Last Jedi Spoiler thread

Loved everything except Casino Planet and the Duel Remake with the starships.

One of my main problems is that the powers and abilities of all of the force-sensitive characters varied arbitrarily according to the needs of the plot. Snoke is damn near omnipotent until he isn't and just allows Kylo to kill him.

Another nit-pick that stood out for me is why exactly were the captains of the other ships just letting themselves be killed instead of evacuating with their crews? And when they were down to the last ship, why the suggestion that someone was actually needed to keep piloting the ship? Couldn't they put on some kind of an auto-pilot? Or just leave the ship heading in a straight line on full thrust since there was nothing to run into out there? I mean, I know the real reason was so that later she could turn the ship around, which makes it a bit contrived, but as it was happening I couldn't help but wonder about that. Of course right along with that was the issue with fuel running out - something the ships following them apparently didn't have an issue with. Also couldn't get over how slow the bombers were in the opening. Kind of made me think they should've kept the Y-Wings. Loved the look of the new star destroyers, though.

I honestly didn't like the film.

it sucked less than the previous one that came out last year or so. It had a little more humor and was just more entertaining in general.

Enjoyed it. I'll tackle my bugbears first.

The fleet running low on fuel and trying to keep ahead of the First Order's weapons - okay, nice idea executed terribly. This was doubly disappointing as there already exists a template for this kind of thing - nuNSG's "33"

I mean, just nick the plot and tweak it. Instead we have to assume the First Order hasn't the tactical nous to surround the rebels fleet and close in. Once arcs of fire start to overlap, game over.

Other bugbear was Snoke's rapid end. Killing him off so that this trilogy wasn't a clone of the original trilogy makes sense, as was ensuring it was own arrogance that led to it, bit it was done a little too swiftly.

And the balance was too overt I suppose, in hindsight Snoke's death telegraphed Luke's - for a film designed to undermine the myth of the Champions of Light and Dark, it also managed to bolster it with Snoke's claim that as Ren's power grew so would his opposite's.

On to the good stuff.

The subverting of the tropes of the original trilogy was very good. Even having a Han Solo type betray them, no last minute successes, the shoot-from-the-hip hero's plan failing...

The humour worked well too.

And it even pushed some messages - many a movie would have left the Casino world and it's wealthy arms dealers to just be one-sided, but we got a "grow up" message in that they they sold to both sides. Scum, yes, but scum both sides used. The prequel trilogy tried for some shades of grey, but didn't do so well with it, this did so rather well.

I'm on the fence as to whether Yoda getting Luke to see that the Jedi need to learn from past failures rather than be destroyed is a good thing. Failure as a teacher is a decent enough lesson, and one Silicon Valley has made it rather mainstream, but it also keeps the concept of the Force constrained into the Sith and the Jedi. Seeing an alternative rise would have been interesting.

All in all, a fun - if flawed - movie that takes a fair few risks, and brings a little more thought to the table than you usually get.

I liked the Force getting nerfed back toward OT levels, honestly. As for Snoke, obviously Kylo fooled him by playing lawyer in his thoughts.

I do think this could be the best SW movie yet. Not greatest or most iconic or most loved, but the best movie in the SW universe. It's top three for sure. It's a brutal movie without dwelling on brutality or feeling super dark. The Republic forces, everything they do either fails or keeps going wrong or partially succeeds at a heavy price. All the little callbacks and inspirations from the OT fit into the flow and stand on their own without you having to realize "oh, there was something like this in the first movies." And they're inspiration without being copies; knowing the OT version doesn't tell you how things will go now. There are a lot of moments where you can clearly see there are several ways this could go, with important consequences in each direction, and there are a lot of little plot twists to keep you guessing, and that's how you keep people on the edge of their seat.

Saying Hamill deserves an Oscar for this is just silly though. He did well, but so did everyone else.


The star destroyers that weren't doing anything could have hyperspace-hopped ahead and cut the retreat off, but blah blah microjumps are difficult and dangerous blah blah they're dead already blah, it's not like the Commodore will ram his ship down the throat of our Doomsday Machine

What does that mean?

Saw it, and I honestly don't know what to think. I went in expecting to see one thing and it took some risk that I don't feel like I completely appreciated. I will officially withhold judgement until I see it again. I really enjoyed the scenes with Luke, Leia and Rey, but that casino scene with Benicio Del Toro and Finn.. I just don't know. It doesn't quite gel together, IMHO.

"They are tracking one of our ships. Should we split up to insure most of the fleet survives or should we just keep doing what we are doing so that all but one ship gets destroyed?"

"Yeah, we will just let them all get destroyed."

And if they absolutely have to have someone on board, and if Holdo has already accepted that this means she's done, why is everyone still shocked when she kills herself by ramming Snope's ship? She would be dead in another half hour anyway! Be shocked for her earlier!

That's why I loved it!
It burned everyone's fanfic to the ground, and did something fresh.
Burn, fanfic, burn!!

Interesting review of the movie, which says that it shares the same flaws as many video games.

They were tracking all of the hyperspace capable vessels, it was the First Order that required a single ship for the whole fleet to be able to detect from.

It took me a moment to figure that out as it wasn't explained very well. It would've been better served if there's been a new type of First Order vessel that was explicitly able to do that, as it's the kind of capability that you need to provide a weakness for too.

I thought del Toro's character was underutilized. I know he was there as a mirror of Han Solo, but I figure more could've been done with him.

Rogue One has a Last Jedi Easter egg.

https://www.cbr.com/star-wars-rogue-one-last-jedi-easter-egg/

Just because they can track one ship doesn't mean they can simultaneously track a half dozen or a dozen all of which are going to a different destination. It seems better to try to test the limits instead of just sitting back and waiting to die.

I hope it doesn’t go like this, but this kind of reminds me of the second The Matrix movie. I can’t even be bothered to think of it’s proper name at the moment, but the worth of that movie at the time depended upon how they wrapped things up in the third movie, IMHO. Obviously the third movie just left me where I consider The Matrix as a stand-alone classic.

I’m going to see it in theaters a second time for sure, so it’s not as bad as all that, but I just don’t know where it stands in the Star Wars canon if that makes any sense.

Nailed it! Yes! That still doesn’t mean that TLJ wasn’t a fun ride though.

I thought Rey was a Skywalker at first, but it seems unlikely that Leia would have a second child and be unaware of her.... Luke made no acknowledgement to the possibility of her being his daughter after they met, so I have to assume that he remained celibate like a good Jedi should. She's too young to be a Kenobi or a Windu... but how much did we know about those characters and their family? Could she even be a Palpatine? And who or what was Snoke for that matter?

But I a remain convinced that Kylo lied to her despite this article.

Yes, I get that, and I can respect that intention. It's a large part of why I wasn't sure whether I liked the movie directly after seeing it, even though I knew I hadn't had a good time. I wanted to think about what it had done and why.

But looking back after a couple of days, I just don't see the point of those reversals of expectation. Shouldn't they make some point? And aren't these narrative promises rather than mere expectations that they're reneging on? When TFA tells us that Snoke is a mystery, would you not expect to find out more about him? When they mention the Knights of Ren, wouldn't you expect them to play a role? When the First Order with its enormous resources appears out of nowhere, shouldn't we expect to find out how that happened? And when every single plan that our heroes pursue over two hours fails, shouldn't the outcome be different than if they had succeeded? In each case, yes, doing something unexpected was surprising. But it didn't seem to make a lot of sense.

"I am your father." certainly reversed expectations, and so did Luke and Leia being siblings. But both those things made the movies more interesting (if perhaps somewhat silly), not less.

Johnson on Snoke and the ending.

http://www.darkhorizons.com/johnson-on-last-jedis-snoke-cameo-ending/

I’m not sure which scene is worse...

Jar Jar getting farted on in episode I?

Luke squeezing milk out of alien tits in episode VIII?

True, but there are going to be competing viewpoints on that - if the Order can track multiple points, then splitting up reduces survival to zero for everyone. There is at least a measure of comfort and defence in numbers.

Plus, the plan was to get to Krait(?), they had no foreknowledge of DJ providing the Order with the codes to defeat the Rebels stealth tech or the miniaturized Death Star tech, without that knowledge the plan they had was relatively sound compared to leaping into the unknown.

Jar Jar.

Milking animals has been a staple of human culture for millennia, farting on people would only have been so if the Bible stories were real and the Adam in Adam and Eve was Adam Sandler.

They do, to both the viewer and the characters. We only have those expectations because they're well worn tropes, and the reversals are usually only seen in the form of comedy or non-tentpole movies, the message here is very much don't get comfy in those well worn tracks. We're going on safari, not visiting a safari park with it's guided track.

One of the usual complaints against Hollywood blockbusters is they take the safe route, and in some cases TLJ does, but in others it most certainly doesn't. The film has flaws, but the reversals certainly aren't them.

Is Star Wars such a comfort franchise that we are now to feel uncomfortable when the director read up on von Moltke?

You have a good point with the Knights of Ren, they've been left behind the back of the sofa. Let's see if ep 9 expands upon it.

As for Snoke, I'm fine with him being a mystery. I think we've lost a little something that we must analyse everything to the nth degree. Did we need a history and expansion of motivations of Smaug to enjoy reading the Hobbit? No. Sometimes the caterpillar is just hungry, we need not know its origins, how it reached that particular leaf or if its ancestor was responsible for the Irish potato famine.

Star Wars has tried before to explain beginnings as it did with the prequels and those showed, if anything, that sometimes a thirsty curiosity is best left unslaked.

The revelation will always seem prosaic when compared to the fevered mind trying to figure out the mystery.

I wouldn't have anything against a new character whose background is left deliberately mysterious. But for Snoke, to me that doesn't work for two reasons.

One, his appearance is connected to the whole plot pivoting in the opposite direction from everything we thought had already been achieved in ROTJ. That does need some explanation, in my eyes, not because the universe needs to be explained completely, but because the story needs it. If the caterpillar turns into a beautiful butterfly and then its main problem in the next volume is how ugly it is and that it can't fly, I'm going to want to hear more on that.

And two, everything about Snoke in TFA seemed to make a narrative promise that there was some great secret to be revealed here in the future. The Emperor was quite well described as 'Emperor' -- fulfilling the trope of the powerful evil guy in charge of the evil government. It might have been bland, but it certainly was intelligible. Snoke was an Abramsian mystery box. It bugs an audience to show them to be empty. If the Hungry Caterpillar ended every page with, "and then it looked up to that one big green leaf, which was somehow different to all the others", I would expect that leaf to crop up again at some point, not just to tumble away with all the others in the fall.

Don't worry, snookums, you'll get a Snoke novel.

Whats yor problem? Seriously? K has prepared a well reasoned thought out rebuttal to Eckys point. Neither of them are falling out over it, they are only sharing their points of view, and both are making good points. Thats the whole point of discussing a movie over the internet!

And heres you facepalming reps and crying like a little bitch?

Why take it all so personal?