|
Post by Scott on Dec 29, 2017 22:46:05 GMT -5
In the past I would have been there opening day, but my expectations have been let down too many times, so I waited until today to finally see it. I thought it was somewhere between V and VI. I try to enjoy it as a shallow, fun diversion, and I know the more I think about it, the more I will tear it apart. I was happily surprised by Yoda dropping in. There were some Luke moments that really took me back. But overall I was not happy with the way Luke was written. I read before that Mark Hamill was unhappy with the way the character was depicted, and after seeing the movie I get it. And it's crazy to think Luke Skywalker, hero since I was seven years old, is gone.
Leia's survival was a bit much.
The Snoke death was super lame. It couldn't have been more anti-climactic. His Red Guard looked more like backup dancers than menacing, elite guards.
With all the porg hate I'd read online I was expecting an overdose, but mercifully their screen time was limited.
I liked the was the Rey character developed. For the most part I still like the Kylo Ren character.
Big weakness of the writing is the personalities of the characters warp around what's convenient for the plot.
|
|
|
Post by Scott on Dec 30, 2017 0:22:25 GMT -5
Captain Phasma was another dud. Lots of anticipation for something major, and then just a few minutes of screen time and dead.
|
|
foster1941
Warlock
Duke of California, Earl of Los Angeles, Knight Bachelor
Posts: 475
|
Post by foster1941 on Dec 30, 2017 1:33:08 GMT -5
Almost everything that was built up in TFA was dismissed in TLJ: the dramatic lightsaber handover - Luke throws it away; Kylo Ren throws his mask away in the first scene; Snoke and Phasma both go down anticlimactically; all of Poe and Finn’s attempts at heroism don’t accomplish anything and make things worse; Rey’s parentage turns out not to matter, etc. Presumably writer/director Rian Johnson didn’t like any of the plot or character hooks the TFA team left him so he decided to quickly dismiss them and clear the deck to tell his own story instead.
That’s a pretty common move in TV shows when the creative team changes, usually in response to low ratings - they call it a “soft reboot” and the audience just goes along with it with a nod and wink. If TFA had flopped and the creative team behind it had been purged and replaced this kind of “reset” would make sense (though it would still be cheesy and distasteful and unworthy of he sort of mythologically-resonant saga George Lucas created) but to do so after TFA was so spectacularly successful feels like shocking creative hubris that I can’t believe the bosses at Lucasfilm allowed to happen.
An intriguing further wrinkle is that JJ Abrams, who directed and co-wrote TFA, is coming back for Episode IX after Lucasfilm fired the guy they originally had lined up. How is Abrams going to feel about all of his threads and hooks having been tossed aside? Will he retcon the retcons and try to bring some of those elements back? If so, will the audience buy it?
|
|
|
Post by GRWelsh on Dec 30, 2017 7:40:26 GMT -5
Yeah, this movie dismissed a lot of what came before, and I suspect that is why it is so popular with critics: it is subversive. It does the unexpected, sure... but often without thoughtful consideration of the consequences, and so leaves the story in a very messy place. Where do we go from here? It's obvious at this point that there was no master plan, no outline for this new trilogy... They're just making it up as they go along... Just like the LOST TV show!
|
|
|
Post by maximus on Dec 31, 2017 8:11:57 GMT -5
Took the kids to see it the other day. Wasn't disappointed as I didn't expect much. I still have a hard time believing Rey became so proficient in such a short time, with little to no formal training. The Snoke death was unexpected, but I thought kinda cool. I would have liked to have had some history about him though. I agree that the red guard was hokey, and Leia's survival was a stretch. I really expected her to die in this one.
I think Disney is cleaning the slate of all that is old for a 10 - 12 trilogy, sans any Lucas.
|
|
|
Post by geneweigel on May 9, 2018 8:19:57 GMT -5
I was going to watch this finally on Pay-Per-View last weekend and I just gave up. I can't believe that I've reached the point where I don't even care about anything STAR WARS.
I think it has to do with this old brassy plated Darth Vader keychain that I had hanging in the basement. I think it was from the 80's. The clasp just cracked and it was laying on the floor. I took a good look at it and it was literally junk. In that one second, I had evaluated my entire STAR WARS lifestyle. I had used STAR WARS and it worked in the 70's and 80's but following up with it has been hard ever since. Its not sci-fi and its not really fantasy and its always had this corporate-contained "some kids like it but its because its mainstream not sci-fi" attitude.
I had that reunion of 8th grade class of 82 last year and someone said you're the STAR WARS guy. Then I thought how I could not explain that away because thats what he projected on to me. That is his ride. He was the STAR WARS person, I just happened to be the only person in the entire neighborhood who windfalled into all these resources and the hot ticket was STAR WARS to everybody. I don't understand this neo-STAR WARS May the 4th shit. I had the STAR WARS CLUB newsletters and it was no big deal back then. I waited on line in 1983 for 6 hours at someone else's prompting because having me (the artist who makes cool shit) there waiting on the line made it okay. This whole "Luke I am your father" crap I didn't subscribe to it then. I just thought it was an incongruency like Richie Cunningham's brother never being seen again or Jack and Janet getting this endless stream of blonde roommates or Darren Stephens not being Darren Stephens anymore or Jan Brady switching bodies then switching back again.
Clawing back into that time, and my childish view, what really turned me on at the core was the fact I was Kong all the way and because of that on some fundamental level I can't get over the fact that Chewbacca leaned away from space gorilla and into space puppy man. I was like PLANET OF THE APES, PLANET OF THE APES, PLANET OF THE APES, PLANET OF THE APES, PLANET OF THE APES, PLANET OF THE APES, and more PLANET OF THE APES. Then along comes this prestine dream image PLANET OF THE APES-fulfilling character, with ape strength to match, who becomes a franchise lapdog by the next movie. (No thanks to the Holiday Special painting him as Barney Rubble coming home with a lunch pail).
The Jedi are not what they originally implied. This romper room PC inclusion-fest makes them an easy target thats not only unnecessary its downright a bad idea. They should have had a much darker road into all training that made the dark side intuitive and easy. And not the dream tree thing. It should have been sci-fi oriented. It should have been training at zero-g in space. Wasn't that originally in the script and the folio? This whole Yoda thing, while a good job, was not what the original movie promised. It was more about an organization to have no organization but promote secretive deception than TK powered aliens. The Yoda lying introduction should have been part of the training. By the time we got to ROTJ everything was just formulated into playing out what could be perceived by the audiences already. Instead of a battle of lies and deceit for good or bad its this brain dead power play of confusingly flat philosophy. George Lucas should have stuck to what we would later find out what he was good at: lying. Its all there.
Anyway, the angle that they're approaching the continuance has gone off my radar. I'm already retroactively disliking the characters.
|
|
|
Post by GRWelsh on May 9, 2018 8:45:42 GMT -5
Yeah, you're right, the degeneration began in the original trilogy, not later. It went from the audience being dropped into the middle of serial space war with nothing explained and lots of mystery and threats (which was great), to being a family friendly kiddie ride. I think by ROTJ Lucas just wanted to wrap it up because he had a family. When he came back to it in the 90's, he was out of touch and/or surrounded by yes-men who wouldn't tell him when an idea sucked (Han didn't shoot first, Jar Jar Binks, Anakin as a little kid, etc.). I didn't love everything about the prequels, but at least they were still in the STAR WARS universe. Now, with the Disney movies, we're in an homage universe, or a fan fiction universe, I don't even know what to call it. But it's so far removed from the high water mark starting point that I'm just not interested anymore.
In retrospect, I'm sorry I even saw THE LAST JEDI. I was ambivalent about it at first, but the more I think about it, I hated what they did with Luke, and overall it is just a big, pretty mess. Every time a new SW movie comes out I'm hopeful, because I really want to like it, but I think I'm done.
|
|
|
Post by geneweigel on May 9, 2018 9:10:08 GMT -5
I feel like we were set up for some fulfillment and it just never arrived. But I'm starting to see the original weed-smoking idea behind the original concept. Its paranoia inverted where "they are coming to get you" played out and thats what the movie walked away from.
Vader's telepathic attack on the mind was swapped out to be a TK attack and then the philosophy went down the toilet.
I'm thinking Foundation was the core principle rip off and Lucas tried to implement his own version as a real-time psycho-history where certain people can be predicted by discipline and eventually reach to these types with empathic pushes. The Death Star blow being an empathic prediction of human behaviors to exploit the weakness as in the helmet practice on the Falcon.
The dark side being accepting ultimate emptiness as a machine to master the human condition of others. Just look at the sword fight. There is nothing athletic to it. Its a mind game. The Force was with him because he deceived Vader. Vader pushed mental deception over fighting to Tarkin.
|
|
|
Post by geneweigel on May 9, 2018 9:11:59 GMT -5
Also the Force is strong in this one only shows a ship bobbing back and forth as the strength. I'm here. No I'm not.
|
|
|
Post by geneweigel on May 9, 2018 9:22:03 GMT -5
Having Vader transform on "ANAKIN THE RIDE" was the opposite of the the Vader promise. Vader deliberately became a robot otherwise Ben Kenobi is bashing a handicapped man.
|
|
|
Post by GRWelsh on May 9, 2018 11:25:30 GMT -5
LOL! It never sat well with me that in REVENGE OF THE SITH Obi-Wan cuts Anakin's legs off and then leaves him there to die, burning to death! Come on, at least give him a mercy kill! But the problem is that Lucas wrote himself into that when he already said how Vader got injured so badly back in 1977: "Vader kills Luke's father, then Ben and Vader have a confrontation, just like they have in Star Wars, and Ben almost kills Vader. As a matter of fact, he falls into a volcanic pit and gets fried and is one destroyed being." www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/the-wizard-of-star-wars-20120504My original conception was of Vader falling off a ledge and then inaccessible and presumed dead, which I think would have worked better. Like when Anakin was going over the lava fall in ROTS, that would have been a good place to end the battle.
|
|
|
Post by geneweigel on May 9, 2018 12:04:49 GMT -5
He's even shifty in that interview. "True, true." Doesn't that statement always mean "I have to agree with you while not necessarily wanting to"? I think I got his number with jedis being good con artists/manipulators. The line about the wookies being trained to fly fighters in that interview is a foreshadowing of the ewok "threepio is a god" sham which is probably the original scam that Lucas insisted on keeping it his ideas for ROTJ.
In the above RS interview you posted, it seems no matter how hard he tried, he wanted C3PO to sound like a used car salesman.
I recall an interview where Lucas admitted getting lucky about the studio buying the expensive camera equipment from another studio that he set up the deal for. And it just sounded like something a flim-flam artist would pull.
Everybody is salvaging leftovers and asking for more than a fair deal in this movie.
|
|
|
Post by geneweigel on Jul 9, 2018 21:32:33 GMT -5
I just watched. I feel exactly the way both of you guys felt. Its a lot to process.
Alright, I was trying hard to find positives in the Yoda scene. It was good seeing the interaction but I think the writing in general in the film seems cartoon whimsical. The anti-casino/gambling statement seemed odd. I'm the last person to go to a casino but that was a little harsh.
|
|
|
Post by GRWelsh on Jul 10, 2018 10:09:57 GMT -5
The side trip to the casino world was a complete dud. It did nothing for the plot, and it felt so out of place in the Star Wars universe. All it did was foreshadow some anonymous kid becoming a future Force-user or Jedi -- undoubtedly they will develop that character as they do with all bit parts.
The more I think about it the more I hate VII and VIII. I've gone from ambivalent to pure Dark Side hatred. I can understand wanting to move on from the old, passing the baton to new characters, but they did not treat the classic, beloved characters with any respect at all. They turned them into losers. Luke is now a failed teacher who completely gave up and lost hope. Han and Leia have a failed marriage and failed as parents, and Han backslid into the life of smuggling again -- a complete reversal of his character arc in the original trilogy. The great victory over the Empire, only a generation ago, evidently had no effect as stormtroopers are everywhere and the rebels are on the run again. A complete reset button approach. It totally undermines the original trilogy's story arc -- undoing it while also copying it and shitting on it, all at the same time. I suppose that is an accomplishment, if subversion is your thing.
|
|
|
Post by geneweigel on Jul 10, 2018 10:55:12 GMT -5
Are you sure those were lightsabers they were lighting up in this movie? Its not high end cinema for sure but the STAR WARS and PC grooves led us to that romantic sword duel which had some strange dynamics especially the pulling of the unlit lightsaber. I think it makes you love the original movies more in a way.
|
|
|
Post by GRWelsh on Jul 10, 2018 11:15:14 GMT -5
The attraction between Rey and Kylo Ren was actually one of the things I liked. It was a different element and something we haven't seen before. I like the actors and I thought they played off well against each other. For a moment, I thought they might team up and take the series in a completely different direction, with this relationship in which each is trying to pull the other to their side of the Force.
|
|
|
Post by geneweigel on Jul 10, 2018 12:03:08 GMT -5
All I know is that we better get Lando saving the universe in the next one...
|
|