the Empire, that's a story I'd kinda like to know.
We can infer from the Last Jedi throne room scene Snoke "had a little talk", with each Admiral and Moff in turn, and they caved like Hux.

Maybe we're getting a Force Awakens prequel as the next animated series.
Maybe Episode IX will fill some of that backstory in the way TLJ did for Luke and Kylo.

 

It's just so sloppy, by creating a resistance separate from the republic, and then wiping the republic government out before any relationships can be established, they have essentially been made a non-entity. There was no real impact to starkiller base wiping planets out because there was nothing established. The republic was a non entity so why target it, and there was no Leia character to argue against the destruction like in anh, thus nothing giving the audience some idea of what was being destroyed, or why it mattered.

 

That's all explained in novels, but I know you're gonna hate that answer.

 

I agree with both @TheBurgerKing and @Diacanu on this one, if that makes sense.

We can infer that after RotJ that the New Republic was formed but that factions of the Empire remained. I'm guessing Disney purposely left a long gap between RotJ and TFA, not just because of the actual real-life time difference but because that time period will be ripe for future story-telling.

But it is sloppy that they didn't at least address that in the opening crawl. As I said, one or two sentences along the lines of "from the ashes of the Empire..." would have sufficed for now. I also agree that separating the New Republic and Resistance seems a bit unnecessary. I recall some sort of line about the Republic fleet supporting the Resistance in TFA, but it really wasn't made all that clear.

 

Ummmm... we're discussing the First Order BEFORE the events of SW:TFA.

 

I enjoy a good tie in book as much as the next guy, but they shouldn't be required reading to understand what the fuck is going on in a movie. The film should be capable of standing on its own, and it's bad writing that it's not able to do so.

 

I dunno, TFA wasn't about the politics, it was about Rey, Finn, and Po blowing up the Starkiller, and Rey's heroes journey.
IMHO, novels are the correct place for that stuff.
Star Wars isn't Dune.

 

The disconnect between starkiller base blowing those planets up and what they mean to the story (effectively nothing) is still quite jarring. We need some rudementary inkling of what the politics are. Yeah, someone mentioned something about killing the republic or the senate, but that's pointless when they weren't part of the story. Has they targeted yavin or the rebels that would have been different.