LemonMelon
More 5G Than Man
Saw it again. Still great.
The Finn/Rose plot is the only downer.
The Finn/Rose plot is the only downer.
The whining about the whining isn't that intense in here. I think it's more curiosity over a phenomenon than anything else.Hey Batman, if you're out there riddle me this:
What's the difference between people whining about a movie and the people whining about people whining about a movie?
I'll throw my post in spoiler tags, in case anyone hasn't seen the movie yet.
I was really unsure how I felt about the movie after I saw it. I need to see it again, but I'm feeling really negative right now. It's probably my least-favorite Star Wars film. I feel negatively about it much faster than I felt negatively about TFA (though my eventual negativity for the latter may have primed me for negativity on the former). I'm generally just not excited about where the sequels ar going.
- Snoke - Seems like he is pointless and easy-to-kill. I recognize that my pipe dream of Team Plagueis may not have been wise for non-hardcore fans, but this character deserved some sort of a backstory for how he came to be who he is, what his motivations were, what he was doing during the time of Palpz, et cetera. I feel totally cheated out of a fascinating character that Abrams did some nice work setting up.
- Rey Random - I guess I see the point here ("anyone can be a hero"), but it still deprives the saga of some nine-episode weight that could have been really good. *shills for Rey Palpatine* Plus, the "I'm going to screw with fans on the internet" buildup to that reveal is just downright annoying.
- What the hell is the deal with Rey and the dark side anyway? Luke says she was tempted by it, and she goes to the cave-thingy, but there's not a ton of solid evidence of practical temptation to convert to the dark side. Even when she goes all Anakin/Luke-In-Episode-VI on Snoke in the throne room, Snoke interprets that as her being a "powerful Jedi" or whatever instead trying to practically convert her to the dark side. So, it's all random talk of the "dark side", but the support underlying it is actually terrible. Compare to both Luke and Anakin's real, palpable temptation, and this feels so emotionally weightless.
- The number of almost-deaths is quite annoying; it just adds to the "I'm going to screw with fans on the internet" feel that the whole movie had
- The humor was horrible
- Hux was annoying
- No particularly memorable new music at a first listen, although it liberally uses Rey's Theme, which I love
On the positive side:
- The film was absolutely stunningly beautiful. I loved the fact that there were some prequel-esque fantastic world moments that didn't look like Pixar, as the prequels are wont to look.
- I generally found Luke's anxiety pretty believable, though I of course wish it had been better-developed re: Rey
- I rather liked Luke's swan song and death
And still uncertain: I'm really unsure how to feel about Leia's non-death.
I was literally stomping my feet and going all Ric Flair-style "WHOOOOOO!!" after the revelation of Luke's big stunt. .
On this one noteI'll throw my post in spoiler tags, in case anyone hasn't seen the movie yet.
[*]Rey Random - I guess I see the point here ("anyone can be a hero"), but it still deprives the saga of some nine-episode weight that could have been really good. *shills for Rey Palpatine* Plus, the "I'm going to screw with fans on the internet" buildup to that reveal is just downright annoying.
That said, Adam Driver's acting really won me over this time around. Great job, perhaps the strongest performance of the whole film.
The whining about the whining isn't that intense in here. I think it's more curiosity over a phenomenon than anything else.
And of course everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I am entitled to my own: thinking The Last Jedi is a worse film than the Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones is patently absurd. I can't imagine how many galaxies away from being an objective filmgoer one would have to be to come away with that conclusion. It's like preferring Nightmare on Elm Street 5 to The Shining because you thought Kubrick's adaptation was heretical.
It’s different in my case, I think, because I subscribe to the heterodox belief that the prequels are criminally underrated, and a lot of what I like about the saga (which is present in the PT) has been pivoted away from in the ST as a whole and TLJ in particular. We probably have very different wants out of Star Wars, and they can lead to very different conclusions.
Exactly that - something people halfway acknowledge but don't really think through the implications of is that Star Wars is one of the most popular things in human history. So it's not surprising something casting such a wide brush brings in a lot of different people. Same for U2, really.
FWIW I think I agree with you about the prequels. It's entirely possible after Episode IX comes out that one can look at a through-line from 7 through 9 as their own internally consistent piece which doesn't quite sync with what I got from the first 6.
Yeah, I think I agree. I was very wary of the character heading into the Force Awakens, but thought it made enough sense to have a chance to be good. I think they nailed the character's arc in this one and it was very compelling.
The Snoke thing is obviously going to be something that bothers people, but the problem isn't how he was dispatched. It was that the concept of the character being so all-powerful basically made it impossible to resolve in any satisfying way.
I just don't understand how someone can ignore terrible acting, incompetent direction, bad pacing (especially in II) and SFX that's already aging badly because it offers "what they're looking for from Star Wars" in terms of narrative. The new trilogy has been miles ahead in all those categories. I've seen all the movies, but maybe I'm not a big enough fan as far as the lore is concerned to understand that mindset. I'm willing to accept that possibility.
I'll take a stab at explaining myself here. I don't feel a need to evangelize the prequels, but I don't mind explaining myself, because it can be a little frustrating for people to look at me like I have the intelligence of an eight-year-old who just like Jar Jar Binks toys when I say that I like the prequels. And, if I can make someone who is more ambivalent find something enjoyable about the prequels, I'm happy about that. But I'm not trying to make a wholesale believer out of a wholesale unbeliever.
Let me first say that a lot of what you accuse the PT of is valid. It has huge execution issues. I may not be as bothered by them as the average fan, but I won't deny that the prequels have issues with dialogue, acting, directing, pacing, and I'm sure plenty of other -ings. Hell, even one of my absolute favorite scenes in the saga is marred by it: the Anakin/Obi-Wan duel on Mustafar has "from my point of view, the Jedi are evil".
So, what do I find appealing about the prequels? When I take a step back from the execution issues, I see a plot arc that is extremely satisfying, both emotionally and intellectually, in setting up what happened in the OT. It brings together a remarkably strong six-part saga, despite many pieces having huge flaws. I see this on a couple of dimensions: as a political drama, and as a Skywalker family drama.
On the political front: well, I know that the PT gets a lot of criticism for being overly political, but I think it works really well. Why? Because it shows some really fascinating themes, with plenty of real-life parallels. It shows an incredibly wealthy and futuristic society, but with real struggles outside of Coruscant and the surrounding galactic core. Our Chosen One is literally a slave from a backwater Outer Rim planet. The contrast between Tatooine and Coruscant, or even Naboo (an outpost of wealth in the backwater), is incredible, and speaks a lot to urban versus rural, to the wealthy versus those without a chance. Then you have Sheev Palpatine - senator from the aforementioned Naboo, absolutely capitalizing on the fears of the core to seize power in a time of fear as economic inequality rises even in the core. I hesitate to provide analogies to real-life politics, but the themes are certainly believable, and have occurred before. (I'm not trying to make a Trump = Palpz comparison here.) "I hate sand" feels less ridiculous in this context.
On top of that, you have the Jedi Order. The Jedi were portrayed as so saintly in the OT, but I love how they are portrayed as narrow, conservative, and flawed in the PT. Honestly, when Palpatine speaks of the "dogmatic view of the Jedi", he's not completely wrong. Yoda is so deeply conservative that he drives Anakin to repress his emotions, to disastrous consequences that breed the dark side more that would have likely otherwise been the case. Mace Windu clearly enjoys his own power, and is seemingly tempted by opportunities to overthrow Palpatine. Obi-Wan tries to stick to the party line, but addresses problems with it (especially in the form of Anakin/Padmé, to which he turns a blind eye) by ignoring them and pretending that the party line is alright. There are clearly issues at play here, portended by Dooku's departure from the Order. One Jedi, Qui-Gon, seemingly has a renegade attitude. His oneness with The Force is stronger than anyone's, but he's held back by the Order for it. And even Qui-Gon sees a planet filled with slaves and doesn't think anything particularly bad about it; he saves one with essentially selfish motivations, and leaves the rest to rot.
Politically, things are not black-and-white in the prequels. And that goes for the motivations of the "hero" characters as well. It's very human. As the crawl to ROTS says: "there are heroes on both sides." The "from my point of view, the Jedi are evil" line may have been poorly-written, but the sentiment behind it has a lot of fascinating weight and legitimacy.
On the Skywalker family (and other involved characters) drama front: this adds so much weight to the OT to me. Yeah, the lines between Anakin and Padmé on Naboo were often bad. But is the overall concept? When I watch ROTJ, at the end when Vader is considering what to do with Palpatine, I hear Padmé's heart beating as she dies. I hear Obi-Wan yelling "you were my brother, Anakin; I loved you". The togetherness of the saga, as Vader picks up Darth Sidious and throws him to his death, is strong. The conflict that Luke feels as he looks to the dark side, as he considers killing his father, is stronger, because we've seen it before. Yoda's hesitation to train Luke... we've seen it before, as we think of his dejected failure when he climbs into the flying car with Bail Organa. Speaking of Organa, when his planet gets blown up in ANH, I think of him bringing Leia home. When I see Leia talking back to Vader, her father, I think of her mother, a gifted leader from a young age (though that portrayal is, certainly, flawed).
It works. It brings together a narrative for the whole saga that feels so, so satisfying to me.
To revisit execution, yeah, there are issues. But I don't think that the prequels are totally ruined by execution, nor that they are uniquely full of bad execution decisions. There are issues in every Star Wars movie; even the OT has its fair share of pretty bad humor, and TLJ is an utter disaster on that front. Yeah, the Gungans (Boss Nass in particular is a loathsome character) are a questionable decision, but worse than the Ewoks? The CGI was over-the-top, especially in AOTC, but I appreciate the ambition of it, at least. There were also some really good execution points in the movies, centered around some well-acted characters: Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, Dooku, Palpatine, Padmé (mostly), Windu, and Organa all come to mind. So, my point is here that execution is an issue in the PT, perhaps more than in the OT and the ST to date (though I'd dispute that with TLJ). But it's not uniquely damning in the context of Star Wars, nor is it all a catastrophe.
I'll contrast this with the ST, just a little bit. Sure, the ST movies are beautiful, and there's no individual line as bad as "from my point of view, the Jedi are evil" (though Poe's call to Hux was nearly that bad). But, so far, they feel like a complete mess from a political standpoint, and Disney/Kennedy/Abrams/Johnson deliberately made choices to avoid making the ST feel like an effective part of a larger saga, other than wholesale ripping off OT plot points and settings. The EU has attempted to fix some of the former, to some success. But decisions like some of the ones that I mentioned in my spoiler-tagged post making it an uphill battle.
So, that's my take. Again, I'm not trying to convince you to agree, but I think I come to this conclusion from a standpoint that's not completely ridiculous or stupid.