I barely remember PM but there were no hands left after Rogue One.

 

Rogue One doesn't have "Star Wars" in the name.

But you're right; no one loses a hand in Phantom Menace.

 

No hands lost in Phantom Menace. Maul did lose his legs though.

Link

 

Who lost a hand in New Hope or Return? It's been a while since I saw those.

 

In New Hope, the random criminal Obi-Wan stops attacking Luke in the cantina. In Jedi, Vader, after Luke beats the crap out of him for threatening Leia.

 

Meh, if you want to use DarthBill's metric, Vader doesn't exactly count. Point on the cantina though.

 

Just saw it. Still processing everything but my biggest gripe was the Luke/Kylo plot point. It could have been great with like.. 2 extra minutes of exposition. Show the progression/growing concern and it would have worked.

Also:

Spoiler

Anyone else notice Rey made off with all the Jedi texts? Kind of undermines the Yoda scene.

EDIT: 2000th post for Star Wars.. I'm ok with that.

 

I think the big take away with Rey is that she's not scared of the Dark Side, not that she has the ancient texts too.

I can see them going full Balance with her.

 

Which pisses me off so goddamn much, the dark side is a cancer on the force, a malignant corruption that destroys everything it touches, this has been established in the previous films. You don't go all half-cancer edgelord and call it Fair and Balanced.

 

Umm...where is it stated that the dark side is not part of the force but an external disease of it.

Even though the books are no longer canon, I believe Disney stated The Rebels tv series is and they dealt with the idea of balance.

I don’t know if this is canon, but check out the origins of the Jedi in that comic.

Basically both Jedi and Sith have gone to the extreme with their devotion to light/dark.

 

My take of it was that clearly the jedi of old weren't too concerned about the dark side, as they had the "altar" of it literally just underneath their tree-temple. You'd assume they would have purged the hell out of that if they though dark side was some kind of cancer.

Sort of a "death is just a part of life" type of deal.

 

Hitler gets it

 

This would only be true if the OT was your only frame of reference for SW. Even disregarding Legendsverse, Rebels, Clone Wars, and even, to a lesser extent, the prequels, all basically hammer home the idea that Light/Dark is more about order vs chaos than good vs evil, and that these things are meant to exist in perpetual balance.

IMO, balanced!force is a far more realistic and interesting route to do down than having all your chars intrinsically defined by a dichotomy that only has two shades of flavor. The Mortis arc from Clone Wars is probably my favorite thing in the entirety of SW canon.

 

Sooo ... this movie summed up in 35 minutes, got some good laughs from it

 

Wait the Empire with identical stormtroopers, ships, monochromatic palette, and centralized authority is about chaos? Every dark sider we’ve seen in the films has been an awful person, Luke’s brief temptation to the dark side ruined his life, and the prequel Jedi might not have been perfect but they were at least trying to do the right thing.

Call me a zealot, but the dark side is evil.

 

But in my point of view it is the Jedi who are evil!




Sorry...couldn’t
Resist.

Serious note, the Force doesn’t care what is good or evil. It’s not like God that makes moral claims.

The dark side is just as much a part of the force as the light side and the force seeks balance between the light and the dark.

 

So, late to the party but I decided to watch this today.

As a preface, the media I'd seen around it (though I avoided [most] spoilers as much as I could) made me think I would take offense to some things happening, so I went in mentally prepared for disappointment.

I was not prepared.

None of this 'self-fulfilling prophecy of expectation', bullshit either. I wasn't going to go at all, I didn't want to give money to that, but I at least wanted to see the action scenes on the big screen. At the very least, I went in there expecting good old Star Wars action and massively over the top but well-crafted effects. Those were there in Episode 7 and Rogue 1, no reason they wouldn't be here; they weren't.

I mean, if even that gets taken away; what's left? What the fuck am I supposed to take away from this movie? The solid and interesting storytelling? The respect and faithful accuracy to the original characters? At least give me some bright lights and many moving things at the same time.

Storytelling:
-We're supposed to buy that the post ROTJ New Republic is now back to being literally a handful of Rebels. And that is definitely not treading familiar grounds. Good thing this is all original material.
-Good thing we finally realized who/what Snoke was and got enough background on him to legitimize his position and power. Otherwise he might have felt like a cheap device with no meaning.
-Good thing we finally see Rey legitimately earn her skills like literally any other fucking character in the series. That got old in the first movie very quickly, and I'm glad they addressed it. I mean, I have nightmares about Rey beating Luke and holding him on lightsaber point; but that'd just be absurd, right?

As for respecting existing characters, what is there to say? Chewie is non-existent. 3PO and R2 get a combined total of like 10 seconds of screentime. Leia is Leia-ing in the background. And Luke ... Luke.

I went in there prepared. I'd seen some of Hamill's interviews. I watched them after seeing Episode 7, so Hamill's outrage at the butchering of Luke at Disney's hands did not surprise me. Still, I hated pretty much every decision they made regarding Luke. Like, holy fuck, what a slap in the face. Fuck you too, Disney.

At least give me some cool, large-scale action scenes if you want me to ignore that shit, damn it.

Now, to be entirely fair, the positives:
-Kylo Ren, a big detractor of Ep 7, is actually solid in this one. I dig him. Not support or necessarily respect, but I dig him.
-Leia's bridge scene. A contentious one, as I understand it, but I loved it. Happy to see the acknowledgement of the Leia's latent talent (Skywalker genes is a helluva drug) and also Carrie Fisher. <3 <3 <3 Always in our hearts.
-A couple of cool scenes with Luke in between disasters; like the stand-off with Ren and the convo with Leia.
-The thing with the purple-haired whatsherface. Not talking about the light-speed kamikaze that raises a billion questions, but rather the rug they pulled under us with her character. Not huge, but I liked it.
-The fight against the guards. Now that is the kind of thing I went in there expecting more of.

And not much else. I'd say the humor too, but for every well-crafted joke there were at least two more forced ones.

I mean, I get it Disney. You want to separate the new generation of Star Wars from the old; you want to pull it away from the Skywalker family. Fine, all for it, do the thing. You don't have to butcher and piss all over the still warm corpses of everything that came before you to do that. Have some fucking respect.

I wish Hamill had taken Ford's stance and refused to be part of this any longer.

Maybe they'd have CGI'd him? That, at least, would have been worth a bit of money and a couple hours to see.

 

I just thought it was a bad movie with unlikable characters and arcs that went nowhere. So the dark side is a mirror with sound effects? Really?

 

Well, I just watched it today, and I have a lot of opinions about this movie, most of them negative.

I generally watch movies solely for entertainment. I don't really look too into a movie to decide if it was necessarily good or bad. If there's a lot of cool action sets, I'm usually quite content. But this is Star Wars, and I love everything about Star Wars. So, I was actually actively watching and analyzing the movie.

My overall impression was that it was okay-ish; I'd maybe rate it a 5/10? Maybe 6/10?

I don't know. This movie was just wholly disappointing. I'll break it down into the areas I felt it went wrong: character, pacing, runtime, identity, inspiration, and all that mumbo-jumbo. Oh, and the trailer. I am definitely going to talk about the trailer.

Spoiler: Opions

The Trailer:
You know the saying "never judge a book by its cover?" Well, yeah, it works for movies too. Never judge a movie by its trailer. Movies are over two hours long. Any competent editor can throw around a two-minute video of that to make it interesting. But I let the Star Wars hype get to me. There were so many questions loaded into the tiny three-minute clip we got: who are Rey's parents? why is luke on an island? who is Snoke really? will Leia die? why do the Jedi need to die?

I was drooling at the thought of what could happen. There were so many possibilities there. I was waiting--hoping--for Disney to expand upon the Jedi backstory or add some crazy plot twist we'd never expect. It didn't come. Rey's parents? Simple people (probably the most shocking event in the movie). Luke's reasoning for exile? Guilt. Snoke's backstory? LOL! Leia's fate? Still somehow alive. The Jedi's necessary end? An extremely weak reasoning by Luke.

The trailer raised so many questions, and it answered them in probably the most unexciting ways possible.

Identity:
I felt, as others did, that the writers didn't know Star Wars.

To start, this movie seemed to be more of a science fiction story than a space fantasy. For me, all this tech stuff-- the "string" and hyperspace bull shit--really bogged down the narrative. I don't recall the original trilogy having any of that. It was quite simple: big laser kills stuff; there's an opening to shoot at.

Also, am I the only one who was wondering why I should hate The First Order? To be honest, the shit they have done really isn't that egregious. I think the movie makers also felt that as they added the child slavery bit at like the 50% mark of the movie to really drive home why The First Order is so bad. I don't know. The First Order just doesn't seem that bad to me. Like, for the rebels, yeah they're the worst. But the rebels are the rebels. They're in a war with each other. The Storm Troopers killing their enemies in a war doesn't necessarily make them evil. In WWII, the British killed some Germans. Were they evil for doing that?

Yeah, I got a little off track. But anyway, for me fantasy has adventure. This didn't have it. It was a crappy science-fiction space sim.

Inspiration:
This is where I found the stories biggest blunders. The movie simply wasn't inspired. There was no innovation. Disney stuck to the old tried and true Star Wars formula.

This really pisses me off. Star Wars Expanded Universe has one of the largest collection of already fleshed out content available out of any media IPs out there, besides, perhaps Marvel and DC. There is so much innovation and storytelling already at the writer's fingertips. It can't be that hard looking at previous stories for a little inspiration. Just look at it, damn it! But this, what we got with this movie, was their best work. Stars Wars can be and should be more than just space infiltration, because, in these last three movies, that's all there was. Three movies in a row the entire plot was revolved around infiltrating the First Order or Empire. And besides Rogue One, they were pretty shitty infiltration sequences, at that.

I can't be the only one who believes Star Wars can have a plot that goes beyond: "Oh no! They're pointing a super-evil laser at us. Quick! Let's infiltrate it and run away." Some time passes. "Oh look! The evil laser is pointing at us again. Quick, infiltrate it and run away!" That exact sequence happened twice in the same damn movie.

Rag on the prequels all you want. The characterizations for the most part sucked. The dialogue was awful and cringy. But you know, at least they had a story, and fighting, that went beyond space infiltration and fleet. The prequels told a story about a character: Anakin. Was the story good? Ehhhh, not so much. But at least the writers were inspired to do something beyond a basic rehash of the last movie. There was depth to it. Yeah, that depth stank like shit, but depth nonetheless.

Characters:
I'm not going to go too far into this. A lot of other people have already detailed the shortcomings of Luke's character, and his uncharacteristic actions. Honestly, Luke Skywalker's entire character can be summed up by a giant "WTF Why Is He Doing Any Of This?". People, @Republic especially, touched on the fact that Rey is still a Mary Sue.

Perhaps my largest issue was summed up by what my sister said as we left the movie together. She said, about Kylo Ren, "I didn't like any of his scenes. It just looks like they're setting him up for his redemption." I wholeheartedly agree. The seeds of redemption are already being spread by his and Rey's conversation. To me, it felt quite obvious that, somehow, Rey will find a way to redeem him. I'm sick of this bullshit. Can't the bad guys ever stay bad? Like, if their conviction in their actions is so weak that they can easily be swayed by their enemies, you'd think they wouldn't, you know, try to kill an entire solar system. Usually, when someone doesn't feel too confident about what they are doing, they are skittish about their actions and usually employ the art of inaction. Not Kylo Ren though. He's special.

Now, this is really getting into my personal taste, but, for once, I want a movie where morals don't decide the victor of a war. "Love" doesn't and shouldn't mean your side will automatically win in the end. The British colonists in both America and Australia, for the most part, were in the wrong. They killed and stole from the natives for coin or land. But they won. The Native American and the Australian Aboriginals didn't win in the end because they were on the "right side" or because they "knew love". At the rate Hollywood is going, we're going to be anime soon. Are we soon to see characters, in the middle of a battle scene, yelling "for love" and then they receive a huge power boost? We're going the route of Fairy Tail, for fucks sake.

Snoke was also a fucking disappointment. All that hype about him. His incredible force prowess shown in the meeting with Rey, and that was how he ended? That's a huge letdown. He was literally the only character in the entire universe that had some mystery about him, and now he's dead (though I don't discount a revival; he died way too easily.). To be honest, at the end of the movie, I was hoping that, after Luke fought off Kylo Ren, Snoke appeared behind him, on the island, and skewered Luke with his lightsaber. I know it's a Disney movie, but not every character should die on their own terms. And, that would also be a surprise.

Runtime, pacing, and subplot:
I got bored. Yeah, I'll admit it. Probably half-way through the movie, I got bored and started to wonder when it would end. The only reason I was still invested in the movie was because I was waiting for Luke's heroic entrance, and for him to "fuck the enemy up", if you will.

I'd attribute this for a few reasons. The first is that, in my opinion, the movie was too long. The average Hollywood blockbuster comes in at around 130 minutes. The Last Jedi was 155 minutes. They could have, and should have, cut A LOT more. If I were directing I would have shaved off at least 25 minutes of runtime.

This leads into the subplot. The entire gambling town was unnecessary. It didn't add anything except runtime to the story. It took us away from the narratives we'd rather be at: Rey and Luke as well as the main Rebellion ship. The child slavery stuff felt like the writers were trying to force me to hate the First Order because they did a weak job at establishing why The First Order is such a bad group. The gambling town also had some of the worst comedy scenes, in my opinion.

The codebreaker also felt kind of token-y as if to show that there are people who don't give a shit about the rebellion either way. Finn and the Asian chicks' reactions when he betrayed them was also kind of laughable. LIke how didn't they realize that he couldn't give a shit about the rebellion? Are all rebellion members that naive?

Misc.:
Because this has nowhere else, I will just list a few of my other dislikes.

• Humor: Most of the humor felt off for this type of movie. I don't like this movie trend where everyone is trying to insert humor like Marvel movies. It doesn't work in a lot of projects.
• Contrivity: A lot of shit felt contrived to move the plot along. Rey and Kylo Ren's mind link? Contrived as fuck. The code stuff--contrived. PROBABLY THE WORST THING THEY DID WAS WITH THE SHIPS! SNOKE'S SHIP CAN'T CATCH THE REBELLION BECAUSE IT'S BIGGER? I BET SNOKE'S SHIP WAS WAY NEWER, HAD BETTER TECH, AND WAY BIGGER ENGINES. THAT SHIP SHOULD HAVE EASILY CAUGHT THEM!
• The First Order's incompetency: Yeah, we get it, the First Order sucks. They are literally awful at war (which is so incredibly ironic since they basically conquered the entire galaxy). But come on. At least make them somewhat competent. Three ships shouldn't be able to avoid an entire Empire. Maybe if the writers didn't make the Rebellion have so little resources we might have actually gotten some good war setpieces.
• Spies?: Like honestly, the Rebellion has zero vetting process. I can't believe that the First Order was unable to get at least one spy in their midst. Yet, the Rebellion can easily slip by the First Order's far superior security systems. I call BS.

Some Pros:

• Cool visuals: Nuff said. Star Wars CGI, character oufits, and overall thematics are top notch.
• Decent dialogue: While I disagreed with the characters thoughts and actions, their actual lines weren't too bad.
• Fights: Top notch choreography. Looked cool. Though this is all expected by Disney.

Overall:
The last two movies, I felt, were lacking on the "Star Wars" factor. I found them to be half-baked science fiction flicks with a noticeable Star Wars skin plastered over them. This one was more of the same. I mainly went to this movie for Luke Skywalker. They butchered his character.

The story itself was boring. Everything that happened was predictable. I don't think anything actually shocked me about this movie. There was no "doom" factor for me, either. I never felt that the characters who truly mattered were ever in danger.

Based on the blunders of The Last Jedi, I'm not excited about the next installment. I'll go see it, of course. Star Wars is practically ingrained in pop-culture; you have to at least see it. But Disney Star Wars is most likely permanently soured for me.