Finally got to read all the spoilery bits after seeing The Last Jedi last night.
I really enjoyed it. I haven't seen The Force Awakens since it came out in the theatre, but it feels like I enjoyed this one more. I would put it slightly below Rogue One though.
There a lot of people that seem to hate what they did to Luke, but I thought it was classic Star Wars really. He can't get over how he handled Ben Solo so he goes into seclusion. Same as Obi Wan did over Vader and arguably what Yoda did after Palpatine.
I think it all makes more sense when you view it from Luke's second telling of how that night went down. He sees such darkness in Ben that his first reaction is to strike it down, but he instantly recoils at that reaction and feels ashamed. Afterwards he is overcome with guilt and shame.
Anyway, I like it and didn't even notice the 2.5 hour runtime. Sure there were some weird meanderings but they were interesting enough. I thought the performances were pretty good all around and no one really stuck out as poor.
I'll watch it again once it's out of theatres and probably back to back with TFA to see how they match up.
I enjoyed it the first time, for the most part. I enjoyed it a lot less the second time around, and I have to say that the more time I've had to think about it, the less I like it.
It's not just the whole Luke thing. It's that most of the characters (on both sides) are just so unbelievably stupid.
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
By the way, would all those "Men's Rights" jerks and "Anti-SJW" people kindly shut the heck up about how The Last Jedi is supposedly terrible because it has (*gasp*!) women and (*double gasp*!) people of color in prominent roles?
In my view, The Last Jedi has plenty of things wrong with it. That it has a somewhat more diverse cast than has typically been true of a Star Wars movie is not one of its problems. (Reading reviews, I've pretty-much come to the conclusion that the moment someone uses the term "Social Justice Warrior" as a pejorative, that person can be immediately written off as an ignorant bigot, unworthy of being taken seriously.)
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
SJW is the new sheeple. Anyone not using it ironically is probably a douche. People say it cause they heard others say it and they want to belong, but also feel like they are above such petty things as belonging or being nice to others.
So far my favorite comment is how the new trilogy sucks, cause apparently I no longer know what the term trilogy means.
Why these half-assed reboots are being done,I don't know. If you want to reboot Star Wars just fucking reboot it. These retellings of A New Hope (The Force Awakens) and The Empire Strikes Back (The Last Jedi) aren't working. Nobody gives a rats ass about the new "heros", and no it's not because one if a woman and one is a person of color. It is because they are so bland, and so gob smackingly stupid.
First off, as hard as it is to believe the writing and directing sucks worse than what George Lucas did. That is hard to do. Given the choice of watching the prequels, The Last Jedi, or taking a ball peen hammer to my nutsack, I'd seriously consider the ball peen hammer.
That Disney had not road map for these last 3 movies, short of let's milk this franchise for all the money we can, is so very obvious. For fucks sake The Last Jedi practically undoes everything The Force Awakens setup. It's almost as if Rian Johnson took a look at what J.J. Abrams set up in TFA and said "Fuck you JJ, I'll do what I want.", and nobody at Disney had any sense to make sure these stories were cohesive.
Fuck Disney for throwing out the entire Expanded Universe (but not really). They are ready stories for movies right there yet decided to take a shit on this franchise for a quick buck. The Ben/Rey story is just an adaptation of the Jacen/Jaina story from the EU.
That's all I am going to say for now. I have more specifics I want to get into a little later.
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The best way to make America great is to lower the standards!
Frankly after the absolute horribleness of Episode 2 & 3 I thought remaking A New Hope was a great idea to show us they still knew how to make a decent movie. The first trilogy had lots going for it but at heart it's pretty basic heros journey 3 act structure type of stuff, so it's going to be hard to give a similar feeling and not rehash the old stuff.
The reality though is that as the giant franchise the main 3 movies are going to be pretty safe overall, it's the side stuff that's going to be interesting, like Rebel One or the animated Star Wars rebels.
Hell I have no idea how they retconned Darth Maul's death but this fight scene is not only perfect, it mimics and honors the samurai pulp Lucas mined way better than entire SW movies.
The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi aren't terrible movies, but they aren't very good, in my opinion. As has already been mentioned, The Last Jedi pretty-much undoes everything set up by The Force Awakens, which is rather annoying. It also comes across as a complete betrayal of Luke Skywalker, if you ask me.
It doesn't help that the main character might as well be named Mary Sue.
But what bothered me about The Last Jedi more than anything else was how unbelievably stupid virtually all of the major characters were. I mean, did the average IQ in the galaxy drop by 50 points or so between the movies?
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Originally Posted by Ari
Hell I have no idea how they retconned Darth Maul's death but this fight scene is not only perfect, it mimics and honors the samurai pulp Lucas mined way better than entire SW movies.
That was a nicely-done (and surprisingly-realistic) fight -- much better than the swordplay in any of the movies. And it illustrates something that I've been saying since The Phantom Menace came out: Darth Maul's double-bladed lightsaber is a breathtakingly stupid design. Why? Because it severely limits your attack options and more to the point, makes the wielder almost completely incapable of defending against a centerline attack (the single most common attack in virtually every sword art). And Obi-Wan demonstrated that fact in three quick strokes.
Heck, I'll even forgive the hasso-no-kamae stance, which only makes sense if you're wearing a helmet. (But people think it looks cool, so you see it in movies and television all the time.)
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi aren't terrible movies, but they aren't very good, in my opinion. As has already been mentioned, The Last Jedi pretty-much undoes everything set up by The Force Awakens, which is rather annoying. [...]
Honestly, I kinda liked that. Once I understood that the movies were *not* going the way I expected, I accepted it and found the movie to be quite enjoyable. TFA was a perfectly good Star Wars movie, and I enjoyed it immensely, but it's very much like A New Hope. While The Last Jedi has some similar parallels to The Empire Strikes Back, it's very different.
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Originally Posted by The Lone Ranger
It also comes across as a complete betrayal of Luke Skywalker, if you ask me.
This is where you have to resolve the Luke Skywalker from the last 30 years of your imagination (and the extended universe books) versus the Luke Skywalker from the reworked universe canon. If you can't, you're not going to find The Last Jedi enjoyable, and that's a risk the filmmakers took. It took me a quite a lot of effort to separate the two Lukes, and I didn't really consume the extended universe books, so I'm not going to blame anyone if they don't like it.
While I wasn't entirely happy with Luke in this movie we shouldn't be blaming Rian Johnson and The Last Jedi for this - it was set up in The Force Awakens. To be honest, I was more unhappy about this in TFA than I was with the way that informed his character in TLJ. In the opening scroll of TFA I thought to myself, "Luke ran away? Why would he do that?"
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Originally Posted by The Lone Ranger
It doesn't help that the main character might as well be named Mary Sue.
But what bothered me about The Last Jedi more than anything else was how unbelievably stupid virtually all of the major characters were. I mean, did the average IQ in the galaxy drop by 50 points or so between the movies?
I don't actually agree with either of these.
Rey's power is explained by Snoke. Because there was such an imbalance of the Force to the dark side, a power of the light would rise up to meet it. Yeah, OK, it doesn't explain how she's so good at everything,
but maybe she's been given the power because she had the talent to be the counterweight the light side "needs."
In universe, I don't think anyone acted so stupidly as to get angry about it, nor is it out of line with the general stupidity present in all the Star Wars movies. That's my opinion, though.
Let's be real here for a second. The Jedi are shit. They always have been. Yeah, they can do shit with their mind and they have sweet laser swords. And because of that they appointed themselves "Guardians of Peace and Justice" throughout the galaxy. But what shit there were doing even that simple job.
The first real Jedi we meet is a bald faced liar. He lied right to some kid's face. And it was a terrible lie that could have gotten that kid killed or worse. You can tell it's a terrible lie because Jedi even doubled down on it with some bullshit "from a certain point of view" qualifier that was as much if not even more bullshit than the lie.
It's only by some miracle that our boy survives his encounters with Force users many decades his senior and experience.
And on top of that he kissed his own sister in a not very brotherly way.
So, starting off, dude has major emotional problems. And that galaxy far far away doesn't seem so big on universal healthcare or mental health. (And his two plus ghost friends are shit at life advice too, so they're no help either.)
So, our boy wants to bring the Jedi back in a big way. In his very first not even graduating class, he has at least two dudes - one is his nephew - fall to the deep dark blackness of the Dark Side of the Force. This was so serious that our boy thought - for long enough to get up in the middle of the night, get dressed, walk to a different room or hut or whatever sleeping broke ass sleeping arrangements they had working, bring his sweet laser sword, have a moment of reflection and ignite that sweet laser sword - to kill his own damn nephew while he slept.
That's some bleak shit right there. And let's consider this. Luke was even standing over the wrong bed. It's not like Ben was doing this on his own volition, self study at the library. He was being influenced by Snoak. Luke prolly wouldn't have had any second thoughts taking that dude out. Boom. Universe saved. Again.
But nope. He was about to kill someone he loved. (Again.)
Makes a dude want to step back and think about things.
It also comes across as a complete betrayal of Luke Skywalker, if you ask me.
This is where you have to resolve the Luke Skywalker from the last 30 years of your imagination (and the extended universe books) versus the Luke Skywalker from the reworked universe canon. If you can't, you're not going to find The Last Jedi enjoyable, and that's a risk the filmmakers took.
I agree, and actually kind of like new canon Luke and see him as a reasonable interpretation of original canon Luke. When he was standing over Ben in the flashbacks, I kept seeing the scene from Return of the Jedi where he's smashing Vader's lightsaber back until he cuts off his hand - with a snarl of rage locked on his face. Sure, he learned and grew, just like after he abandoned his training to run to Cloud City, but he's never been a particularly good Jedi, let alone a perfect one. You can always disagree about the exact direction and decisions they use for a character, but "betrayal" seems like an overstatement that's only possible if you are looking at Legend Luke and not Actual Luke - just like he points out in the movie.
The Jedi are shit. They always have been. Yeah, they can do shit with their mind and they have sweet laser swords. And because of that they appointed themselves "Guardians of Peace and Justice" throughout the galaxy. But what shit there were doing even that simple job.
That I can certainly agree with. Both the Original Trilogy and the Prequels pretty thoroughly established that however noble they might have been at the beginning, the Jedi were arrogant, imperious, manipulative, and often dishonest. And if we take Knights of the Old Republic as canon, this has apparently been true for a very long time.
The galaxy was very, very lucky that Luke was such a decent person at heart, because you know what might very easily turn someone to the Dark Side? Learning that both of your masters lied to and manipulated you, that's what.
In fact, once the Prequels came out, they made you wonder about the whole story regarding Luke. I mean, if Yoda and Obi-Wan were really trying to hide Luke, with the goal that he'd eventually be trained as a Jedi to bring about the downfall of Vader and the Emperor -- they did a spectacularly half-assed job of it.
They "hid" him on the one planet in the Universe that Darth Vader knows best -- a planet that's very sparsely populated, so finding someone should be a relatively easy task. They "hid" him by having his aunt and uncle raise him. They didn't even bother to change his name. If Vader or the Emperor had ever thought to check, they'd have found Luke pretty easily.
Which makes you wonder: Maybe the real plan was to use Luke as bait and distraction. If Vader or the Emperor were to locate Luke, they'd likely have killed him, and they would then conclude that Anakin Skywalker's legacy was ended -- (or at least, that's likely what Obi-Wan and Yoda figured would happen). That would leave Yoda and/or Obi-Wan free to train Leah to be the "New Hope" without attracting attention.
Unfortunately, the Jedi can't just go away, because the Sith (or Knights of Ren, or whatever they're calling themselves nowadays) won't. Thus, the Jedi (or something like them) are probably necessary. So, when the trailers for The Last Jedi had Luke saying that the Jedi had to end, I was thinking: "Yes! The Jedi need to be broken down and then re-made into what they should have been, not what they actually were!"
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
I don't necessarily exactly 100% agree with everything, but he makes some good points, I think.
I can't pretend to have thought as deeply and thoroughly about TLJ as that dude, but he did mention many things that I had been thinking. And of the dozens of other things he said, I agreed with most of them. I'll probably start checking out more of his work, so thanks for that.
Also, holy shit he talks fast and I feel sorry for anyone watching his vids that doesn't speak English as a first language.
I am confused, are there people that don't think the Jedi are stupid?
Looking at this from a larger context, the force is a kind of universe binding energy thing (let's pretend metaclorians were a Jedi fuck up) I've presumed that there are plenty of people in the universe attuned to the force, which makes for great plot luck and convenience, and also keeps them alive through feelings/premonitions. The Jedi and Sith have learned how to control the force to do things for them and the Jedi decided to build a controlling religion around the light side and eradicated the Sith even with a prophecy that imbalance will bring restoration. Thinking the prophecy means the light triumphs they blindly train their downfall, as the force rebalances by destroying the whole jedi 'republic' and throwing the area into chaos leading to the empire. They have noble goals but the Jedi and the Jedi council weren't the brightest bulbs in the bunch.
I would be surprised if Luke *wasn't* worried about the destructive ability of the dark side or whether or not the Jedi and Sith screwing with the force is actually causing more harm than good.
Also given how much of Star Wars is driven by classic narratives Luke could just as easily say "What, you think the old-guy-handing-out-swords-in-a-cave gets a call and just pops over? It takes years of dedicated waiting for a young disciple to wander upon you, and God do you hope he's not named "ImADickhead" or "I<34004s" Like how do you even pronounce that... anyway I've gotten off track, another important characteristic of my archetype, but worry not for I will always off track in ways which are useful to your specific story and may be relevant later on..."
Priscilla hits all the major points here but I’ll just add hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha https://t.co/f0bKJ9NeUe
Agreed. But let me add 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣��🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣- mh https://t.co/H3jacep5sU
Re: Is this Star Wars nerd-rage worthy?
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