The Last Jedi thread (spoilers inside)

general topics
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Was he really that interesting though? He was just another generic Super Powerful Evil Force User who you don’t even see in TFA as any more than a projection.

Good riddance, I say. That said, we still have Skywalker clan adventures here with Leia and Kylo Ren. As a whole though I definitely see a passing of the torch from the Skywalkers to a new generation of heroes and villains.

There’s literally hundreds of new stories that are far more interesting that deserve to be told. Look at how great Rogue One ended up being despite it being largely self-contained.

I’m also definitely not looking forward to the Han Solo movie (I mean, does the world really need to see him do the Kessel run in 1412 parsecs? Do we need the origin story behind how he got his leather jacket? No!).

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64

I will preface by saying that I enjoyed this movie tremendously.

It was the in-your-face jokes and character flip-flopping that were the weakest points for me.

Funny should happen but if you go back to IV and V the funniest moments weren’t punchlines. They were scenarios. The holding for General Hux “Comedy or Die” opener was horrible in my opinion. Injecting modern comedy into the Star Wars universe just doesn’t work for me. A good Downton Abbey put-down works. Mama jokes do not. Luke tossing the lightsaber over the shoulder was a throw away gag when it could have been a powerful moment of Luke turning around and hurling it into the sea.

I also feel that there were far too many characters who you initially thought were going to be good/bad, flipped, and then possibly flipped again. (Kylo, Purple Hair, Purple Hair’s Lackeys, Code Breaker, and I think another that I’m missing.) This isn’t a space version of Clue. Misdirection only goes so far.

Still, I can’t wait to see it again. :smiley:

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65

I liked the casual tossing aside of the light saber. After all that time and effort just for him to be like, “fuck it” really drove home from the start that this was not the Luke of old.

The holding/yo momma jokes felt very out of place and really took me out of the film.

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66

In a lot of no-longer-canon stuff, the reason being Vader sucks so much is because Palpatine literally won’t pay for better cybernetics, and always sabotages Vader’s equipment when he tries to find or make better stuff on his own.

Believe it or not, the evil sith emperor is a real fuckwad.

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67

Well, 7/9 ain’t so bad, right?

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68

LOL, there’s a fanboi-petition to Disney on change.org to kill TLJ from the canon.

Ok then, now I truly love the film.

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69

It’s still open ended though, because they ‘sensed’ that her parents are nobodies after Snoke was messing around in their heads.

On one hand, I hope they are nobody, because maybe it will help to remind fans (including myself) that it’s just a movie, and it can be fun and entertaining without everyone being related to eachother, and all surprises don’t need to be based on that.

On the other hand, Lucas has said the saga is really about family, so we do have some family left alive (Ben and Leia), but having a character who’s that strong in the force and the result of two drunks unrelated to jedi or the Skywalkers seems less plausible. It’s not in Lucas’s hands anymore so that might not be relevant.

That aside, I thought it was a fun science fiction action movie, that was maybe a bit self aware while trying to be a fan pleaser.

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I really appreciate that she’s apparently a nobody. Besides getting away from the idea of it being a saga about a special family of Force Gods who have magic bacteria that give them superpowers and bringing it back to the simple concept of the Force being something neat that people can tap into, it gives us a larger universe. It’s not as limited.

Of course, the other possibility is that Kylo is right (the parents she knew were drunks who sold her for booze) AND she’s secretly Palpatine’s kid or something (maybe her mom was Obi-Wan’s mistress and became a drunk when he left her). We’ll see.

This movie left its characters in a really bad place. The Rebellion is now a sad group of people aboard the Falcon, Luke’s dead, and all of their allies have apparently abandoned them. To the kind of fans who’d sign a stupid petition, that’s awful and infuriates them and is bad filmmaking. To me, it’s more intriguing than the end of ESB, with Han frozen solid, the Rebels losing all their battles, and Luke losing a hand and finding out his awful lineage. They’ve got nothing now – I want to see where they go from here.

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71

I think they reinforce the “nobody” line with the little kid on Canto Bight at the end, casually force-pulling his broom into his hand like nothing. The Jedi used to comb the galaxy for Force-sensitive kids, and then they all got murdered. 30, 40 years on, there’s a new population of these kids. That came from nowhere and nobody, just like before. Makes perfect sense to me. After all, Anakin came from nowhere and nobody.

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Yes. You are the kind of person I would like to watch Star Wars movies with.

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73

Shmi is not nobody! She had Anakin through divine midichlorean intervention!

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74

I think Rian Johnson put too much into one film. It kinda felt like two or three films in one. I understand the need to give the cast something to do but I suspect much of that could’ve been done better by having most of them stay in the fleet figuring out how to evade the first order while traitors in the fleet start sabotaging the ships. That would’ve been a more tense plot because about half way through I felt tired from the side story at Canto Bight and it should’ve ended earlier. It’s not to say there’s nothing good in it. I think the arc of Kylo Ren finally sets him up as a proper villain in that he wasn’t trick into it. Rey feels like she’s her own hero now and not dependent on the past to define her. She’s just a junker daughter that happens to be strong with the force. Finn is a compelling character despite the jokes at his expense. And… Hux is definitely the cartoon space nazi he needed to be. IIRC in the books he’s the son of a low ranking imperial officer who just lucked out being left in charge, so having Hux raised with a sense of entitlement making him into a sad cowardly space nazi is amusing to me. And killing off Snoke was the best thing they’ve done because honestly I don’t want to deal with fan theories anymore. I won’t lie I’ve indulged in them myself but it’s really time to kill the past as Kylo Ren said. It’s the only way any future directors have a chance to add to the Star Wars universe.

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75

Now that there’s a Star Wars movie every year as opposed to every 2-3 (not counting the decades gap between fracnchises) can’t we have both? Can’t the “Star Wars” stream be full of pulpy goodness like George used to do, while the “Star Wars Story” stream is about other genres or settings within the same universe?

What’s the point of creating mysteries in TFA if you’re not going to pay them off in TLJ?

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What big and important mysteries were really created in TFA, though? I watched TFA the night before going to see TLJ and this was about all I could come up with:

  • Rey’s lineage. This one seemed to get the most buzz, but on further reflection, is it really that important? We already know she’s special, and a prodigy in the force. Does her lineage really matter?

  • Snoke. What development did he have beyond “all-powerful Palpatinesque figure”? Are his back story or motivations particularly important?

  • Knights of Ren. Not much more than a passing mention in TFA. Maybe this will be a part of IX?

Did I miss anything?

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77

It’s kind of fascinating how much the debate around TLJ reminds me of the elementary school playground right after Return of the Jedi came out. Kids who’d been debating who the “other” hope that Yoda talked about in Empire were saying “there’s NO WAY it’s Leia! She doesn’t even use the Force! That’s so lame!”. Kids who’d been theorizing how the Rebels could defeat the Empire were livid that they were helped by teddy bears. Kids who wanted Luke to blow the crap out of Vader were incensed that his dad was a good guy after all (sort of).

Once Reddit and 4chan have stopped their stupid trolley campaign against TLJ, I hope some angry fans can catch their breath and re-evaluate the things they’re so mad about that they’d essentially built up in their own heads.

That was my assumption. Now that he’s Supreme Leader, wiped out the Praetorian Guards, and renounced the Sith, I had assumed that this was when he started his own thing and recruited knights to be his crew and hunt down Rey, as seen in her premonition.

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78

The pulp answer to these questions is that something interesting (and possibly improbable) would come from them all.

If they were all dead ends, why bring them up in TFA in the first place? That running time could have been used for other purposes in TFA or to set up different events/themes in TLJ.

  • Rey could have just been an orphan on Jakku (no need to talk about her parents at all).
  • Just have Hux as the leader of the First Order (and drop Snoke entirely)
  • Have Kylo kill everyone in Luke’s school in a sneak attack (no need for the Knights of Ren)

Abrahms put them into TFA, so I (fans?) expected them to be paid off in an interesting way down the line. It’s supposed to be a trilogy and I am expecting a pulpy one where these kinds of things don’t just fizzle out. These mysteries do something exciting or are left unanswered for now.

It’s cool that you didn’t see the need for them to be paid off, but others have different hopes and expectations.

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This is gonna be an unpopular opinion… but I welcome even the crap Star Wars offshoot movies to come like the Ewok movies.

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80

I disagree. Thinking her parents would return for her was a critical character motivation. She clearly had raw and innate talent and would never have been slumming it on Jakku for so long if she didn’t have a damn good reason to.

The only problem was that fans built up her parentage be some huge reveal (and I’m as guilty of this as anybody) and were let down when the reveal was that she was just a very gifted nobody, but still a nobody.

Just have Hux as the leader of the First Order (and drop Snoke entirely)

Hux may be a skilled military commander, but a leader of a society? No way. He’s clearly not respected or taken seriously. Anyway, it makes sense that there’s someone higher than that pulling the strings given how the First Order is just Empire 2.0. Like the Empire before it, the First Order is presumably more than just its military.

To phrase this another way, does knowing more about Snoke really do anything to help the story or add to character motivations? He’s Ruling Powerful Evil Force Guy.

The prequel movies answered all kinds of questions and provided many origin stories. Knowing these answers and stories did little to improve the original trilogy – and in some ways the OT was retroactively ruined by events of the prequels.

Have Kylo kill everyone in Luke’s school in a sneak attack (no need for the Knights of Ren)

The Knights of Ren are just a group of powerful dark side force users led by Kylo Ren… and that’s about all we know about them.

Abrahms put them into TFA, so I (fans?) expected them to be paid off in an interesting way down the line.

We still have another movie to go, so it’s probably too soon to really know what is and isn’t paid off.

Dead ends and unresolved plot points are nothing new to the Star Wars franchise. It’s amazing eps 4, 5, and 6 ended up being as cohesive as they were given how they were largely written on the fly.

It’s cool that you didn’t see the need for them to be paid off, but others have different hopes and expectations

I don’t think it’s that some of the plot points set up in TFA didn’t pay off, it’s just that they didn’t pay off in a way some found satisfying. (Basically, the LOST problem.)

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“Wait, we need to discuss the order of succession!”

[hurk!]

“…oh yeah I forgot you can choke people with your mind.”

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82

Thinking on this, part of the appeal of the original triology was the fact that Luke was from a backwater (er, backsandy) kind of place, apparently no one special, and it turns out that he’s really connected to an elite sort of legacy. In the case of Rey, she’s still from a backsandy kind of place, but if what Ben says is true, and her parents were nobodies, that means that her rise is even more of an overturning of class than Luke’s was. He was of this elite class (though he certainly brings his working class ideals to it). But Rey IS of the working class and is more effective in upending class barriers represented by Ben. It’s a nobody rising up without actually being of some special blood.

But it also occurs to me that he could have lied to her about her parentage. Or didn’t see it correctly somehow.

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