EDIT: Warning, wall of angry text.
I just assumed the red guards were the missing Jedi.
You mean the new movie which spawned a giant space lobster from nowhere Sith Noone Knew Existed* and then killed him off with no previous warning? 
So yeah, no, it´s not a peak of narrative quality. If anything it´s sort of reminiscent of Poochie the Dog in The Simpsons (anyone remember that?)
*The name and character implementation are so lame that I´m pretty sure the redditer who came up with this acronym hit jackpot as to it´s etymology.
The bombers in the opening were brilliant. SW has always been WW2 dogfighters in space, now we have a WW2 bomber in space. Complete with the obligatory midflight repair/crew death war story. That bomber is the first SW vehicle I’ve seen since the original trilogy that wasn’t based on any old vehicle, yet still felt like it belonged.
The bombers were retarded. Actually. Where the fuck are the y-wings??? Granted they looked alright, but it's pretty well established that neither the rebels or imperials use fucking carpet bombing in a fleet action. Like y-wings are a thing. tie-bombers. These new things didn't make any sense.
As for Leia pulling herself out of space... I basically just wrote an essay about this and it digressed at some point. So I'll split this into two things. First, about Leia:
this movie rebuilds what it means to be a jedi in a way that needed to happen. George Lucas never understood his own universe; the the original trilogy's construction of what a jedi is gets shat on in the prequels and most supplemental materials.
The light side protects, the dark side destroys. The light side warns of danger, the dark reveals your enemies. The light decieves to avoid violence, the dark decieves to entrap one’s enemies.
People have pointed out in the prequels that the jedi don’t act like jedi. This is because they do nothing but fight and kill, because George Lucas puts too much stake on his own icons (in this case, he thought the lightsaber was what defined a jedi simply because the lightsaber is what the fans latched on to). This is also the sin of the extended universe and why I’ve always dislike it. The EU practically masturbated to OT icons. The deathstar was rebuilt and redisgned endlessly. Palpatine came back to life a billion times, be it through a secret apprentice, literally being cloned, or through expies. Force users and lightsabers were ubiquitos. To say nothing of the undo importance given to the core trio even tho in universe they’re not *that* big a deal and Star Wars has so much room for other stories. I’d go on but this is a digression.
Going back to what a jedi is: Obi Wan did jack shit with his lightsaber. He protected Luke once because Luke wasn't tough enough guy for the cantina, and he distracted Darth Vader for about 5 minutes. In all other ways he used the force and his wits. Yoda never accomplished anything with his lightsaber. The only time Luke used his lightsaber and it actually helped him, was when he threw it away. All other times he could have used a blaster or, again, he was just delaying Darth Vader. And it was heavily implied that Vader only had a saber because he was a fallen jedi, an implication that the new trilogy holds to.
The lightsaber was a symbol of the jedi, not the core of their power. The core came from the force. But the jedi never use the force to cause direct harm (outside the prequels), hence why they carry physical weapons. Also why Palpatine had no respect for the lightsaber. Palpatine probably could have snapped Luke’s neck whenever he wanted or stopped his heart, he used force lightning not as some kind of MOBA ultimate, but because it inflicts a torturous and slow death. The new movie also held to that implication. Palpatine spent his last moments fruitlessly spewing lightning everywhere because he’s a wretched old man with dark magic fueled by negative emotion. Hurting people is all he knows how to do. It would have made no narrative sense for him to lift himself out of that pit.
Okay, that was all discussing the OT. Now back to TLJ. All plotlines in TLJ are built around a single narrative thrust: "do we need a hero, and if so, what is a hero?" To this end the movie even questions whether the galaxy needs jedi to fight sith and a resistance to fight the first order (the answer is "yes" obviously, but its noteworthy the movie went there). Each member of the core trio gets their own narrative thread, and each reaches the same conclusion via different means: "being a hero means helping the people you love, not hurting the people you hate." Rey has the most interesting plotline because Rey reaches this conclusion way earlier than the others, about halfway through the movie when she realizes that her and Kylo share something in common. The rest of the movie isn't spent on her learning that lesson, its spent rebuilding her into a new Jedi after she rejects Luke's mentorship. Luke was the first person to ever learn this lesson, as he went into his final battle not to kill the emperor but to save Vader. Luke's failure was not in being a hateful, violent, absolutist prequel jedi (which is what Rey *thought* a jedi was). Rather Luke's failure was giving up. Much like Luke took the good parts of Yoda's teachings and replaced the one part he didn't like ("let go of your friends") with his own new truth, Rey takes that core kernel of Luke's belief (pretty much the only thing he *does* teach her) and becomes a new Jedi without the rest of the trappings.
We see what this new Jedi means first when she and Kylo physically rip her lightsaber in half with the force, destroying it beyond any possibility of repair. She goes the rest of the movie with no lightsaber, in the first SW movie with no true lightsaber duel at any point. Then we get a hint of what this new Jedi is when Luke defeats Kylo Ren using only the force, without harming him in any way. Not only does he not physically harm Kylo (remember, he did have an X-wing, he could have showed up), but he doesn't give him the uncertainty of the truth that he only meant to kill Kylo for a brief second, nor does he give Kylo the guilt that would come with killing Luke. He entered that final fight having let go of his failure, and as a result he is able to confront Kylo content in the knowledge that the fight isn't about his old student but rather about the galaxy, Leia, and his new student. The finally we see it in full at the end of the movie, when Rey lifts the rocks out of the way so the resistance can finally escape. That's what a new-school jedi is. Not someone who says "1v1 me bro" to the main sith at the end of the movie.
And that is why Leia is able to pull herself out of space. She's not a jedi at all, she's just a force sensitive who taps into the light side, much like that one dude from Rogue One. All she uses the force for is to check up on her elderly friends dying, do some fortune telling on the side, and to save her own life when the resistance still needs her. Because she has no illusion that the force is her weapon (rather relying on her fleet, allies, and blaster), she doesn't need to learn the lesson that brought down the prequel jedi. Thus, Leia is using the light side its most proper way, to save a life and to guide others towards the right path. Hence why something that might have been very difficult for the powerful dark side users we saw in the OT, she makes look easy. It also can be inferred that with skywalker blood Leia is a very powerful force user. She seems to have a strong understanding of the light side, just in a wise old lady way, not a jedi way.
Then continuing on to talk about TLJ, still using the above points:
As I said above, TLJ was about among other things Rey learning a core lesson about the force. But the first piece of that lesson we see isn't from a jedi, its from Snoke. "Destroy the past." Luke and Rey entered the movie as terrible jedi because they thought they had to be an old jedi, a prequel jedi. Rey comes one step short of saying it. If you'll let me twist one of her quotes a tad, "the force is a power the jedi use to fight bad guys." No, of course not. Big bad guys exist and they always will because the force has a dark side as well as a light. To be a new school jedi like Luke tried to be and Rey became doesn't mean fighting the sith. It means not giving a shit about the sith except to pity them. The prequel jedi, and in a better written way yoda and obi-wan, they hated and feared the sith. That was the seed of their destruction. Fear and hate are not the way of the light side.
As part of this journey, we destroy the images of the sith and the empire. Vader's mask, the single most important icon in Star Wars history, is 100% absent. Its destroyed in effigy by Vader's whiney, contemptible replacement that no one is afraid of. The empire is destroyed when its geometrically shaped super weapons are destroyed twice with little effort, like they always are. The gruff dreadnought commander goes scowling into the fire, leaving Raeh, the only notable imperial commander we see for the entire film. A thin, man, squabbling but competent, not particularly evil, who gets tossed around like a ragdoll by the force all movie. Again, someone no one is afraid of. Palpatine is destroyed when his expy is cut in half, his person honor guard killed, his throne room burned down. All this left is Kylo, and Kylo lacks the one thing both the Emperor and Snokes had in spades: self-confidence. He's never going to truly replace the emporer. The semi-competent, mundane-evil imperial officers are never going to break lose of the sith, and they're never going to catch the rebels or defeat the jedi.
At the end of the movie, the square-one journey of The Force Awakens is complete. The larger rebellion is left ambigious, the rebels but a small group, the empire and sith control the galaxy and only one jedi is left. We're back to the OT. Yet, we end on a note not of pity but of happiness for the devastated rebels and jedi, because they are reunited with their friends and they've been freed to start a new adventure. And tho the sith and their empire are still the galaxy dominating superpower and evil as ever, we end on a note not of menace, of hating and fearing them, but on pity. "Destroy the past." These words resound throughout the movie. Star Wars isn't destroyed, the war isn't over and the adventure isn't either. But cultural icons were killed symbolically. This is what the hardcore Star Wars fans, and the EU fans especially, hate about this movie. They've been extrapolating what SW is not from its setting but from its icons. To them SW is the lightsaber, its Darth Vader, its the original trilogy of heroes. This movie extracts the beating heart of what SW is, and cuts away the rotten flesh that was the icons. In doing so, those hardcore fans are left behind because their version of SW doesn't exist. The Han Solo movie is likely to be the last hurrah of that SW. Everything else is new territory. But the hardcore fans are wrong to throw up a stink, because they're claiming ownership of something that was never theirs to begin with. SW may have helped define geek culture but its not a geek thing. It was never niche. Pretty much any white dude over the age of 35 is a SW fan, the young fans are less numerous but more enthusiastic and diverse, the SW fandom is just "the USA" at this point. I'm pretty sure more people like SW than baseball. To me, SW is a classic piece of Americana, if any fans have ownership of the franchise (which is a fallacy unto itself), its American moviegoers as a whole. Some guy who's personally written 300 Wookiepedia articles owns the franchise no more than some random smuck on the street that watches three movies a year. And to me quoting SW facts about how fast the millennium falcon can go or whether Vader would beat Maul in a cage match, reaks to me of fandom gatekeeping.
This movie needed to happen. If the prequels are to remain canon yet be redeemed so they don't keep hurting the story, we need to canonnically move away from the prequel jedi (and by extension, the EU + video game jedi that have more in common with prequel jedi than they do OT jedi). And for OT obi wan and yoda to be redeemed, we needed to finally address the flaw in their teachings, which is that one stupid "here's an absolutist speech about why absolutism is bad", and that other speech about how hatred is bad that's why we hate the sith. In this way the OT too, is redeemed, in a way I never realized it needed to be. Finally, the seventh movie is redeemed from it existential worthlessness. The work that the heroes did in the OT was effectively undone halfway through The Force Awakens. As a result it essentially rebooted the franchise just to tell a the same old story. Its cool that we got a new SW but it didn't need to exist. The new director for TLJ had the choice of following the arc of the previous movie, or choosing to turn things around and have Luke and the New Republic not be completely dead. Instead, the director chose to continue the path of The Force Awakens to its logical conclusion were all the fighting Luke, Leia and Han had put in has been erased. Instead, their victory is a personal and moral one, as each guides the next generation of the galaxy to greatness in a different way. In this way episode VII is redeemed: what was an unintentional middle finger to the OT now reads like part of a two movie love letter to everything the OT was. Because IMO while it cut away the icons TLJ *got* SW on a deep level. What made it for me, and the final way that it redeemed the previous movies (prequels this time), was that it created a universe in which ordinary people could make a difference. A little kid, a kangaroo race horse thing, an arms dealer, random rebels. Hell, a BB8 spray painted black gets to have its moment and be a weirdly menacing character. The OT was always like this; but the prequel trilogy, with its inescapable destiny and lack of any obvious Han Solo character to balance out the royalty and jedi, took this away and made people forget what SW is really about. To me TLJ is a triumphant return to form.
The most destructive thing the movie did to the franchise IMO is that it destroyed without creating. The story could go anywhere from here. By declawing the main bad guys a bit and leaving Rey with no obvious next step, plus establishing that the new trilogy can be its own thing now, TLJ leaves the next movie with a lot of freedom but also a difficult task. Whatever comes next is going to have to build a new identity for the "main line" Star Wars franchise. Not even for any hypothetical fourth trilogy; rather, for itself, as the new trilogy has been left intentionally rudderless. Personally, I don't think the next movie will succeed in this task. I think the next movie is going to see the conflict to its logical conclusion: Rey will kill or redeem Kylo Ren, the resistance will defeat the first Order or at least one of their fleets/super weapons/bases. I expect JJ Abrams to go back on some of the changes that TLJ made to the franchise and to his own plotline, but I think the changes to the franchise from TLJ will ultimately stick. If nothing else because Rian Johnson is going to make more movies in the franchise. I for one am excited to see where things go! No more rules now. No more prophesies, no more skywalkers. No more limits about how many force users exist in canon.
[rage intensifies] this movie is not how you do anything correctly!
Shit. I don't even know where to start.
Leia: That scene was dumb. as. shit. I have no qualms with Leia being force-sensitive with the potential to be Luke-level powerful, that makes perfect sense within the logic of the universe. But... UGH, first of all the whole way she like wakes back up and flies through space to look like a Disney princess is just fucking bullshit. I mean, seriously? It was so saccharine and campy, if she IS so powerful as to fucking protect herself from space AND force-pull herself back to the ship, why didn't she just stop the missiles from impacting? Easy stuff in comparison. Why didn't she sense Kylo? So many things that should have happened first, didn't. And y'know what, frankly, if you wanna bypass all that stuff so you can have the bullshit Disney moment, at least back it up with logic that we can see. TELL US OUTRIGHT why didn't these obvious things happen.
As far as "rebuilding what it means to be a jedi"... just, no man. No. I'm pretty sure the whole point of the movie is the opposite. The whole theme is that both Jedi and Sith are outmoded and overly extremist, that the whole good vs evil thing is bullshit. Rey ISN'T a Jedi and Kylo ISN'T a Sith--that's like pretty heavily present in just about every scene. It's called "The Last Jedi" for a reason. Rey's arc, and EVERYONE'S for that matter... are bad because they're all things that the characters WERE in the last film.
Rey = selfless, helping the ones you love (uh, decides to blow up Starkiller Base?
) Also her parents being no one is such a bullshit thing. If you gonna build up the whole "who are her parents" thing and then RUIN IT for us, give us a more interesting scene then her just fucking looking into a cool mirror. What a lame way to end that plot line. I mean Kylo brings it up again, but he was just being a meanie weenie. There's basically no emotional realization for Rey.
Finn = not being a fucking coward (UH, ALSO decides to GO BACK to FO territory to blow up Starkiller Base?
?)
Poe = not being the worst wing commander to have ever made the fleet (He just isn't. I don't know what to say. He does what he does because he has to. And now he does it because he has brain damage.)
Kylo = actually pretty good character development, goes from trying to decide between dark and light and realizing it's all bullshit and they're just two sides that don't correlate to right and wrong. The only character which I actually think has gotten a lot better.
... and because it has to be said, I know she wasn't in TFA:
Rose = "Delete this." SELF-INSERT FAN FICTION. Fuck off Rian.
The Luke v Kylo fight: DAMN MAN. Worst fight in all nine movies. Hands down. What the fuck was that? I get WHAT Luke's doing, but just the choice for him to astral project instead of actually show up is terrible filmmaking. *sigh* There is so much fucking wrong with this sequence. The goofy-ass, dog-looking new AT-ATs (apparently some Disney exec has a hardon for making things bigger, which makes them look badder) volleying Luke, Luke just dodging Kylo's swings for all of 5 seconds, the fact that THAT kills him. [angery noises] And listen dude, you are going to tell me straight-faced, without laughing that Luke NOT being involved is somehow better for the galaxy??? Oh shit, let's just let these force-sensitives figure it out on their own! My god. His whole plot arc is about getting back up on the horse and overcoming his failures and he just... poofs!? Are you fucking serious!? Luke Skywalker. The guy. The dude. The man. Just fucking poofs? The worst plot arc in history. Killing him without basically passing on any of his wisdom is tantamount to resetting the whole Jedi v Sith thing back to the Old Republic era! So much progress lost!
And ooooh boy, Rey saving the day makes her super duper good and right! No! How could you think that??? She went to figure her own shit out first and only happened to arrive on time via chance. Rey literally acted selfishly this whole movie. Her mission is to get Luke to help, fails. Then she decides oh, I have to turn Kylo--fuck this mission. Fails, also fucking delivers herself into FO custody which via plot-armor is somehow a good thing. Oh, NOW I'll go save the rebellion--yay me, I'm the best!
No one acts intelligently. No one makes any sort of real discovery. No one does anything meaningful. And on top of it all, what good there is in the movie (see: Kylo being a good character) is shit on by how bad the filmmaking and directorial decisions are. Even if the movie was better in both creative vision and actual screenwriting, it is positively ruined by the off-time comedy, persistent plot-armor, characters acting out of character. This might as well been the last film. Or the first film. It really doesn't matter as it really doesn't connect to anything else done by any SW movie ever.
PART 2:
Damn. I thought I didn't know where to begin before. Holy shit, lol. Alright, just... one paragraph at a time I guess, so we can both know to what I'm responding.
Paragraph #1: I actually kind of agree with this. I think you're extrapolating with the pitying, but generally ya.
Paragraph #2: Kylo trying and failing to be Vader is part of a great plot arc. Empire? That image is definitely not destroyed, if the dialogue is be believed they once again control most of the galaxy as the First Order. Bad writing. Kylo taking control is interesting though--kinda. Because now he's the big bad, when he could have had a much more interesting arc. So that's disappointing.
Paragraph #3: So many mixed emotions. One, no. What was started in TFA is not at all finished--and if it is, it was hacked down by a bad director. Two, what if I told you that Episode 8 is just a bad movie. Yes, a bad Star Wars movie, but just a bad movie. If this movie wasn't a Star Wars movie you'd just be like, damn, that was a bad movie. It certainly DOES NOT extract what the core of Star Wars is. IMO, the core of Star Wars is this: Secret Missions. Exotic Landscapes. The Force. And above all: A sense of wonder. Episode 8 has all of these things... but executes them poorly, and in my book is perhaps only slightly better than Episode 2, that one being the worse if I'm being objective. Worse than that though, you are right in Star Wars being Americana, it's a cultural artifact. Ep4 is in the Library of Congress ffs. Episode 8 fucking destroys that. I mean... damn. How can you not see that Disney is just going to mass produce these movies, IS mass-producing these movies? The light has gone out from the vision that is Star Wars. Hell the originals are not perfect, and frankly the prequels are a rushed mass of ideas and references, but goddamn there is a golden string of inspiration that runs through every one of those movies. TFA, Rogue One, and TLJ all lack it. The Fifth Element is a better Star Wars movie than Episode 8. There is a movie that LOOKS like Star Wars, but does not FEEL like Star Wars. I mean, shit TLJ is just flat out bad from a non-fan perspective, but the same applies to TFA and to a lesser extent Rogue One which are much better movies. TFA is has the makings of a Star Wars film and comes pretty close, but is really just emulating the originals without the style that Lucas had. Rogue One actually hits DAMN CLOSE to home. I would say that the director actually succeeded in making a Star Wars movie. It feels right. The story is just a little lame to be truly great. Forgettable main characters. Everyone dies when they don't really need to. TLJ is the death knell. The final stroke that kills Lucas' creative influence. In a few short years, the series that he created will be dead and gone. It will, as I have said and will continue to say, be Marvelized. We'll get larger and larger casts. Mediocre movies. Comic-book-esque cinematography. And big name actors. Bad stories. Bad dialogue. Obviously, Star Wars had to move on from Lucas at some point if it was to continue being a PROFITABLE franchise, but IMO this was the worst possible way to do it.
Paragraph #4: Welp. Let's just agree to disagree. Just imagine that I inserted what you typed, but every sentence was in the negative--that would pretty much sum up my feelings on TLJ.
Paragraph #5: I think you're absolutely right in your predictions. 100%. However, fuck Rian Johnson--as far I am concerned, he's destroyed something I loved. The fact that he gets free reign over the next trilogy makes me sick--there is a 0% chance he doesn't fuck it up. Here's my own prediction: We will never see another good Star Wars movie.
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Topic: Star Wars [Warning: Spoilers inside!] (Read 108221 times)