The thing that got me into Star Wars in the 70s was the Sound Design, Music and Emotional Quest. Star Wars was weird and epic and ambitious. It took you places you’d never seen nor heard before. It was scary and thrilling. The call outs were to George Lucas’s childhood genres of classic cowboy and war movies. There was a strange internal logic to the Wizard of Oz like fantasy. It’s mythical roots went deep. Am hoping that The Mandalorian captures some of that dark magic. KEEP STAR WARS WEIRD.
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The 3 narratives in TLJ aren’t necessarily narratively linked, but they are thematically linked. The entire film is about people having their expectations undermined and their best intentions shot to hell. Rey getting the cold shoulder from Luke, Poe getting a lot of good pilots killed and valuable equipment destroyed, and Finn and Rose getting screwed over in the end by the lovable scoundrel rogue are all of a piece. It’s a great big (kinda messy) movie about growing the hell up, getting over yourself, and learning to trust and lean on others. It’s not often that movies go out of their way to have its characters explicitly tell you the theme once, much less twice:
Luke: “This is not going to go the way you think.”
Yoda: “The greatest teacher, failure is.”
I actually wanna talk about the ramming speed thing for a sec on an emotional level. Its absence in earlier films is easily waved off with any number of explanations centering around practicality and executional complexity, but that’s all just nerd wank (and I say this as someone who will nerd wank themselves dry). More than anything else, that scene was brutally effective. I knew exactly what Holdo was going to do the second she started turning the ship around (turns out Rian Johnson isn’t the only dork who’d thought of this idea I guess), and the gruesome slowness of the final reveal unfurling itself on screen was agonizing to watch. That, combined with the blinding (and utterly mute) suddenness of the jump itself was the closest I think I’ve ever been to being punched in the chest by a piece of art before. It left me utterly speechless and gasping for breath in the theater. It hurt.
TLJ forced the main characters to learn some hard truths and accept some staggering defeats in the learning. I just really hope JJ doesn’t kneecap those hard-won lessons because they made a very vocal minority of the fandumb angry.
So far I’ve deeply enjoyed both of the new Trilogy films, as well as both Rogue One and Solo, so I guess that puts me in some rarified air because everyone I know has beefs with at least one of those. I’m really really really looking forward to Episode 9, and I’m cautiously optimistic that JJ can bring this thing in for a landing. So please join me in the chant that I’ll be uttering from now until December 20th: pleasebegoodpleasebegoodpleasebegoodpleasebegoodpleasebegood
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Yes, this hits it spot on.
Of course I’m still going to see the latest film in the series. I’ll be there, watching it in the cinema with my dad, because that’s just one of the things we do together. We went to the re-releases of the original trilogy, the prequels and now all the Disney sequels and one-offs.
Of all the sequels, I didn’t get the dislike people had for The Force Awakens. It was a reboot of the original, yes, but it was done in a way that announced to the world- this is what Star Wars is all about- it’s the grand-scale adventure film that you grew up with, and the new trilogy was bringing it right back to the roots of what people loved about the series.
Then Rogue One turned up and it was just really damn good. A simple, one sentence plot- “They have to steal the plans for the Death Star” blossoms into a new take on the space adventure- this is a war film in the mould of The Dirty Dozen or The Guns of Navarone. A few people thrown together by a single mission have to become a team and achieve something that will further their cause even though they are doomed (spoiler alert). And it just works, with only a couple of rough edges.
That said, if they find a way to pull everything together with the Darth Jar Jar theory, I’m going to laugh my socks off.
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Since ST ships appear to generate gravity within the ships, who’s to say that they can’t “do things” without once/if they entered “full planet gravity”. Hmmmmm? 
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I have no problems with that ramming scene; it’s sf (or science fantasy), and they can make up whatever rules they want, and it was very effective cinematically. I don’t watch any Star Wars movie for tight plotting 
I also had no qualms with the themes being explored, just with the loosey-gooseyness of the narrative structure. It was, of course, also echoing The Empire Strikes back, where Luke separates from Leia and Han and goes off to be trained by Yoda, while Leia and Han have a their own adventure, so that there are two narrative threads. And I have to admit that I find Poe to be rather boring.
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Completely agree. That’s why I enjoyed that scene in space with Leia that some people complained about. We don’t know everything the Force can do. And the cross-galaxy Force teleconferences were amazing. That scene where Kylo was wet even though he’d been physically nowhere near the ocean? 
YES. Less midichlorians and more of that, please.
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Suspension of disbelief is the problem here. It’s not that a writer never thought of it before(this is a pretty obvious idea that a ten year old could come up with), it’s that, apparently, no one in the Empire(or the First Order) was aware that a much, much smaller transport ship with hyperdrive could cut through an entire fleet of ridiculously large and expensive starships like butter.
What this means is that any ship with hyperdrive, in fact hyperdrive itself, is potentially an insanely powerful weapon. Since this universe is multi-planetary, hyperdrive would be a necessity and rather common. Any cargo ship would have it. Han Solo had a ship with hyperdrive and he was just a two-bit criminal with otherwise limited resources. A massive, slow-moving starship that takes some time and considerable resources to create and must house 1000s of troops, seems like a rather impractical idea in a world where it can be sliced in half instantly by the Millennium Falcon or any other junk cargo ship in the galaxy.Technologies that can be used as insanely powerful weapons tend to be utilized as such. This would fundamentally change how space combat is conducted, and before this movie there were 7 other movies in this universe, full of space combat, where this idea never came up.
It is very important that fantasy worlds such as this one have some sort of internal consistency because it is already ridiculous. You accept the ridiculousness because those are the rules of the fantasy world as they are presented, and what makes fantasy worlds entertaining is that you believe they’re real. In this fantasy world, outside of the users of the force, everything else would appear to be bound by laws of physics identical to our own. Hyperdrive is a technology.Jumping into hyperspace clearly does not involve going really,really fast suddenly, as that would instantly kill a human(oid) and destroy the vessel as well. So it clearly does not work this way to begin with. While it looked extremely cool and the moment of complete silence was perhaps the most interesting part of the movie, the idea itself was rather thoughtless and simplistic. Bad writing. Most of this movie felt like it was written by someone that thought Star Wars was stupid anyway. And you know, it is stupid, I suppose. This particular movie was too stupid, lets say.
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A rebuttal from the genius of EC Henry:
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I’m going to be brutally honest. Apart from the ants in my pants prior to Rey meeting Luke, those few seconds between when they broadcast the collision and the sound cuts were the most tense moments of the film for me.
Holy shit they’re actually going to…
The ringing silence in the theater as everyone’s mind was collectively blown was a moment I won’t soon forget. Well. Fucking. Played.
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60,000+ with Chuck Yeager at the stick.
Airplanes love him and will go above and beyond their limits just to please and cherish him.
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Or maybe, just maybe, this is all just nitpicking and looking for more reasons to trash a movie you didn’t like.
Look - all this time apparently no-one in the Empire (or the First Order) was aware that their supposedly formidable stormtroopers kinda suck. At least a dozen of them were taken out only by a small ragtag group of randos (who could, by the way, just board their military establishments using really stupidly obvious trickery), their armor protects them from absolutely nothing, they never seem to be able to hit their target. The Empire keeps getting inconvenienced (to put it mildly) because of this incompetence and yet nobody seems to realize this and say “hey, how about we do something about our military force, let’s at least give them stronger armor”. Hell, in Return of the Jedi their top priority base is protected by only a handful of these guys who are then soundly defeated by forest-dwelling critters with stone-age weapons.
And so on, I could go all day. Point is, these movies are made for a general audience, and not for nerds whose hobby is analysing everything about the franchise. And as movies they have to keep flow and drama as priority. You can’t stop a movie dead in its tracks to pay homage to some character who is only famous because of a meme. You can’t stop a movie dead in its tracks to explain something that most people don’t give a flying squirrel about and in fact wouldn’t have even occurred to them without nitpickers pointing it out. But also, even if you’re that kind of nerd: there are dozens of potential reasons why nobody had done this before. The video above provides one. I said another potential reason above. You could analyize the scene and come to the conclusion that makes sense to you, but since you already hate the movie you don’t want to do this, you just want more reasons to prove that it sucks.
See, I actually thought most of this movie felt like it was written by someone who loved Star Wars but thought it needed some freshening up so it’s not the movie franchise equivalent of masturbation. And there are legitimate reasons to criticize it for, but these things - they killed Ackbar off-screen! why didn’t anyone thought of the hypespace thing before! - are so ridiculously nitpicky I just can’t take them seriously.
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Sadly it’s since been deleted, but a while back Rian (who both wrote and directed the film) posted a video of himself on Twitter pulling a Jedi lore book from the Extended Universe off of his bookshelf and opening it up to a page about Force projection in response to someone who was complaining about Luke suddenly doing something nobody had ever seen a (living) Jedi do before. He’s absolutely a big fan of the franchise.
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Bingo! See: this thread. Also, expecting kids’ movies to be some sort of high art. Star Wars movies achieve some artistic moments, but they are, and always have been, light fluff to sell movie tickets.
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The whole ‘we’ve never seen a jedi do that before’ is such short sighted thinking. Look at how the force is used in ANH and then in ESB and so on. Why limit what jedi powers we see on screen?
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I don’t “hate” this movie at all. I watched it twice and found some of it entertaining. And I wouldn’t consider this particular thing nit-picky. This was the single most visually arresting moment in all of the movies, and the climax to one of the stories the movie had been telling for 2 hours. My thoughts when this happened were “WOW!” and then “Hyperspace wouldn’t work like that.”, which is completely unwelcome while I’m trying to enjoy my sci-fi, fantasy saga with space wizards. The reason I chose to engage you on this topic is that I disliked the particular type of argument that you were using. Everyone is aware that Star Wars isn’t real, but it’s not a LOLrandom universe like the marvel superhero movies. I do not care if something cartoonishly dumb happens in those. Star Wars has always been insanely popular and not particularly clever or complex, so I don’t really see the need to de-nerdify it or make it even more simple for general audiences. It was made for general audiences to begin with, it just happened to resonate with nerds.
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This is already in a galaxy where normal physics don’t work the way they should (fighters in space moving like an airplane, FTL travel even at 0.5 past speed of light is RIDICULOUSLY fast, the force, etc.) and this is your quibble?
I don’t see it as a problem. The Raddus didn’t have enough fuel to actually make a full hyperjump. As we have seen in all SW films: A ship is at rest (or moving at normal speeds) speeds up real quick and then pops into hyperspace. The Raddus did that speed up maneuver like it was going into hyperspace, and then ran into the First Order mega ship. That is all that occurred .
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Because the whole story doesn’t make sense. The Rebels won, the Empire is dead, and suddenly this First Order comes out of nowhere and conquers the galaxy? That’s just lazy writing – rather than try to think about the challenges that the New Republic would have in rebuilding the Galaxy (maybe there are separatist movements who think the problem with the Old Republic was that it was too big), the writers went back to the old Rebels versus Empire story we’ve already heard. I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide to include a third Death Star.
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