Finally saw it yesterday. I love Darth being a badass, of course. Darth Vader was the start of my villain love, and while he's been surpassed, I will always enjoy watching him being evil.
All together now: :awwwwww:
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
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What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. ... The origin of myths is explained in this way.
If you haven't watched the trailer for The Last Jedi - don't. Here's why: It doesn't actually give stuff away, specifically. But. BUT. It gives you ideas of some really important stuff that's going to happen. Like, for reals. So, three months out, you already have to start avoiding stuff about it.
On a more serious note, I'm actually kinda excited for a Star Wars film.
Like ok, my first Star Wars film in theaters was Phantom Menace, and it was... not bad. I mean not good by any means but it had an added bonus of learning about character animation and reading the story of one of the animators of the lead gungan work with this new technology. Then the sequels arrived and the bumps in the road became huge craters their CQI models were clipping through with ease. And omg the dialog!
I kinda half heatedly watched A New Hope Take 2, and enjoyed it. And catching up on my nerd duties just recently watched Rebel One, which I liked a lot, so I once again have hope that whatever the hell this is going to be, it's going to be decent, lead on by the excellent variations in score as the music keeps pace with the screen.
When a friend's son (who was, so tragically, dying from an incurable illness) made a wish: to meet Luke Skywalker, it fell on me -- the only person the dad knew who worked in the film business -- to make a call. 1/4
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
I saw The Last Jedi earlier today. Overall, I liked it; it was certainly better than any of the Prequels (unless we count Rogue One) had been.
Where The Force Awakens was basically a remake of A New Hope, The Last Jedi was rather ... strongly ... influenced by The Empire Strikes Back. Still, if you're going to copy, then you should copy from the best, as the saying goes.
So, is it good? Yes. Is it worth seeing? Yes.
But there's something about it that really bugs me.
I am so sick of the notion that all heroes have feet of clay and that "mature" = cynical and hopeless.
Yeah, yeah, I know that the Good Guys will ultimately win in the next movie. Heck, Kylo Ren will probably even switch sides at the last moment. That doesn't change the fact that this movie -- for all its good points -- leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.
The otherwise excellent "Dark Knight" movies insisted that "You either die a hero or you live long-enough to become a villain" -- that is, nobody stays good. And so Batman had to (figuratively) die at the end.
The truly awful Batman v. Superman had both Batman and even Superman outright insisting that "Nobody stays good" -- and had Wonder Woman flat-out saying that she'd given up hope that humanity was worth saving.
But I don't want to live in a world where Batman straight-up murders people, where Superman doesn't give a flying rat's backside about the thousands of people who died in the crossfire when he battled supervillains, or in which Wonder Woman decides that the Nazis are no worse than anybody else and so decides to sit out World War II.
And I don't want to believe that Luke Skywalker -- Luke Freakin' Skywalker, of all people -- decided to murder somebody in his sleep because he believed that the guy was both evil and beyond redemption. Really?? This is the guy who believed -- and proved -- that even Darth Vader could be redeemed?
Sure, Luke quickly changed his mind about murdering Ben, but by then, the damage was done. Under the circumstances, it was pretty easy to understand why Ben/Kylo Ren would go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, given that he awoke to find that his uncle and mentor was apparently about to murder him.
Now, it's easy to understand why Luke would be feeling despair after his spectacular failure regarding Ben/Kylo. And frankly, I agree with him about the Jedi.
The Prequels made it quite clear that, however noble the Jedi might have been in the beginning, they had grown complacent, arrogant, hypocritical -- and let's face it, stupid. But the solution to that isn't to just give up and hand the victory to Team Evil. The solution is to re-make the Jedi into what the Galaxy at large believes them to be -- a Force [sic] for Good.
Luke knows that Snoke is out there, as is Kylo Ren. Are we to believe that he's so stupid as to think that if he refuses to train any more Jedi, that the Sith or the Knights of Ren or whatever Team Evil is calling itself nowadays will just go away? He knows that the First Order has pretty-much conquered the Galaxy and that they're -- if anything -- even worse than the Empire had been, and he knows that he's widely regarded as the best (perhaps the only) hope that peace and freedom will eventually be restored.
So his response is: "Screw it; I've done my part; let the Bad Guys win."? Bull crap.
I'm not saying I want my heroes to be pure and incorruptible and one-dimensional. I'm saying that I hate the notion that there are no true heroes -- that they all have feet of clay and will eventually fall into cynicism and despair, or give up the Good Fight, or even decide that it's easier to just let Evil win and screw all those thousands, millions, billions, or trillions of innocents who will suffer as a result.
This is why I've like the Marvel movies so much better than the DC movies. The writers of the MCU have shown that you can write admirable and compelling characters who nonetheless have flaws, face failures, and make mistakes -- but who don't give in to despair when things look bad, and who don't abandon the notion that Good is worth fighting for, even if it seems like the whole world disagrees.
Did Captain America ever say, "Screw it, people aren't worth fighting for; I'm just going to let the Bad Guys win"? No, he did not. He made mistakes, he had failures -- but he picked himself up and kept fighting for what he believed to be right, no matter the odds.
I don't want Luke Skywalker to be perfect. But I sure as heck don't accept that notion that to "grow up" is to accept that there are no true heroes, and that even the most idealistic of people must eventually become jaded and cynical.
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Oh, and may I say that I hate the stupid convention that the heroes don't tell their comrades what their plans are? I think it's a lazy ploy on the writers' part, because it makes exactly zero sense in the context of the story.
Most of the conflict between Poe and Admiral Laura Dern (whatever her character's name was) would have been averted had she simply told him -- "I have a plan; trust me."
And Luke couldn't have spent two seconds telling Leia "I'll divert them while you guys escape"?
Yeah, I understand; it creates tension. But Poe basically staged a mutiny (and nearly doomed the entire Rebellion in the process) because Admiral Dern couldn't be bothered to explain that she had a plan -- even after Poe all but begged her to do just that. And if Luke had bothered to tell Leia what his plan was, the remaining Rebellion forces could have escaped in plenty of time, instead of nearly getting wiped out because they didn't figure out Luke's plan until it was almost too late.
So that makes the characters idiots, if you ask me.
As I said, I understand that writers do this sort of thing to create tension, but I think it's bad writing, since no sane and responsible person would do this sort of thing in the real world.
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”