Star Wars: The Last Jedi

[SMD]

5 minutes ago, Smitty said:

 

Is this a joke? Numerous people have explained at length the type of problems with pacing, scripting, story, character etc that the film suffers from.

 

Yes its a joke.

[Smitty]

On 02/07/2018 at 16:10, Uncle Mike said:

I thought TFA did a pretty bad job with both Rey and Finn in unearned capability. Rey is a master space pilot, capable of flying the Falcon to within an inch of its life on a first go. She deflects Ren's mind reading attempts and fights him to a draw. But then Finn also has half a fight with Kylo, which seemed very unlikely.

 

She's a god-level pilot, pulling off a one-in-a-million shot when she has never flown any ship before.

 

From the very start and throughout the sequal Rey has been massively, massively super-fantastic at every thing she has attempted. There really isn't that sense of weakness, learning or progression that there is with Luke. She's able to instantly defeat a powerful and trained darkside force user's mental probing. It goes on and on like that.

 

It all just seems totally effortless with this character. It's one of the reasons why I don't find her a compelling character - she's just so perfect, excels at everything she tries and is a perfectly lovely person in everyway.

[Smitty]

On 03/07/2018 at 08:57, kensei said:

Nah. The tl;dr version is "People are annoyed because they are projecting how Holdo treats Poe onto themselves, they just want to be indulged and no one cares about logic problems in a film they like". I've just saved y'all half an hour of your lives you'll never get back. 

 

He semi insulted Blade Runner 2049 to boot. Now that is unforgiveable. 

 

Fucking hell, amazing to see a professional critic engage in the new 'critics of X are bad people' approach, which is now all the rage apparently. 

 

Where are all the stupid 'why critics of Jurassic World 2 have personality disorders' thinkpieces, though?

[Smitty]

On 03/07/2018 at 13:01, K said:

That filmcrithulk article is fantastic. It feels like it was written in direct response to this thread.

 

What a huge shock that you'd endorse such an argument.

[MechE]

11 minutes ago, Smitty said:

 

She's a god-level pilot, pulling off a one-in-a-million shot when she has never flown any ship before.

 

From the very start and throughout the sequal Rey has been massively, massively super-fantastic at every thing she has attempted. There really isn't that sense of weakness, learning or progression that there is with Luke. She's able to instantly defeat a powerful and trained darkside force user's mental probing. It goes on and on like that.

 

It all just seems totally effortless with this character. It's one of the reasons why I don't find her a compelling character - she's just so perfect, excels at everything she tries and is a perfectly lovely person in everyway.

She also painfully nieve whilst also being headstrong, which made her very easy to manipulate. 

 

She's all passion and no wisdom, which had a great payoff with her complete misreading of where Kylo was at.

[Darren]

Here’s what TFA explicitly tells us about Luke:

 

He was training Ben and some other apprentices. It all went wrong, Ben turned bad, the place got burned down and Luke, blaming himself, ran away alone (even leaving R2 behind). Han had heard rumours that he’d gone to look for the first Jedi temple. He’s never been heard from since and nobody knows where he is or even if he’s still alive. Both the Resistance and the First Order are desperate to find him, the former to seek his help and the latter to kill him.

 

That’s it. Whatever comes next has to fit in with that. The imagined alternative story where Luke has gone away to become an Uber-Jedi has to explain why, knowing what his former apprentice and his neo-Imperial buddies are up to, he stays in hiding, when at any moment he could swoop in and save the galaxy, but chooses not to.

 

The story we got, of a broken man who feels his life’s work has failed and goes away to die alone, might be surprising and disappointing to anyone expecting old Luke to be just as idealistic and heroic as young Luke, but it does make sense and it fits with EVERYTHING TFA told us about him. And it has the added benefit of giving Luke a redemptive character arc in this film rather than him just being effectively a super hero who saves the day (which is exactly what Leia and the Resistance are expecting).

[Smitty]

On 04/07/2018 at 20:05, kensei said:

Think it's deliberate. We'd trust Leia over Poe. We don't know Holdo. 

 

Yeah and it's so utterly transparent the way the film clumsily tries to get you to think Holdo is bad/suspect. It thinks its so clever with its switcheroo but it's entirely obvious that it's trying to manipulate you. 

 

 

[Smitty]

On 06/07/2018 at 22:08, SMD said:

 

 

so you don't want an objective view, you want someone to tell you it's okay that you don't understand basic storytelling

 

Don't you realise that the whole fucking problem here is arrogantly telling people that they don't understand storytelling (!!) just because they didn't like a particular story?

 

What the fuck has happened to criticism around here? We can't say whether we liked or disliked some movie or game without having to engage in gross psychoanalysis/incredibly personal insults of each other?

 

For fucks sake, stop trying to present an essentially childish and immature position of 'people who dislike the things I like are bad poo-poo heads' as adult and carefully considered. This is shit that I thought we'd all left behind 20 years ago, it's so bizarre to witness this sharp regression in the standards of critical debate.

 

Stuff like this is sub Console Warz drivel. 

[Smitty]

On 08/07/2018 at 09:03, JohnC said:

Did you even watch the movie?

 

The hyperspace tracking was their flagship tracking the resistance fleet.

 

The line you just quoted was when they were escaping to the planet on the transports. First Order were focusing on the remaining big ship with Holdo on it, not the transports. She was buying time with the big ship before they noticed the small transports.

 

Which doesn't make any sense. TFO is surely going to have every lens and sensor watching every centimetre of the ship. Later on we even see that Snoke can easily see the transports by eye with a comical giant magnifying glass he has in his throne room .

 

Yet they are not noticed (similarly Poe's ship can just slip away), somehow, at first. It's incredibly stupid and yet handwaved away like so much in the movie. The only ship containing the last of the only resistance to you (including its leadership) is in front of you and yet apparently watching it closely is not a priority.

 

I'll wait for someone to tell me that telescopes, lenses etc don't exist in Star Wars. 

[Fierce Poodle]

I like this film and anyone who doesn’t like it is a bad poo-poo head.

[Hanzo the Razor]

4 minutes ago, Fierce Poodle said:

I like this film and anyone who doesn’t like it is a bad poo-poo head.

 

Thanks for that Jar Jar.

[sandman]

On 17 April 2018 at 17:30, Stigweard said:

 

Personally I'm not convinced by her acting either.

 

Plus Kylo Ren is clearly the best thing in all of this. The best actor too.

Kylo is a terrible actor

[Smitty]

5 minutes ago, Fierce Poodle said:

I like this film and anyone who doesn’t like it is a bad poo-poo head.

 

The sad thing is this genuinely is the level that your posts are at.

 

I'll file this alongside 'I hate this film because of the poster I saw for it on a bus', in response to someone, er, criticising a film trailer.

[Fierce Poodle]

4 minutes ago, Smitty said:

 

The sad thing is this genuinely is the level that your posts are at.

 

I'll file this alongside 'I hate this film because of the poster I saw for it on a bus', in response to someone, er, criticising a film trailer.

 

Do you actually have a physical file where you store all these comments?

[Kevvy Metal]

1 hour ago, Smitty said:

 

Fucking hell, amazing to see a professional critic engage in the new 'critics of X are bad people' approach, which is now all the rage apparently. 

 

Where are all the stupid 'why critics of Jurassic World 2 have personality disorders' thinkpieces, though?

 

1 hour ago, Smitty said:

 

What a huge shock that you'd endorse such an argument.

 

1 hour ago, Smitty said:

 

Don't you realise that the whole fucking problem here is arrogantly telling people that they don't understand storytelling just because they didn't like a particular story?

 

What the fuck has happened to criticism around here? We can't say whether we liked some movie or game without having to engage in gross psychoanalysis/incredibly personal insults of each other?

 

For fucks sake, stop trying to present an essentially childish and immature position of 'people who dislike the things I like are bad poo-poo heads' as adult and carefully considered. This is shit that I thought we'd all left behind 20 years ago, it's so bizarre to witness this sharp regression in the standards of critical debate.

 

Stuff like this is sub Console Warz drivel. 

 

[Jarik]

At the end of TFA, I give full credit to Mark Hamill’s facial acting for planting the seed of doubt in my mind that things are going to go the way that Rey (And the audience) expect.  That was not the look of someone who was just going to say “Took you long enough” grab the Sabre, then March out there & fix everything.

[HarryBizzle]

7 hours ago, Kevvy Metal said:

 

We thinks the Lady doth protest too much. 

 

 

Well... rather than thinking this is what you think is suggested, you could look at the scene where Han Solo quite plainly explains that Luke is running away and hiding from it all after the disastrous event resulted from the training of his nephew going wrong.  

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86zgadLCu9g

 

Nothing in that scene is in direct reference to the map. He says people who know him best think he might have gone after the first Jedi temple. 

 

Everyone else treats the Map To Skywalker as his definitive location. No maybe about it. 

 

It’s a very odd choice. Would have taken about 5 words of dialogue to clarify. 

[Tourist]

On a ten hour flight. Tried to watch this again. Lasted as far as Poe taking the executive decision to call in the extremely slow moving bombers, even though those bombers amounted to about 90% of the entire fleet and even though those bombers are about as much use as a chocolate teapot and even though he'd just been ordered to head back. 

 

So, so, stupid.

[Harsin]

But that's the entire point of that scene, that he's making a boneheaded decision.

[Tourist]

A literally unbelievably boneheaded decision. Like, so unbelievable that it is impossible to suspend your disbelief. There is no way that anybody in any universe would take that decision. And if, somewhere, in a galaxy far, far away, someone actually is so stupid as to try to destroy a huge enemy ship with not fit for purpose bombers  then you'd imagine that his superior commander might actually be able to tell all those glacially slow bombers not to obey the orders of a lone pilot who has just unbelievably managed to not get shot up by pretending to hold on a call.

[Darren]

36 minutes ago, Tourist said:

And if, somewhere, in a galaxy far, far away, someone actually is so stupid as to try to destroy a huge enemy ship with not fit for purpose bombers

 

Those not fit for purpose bombers that then go on to destroy the huge enemy ship? Nobody would be so stupid as to try the thing that actually works? It's literally unbelievable that they could do the very thing they're shown doing?

[JPickford]

I loved TLJ but the very existence of bombers in space was unbelievably stupid.  

[Kevvy Metal]

Why is this even a thing?

[kensei]

I generally like the humour in the film - Porg! Nuns! Luke creepily drinking blue milk! - but the "phone call" only serves to completely undermine Domnhall Gleeson's character, who has someone managed to become a panto comic relief over two films. 

 

People have compared it to Han talking over the radio, but he wasn't talking to Grand Moff Tarkin. You want your head Space Nazis to be a wee bit threatening. Presumably you don't get to be head of a Galactic Army without some level of competence. 

[Tourist]

24 minutes ago, Darren said:

 

Those not fit for purpose bombers that then go on to destroy the huge enemy ship? Nobody would be so stupid as to try the thing that actually works? It's literally unbelievable that they could do the very thing they're shown doing?

 

Uh, did you actually watch the film? The bombers all get destroyed. The only reason they manage to destroy the huge enemy ship is because the bad guys are so monumentally stupid that they let a lone rebel fighter take out all of their defences and then the last remaining bomber gets some sort of plot/force assistance. 

[Thor]

30 minutes ago, JPickford said:

I loved TLJ but the very existence of bombers in space was unbelievably stupid.  

Been in Star Wars since Empire Strikes Back. 

[JPickford]

4 minutes ago, Thor said:

Been in Star Wars since Empire Strikes Back. 

 

I never noticed.  Still stupid.  It's the only thing I can't really get over with TLJ.  I can just about handle them nipping out from a siege situation to space vegas.

[Darren]

12 minutes ago, Tourist said:

 

Uh, did you actually watch the film? The bombers all get destroyed.

 

Yes, which is why Leia gives Poe a bollocking and demotes him. So your argument is that she was right, he was too focused on his narrow objective which wasn’t even his mission in the first place and ignored the risk and cost, getting the entire bomber fleet destroyed in the process.

 

I just don’t understand what your objection is here. You’re saying exactly the same thing the film is!

[Thor]

15 minutes ago, JPickford said:

I never noticed.

Eh? How can you not notice these:

 

 

They're dropping massive bombs on the asteroids in an attempt to flush out the Falcon. 

[Kevvy Metal]

Bombs in space!? 

Characters not fully conforming to whatever notion or personal logic I have in my head?!

 

#notmystarwars