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[Egan_BW]

A part of the movie was just Firefly, complete with train heist and scary mob boss man. This is fine by me.

[USEC_OFFICER]

So I didn't see anyone bringing it up in this thread so I think its worth discussing.  Solo had some production drama and was essentially shot twice.  Spoilers ahead.

This explains so much. I remember watching the movie and thinking that the quality bounced about afterwards. Getting in another director partway through would certainly explain all of that.

I have some guesses as to which scenes were kept from the original shoot; I think the trademark isn't just jokes but scenes that went too easily.  For example when Han bet an expensive ship he didn't have to Lando and lost; that debt was never brought back and it bothered me the whole time. 

I assumed it was because Lando was bluffing about having his expensive ship as well. He obviously knew that the Millennium Falcon was impounded and didn't have the contacts/skills/whatever to free it. So was there really a debt if both of them were betting something they didn't have?

[Reelya]

Idk. I did hear about the study, but the reporting on it stretches what's in the paper.
https://screenrant.com/last-jedi-backlash-trolls-rian-johnson/

Research Finds 50% of Last Jedi Backlash Was Political Trolling

First up is how they define "backlash". It turns out that the study only covers tweets made directly at Rian Johnson. The problem is in trying to jump from "trolls trolled Rian Johnson" to "the negativity to the film was all part of a political conspiracy". The central conclusion of the piece: that Neo Nazis and Russians are trying to undermine American society by making people not like Star Wars is fucking retarded.

Trolls are not representative by their very nature. Sure, assholes trolled Rian Johnson, but that doesn't mean that the trolls were the cause of the backlash, they could just have easily been capitalizing on a backlash that already existed to the film. People with legitimate criticisms are just far, far less likely to want to go and send hatemail to people than dumb idiots are.

How about a hypothetical: a black woman made a movie, and it wasn't a very good movie. It got bad word of mouth reviews. Then a bunch of people started tweeting at her about how much her movie sucks, and half those tweets are clearly racist bullshit. Would this be good evidence that there was a "racist agenda" behind not liking the movie? no, it would not. The movie was a stinker and that became the impetus by which racists opportunistically attacked the actress.

The hypocrisy is that the author of this paper discounts all other possibilities in favor of "evil alt-right russians politicized the film" when the author himself is so reductive that he himself is equally guilty of politicizing this thing, by himself making broad reductive arguments about why people didn't like the film.

Overall, the scholarship on the paper is very poor because he draws way too much in terms of conclusions compared to the amount of evidence that he actually has.

~~~

As another similar incident, you have Battlefield V. People criticized the tone-shift of the series to a cartoonish and colorful cyberpunkish looking thing (clearly the devs trying to capitalize on the Fortnite craze). Then, every criticism was reduced to "angry white men just don't want girls in their game" which is bullshit. However ... the head of development has since resigned and the game's launch has been delayed in favor of a redesign to increase "authenticity". This is in response to a plummet in pre-orders.

Clearly, the devs always knew what the actual criticisms were and they're moving to address those actual criticisms. They just tried to brush off the disquiet by labeling the skeptics as bigots, and it backfired big time. The real story is that the devs never gave a single thought to "social justice". They tried to rebrand the product to appeal to a different and younger demographic they thought would make more money - Fortnite players, and when the existing fanbase for Battlefield complained, they called them bigots and told them not to buy it. The reason they thought this made sense to blast their customers like that, is that the goal was never to be more "inclusive" in the first place: it was in fact a profit-driven move to try and change the target demographic completely. So they assumed that the fans they pissed off weren't relevant anyway since they were no longer in the target demographic.

"buy our trendy shovelware or you're a bigot and you can GTFO" didn't go down too well when the "bigots" were effectively most of your existing customers. Note, that to appease the fans that boycotted the game, they're not having to promise not to put female characters in the game, and that clearly indicates that the presence of female characters had literally nothing to do with the backlash.

A similar boycott may have happened with Solo: A Star Wars Story. If TLJ had been really good, I definitely would have gone to see Solo. Solo stars a "white male" BTW. I still decided not to go because of TLJ, and so did a lot of people. If they consistently made good movies, I'd go see a Princess Leia movie, an Obi Wan movie, a Boba Fett movie. But now it looks like a lot of those movie ideas are canned. If everyone liked TLJ as much as they say then where were the crowds for Solo?

[Telgin]

Just an anecdote, but indifference definitely kept me from seeing Solo.  Admittedly, TLJ may have influenced that, since it didn't really wow me.  It was okay, but not what I was hoping for.

Anyway, Solo had some other issues going against it.  For one thing, it felt like Disney didn't spend much on advertising.  I barely saw anything related to it and honestly forgot it even existed until some friends mentioned it to me after it came out in theaters.  By that time I could look at reviews, and people weren't saying great things about it, so... I skipped it.

Which was a disappointment because I really liked Rogue One and was hoping that the side stories would continue to be like it.

[Dunamisdeos]

I loved Rogue One, I was happy with TFA, TLJ was.... I mean I don't want to say bad, but I was displeased overall. Good action sequences, and I liked jaded Luke. I liked how Snoke died. Definitely hoping I enjoy IX more.
 
But, turns out if you deliberately alienate your fanbase then ceaselessly mock them for having a problem with it, it makes things worse. The backlash was relatively minor* until Disney started aggressively pushing the idea that the movie has zero flaws and the people giving them money were at fault. Now you have people who are more angry because of the intelligence-insulting PR campaign than anything about the movies.

Disney basically dared it's fanbase to stop giving them money here. Shockingly, Solo failed immediately after.

*I don't count the sexist rage shit as valid movie feedback.

[ChairmanPoo]

I thought TLJ was lame because the story was disjointed and made everything before less coherent. If anything its a reverse ESB

[Dunamisdeos]

Obviously you are a Russian Hackerbot Political Troll. Be sure to go see XI, person we just swore doesn't exist.

[ChairmanPoo]

Of course I don't, I'm Pathos.

I heard there are a number of wrongthinkers here who are still not one in Pathos but fear not. Our scientists are working on it. Soon we shall have full synchronicity https://bgr.com/2018/10/02/brainnet-tetris-game-experiment-study/

[Reelya]

Heh, while we're on the Star Wars topic for a while, I saw some "physics-based" critique of the Death Star's design on youtube which didn't make a single lick of sense. The main criticisms were these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ8mRS5zAro

This one claims it would take 830,000 years at current rates of steel production to make enough for a death star, then you'd have to blast it all into space on rockets, thus leaving the Earth's atmosphere uninhabitable. So, no Death Star. Uh, really, that's a terrible argument. Common sense would suggest that you'd use material in the asteroid belt to make it, and once you have space industry kickstarted, then you'd clearly expect capacity to grow exponentially. Assuming that steel production capacity never increases from right now is plainly idiotic. How could anyone think that such a line of "logical" argument made any sense at all?

also this one:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/the-math-of-why-its-so-hard-to-build-a-spherical-death-star-in-space/

a sphere is the maximally symmetric shape. But it's hell on the aerodynamics, since how much force an object experiences from air molecules as it travels through an atmosphere
...
As Grand Moff Tarkin points out, unlike the sensibly designed Star Destroyers, where air molecules mostly glance off the sides as the spacecraft travel through the atmosphere

What "air molecules"? It's in space, dickhead. For a physicist you're really good at the math calculations but obviously not so great at common sense.

That brings up another issue. The Death Star was constructed in space, a realm where massive things (moons, planets) tend to take on a spherical shape due to gravity. But when Orlin did the calculations, he found that the size at which objects take on the shape of a sphere is about 400 kilometers in diameter, which is significantly larger than the ~160km Death Star.

What sort of retarded point is this? Can you see the labored train of logic that lead to this brain-melting point. Massive things don't form into spheres due to gravity until 400km diameter. The Death Star is less than 400km diameter, therefore it cannot be a sphere. Checkmate, atheists.

[Putnam]

it's like if neil degrasse tyson didn't know anything about space, either

[Dunamisdeos]

The Galactic Empire's territory at its peak consisted of some one and a half million member and conquered worlds

Yeah youtube guy, all those worlds had the combined steel output of one IRL Earth in the year 2018. Sure.

[Egan_BW]

Launching steel from earth on rockets? Did this person not notice "in a galaxy far, far away"?

[scriver]

If you look at the history of the universe, you can see that the steel production has increased significantly over time.

Therefore, one can conclude that "a long time ago", steel production wouldn't just be less than on earth in 2018, but perhaps even negative.

Chess tape, magnetits

[Rolan7]

Heh, while we're on the Star Wars topic for a while, I saw some "physics-based" critique of the Death Star's design on youtube which didn't make a single lick of sense. The main criticisms were these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ8mRS5zAro

This one claims it would take 830,000 years at current rates of steel production to make enough for a death star, then you'd have to blast it all into space on rockets, thus leaving the Earth's atmosphere uninhabitable. So, no Death Star. Uh, really, that's a terrible argument. Common sense would suggest that you'd use material in the asteroid belt to make it, and once you have space industry kickstarted, then you'd clearly expect capacity to grow exponentially. Assuming that steel production capacity never increases from right now is plainly idiotic. How could anyone think that such a line of "logical" argument made any sense at all?

also this one:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/the-math-of-why-its-so-hard-to-build-a-spherical-death-star-in-space/

a sphere is the maximally symmetric shape. But it's hell on the aerodynamics, since how much force an object experiences from air molecules as it travels through an atmosphere
...
As Grand Moff Tarkin points out, unlike the sensibly designed Star Destroyers, where air molecules mostly glance off the sides as the spacecraft travel through the atmosphere

What "air molecules"? It's in space, dickhead. For a physicist you're really good at the math calculations but obviously not so great at common sense.

That brings up another issue. The Death Star was constructed in space, a realm where massive things (moons, planets) tend to take on a spherical shape due to gravity. But when Orlin did the calculations, he found that the size at which objects take on the shape of a sphere is about 400 kilometers in diameter, which is significantly larger than the ~160km Death Star.

What sort of retarded point is this? Can you see the labored train of logic that lead to this brain-melting point. Massive things don't form into spheres due to gravity until 400km diameter. The Death Star is less than 400km diameter, therefore it cannot be a sphere. Checkmate, atheists.

Haha, wow.  I guess the argument is that it's "unnatural" to make spheres that small, because they don't appear naturally.  There's probably a name for that fallacy, at least I hope.

The sphere shape is surprisingly sci-fi for Star Wars, since it reduces vulnerable surface area.  The Death Star was presumably only so large in order to support its unique feature, the planet-destroying cannon.  Return of the Jedi showed that it was deadly in fleet combat, but surely cost-ineffective compared to the standard star destroyers.  That might explain the shape.  Star destroyers had vast surface areas covered in hardpoints, much like contemporary battleships (No coincidence, the first episode was inspired by WW2 naval-aerial combat).  Individually vulnerable, but part of a fleet where tactics should keep its flanks covered.  A sphere is much more defensive, even paranoid.  Ironically, designed for a situation where enemies slipped past the main fleet to try and take it out - no clear weaknesses, covered in point defense.

Bah, Lucas probably just thought an artificial moon was awe-inspiring.  Which it was, even though it was a lot smaller than a typical moon.

I should see Solo sometime.  I also enjoyed Rogue One, though I agree with a lot of the criticism of it.  It was a pretty mindless action flick that felt true to the setting, like one of the fun EU novels.  The characterization was lacking and a lot of things didn't make sense, but it was fun.

TLJ was like that except not fun, to me.  I just found it more frustrating, maybe because it was using existing characters (heck, I was offput by Vader in Rogue One as well.  Seemed silly.)
Jaded Luke was alright I suppose.  His end was so random I could believe it ("He fake sacrificed himself...  but then he actually sacrificed himself... somehow??).  It was a bizarre opposite of Leia.  Gets a good death, but then magics out of it, only to spend most of the movie in a coma, then finally come back to try and prop up Holdo's condescending authoritarianism against the plucky pilot.  In Star Wars.

I would have been much more interested if Rey and Kylo had teamed up, but the ending we got instead was just confusing.  It kept contradicting its own messages, much less those of Force Awakens.
Bah I say, bah.

[Dunamisdeos]

If you look at the history of the universe, you can see that the steel production has increased significantly over time.

Therefore, one can conclude that "a long time ago", steel production wouldn't just be less than on earth in 2018, but perhaps even negative.

Chess tape, magnetits

No sir, I challenge your logic. What we can infer is that since the production of all metallic substances was obviously much higher a long long time ago, that steel production on a cosmic scale has in fact DECREASED at a worrying overall rate, and that by this logic within the next 100 years we may find that we can no longer produce it.

Time is the only thing that can melt steel beams.