Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi

[mothman]

speaking as someone who doesn't like spectator sport and isn't particularly precious about Star Wars, they're exactly the same - Star Wars = kids film, football = grown ups chasing a ball around a field and falling over and crying like children.

Yes, exactly. But one is regarded by society as normal, the other as sad.

[mothman]

we're talking about the fans not the participants here. football is obviously shit, but there's evidently a toxic fanbase problem here where people cannot just let. things. go. if a band i love releases an album i don't like then i don't tend to listen to it and spend even less time thinking about it. people would be well advised to do the same, instead than holding bizarre grudges against the creators, and trying to hound them off social media, or even out of a career

For the toxic (so-called) fanbase, the actual thing they profess to be fans of is secondary to their goal. For football hooligans, it's not really about football itself, it's the tribalism. For the TLJ haterz, it's the hatred of the perceived "SJW agenda."

[that's not everybody who hates TLJ BTW, just the rabid subset under discussion]

[Shit Good Nose]

we're talking about the fans not the participants

Okay, people watching grown ups chasing a ball around a field and falling over and crying like children, and them getting upset/angry about it.  That, if anything, makes it even worse and narrows the divide even more.

I'm not saying one is any better or worse than the other, but I don't think you can single out Star Wars for reducing otherwise "normal" adults to gibbering idiots.

And anyway, none of this changes the fact that Last Jedi is a bag of rotting cunts.

[Monsieur Verdoux]

who was 'singling out' star wars

[Shit Good Nose]

You were.  Well, its fans at least.

Unless I've COMPLETELY misread everything you wrote.

Last Jedi is still an embarrassment that would make Ray Dennis Steckler chew his fist, though.

[Monsieur Verdoux]

Point me to where I said "Star Wars is the only cultural object that has a contingent of toxic fans".

[Shit Good Nose]

Over there

(points and runs away)

[Shit Good Nose]

Also, did I say that Last Jedi is an abysmal film?

[mothman]

Also, did I say that Last Jedi is an abysmal film?

Yes, but you buried it in a corollary to a footnote in an annex to the supporting materials to the thread. Easy to miss.

[Shit Good Nose]

Oh.  Shit.

Last Jedi is a bad film.  Watch The Terror of Tiny Town instead.  Twice.

[greenman]

To be fair in this case you do have a sizable part of the fan base(like me) who liked Rogue One and indeed a lot of people liked Looper as well so together that did create a good deal of positive expectation.

[Shit Good Nose]

To be fair in this case you do have a sizable part of the fan base(like me) who liked Rogue One and indeed a lot of people liked Looper as well so together that did create a good deal of positive expectation.

I maintain that, so far at least, Rogue One is the only really decenr new Star Wars film.  Solo isn't terrible to give it its due, and it's a hell of a lot better than Last Jedi and Force Awakens, but it's also not in any position to keep the franchise a going concern.

[lebowskibukowski]

I maintain that, so far at least, Rogue One is the only really decenr new Star Wars film.  Solo isn't terrible to give it its due, and it's a hell of a lot better than Last Jedi and Force Awakens, but it's also not in any position to keep the franchise a going concern.

Agree with all of that. I started rewatching The Force Awakens last week to see if it was as poor as I remember and, although it seemed a little better, it was still not more than a 4/10 at best. Maybe if I rewatch The Last Jedi about 65 times it will get incrementally better every time and maybe hit 3/10 by Christmas.

[Shit Good Nose]

Agree with all of that. I started rewatching The Force Awakens last week to see if it was as poor as I remember and, although it seemed a little better, it was still not more than a 4/10 at best. Maybe if I rewatch The Last Jedi about 65 times it will get incrementally better every time and maybe hit 3/10 by Christmas.

Interestingly, one thing Last Jedi did do was greatly improve Force Awakens in retrospect.  But, I think, only because Last Jedi seems like it belongs with the prequels.

...it hasn't improved the prequels in retrospect...

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

The portrayal of Kathleen Kennedy from certain quarters as some sort of monstrous villain who hates Star Wars fans is pretty baffling to me. I don't think I've ever seen the same level of sustained hate and bitterness expressed towards any other film producer or head of a franchise.

Barbara Broccoli gets a lot of flak for what she's supposedly done to the James Bond franchise. It's also interesting to see how people evolved over the years. When Daniel Craig was cast, he was the target of a "Craig is not Bond" campaign, then Casino Royale turned out to be a huge hit. At this point, some of the accusations started to shift towards the person supposedly responsible for hiring him, and pushing a feminist agenda, Barbara Broccoli, even if she runs the family business with her half-brother, Michael G. Wilson. Yet, these people will give a free pass to what's arguably the nadir of the entire franchise, Die Another Day, which was rote, classic Bond, with a nauseating contemporary update.

Broccoli and Wilson have made a lot of mistakes together. The score for GoldenEye, the lost opportunities of the three other Brosnan entries, Quantum of Solace having an unfinished script, the nonsense of Spectre. Yet, they have arguably delivered three good or great entries out of eight (GoldenEye, Casino Royale, Skyfall) plus brought the talents and the audience back, which is much more than the seventies or eighties track record of the franchise. So, when people single out Broccoli for destroying Bond, I assume the guys are MRAs or die-hard tories. The difference with the toxic Star Wars fans is that most of them are already middle-aged, a little more articulate, but they definitely do a lot of projection over the main character.

[Shit Good Nose]

Let's not forget that Lucas himself was the (deserved) target of a huge amount of venom when the prequels came out, not least because he went back on his early promise that he would only co-write and produce, leaving the direction to others.



Live long and prosper, you nobs.

[greenman]

Honestly I think the biggest error with recent Starwars has been similar to recent Trek, the assumption that most of the appeal of the franchise was very casual nostalgia. In both franchises Abrams had a lot of success with one film that targeted that following poorly regarded previous entries and a long(ish for Trek) break but quite quickly after that I think you saw a significant backlash.

The Last Jedi to me seems to depend on the belief people don't actually remember the originals very well and will accept the idea that Luke was a fairly bland hero who blew up the Deathstar and beat Vader in a lightsaber duel.

Solo as well whilst it has less obviously wrong with it was basically constructed from a series of references to the originals in favour if actually focusing its main plot.

[Mister Six]

The fanboy backlash to TLJ suggests that it wasn't nostalgic enough. In fact, the stuff they did with Luke was a substantial development of his character that meshed perfectly well with his past as written. I don't like it as a film or as a Star Wars movie, but it's not relying on nostalgia at all.

EDIT: Except fast-tracking the Order into a new Empire and the Resistance into Rebels even though it doesn't make any sense. That did feel like trying to force the old template on it. But the character work was fine.

[Shaky]

Yeah, I have absolutely no issue with the way they treated Luke. Ultimately he manages to defend the main resistance via entirely peaceful means and self sacrifice, essentially creating a new power through sheer, er, force of will. As the last symbol of the Jedi, he stood for everything that was best about the order. If they'd had him running around sabre-ing the baddies I suspect it would only have been briefly satisfying in comparison.

[greenman]

The fanboy backlash to TLJ suggests that it wasn't nostalgic enough. In fact, the stuff they did with Luke was a substantial development of his character that meshed perfectly well with his past as written. I don't like it as a film or as a Star Wars movie, but it's not relying on nostalgia at all.

EDIT: Except fast-tracking the Order into a new Empire and the Resistance into Rebels even though it doesn't make any sense. That did feel like trying to force the old template on it. But the character work was fine.

Not quite as much as TFA but theres plenty of nostalgia there in terms of referencing very well known designs/charcters, the film ends with Hoth mk 2. Theres a difference between people wanting to see an entire setting/story carried on I'd say and a series of "look lightsabers! weren't they cool?" moments.

[phantom_power]

I find the online reaction to TLJ odd as almost everyone I know in real life who has seen it liked it a lot. There was a fair amount of not liking certain bits but overall, from 8 year-olds to 40-somethings and fanboys to casual viewers the reaction was positive. If all you read was this thread and certain parts of the internet you would think it was universally loathed

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

...and that Ricky Gervais had been creatively involved.

[Dr Rock]

Everything to do with Luke Skywalker is stupid, and shits on the character which makes me cry man-baby tears. In TFA the plot surrounds the search for Luke Skywalker, who is missing, oh noes. But he's left behind most of a map to find him but not all of it. Why? We learn that after his Jedi temple went tits up and one of his students went all evil, he ran away and hid. Oh the student was the son of his best friend and sister, but that didn't seem to stop him running away and hiding and staying hid as the student went to near running the resurgent dark forces who were now blowing up planets. Although he did leave behind that stupid map with the missing last piece for reasons that are never made clear. This isn't (just) a disservice to Skywalker's character, it's too out of character. A Jedi wouldn't do that, as Mark Hammill has repeatedly said. And I'm going to repeatedly say now.

The OT makes Obi Wan seem like a lying manipulator when we find out what he must've known and how he has lied to Luke from the start. Or not lied, from a certain point of view, but that's accidental, I'll forgive the movies that and accept that Obi Wan is a good-hearted mentor figure to Luke as originally intended. The Prequels cast more shade on the Jedi Order, from a certain point of view, but I don't like the prequels and think it's best that the series holds the Jedi in high regard, although I am also open to them being questioned if it's well-written. But fuck the Jedi, Luke Skywalker wouldn't do any of this. Or you may think he would, in which case we'll have to disagree.

By the end of TFA The map to finding him has been completed and Rey is for some reason sent off to get him back, but in TLJ we see he's even less keen on fixing his mistakes than we previously could have realised. Rian Johnson was already given this to deal with, and at this point Luke could have possibly been written to serve the story, explaining his reasons, which could include a loss of confidence, and just about getting the arc to where he decides to return to clean up his mess. I'd still have a big problem that this new trilogy had written that he ever ran way and hid from such a mess of his own creation, it's like writing Superman had a kid for five years because he didn't know about birth control and then comes back and spies on Lois Lane, who's fooled some other guy into thinking the kids his, and then seeks to break up the relationship she had with that guy. I may have misremembered some of that, but Superman Returns (and every Superman movie since come to think about it) gets Superman's character too far removed from what it should be. Superman and Luke Skywalker are archetypes that you mess around with only if you really know what you are doing. Rian Johnson doesn't. I don't know who the fuck that's supposed to be in (the otherwise godawful anyway) TLJ, but I don't buy that it's Luke Skywalker. I've said 'Luke Skywalker wouldn't do that' as a criticism, but I'd have bought a Fall Of Luke To The Dark Side arc in the new movies (or somesuch), if it had been well handled, but none of this is. Even with the partial redemption by the end of TLJ, he then chooses to die and his mess still hasn't been cleaned up. He's not even told that his old friend Han just died, or who killed him. Because Rian Johnson forgot that would be something Luke would've been told. It probably should've been the turning point for him, have Rey exasperatedly goad him with the revelation, and he sees what he's done by running away and hiding. See that's better than what was in the movie isn't it, and I just thought of it. So he's dead for some reason, it's not clear, and I suppose there's room to have him do stuff as a Force Ghost in the last movie which could fix some of this, but so far none of it makes sense, none of it is a story well told, none of it is satisfying, and all of it is too out of character for Luke Skywalker for me to believe any of it.

And that's just the handling of Luke Skywalker, not to mention what they did with Han Solo.

[Bad Ambassador]

Too long, bored. You didn't like it. Get over it and stop bleating all the time.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

You're not supposed to like Luke running away, but it made perfect sense to me when we finally found out what happened. He didn't just fail as a mentor, he considered murdering his own nephew (almost like he was tempted by the dark side, or something) and that one brief moment of weakness caused everything he'd feared to happen. It's dramatic irony.

[Kelvin]

TLJ is the only time Luke hasn't been a complete pile of shit, apart from that one bit where he's cool in Jabba's Palace.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

[Custard]

This thread will never end. Ever.

Even the next film's thread will vanish before it

[Mister Six]

Not quite as much as TFA but theres plenty of nostalgia there in terms of referencing very well known designs/charcters, the film ends with Hoth mk 2. Theres a difference between people wanting to see an entire setting/story carried on I'd say and a series of "look lightsabers! weren't they cool?" moments.

I'm thinking mostly of your remarks about Luke which make no sense to me at all.

[FredNurke]

So he's dead for some reason, it's not clear

I thought this was set up by Kylo Ren's remark to Rey during their first mystical encounter, when he initially thought he was seeing her because she was force-projecting, then decided against it: "You're not doing this, the effort would kill you", or something like that. I guess not even Luke Skywalker can skywalk that far for that long without his heart giving out.