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[Reelya]

That seems to be catastrophizing a bit. Basically anyone who doesn't have a positive view of the movie on balance is accused of "calling it the worst movie of all time". Nobody is even calling it the worst Star Wars movie of all time.

 "Below average" in movie terms. Not up to snuff. Pick any science fiction movie you know nothing about that's airing at the cinema, and more likely than not, it will be a better movie that The Last Jedi. None of these things equate to "worst movie of all time". The things is, independent stuff gets a free pass on a lot of things, however, major franchises which have massive budgets, they don't in fact need or warrant a free pass on any flaws: if any, those movies should be held to a higher standard than normal, the same as you would an AAA game vs an indie game.

Nobody who didn't like the movie is going around accusing it's fans of calling it "the best movie of all time".

[McTraveller]

I was going to say I think the perception of an "average movie" probably suffers from the same phenomenon as "everyone says they are a slightly above-average driver."

I was going to say some other stuff, but Ispil basically ninja'd me.

[Reelya]

You've forgotten the Ewok Adventures, Ispil. And the Holiday Special. If someone was saying it's the worst Star Wars movie of all time then those would come up.

But like I said, the reason for slamming it was first impressions: I hoped for more than The Force Awakens, but got a lot less. Less than I enjoy any old sci-fi movie in general. Hell I rewatched all the OG Star Trek movies recently and even enjoyed the Shatner directed Star Trek V: The Final Frontier more than I enjoyed TLJ.

[Kot]

That seems to be catastrophizing a bit. Basically anyone who doesn't have a positive view of the movie on balance is accused of "calling it the worst movie of all time". Nobody is even calling it the worst Star Wars movie of all time.

You realize including the Holiday Special is a bit of cheating, is it not?

Literally nobody has done anything like that, we've just said it was a boring movie with a substandard plot structure. "Below average" in movie terms. Not up to snuff. Pick any science fiction movie you know nothing about that's airing at the cinema, and more likely than not, it will be a better movie that The Last Jedi. None of these things equate to "worst movie of all time".

Nobody who didn't like the movie is going around accusing it's fans of calling it "the best movie of all time".

It's... a mater of scale, and perhaps indeed expectations. When you go to see Star Wars, or even any "loud" movie that is popular, you kind of expect it to carry a certain quality behind it, even having no idea about it beforehand. It doesn't have to be amazing, but at least solid in overwhelming majority, and when it's not, you understandably feel that something has gone terribly wrong and the movie is popular for no particular reason. Meanwhile The Last Jedi is... not solid at all. There are gaping internal (setting aside the problems with the rest of universe as a whole) plotholes, characters that for some reason are supposed to be important, but really don't feel like they are, and so on, the list has been already repeated many times in this thread. It would have been fine if it was random movie that nobody really cared for in mass popular culture, but since it's Star Wars, it's so popular and since people (critics, apparently) DO actually call it the best Star Wars movie, it does tend to ring a bell in your head questioning wether you and the people who love it have saw the same movie.

[Egan_BW]

Oh yeah, I watched that ewok movie. For... some... reason?

[Urist McScoopbeard]

IMO, the worst Star Wars movie, maybe tied with Ep2

[Egan_BW]

Damn I kinda loved ep2 when I was a kid. For... some... reason.
Oh yeah, it had those space seismic charges. Makes no sense, but looks cool as fuck.

[Reelya]

You've forgotten the Ewok Adventures, Ispil. And the Holiday Special. If someone was saying it's the worst Star Wars movie of all time then those would come up.

Read the quotes above. One of them, word for word, contains the phase "worst Star Wars movie ever made."

If one person said it, once, then it is a plain exaggeration to say "it seems like everyone on the other side is constantly saying ..." which is pretty much what was claimed. Also the original claim was "worse movie of all time". "Worst Star Wars movie" isn't really in the same category. There are hundreds of thousands of movies, almost all of which have lower imdb scores that the lowest-rated of the main Star Wars movies. There are 7 other Star Wars movies, and the lowest has a 6.5 on imdb. "Worst Star Wars movie" is in fact a pretty mild claim.

[smjjames]

/musing

I wonder if Jar Jar would have been a more popular character if he was a more serious character rather than the goofy and clumsy one he was?...

/musing

[Reelya]

Huh? I said "nobody did X" and you found the one utterance that I'd missed. So yeah I was wrong, but I don't think accusations of "over-generalizing" is really a salient complaint if there's like a single counter-example in 23 pages of discussion.

Also, nowhere did I say that I thought it was worse than e.g. phatom menace, I just said I'm willing to give the prequels as a whole more benefit of the doubt now that these other new movies are out. If you want to nitpick specific semantics, I didn't actually make the specific claim you're saying.

[Reelya]

I didn't make that claim either.

I said the one person who accused anyone who didn't like the movie of "acting like it's the worst movie ever" was exaggerating.

I gave detailed descriptions of what I didn't like, and why. So it's not like i was just mouthing off with no basis or thought about it.

For example, the speeder vs walkers scene is there to showcase how plans don't always work out. But hey, if you're going to show that, why not make an entirely new set piece instead of "Hoth Battle lite"?

That's one thing that even Phantom Menace has going for it: it has tons of great set pieces with original tech in them. Darth Maul, plenty of light saber combat, the death on Qui Jon, the pod race, underwater scenes, full-scale planetary invasions. The Phantom Menaces' plot structure also packs a lot more movement and action into it than TLJ, which is 2 hours of "space chase".

[Reelya]

We should probably leave that aside, since we're not talking about anything in the the movies now. "you said this" ... "no you said that first" stuff isn't healthy, interesting, or actually leading anywhere, and the stuff we're talking about is purely meta now as well.

One interesting thing I started looking at what the gender breakdown of scores for SW movies on imdb. Women, especially young women are super-positive about TLJ. So that could be a thing related to guys have a negative reaction to the "progressivism" in the movies (a common claim).

However, on that note, I looked up the stats on the other movies, and there's a noticeable gender divide of opinion on the prequels, especially with the youngest demographic.

For example, Attack of the Clones scored 5.8 from young males, 7.3 from young females, and Phantom Menace scored 5.9 from young males, 7.1 from young females. Even "revenge of the Sith" has 0.5 higher ratings from young women vs young men. These differences are greater than the gender difference in approval for the new movie. The interesting fact is that *none* of the Star Wars movies since 1983 actually scored higher among young men vs young women. The prequels have the most massive pro-female bias in scoring, funnily enough, while the "The Force Awakens" and "Rogue One" are more equal, but even for those two movies, teenage girls gave the highest average scores. Ironically, it's not the movies with female leads which have the biggest pro-female gender divide: it's the ones with cute boy Anakin. Basically he's the Justin Bieber of Star Wars fandom.

Even "Return of the Jedi" has higher scores with teenage girls than boys. You need to go back to 1980 to find a Star Wars movie with higher average ratings from boys than girls.

Which suggests a lot of the cliches about who the "core" fans actually are for this material might be mistaken. No demographic scored even one of the 1983-2017 movies higher than teenage girls did. So casting a female lead in both Force Awakens and Rogue One might have very little to do with "feminism" at all (though anyone casting a woman is clearly going to cash in on that), and everything to do with the fact that they realize their core demographic has changed.

[EnigmaticHat]

The prequels are their own bag of worms.  Do you have the percentage of reviews written by each gender?  Cause I'd bet money that while the prequels may have gotten better reviews from female reviewers, there was a higher percentage of female reviewers on the new movies.

Also, creepy and dumb as it is, Episodes 2 and 3 have that Twilight/Fifty Shades of Gray thing going on with the Anakin/Padme plotline.  You know, romanticized creepiness that blossoms into romanticized abuse.  Back in the early 2000s that shit did pretty well with young women.  Granted even by the standards of Twilight* that plotline is abysmally written but then... so are the prequels in general so not much new there.  I guess what I'm saying is I could see how eps 2 and 3 could resonate with females and not males, since they have elements of a story female viewers would find familiar and male viewers would find both unfamiliar and offputting.

*I maintain that Twilight at least has genuinely romantic elements amongst the mess.  I... struggle to see what's romantic about Anakin and Padme.  The actors don't even try to give the characters chemistry and in the reunion scene Padme's actor clearly has "that's creepy also weren't you like 9 yesterday" written on her face.

[Kot]

I... struggle to see what's romantic about Anakin and Padme.

I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.

[EnigmaticHat]

Okay, you can look at that as bad dialogue.  Or you can look at it as jedi wisdom about why you should never have sex on a beach.