It's less about plot points and more about the stupid shit like the hyperspace lance, hyperspace tracking, ships slowing down in space when they run out of fuel and dumb slow bombers when the Ep 9 trailer features the Y-wing.

 

None of that would have been storyboarded out in those early big picture planning sessions my dude. That shit is all TLJ writing team.

I'm also unsure why you think any of these things would derail the central plot of the sequels. If I had directed the Force Awakens, had a tentative plan for the series, and then my successor dropped some weird technical plotholes into the sequel movie, I would say roughly the same thing. This is science fantasy. You can easily write around technical plotholes with a pseudobabble handwave. Here, I'll do it now.

"Oh, the hyperspace lance worked because the forward shields of the First Order fleet were lowered to fire their weaponry and it takes time to raise them. It wouldn't always work."

 

I'm convinced at this point that people's minds are made of about this thing sight unseen.

I guess this is the consequence when a piece of media gets broadly embroiled in the internet Culture War, especially one with such a passionate fandom surrounding it.

 

Neckbeards gonna neckbeard.

 

Pff, ad hominem attacks do nothing to support your stance. There are legitimate concerns regarding the last Jedi.

 

I mean, that shit's stupid, but it's nitpicky detail shit that, ultimately, doesn't matter at all. Or rather, it only matters as much as you make it matter, and since Last Jedi was pretty much full of stupid nitpicky details, you really shouldn't let it matter at all.

The far more cogent complaints are related to how the idiotic story beats of the Last Jedi will impact the other movies. Given the context, I'm 98% certain that that article is Abrams putting on some corporate spin to try and salvage ep 9, as the Last Jedi almost certainly took some of the core elements of his original outline (specifically, Luke and Snoke, along with other, lesser elements) and threw them out the fucking window.

Which is presumably why the leaks are talking about Force-Ghost!Luke showing up and pulling impossible shit out of his ass, among other things. From where I sit, Rise of Skywalker is gonna be Abrams playing whack-a-mole with the problems Johnson created for the overall plot, and shitting out a movie that's somehow even worse than his usual drek because of it.

 

@Agayek

No film is perfect. Something always slips through the cracks. If a film is good, I'm more willing to overlook minor flaws. If a film is bad, minor flaws just pile on top of major flaws.

I noticed but was willing to overlook the flaws of the last two Avengers movies because of all the many things they did right. Flaws in TLJ stick out all the more because I found TLJ to be fundamentally flawed before I started noticing the little things.

At the end of the day, you like Disney SW or you don't.

(btw I don't consider worldbuilding or basic space physics to be nitpicky shit in a Star Wars movie--it doesn't have to be Interstellar, but slowing down because the engine cut out is dumb as fuck)

And fanboys gonna fanboy, and thus balance is preserved.

 

That's fair enough. I don't disagree with you at all that all those things are issues that probably shouldn't have happened.

My point is more that most of the shit you listed is little details, minor things most people don't even notice, let alone think about, and have exactly as much permanence as the creators care to give them. Abrams could wave his hand and pretend they never happened (or happened in the "correct" manner) in the Last Jedi and very few would really notice or care. It's all ancillary to the movie itself, which is all about the plot and characters, not the background details.

And like I said, I'm pretty sure that article you linked is him talking out of his ass, because there's almost zero chance that Snoke and Luke, at minimum, weren't central figures in the original outline. You can see Abrams already trying to "fix" the shit Johnson ruined with the whole "Kylo's repairing his helmet now after his character arc in TLJ had him destroy it" that's in the trailer, and that's without getting into the utter ludicrousness that is the leaked plot. There's practically no chance at all that Johnson didn't totally ruin Abrams' plan(s), so that article has to be corporate double-speak to try and soothe some ruffled feathers.

 

@Agayek

Of course it's PR damage control. Jajabrams was given the thankless job of actually resolving one of his "mystery boxes" after he set it up and was content to wash his hands off it, but Rian threw all of that out, so Jajabrams has to do stuff like "Kylo is repairing his helmet and do you guys remember the TIE Interceptor? Darth Sidious? the Death Star? yeah?"

Disney will never say it out loud because no corporation will speak candidly if money is at stake, but the suits at Disney have to realize that the brand is damaged and this is just a calculated move on their part to try and have Jajabrams fix what Rian took a steaming shit on.

 

If you recognise it's PR damage control, I dont understand why you found it worthy of saying in the first place. PR campaign conducts PR where public figure related to it says PR thing isn't really worth claiming that the public figure will agree with the PR speak. Other than to wank off at the thought that everything that happened in TLJ was dogshit and that disney should just say so already.

 

Is that not what this thread is about?

 

As it happens, I feel TLJ gets way too much stick, is a legitimately good movie, and did a large number of things well (with the notable exception of the casino segment and that extra character to give Finn a love interest). I'll come back and defend this (because I know this is a very unpopular opinion) after my Uni class, but I consider TLJ to be either the 3rd or 4th best movie in the Star Wars saga.

 

TLJ being bad isn't a matter of opinion.

 

It very clearly is. Lots of people love it

 

Lots of people love Trump.

 

Not quite the response I was expecting, I'll grant you, but does perfectly illustrate why I don't get into this discussion anymore. Best of luck, @PomMan.

 

I think they're well aware. Nothing gets Disney's attention faster than flailing sales, and Solo's complete commercial failure (along with TLJ downward trend in sales when everyone expected it to rise) was definitely setting off red flags for them. They held a bunch of story meetings early 2018 and openly admitted to the public that they were making a course correction with Episode 9 and future content.

If you believe for a single moment that Disney's army of financial analysts did not connect the divisiveness of TLJ to Solo's flop and that they actually believe it is all attributable to Star Wars fatigue, then you do not understand their corporate machine at all. Disney does one thing better than literally any other media company, and that's brand management. If a property/IP is broken and no longer generating the expected revenue, Disney will either promptly kill it or promptly do everything in their power to fix it if it is too big to kill. They do NOT let that shit stagnate. I can't even think of the last big Disney franchise that has had two flops in a row.

They are in the business of making money. And to make money, they need to keep the vast majority of their customers happy. Walt knew it. Roy knew it. Bob Iger knows it. Kathleen Kennedy doesn't do anything that isn't in the service of it.

JJ is absolutely here to fix the franchise. They may have brought him back before TLJ released, but if they didn't trust him to make a graceful recovery and at least stabilize shit, he would not have stayed on as director for 9. It remains to be seen whether or not he can truly accomplish the herculean task, but I remain cautiously optimistic. Disney trusts him with the reins, and the one thing I trust is Disney's greed.

I don't think anyone should go into RoS expecting a masterpiece and the best Star Wars film ever made. But I also don't think people should let The Last Jedi absolutely destroy their hope for a satisfying third movie. You can sure as shit bet they've been pooling every available resource to fix Star Wars, because the franchise is simply too big and too costly to kill.

I imagine we'll get a fun, exciting movie that looks great, and which makes the vast majority of fans and casuals at least passably happy.

 

I agree, though with the caveat that it's not going to play very well to the "hardcore" star wars fans. It's highy likely that the overwhelming majority of the audience will come out of the theater going "I do not regret buying those tickets", at the very least.

That said, I fully expect it to also be the same kind of bland, vapid, and pseudo-mystical crap Abrams has made a career peddling. It likely won't be a disaster, but it's also not likely to be very good either.

 

OK so with TLJ, as I already said, it does a number of things very very well, before getting into the script or Star Wars'y elements of it. The cinematography is good to great throughout, the acting is good, sound design very good, and the editing is largely good as well, with the notable exception of the casino scenes.

Actually first point of order, the casino thing was bad and a waste of time. It didnt add to the movie and if you delete that entire part of the movie, I think the movie works better. So yes, the casino planet is a bad aspect of the movie.

But nobody actually cares about those elements of this movie. Nobody has cared about how good it looks, or the technical elements of the movie which were well done. There is a reason critics have it at 91% positive on RT, and it isnt any of the conspiracy theories regarding Disney buying them off I heard suggested when it came out, it's because to people who arent overly invested in Star Wars movies, but are big fans of moviemaking, the film did things very well.

But the Star Wars stuff is what drags people's opinions of it down massively. That's fine, those are subjective and I disagree, but I'm not saying you cant dislike TLJ. It did do a lot of things that are contentious. But I'll defend my position behind a lot of them (again fuck the casino segment).

Lets start with Luke. TLJ's treatment of Luke was a big aspect of the film that people ended up not liking. I really dont think that any path his character could have taken would have worked better than the one he went down in TLJ, and people who thought otherwise were blinded by the Extended Universe Luke. He abandoned his friends when they were needing him and his power, and doing so didnt have a satisfactory explanation. Gone off to study ancient Jedi techniques? But that's not more important to him than helping his friends, and would have gone directly against his previous actions with Yoda in Empire. Both thematically and from the narrative, the best explanation is that he's feeling scared, guilty, and remorseful for something, and failing to teach his nephew, leading him straight to the dark side is a good tool for the plot, especially in the parallel it creates with Rey. And for a satisfying arc over a movie, which is better, Luke being broken by his previous failure in teaching, or Luke being uber powerful and just unaware of what was going on. One creates narrative tension, one removes all of the stakes from the conflict. And it isnt like the film depicts him as being weak in any way, just broken.

Snoke died unceremoniously. We dont know who he is, where he came from, how he got so powerful or really anything else. Sound familiar? It's the role Palpatine had in the original trilogy. And for his increased role in the prequels, we dont know much more about him than we did at the end of RoJ. It's also close to how much we knew about Vader, and explaining how he got there resulted in the 3 worst Star Wars movies. His role was to advance the plot, and having him die unexpectedly, and make it so that a character we had investment in was the actual Big Bad, is a good thing. I didnt want to have Empire p2 like we got New Hope p2 for TFA, and this was something that I felt worked. Snoke set things up for the interesting character dynamics to happen, and now he's dead when he is not of use to the plot. Could he have stayed as the big bad? Absolutely. But the way they chose keeps the important characters as the ones we are most invested in, which I prefer to having the epitome of evil as the big bad. This is why I'm also not particularly hyped for Palpatine to return in RoS.

Poe's actions in the first act of the movie showcases his recklessness and shortsightedness which make him unsuited for a commanding position, sacrificing too much for not enough gain. Given that he is being groomed for a future commanding position by Leia, this is an important point that he needs to overcome and we see this by the end of the film when he recognises the futility of Finn's suicide run towards the cannon, and when he realises that Luke is stalling for them to escape. The film uses his relationship with Holdo and Leia to further this, both of them reprimanding him for his actions and ultimately leading him to realising the effect his actions have. Holdo gets criticism for her part in the film for not telling everyone the plan... when the point was that by not telling anyone, the First Order would be unable to stop the resistance ships for setting off, free, in case of any spies on board who could inform them ahead of time. She also didnt trust the guy who recently disobeyed orders to disengage with the knowledge that they were fleeing.

As a side note my headcannon is that Holdo's role was originally Admiral Ackbar's, and then someone realised they'd have a guy called Ackbar deliberately flying a transport spaceship head on into something as a suicide mission, and re-wrote the character into Holdo to avoid backlash.

Finally, Rey and Kylo.

Rey's parents being unimportant isnt a bad thing. Not everyone needs to be a Skywalker or a Kenobi to be a character in Star Wars, and having her be one, while easy, isn't nearly as satisfying as having her come from nothing and end up one of the most powerful people in the galaxy. Her power ups, while handwaved away by Snoke, are not particularly satisfying, but her search for belonging is a good plot point. It gives us a much more believable and nuanced look on the character as opposed to just 'wanting to do the right thing'. She wants to belong, to find her place in the world, and is determined to see it through. She does want to do the right thing as well, but that isnt the main driving force behind her character, and that opens her up for nuance, for poor decision making, for being tempted, and ultimately it makes her a more interesting character. And ultimately, her actions in this movie drive her to temptation before she rejects it, trying to respect the position she is in and make her own place in the world, after having gone through the crucible and coming out better for it.

Kylo Ren is someone designed to be Rey's counterpart. He knows his natural place, and his heritage, and completely rejects it. He wants to be respected and powerful on his own merits, and that the past is an inhibiting factor in this. He is selfish, prone to anger, and desiring control over his own destiny in the face of what legacy expects. While Rey is searching desperately for where she came from, searching for answers from the past, Kylo completely goes against the past that he had no control in, making his own path. And in spite of this, he is constantly unsure, second guessing many of his decisions and unable to commit to many of them, like when he stops himself from shooting where Leia is. This duality between uncertainty and his desires creates a much more interesting character, and the actor playing him does a great job.

The theme of the movie is failure. Everyone fails throughout the movie, and the way characters respond to their own failures drives the plot forward constantly while giving insight into each character by way of how they respond to their own failure (other than Snoke, who fails and then immediately dies). It also showcases how failure causes uncertainty and temptation, which Kylo and Rey both being tempted to switch sides as a result of their own failures, and when nuance joins Star Wars, one of the biggest examples of a Good side and a Bad side in cinema, I appreciate it.

Rian Johnson got a lot of stick for 'subverting expectations'. But his result still stands up as its own movie. It isnt meant to be a feel good thriller, it ends with the Good Guys outnumbered and outgunned massively, the biggest hero dead and seemingly everything going badly for the heroes. With the note for note rehash of A New Hope that was The Force Awakens, I'm ultimately pleased with the lack of predictability in TLJ, and feel the decisions most often lambasted (Luke, Snoke) ultimately were good things for the movie.

That isnt to say there arent nitpicks, and things that got me out of the movie. Bombers working in 0 gravity is, however, a nitpick. Luke's character and the way they went about portraying him, is not a nitpick, but something where you can either like it, like I do, or hate how much it goes against his character.

Ultimately, while not as good as Empire (lol) or A New Hope, I'd put TLJ around the same level as Return of the Jedi, in the 3/4 spot, where it was fundamentally a well made, well acted film, which had good/great characters and character interactions, with some immersion breaking and poor plot points (Ewoks vs Casino as an example). I think what TLJ does well, it does better than RoJ. But what it does poorly, it also does a lot worse than RoJ does. But acting like it's an awful Star Wars movie I think goes very extreme, and acting like it's an outright poorly made movie is something I find amusing.

 

This is a bit weird, because obviously. The production values for TLJ were quite high, and from a purely mechanical perspective, it's generally above average to quite good. Nobody sane's ever accused it of being a poorly made movie. Just that it, and the whole sequel trilogy really, has no respect for the source material and is perfectly willing to ignore or alter it as the plot they want demands.

For example, the problem with Luke is not that he wasn't powerful, it's that he's a fundamentally different person in The Last Jedi than he is in Return of the Jedi, and there's no sign of the optimism, bullheaded determination, and faith that defined him in the original trilogy. It's some random schmuck wearing a Mark Hamill mask and pretending to be Luke Skywalker, and that's the whole problem.

People rage against the Last Jedi not because it's a bad movie, but because it's a bad Star Wars movie, that seems to actively want to piss on the source material.