So I was talking with a friend last night... about how the movie seemed awkward with effectively 4 acts. Came up with a solution, which also rectifies the greatest injustice of the movie, AND lops off a solid 25 minutes of run time.
First, you don't kill Ackbar like a little bitch. Sorry Purple Hair McAnglenose, you're on the cutting room floor. Which also saves us all the stupid Poe nonsense with her.
Next, you remove all of Finn/Rose and just promise BDT a role in the next movie instead of this crap. Finn is recovering at a resistance base somewhere. The very few survivors make it to salt planet OK, which still leaves you where you need to be. (Tiny resistance, ready for next film)
Skip the whole salt planet thing. Have Luke confront Kylo on the dreadnought after Kylo wakes up and Rey is gone, which would have delayed him long enough for Ackbar to turn the main ship around towards the dreadnaught. This leads to the following exchange.
General Hux: They're turning? Open a channel... Resistance ship, we are not offering quarter, is this some kind of ruse?
Ackbar : No General Hux.... It's a trap.
Ackbar goes to light speed and exits a damn legend....
Snoke. Maybe the best character in these new Star Wars movies, as far as dialogue, wit, and awesomeness goes. Ya. Let's kill him off. But keep that fat bitch. Star Wars needs more fat bitches. This mother fucker TELLS us he can read this dudes mind, and he can't see that shit coming? "But he was confused on WHICH light saber!" Come on. Fucker can connect two minds across the galaxy...but forgets that light saber is there. Let's build up the mystery of Snoke and then lets leave that hanging forever. ON TOP OF THAT...THEY HAD SEVERAL TIMES TO KILL CARRIE FISHER OFF CLEANLY, AND INSTEAD MADE HER DO WHATEVER THE FUCK THAT WAS...The one who is actually DEAD!
How badass would that have been if they did everything with Luke on the salty planet exactly the same, but he was actually there. Then leaves. Simple as that.
Phasma...Could have been Boba Fett levels of Star Wars nerd awesomeness...newp. Let's kill her off too.
It's like they totally went out of their way to separate themselves from the 1st film? WHY?
This leads me to believe Disney is going to pull exactly what @LiquidDeath is pissed off about.
It's the men, it's always been the men that have fucked up the galaxy. The women will save the day.
Obviously Leia has to die because of Fisher's death, but they're going to do it in a way that outshines Luke's sacrifice. Between her and Rey the message will be, we should have been listening and following women all along.
Prequel bad but not that prequel bad, if you know what I mean.
It's like the prequels are the worst and this shit comes in 2nd place.
That is why I will disregard these new movies, just like I did with the prequels.
Just saw this last night, and I wanted to sleep on it before writing about it.
This was a terrible movie. Terrible at being Star Wars, terrible at being a movie in general. Things were pretty, and there were some good performances that miraculously resulted from an absolutely god-awful script, but that's about it.
I'm going to say it: This was prequel level bad. I'd put this on par with Phantom Menace(the worst of the prequels), if not worse, since at least with TPM I didn't actively feel annoyed, and disgusted upon walking out of the theater. TPM reaction was more "wait... what?" combined with some mild disappointment after you thought about some of the things you just saw. TLJ was me shaking me head for the last 10 minutes of the movie, and then actively becoming more angry on the drive home. And this is speaking as someone who enjoyed TFA, and even enjoyed parts of R1, despite it being severely flawed.
So, where to begin? Most people are citing the characterization of Luke as the main flaw of the movie - and I agree, his entire character was taken out back and messily dismembered with a lightsaber, as Lithose has laid out - but I would argue the movie has far more fundamental flaws.
Narrative Structure
There basically isn't one. A movie must build up to some climax, a payoff, an event that changes the characters and ends the rising action of the plot. Go ahead and name the climax in this movie. Was it Snoke's death? There's like 30-40 minutes more movie left, and he wasn't built up enough for his death to be an effective climax. Was it Smug Laura Dern lightspeed ramming Snoke's ship (which was an awesome effect, I'll grant you. But a couple awesome effects do not a good movie make)? There's tons more movie left. How about Luke's fight with Kylo? That was cool, until we find out HE'S NOT ACTUALLY THERE. The point of having a fight with someone is that you're risking death, but Luke wasn't risking anything there, so it's just a bluff. Also, Kylo's character is unaffected by this fight, he's still just doggedly pursuing the rebels and acting pissed off. The rebels aren't affected by this, they could have likely escaped without the 3 minutes of stall time Luke provided.
This will be an unfair comparison, but compare that "climax" with ESB. The climax of ESB isn't the actual fight between Vader and Luke, but the most famous plot reveal/twist in cinematic history: "No, I am your father". HOLY SHIT! IS HE? Was he lying?! I MUST KNOW
Now you want an even worse comparison? TPM had a better payoff, a better climax that TLJ. The whole movie was leading up to the fight with Darth Maul. The trailers for the whole thing foreshadowed this and the whole movie built up to it. Yes, the rest of the shit going on with the gungans and droid bullshit was terrible, but the fight with Maul was what we wanted to see, and we got a great scene out of it. And this from a movie that was almost completely irrelevant, a movie that should never have been written around a kid as young as Anakin was. The fact that TLJ is making me think of TPM is even more annoying as I type this.
NOTHING MAKES SENSE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE STORY
They were going for: This is our Most Desperate Hour, Our guys are in Trouble! They went way over the top with this though. Ok, so the rebels are on a planet, and about to get bombarded by that dreadnought. Ok, fine. So the rebels nuked Starkiller base in TFA, killing tons of FO ships and guys and their most important weapon, but the rebels are even more fucked in the grand scheme of things after that? Why? Could they not get anyone to build more ships for them? Wouldn't that crushing victory bring more systems and people to their cause? Nope, we get the message that these few rebels on that planet, these last few ships, are all that's left of the rebellio..... I mean, OOPS, Resistance (/facepalm). If that's the case, and there's only a few hundred of them left, aren't they completely fucked no matter if they're killed or not? If the Allies whittled down the Nazis to a few hundred dudes and 3 ships, they'd consider the war won and move on, even if one of those few people left were Hitler or Himmler or any of those fucks. They wouldn't be committing tons of starships to be ambushed or killed in a prolonged guerilla action. You'd track the survivors, use spies and assassins and publicly claim they were already dead, while consolidating your position and power.
This kind of story worked in the OT because you always got a sense that what we were looking at was important, but only a piece of the overall picture. No matter what happened here, there were always more outposts out there fighting, more people fighting against the empire and working to bring it down. At no point did they come out and say, "Hey, these few hundred dudes on Hoth are it, if we can kill all of them, the rebellion's toast!"
Then, they get to Crait, and say, whoops, we just need to get a message out to our allies, they'll come and get us! If you had allies all this time, why didn't you call them in to help you before all your ships got killed?!? Goddammit I hate this movie.
The PC Bullshit Has Gone Too Far
I didn't want to talk about this, but this shit was so obvious to me I have to. So skip this section if you want a politics free review.
Leia was a moron. In the scheme of things, Poe taking a risk and sacrificing a few bombers and ships to take out a Dreadnought (successfully) was absolutely the right call. Sacrifice a few cheap bombers for a huge ship that must take years to build? A good commander takes that trade any time. WTF were they going to use those bombers for if not something like that? Then Poe gets back and she basically tells him, "This male macho bullshit risk-taking won't fly, I'm demoting you." Step back you, you, MAN, you. We women know best. This is reiterated by Dern and Leia's look and hand clasp. (Scissor me timbers, I guess we know what Leia was up to after Han took off!) Then Laura Dern basically does the same thing, by not communicating with her most effective and surely most senior pilot left alive. She has no plan except stall and pray. Except, oh wait! The plan was to distract them while we escape on small vulnerable unshielded uncloaked ships to a nearby planet. And then that plan goes horribly wrong and the FO kills most of the ships easily, because I guess she forgot the FO has scanners. Great plan idiot! No wonder the resistance can't find anyone to join up, who would follow a bunch of dried up old women to their certain deaths resulting from their obviously incompetent leadership?
The united colors of benetton casting: Even worse here than in R1. The actress that played Rose, just why? Why does she have to be fat and ugly? Can't they find a chick like Kaylee from Firefly? All the rebel supporting actors are just awful and are obviously just diversity hires. Even the FO had diversity hires manning their bridge equipment. It's Star Wars, make the diversity quota with aliens, not illegal aliens.
The Rich People's planet: JFC. Talk about ham-handed. Everything about this was terrible. From the flop eared endangered-species-list horses with near human faces, that are of course abused for sport. Apparently because Disney needed some PETA funding or something. The casino looked like it was a barely space-ified F. Scott Fitzgerald parody. Good god. Why not have them be gangsters? That's already established in Star Wars with the Hutts. And that little alien who was drunk and putting coins in BB8 reminded me of an alien Monopoly Guy.
Also, why would Finn park that ship on the beach? They don't have landing pads? They could have had a short scene where Finn pulls up to the casino and the valet gives him a look like, "You expect me to park this POS here somewhere? Filth"
Also, for there to be a rich people's planet makes no sense. The first thing a group like the first order or the empire does is confiscate everyone's money, so the only power in the galaxy is the FO/Empire, not the rich people. It's like the idea of there being rich bankers in the soviet union; the people in the soviet union that were rich were all part of the Communist party power structure. There was no room for anyone outside of the party that held any power.
They Ruined Everything They Set Up in TFA
The narrative cliffhangers from TFA:
Q: Who's Snoke? Where did he come from? How did a powerful dark side user arise when Palpatine would have snuffed out any competition during his reign, and Palps is dead? Why didn't Luke kill Snoke if he knew he was trying to corrupt Ben? How does a dude that looks like Swamp Thing attract a young kid to his cause?
A: Fuck you, Snoke's dead now and you get no answers.
Q: Why is Luke off on a faraway planet?
A: Because he's a huge pussy and couldn't handle the first set of students he tried to train. Did he really think there would be no risk to training people to have all the powers of the force? Fuck you, entire OT.
Q: Who's Rey's parents? Why did they leave her alone on Jakku? She has crazy strong innate force powers, she must be related to someone we've heard of?
A: Fuck you, she's nobody from nowhere. Even if Kylo is lying, this is a stupid lie for the audience, it would be better to have said nothing.
Q: So Rey's pretty strong in the force with no training, will she get some training from Luke and really come into her own so she can fight these powerful dark side users?
A: Fuck you, Rey does 2 lightsaber forms and gets 3 lines about the force and it's meaning, and that's it. No cool training sequences, no insights into the force, no instructions from the 15,000 year old Sacred Jedi Texts(!) that are burned up for the lulz, fuck you for even thinking that.
No Foreshadowing for Anything to do with Episode 9
What's left now for episode 9 to look forward to? Nothing. I'm looking forward to precisely nothing going forward.
Rey has no one to train with, except force ghosts, maybe? Meh. But she'll probably manifest some new never-before-seen force power and become the Chosen Sue, or some bullshit.
Kylo Ren is still the same guy, except now he has no Snoke to check his emo outbursts. But I guess we have to kill him now that he's the big bad. Meh.
The Resistance is still fucked, but I guess Luke's astral projection inspired the galaxy, or some shit, when destroying Starkiller Base didn't. /facepalm
I don't give 2 fucks about Finn, Poe, or any other resistance idiots, so whatever they're doing I don't care.
Compare this to the end of ESB:
Was Vader REALLY Luke's father? I must know!
Will Han be Ok? I want to find out!
Will Luke become a true Jedi?
All of this was enough to make you want to see how things turned out for our heroes. For TLJ, we've got nothing and that's just sad.
TL;DR:
The more I think on it, the more I hate this movie. I don't use that word frivolously. This has to be one of the biggest cases of wasted potential in a movie I can think of.
Don't go see it. Don't waste your money. Don't give any money to Disney, a corporate monstrosity that is proving day by day it has less and less idea of what constitutes good entertainment.
i'm with you on everything you said but this one thing:
The ships were cloaked, Del toro's character instead of helping fin and fat chick cracked the cloaking code for the FO to be able to detect an shoot them down (which is why they make it VERY obvious to show the audience the large cases of money they're giving him for his job)
Well, think about it, what did the prequels do? Take an established and beloved universe, and take a giant steaming dump all over it. Midichlorians are a great example.
What did TLJ do? Take a much less established universe (TFA new timeline), and take a giant steaming dump all over it. With the added bonus of shitting all over Luke Skywalker, the hero of the OT. Even the prequels only shit all over Darth Vader, the bad guy of the OT.
Sure, the prequels took a dump on a more important target, but it's the same crime. Also, I can pretend the prequels never happened, and be comfortable with the OT existing in a vacuum. These new movies make that much more difficult to do.
Feelsbadman
I'm more forgiving of this film than a lot of people are. I like what it was trying to do in many places. It just failed in execution. It was fundamentally Dune Messiah, which is hardly a bad pedigree. They piled a bunch of shitty side stories on top though, and the slow speed chase for a whole movie was dumb.
i'm with you on everything you said but this one thing:
The ships were cloaked, Del toro's character instead of helping fin and fat chick cracked the cloaking code for the FO to be able to detect an shoot them down (which is why they make it VERY obvious to show the audience the large cases of money they're giving him for his job)
I must have missed that exact thing, I remember that part and that they said something about it, but the specifics got lost.
If that's true, holy shit, it makes even less sense. They could have cloaked their ships and got away leaving the cruisers to draw their fire from the very beginning? That means there was no need to draw out the Speed chase, no need for Leia to get shot into space, no need to go to Space Vegas, no need for........ goddammit.
The prequels were bad Star Wars movies. The Force Awakens was a kind of mediocre Star Wars movie, but mostly because it was actually TOO similar to THE Star Wars movie. Rogue One was the most bland, boring, forgettable Star Wars movie ever made. Which brings us to TLJ.
The Last Jedi is a bad movie that somehow manages to be full of Star Wars characters and names, yet completely failed to feel like it was a continuation of the Star Wars story. Remember way back when ebaying a high level EQ char and knowing fuck all about how to play that class was an easy way to earn a bad reputation? TLJ is almost exactly that same situation, except with a much larger budget.
The prequels had a coherent story across the 3 films. The problems with those films are Lucas is a shit director and the entire idea of a prequel, going back to tell a story you KNOW how it ends is just a bad idea to start with.
These films? Like how do you do a trilogy without having it all written out ahead of time? All 3 of these films should have been locked down from a story standpoint beforehand. Now it's just a mess of different captains and storytellers that have left nowhere interesting for the next film to go.
This leads me to believe Disney is going to pull exactly what @LiquidDeath is pissed off about.
It's the men, it's always been the men that have fucked up the galaxy. The women will save the day.
Obviously Leia has to die because of Fisher's death, but they're going to do it in a way that outshines Luke's sacrifice. Between her and Rey the message will be, we should have been listening and following women all along.
Well of course.. I mean look at the arcs of every major male character in the story....
Finn - Gets drug along by a confident and motivated woman who catches him trying to bolt, doubts her at almost every turn, proven wrong at almost every turn. If only he had listened to THE SMART WOMAN!
Poe - Insisting on taking our the dreadnaught costs the lives of all those bomber pilots and the loss of those bombers.. Then everything he does flies in the face of the OBVIOUSLY SMART AND WISE WOMAN who has taken Leia's place (because they conveniently snuff out Ackbar like a little bitch... to make way for an OBVIOUSLY SMART AND WISE WOMAN since you can't have a good leader now who's a male, even if he's a squid male....)
Kylo - Let's not even touch how all his problems are caused by toxic male figures in his life, which leads us to....
Luke - The guy who ignored the advice of tons of people in order to try to save his own fathers soul by giving him redemption at the risk of his own life, but then somehow decides to go all Old Yeller on his own nephew because he could "sense the darkness in him".. wut? Then retreats to die alone living like a hermit until a SMART AND MOTIVATED woman comes along who he tells to go away until she proves him wrong and makes him need to sacrifice himself to the child he tried to kill....
Name one male character in the movie who wasn't written like either an idiot, or a blatantly malevolent ass?
Also...Luke shouldn't have died, that fight was a joke and a grave injustice, i really hope JJ can wave away that ending scene and bring him back for a proper send off... explain it away somehow, like maybe he can teleport or some shit now, maybe he shows up on Leias ship for real.
Abrams specializes in wacko amalgam plots. I'm expecting Luke to "phase in" with the help of some other force ghosts, including Anakin, because "X Y Z" is unfinished business. It would mean knocking Rey down a peg story-wise, since the justification would need to be Rey cannot be trusted and/or is not the new force prototype afterall.
If Abrams wants to secure himself a spot as the hero of this franchise and he's willing to argue against Kennedy and her lovechild Rian (3 movies signed, that's a lot of pull) then everything could work out theoretically. Abrams could point out Rian had freedom with his storyline, and he'd like the same courtesy extended to him for Episode 9.
Mark's in good shape. It would be fucking stupid not to bring him back to the story in full capacity.
Well of course.. I mean look at the arcs of every major male character in the story....
Finn - Gets drug along by a confident and motivated woman who catches him trying to bolt, doubts her at almost every turn, proven wrong at almost every turn. If only he had listened to THE SMART WOMAN!
Poe - Insisting on taking our the dreadnaught costs the lives of all those bomber pilots and the loss of those bombers.. Then everything he does flies in the face of the OBVIOUSLY SMART AND WISE WOMAN who has taken Leia's place (because they conveniently snuff out Ackbar like a little bitch... to make way for an OBVIOUSLY SMART AND WISE WOMAN since you can't have a good leader now who's a male, even if he's a squid male....)
Kylo - Let's not even touch how all his problems are caused by toxic male figures in his life, which leads us to....
Luke - The guy who ignored the advice of tons of people in order to try to save his own fathers soul by giving him redemption at the risk of his own life, but then somehow decides to go all Old Yeller on his own nephew because he could "sense the darkness in him".. wut? Then retreats to die alone living like a hermit until a SMART AND MOTIVATED woman comes along who he tells to go away until she proves him wrong and makes him need to sacrifice himself to the child he tried to kill....
Name one male character in the movie who wasn't written like either an idiot, or a blatantly malevolent ass?
I guess they figured they'd Guardians of the Galaxy this film up with humor, the problem is Starlord's Earth era jokes make sense because he grew up there. There was plenty of decent humor in this film without adding in the obnoxious shit.
