[RD] The Last Jedi – Another Cold Rehash

[aelf]

But the point isn't having 100% control of all planets. It's just getting recognition of your authority and the right amount of taxes/tributes.

And I believe ruling the galaxy doesn't literally mean 100% of the galaxy either. Parts of the galaxy were notoriously wild or even unexplored.

 

[Kozmos]

On the other hand, the premiere is also when the fans who take themselves the most serious go, right? Its the folks who are the most likely to be the harshest critics and the biggest nitpickers with the highest expectations and the lowest tolerance for any perceived inconsistencies or deviations from canon etc... so it can be a mixed bag, right?

I just object to stupid plots. So you have this cutthroat working environment where office politics have lethal outcomes and then you have the incredulous exchange that happens at the start of the movie and you're expected to believe Hux can credibly hold the highest ranking position in the First Order? I might buy incompetence from Stormtroopers working in garbage disposal, but not from the backstabbing psychopaths in the officer ranks.

 

[onejayhawk]

Someone liked the movie. No quotes, because the whole article is full of spoilers.
https://www.theatlantic.com/enterta...wists-spoilers-star-wars-episode-viii/548402/

J

 

[rah]

But the point isn't having 100% control of all planets. It's just getting recognition of your authority and the right amount of taxes/tributes.

And I believe ruling the galaxy doesn't literally mean 100% of the galaxy either. Parts of the galaxy were notoriously wild or even unexplored.

I don't know about that. The US has weapons that could destroy entire countries. It's not enough to get the recognition of those countries.
Destroying them if they didn't recognize us would not be a workable strategy. I will definitely agree that they could rule part of the galaxy but just not the percentage I think you're thinking.

 

[Evie]

I rather liked it, though I would have liked it more if the Finn/Rose plot had gone somewhere. Ultimately, though, like all trilogies middles, this one depends on whether the payoff ito all ots swerves and twists is worth it. Empire had great critical but middling to poor fan reaction, too, at first. Today, of course, it is Empire.

Thematically, this one has the clearest theme or message of the franchise's history, and I love it

Spoiler :

Give the past a rest. Pretty much the entire movie rest on the idea that hile the past can inspire, it should not control us, and we shouldn't rely on it. Kylo, being the vilain (Snoke, I think, was a spectacular red herring)) take it to extremes, wanting to see the past burn, but then again, Yoda literally burns the past, too. Yes, the books have gone with Rey, but the destruction is still a powerful symbol that it's time for a new kind of jedi to rise - a better order, founded on learning from the old jedi order's mistakes (which Yoda pretty much says). Not for the old jedi to return.

Likewise, the resistance. Again and again and again, they put their faith in the past. Bringing Luke back will save the galaxy. If we broadcast a signal our old allies will show up. The big old rebel fortress down on Cait will protect us. A speeder assault will defeat the attack.

It doesn't work. Not once. The speeder attack is doomed. The fortress door can't resist modern weapons, the allies abandon them. And even Luke, in the end, can barely save them the one time. The answers they need aren't in what worked in he past.

Rah - Thinking of the psychological impacts of the nukes on Japan, I'm not so sure a Starkiller base wouldn't be a powerful psychological weapon...

 

[rah]

Burning the past isn't popular with the purists.
It diminishes the knowledge attained.

 

[Evie]

Purist tears are tasty.

Jokes aside, I of course habe a very personal reason to embrace a theme of what our relation to our own past should be - transitioning and having to examine your relation to who you were, to the past go hand in hand. But I also think it's very topical to our contemporary world situation, and the problems we face,where the temptations to look for answers to our problems in the ideas of the past is very strong.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

The thing about 'let the past die' is...

Spoiler :

The movie fundamentally doesn't. It's a facade. Literally the title crawl starts calling the Resistance "Rebels" again. We get entire lines ripped from the originals. "Rebel scum" is now a thing. I half expected Leia to say, when she talked about putting the distress signal out to all corners of the galaxy to help the Rebels, that they were now the "Rebel Alliance." Even Kylo Ren, whose struggle early on to kill Leia and his alliance of convenience with Rey when he kills Snoke makes it look like maybe they're going to mess with the standard expectations of Sith by making him more complex and guilt ridden, is by the end of the film a standard Sith (and Rey is a standard Jedi).

 

[Evie]

Except the message is not "Let the past die". It's let the pass rest. Or phrased otherwise, move on.

Spoiler :

Luke and Kyle - the two characters who yell and rant about destroying the past - are shown to be just as wrong as those who cling to the past in the hope it will save them. One has to move on from the past, to stop looking for answers in the good and to stop obsessing room the past. Wipe out the past isn't the sign of a character who has managed to free themselves from the past : it's the sign of a character that's so thoroughly trapped in their past that the only way they can see to move forward is to burn it all down.

That doesn't mean the world doesn't need rebels, or that the Jedi or Sith need to be wiped out. What it does mean is that the Rebels, the Jedi, the Sith, need to stop being beholden to the past. The old Rebellion is dead and done ; this is a new rebellion against a new enemy, and it's going to need to find its own answers, not look to the old rebels for one. The Old Jedi Order, its dogmatic ways, its strict adherence to legalistic thinking, is gone, and instead going back to the basic of what it means to be a Jedi, and then learning from the mistakes of the Order and of Luke to build something new, and better.

That's Yoda's entire message - that the failure of the Old Jedi Order doesn't mean the Jedi needs to die ; it means the Jedi need to *change*. The Sith...well, the Sith would need to learn that same lesson, but Kylo would need to escape the past. In Kylo's defense, waking up to find your uncle (seemingly) about to murder would come under the heading "extreme trauma", and those are hell to escape from.

 

[Traitorfish]

It's unrealistic to think that anyone could acquire enough resources to subjugate the ENTIRE galaxy. All the movies have suffered from that ridiculous thinking. This is simple space opera and putting any realistic constraints on it is just plain silly.

It's worth distinguishing between what the characters say, and what is actually the case. For both the Resistance and the First Order, widespread recognition of First Order hegemony is enough to constitute "Galactic domination", without having to translate into much tangible influence of the day-to-day lives of the galaxy's inhabitants.

 

[Sommerswerd]

It's worth distinguishing between what the characters say, and what is actually the case. For both the Resistance and the First Order, widespread recognition of First Order hegemony is enough to constitute "Galactic domination", without having to translate into much tangible influence of the day-to-day lives of the galaxy's inhabitants.

Sort of like we how have a Ms. "Universe", Pageant... or how MLB championship is called the "World Series"...

 

[Arwon]

I liked it and it was good. Same with the last two.

I think that means I'm not a Star Wars fan - they seem to love complaining and hating Star Wars.

 

[Takhisis]

Positive points of the film: the Nazis-in-space theme of the First Order is toned down quite a bit.

There's no mention of that ridiculous concept about the Force being a microbial infection. All that mild-chlorine garbage can go away.

Spoiler :

There's some speculation that Snoke is still alive and that he might just be doing the Sith thing where the apprentice is supposed to kill his master... except, if he is Darth Plagueis, he might have cheated death again and is playing a long game, biding his time and possibly letting his former apprentices do the work for him. That would be interesting.

Alternatively, maybe he was able to read Kylo Ren's intent but not toward whom the intent was directed. I can live with that, but it would super annoying if they never revealed who or what Snoke really is.

"As a whole the First Order appear to be a group of neo-Nazi neo-Imperial fanboys with a small fleet who really struck lucky when they managed to use the not-a-Death-Star to destroy the Republic, far smaller than the Empire they seek to rebuild. What is the rest of the galaxy doing? Have they been destroyed by the Yuuzhan Vong?"

That's a problem - the biggest problem - with The Force Awakens. I cannot buy the idea that it is possible to construct a planet-sized superweapon without massive shipments from multiple systems that would have been detected or at least reported. Apparently, not only are the bad guys super incompetent, the good guys are too. They seem to have no capacity for intelligence gathering (maybe the Bothans were all dead?). So, if we accept the events in TFA, then the New Republic and Resistance deserve this fate. But it's still pathetic and unless the First Order is also almost on its last legs, there should be no returning from this without another unbelievable plot development.

Spoiler :

I hope they don't just give us a fourth trilogy in which Snoke reappears as the original Sith.

I thought about the Sith tradition of promotion-by-murder. ‘Long live the Supreme Leader’ makes it sound as if they themselves acknowledge that they are a cult/sect rather than a full government. In fact, each and every single soldier the First Order has stops to watch Kylo Ren do his dinky laser sword fight (see how I'm combining quotes from Star Wars and Darths and Droids?)

The problem of scale will, for now, remain unsolved. At least the bit about arms dealers hints at there being more than one faction out there.

 

[Broken_Erika]

 

[Evie]

Hmmmm

Spoiler :

"The supreme leader is dead, long live the supreme leader" doesn't really imply anything about cult/sect rather than government, given how a number of quite developed earth governments used essentially the same phrase.

In this case, Kylo (and a rather less willing Hux) are stating that while the individual who was Supreme Leader may be dead, the institution of the Supreme Leader lives on and passes on to another, with Hux forced to acknowledge Kylo in that role

 

[Takhisis]

Well…

Spoiler :

‘The King is dead, long live the King’ is one thing. Going on about the Supreme Leader(ship) really highlights how little of a territorial and political base the First Order seem to have. Even the land force they deploy to attack the Rebel base at the end is small (I know, they've lost a dreadnought and Snoke's flagship, but still).

 

[Manfred Belheim]

heaters are too expensive but more importantly they're a weird combination of over- and under-stimulation. My attention span has been too warped by the internet to actually sit through a movie while doing nothing else, and theaters are like really loud and in-your-face, so it's just not that pleasant an experience for me usually.

Had to read that a couple of times before I realised it was a typo, not a bizarre aside.

 

[Evie]

I'd argue...

Spoiler :

They've lost more than that - several of the supporting cruisers are also hyperspaced to the death by the Raddus (yes, it's canonically named after the mon cal guy in Rogue One). I doubt what they have left is more than two or three of the smaller ships. What they land is what the few remaining ships of their task force can support in short order. Given how few Resistance types survive by that point, it's probably the right call too. Besides which, Vader, with an intact fleet and a much larger Rebel Army on Hoth, still landed a significantly smaller attack force.)

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Awful "jokes". Terrible lapses in physics/general believability. Horrendous military discipline. Annoying porgs. Pretty good film.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Just like there's no such thing as bad pizza, there's no such thing as a bad Star Wars movie.

But if there could be bad pizza, this would be a pretty bad Star Wars movie.

I dislike this one in different ways than I dislike the prequels. But the earlier reviewers here, civver and Good Enough, got most of my reaction: that there's simultaneously too much and too little going on. It's also somehow simultaneously too rushed and too slow-paced.

I meet a character for the first time and on the basis of her sister's heroism, I'm supposed instantly to take her into my sympathies enough to care about her joining the hero on the plot's central enterprise. Never came alive to me.

Gotta jump way over here for a key, and then way over there to use the key, so as to press a button. Main heroic action is simultaneously too expansive and too micro-managey.

Cruelty to animals handled in such a rushed and perfunctory way as to make me actually not really give a damn about cruelty to (Star Wars-cute) animals.

But everyone, go. I'm going to create a game for us to play on CFC once worrying about spoilers is no longer an issue.