The Last Jedi was an amazing deconstruction of Star Wars. I don’t think better execution would have helped it with a fan base that wants to be stuck in the past reliving the hero’s journey ad nauseam but it had a lot more potential than you see on screen.
Disagree. The first two sequels kept making a defeated bad empire stronger and stronger without any explanation. The rebels then suddenly became just 400 to 20 people. A different type of journey would have been welcomed with open arms if clever enough.
And I think embracing the jedi, but killing the wars aspect, rather than trying to destroy the jedi but keeping the wars it would have been a much better answer to the franchise.
I think I’m really unusual in that I dislike almost everything after IV. I think the first film was brilliant, back when Lucas was fighting for money and had to rely on vision and didn’t have Campbell to advise with. Introducing cutesy characters strictly for marketing, they all lacked the charm of the original.
I know I’m an exception. Nearly everyone liked V and/or VI more. Everyone dunks on Jar Jar, but I could not stand the Ewoks. It was so disgustingly blatant.
At the time I was dying for sequels, and when they finally came I was so disappointed. You know, I think I just realized that it was the Vader/Luke connection that sunk it for me. That all of the major characters had to be related somehow made the universe smaller, and more petty. They only got worse after that; I think I watched all of I-III, but I actively hated those.
Anyway, I think there might have been a path, and I’m no story teller so I couldn’t fix it, but I think the while thing went off the rails after IV.
Good friends have told me the Mandelorian was good, but “Baby Yoda” represents everything I loathed about the series and I refuse to watch it.
Anyway, what were you saying about the Hero’s Journey? Maybe I should watch The Last Jedi, because while the Campbell formula worked for the first film, it didn’t improve any of the sequels, so maybe I’d like it. As long as there are no obviously pandering character designs that exist clearly because they can easily be marketed as toys. Looking at you, BB-8.
There are a bunch of adorable space critters that you’ll think are that when you’re watching the movie, and they certainly were marketed and merchandised like crazy, but they’re actually there due to the unwanted presence of adorable Earth critters during filming. They couldn’t shoot the scenes without including these birds that lived where they were shooting so the solution they came up with was CGI-ing weird faces on them and including some close-ups to make them look deliberate.
It’s a bad star wars movie because of the hyperspace ram.
SciFi inherently requires suspension of disbelief and so I find the way these types of stories ground themselves is through the rules they set. For example fire/explosions don’t really make sense in space but its a consistent thing so w/e.
Hyperspace ramming breaks the entire concept of Star wars BC why hasn’t anyone done it before? Its the perfect weapon for asymmetrical warfare, its cheap and its very effective. Imagine how a weapon like that could be used with a robot piloting a junk ship, why even build a death star just strap a bunch of garbage to a hyperspace drive and ram it into a planet. Its so effective that every fight in the future needs to consider it as well.
I’d defend this movie far more if it didn’t do this. But it didn’t only damage its own movie it damaged every story star wars has told retrospectively.
As I recall, hyperspace is like a pocket dimension. They just speed up a whole lot to enter hyperspace. So you can’t collide with things ‘in hyperspace’, but only as you’re going really fast while transitioning to hyperspace, which is quite a bit more limited in capability.
Hyperspace drives are expensive, and droids are sentient (so its still suicidal). Using it as a weapon would be like having an shotgun in an fps game, where the first 5 feet is extremely lethal to really big targets, whereas anything after that is a waste of time. Also each shot is $10k.
The real question would be why didn’t she just splat against the cruiser’s shields as they established that was a problem in the previous movie (when they need to hyperspace through the shielding of that planet), unless they had a Galaxy Quest moment where they forgot to flip the shields on.
I guess I am thinking of droids as not having free will even if they are sentient.
I don’t find the expense of a hyperdrive to be a valid point though mostly because even if they are expensive they can’t be that expensive. Han Solo has one and he never seemed like a character with money. I.e. an individual likely wouldn’t be able to try this but an army, with unquestioning soldiers and an immoral general would absolutely try it imo. 1 life/ship lost to kill a fleet is a worthwhile trade
So actually to add onto this, this was bothering me so I had to look into it further:
I was very incorrect - Hyperspace isn’t a pocket dimension per se and you can hit things while moving through hyperspace. The reason they ‘sometimes’ get past shields is because shields have a refresh rate so it may be able to phase through if you get it just right.
I’m more with you on this now, its a little ridiculous that no ones really tried to weaponize hyperdrive engines.
As far as I know all droids in Star Wars have free will.
Han Solo gambled and won the Falcon from Lando (who appears well off), it was definitely too expensive for him to have bought normally.
I think the hyperspace battering ram is funky, but I believe it was less that it was a good tactical idea and more of the First Order being extremely arrogant by not having their shields up, not using a tractor beam, and not just sending a smaller ship forward to close the gap and blowing it up.
I think the movie wanted to show that they were savoring the victory and were willing to draw it out as they believed the rebels were drowning in hopelessness.
I’m also pro-TLJ, but I do think it could have done with a few tweaks to the script to catch some stuff. In terms of how it looked and was acted on the moment-to-moment scale they nailed it though, so I’m not sure if that falls under “better execution”
True, but I would argue that TLJ actually did substantially better than the Disney and Star Wars averages on the visual front. Not necessarily in terms of the technical execution of the effects since they’re always basically as good as they get for the time in both Disney and Star Wars stuff, but in terms of the composition of shots
Rian Johnson is a master of deconstructing genres.
if you went this long without watching it I won’t spoil it but to say the themes are not typical of the rest of the franchise and the fans hated it for that.
How Ben and Luke tell the story of how the latter nearly killed his nephew could’ve used better execution/storytelling, that alone would significantly reduce the amount of discussion on how the movie “killed his character”
The Last Jedi was an amazing deconstruction of Star Wars. I don’t think better execution would have helped it with a fan base that wants to be stuck in the past reliving the hero’s journey ad nauseam but it had a lot more potential than you see on screen.
Disagree. The first two sequels kept making a defeated bad empire stronger and stronger without any explanation. The rebels then suddenly became just 400 to 20 people. A different type of journey would have been welcomed with open arms if clever enough.
And I think embracing the jedi, but killing the wars aspect, rather than trying to destroy the jedi but keeping the wars it would have been a much better answer to the franchise.
I think I’m really unusual in that I dislike almost everything after IV. I think the first film was brilliant, back when Lucas was fighting for money and had to rely on vision and didn’t have Campbell to advise with. Introducing cutesy characters strictly for marketing, they all lacked the charm of the original.
I know I’m an exception. Nearly everyone liked V and/or VI more. Everyone dunks on Jar Jar, but I could not stand the Ewoks. It was so disgustingly blatant.
At the time I was dying for sequels, and when they finally came I was so disappointed. You know, I think I just realized that it was the Vader/Luke connection that sunk it for me. That all of the major characters had to be related somehow made the universe smaller, and more petty. They only got worse after that; I think I watched all of I-III, but I actively hated those.
Anyway, I think there might have been a path, and I’m no story teller so I couldn’t fix it, but I think the while thing went off the rails after IV.
Good friends have told me the Mandelorian was good, but “Baby Yoda” represents everything I loathed about the series and I refuse to watch it.
Anyway, what were you saying about the Hero’s Journey? Maybe I should watch The Last Jedi, because while the Campbell formula worked for the first film, it didn’t improve any of the sequels, so maybe I’d like it. As long as there are no obviously pandering character designs that exist clearly because they can easily be marketed as toys. Looking at you, BB-8.
There are a bunch of adorable space critters that you’ll think are that when you’re watching the movie, and they certainly were marketed and merchandised like crazy, but they’re actually there due to the unwanted presence of adorable Earth critters during filming. They couldn’t shoot the scenes without including these birds that lived where they were shooting so the solution they came up with was CGI-ing weird faces on them and including some close-ups to make them look deliberate.
It’s a bad star wars movie because of the hyperspace ram.
SciFi inherently requires suspension of disbelief and so I find the way these types of stories ground themselves is through the rules they set. For example fire/explosions don’t really make sense in space but its a consistent thing so w/e.
Hyperspace ramming breaks the entire concept of Star wars BC why hasn’t anyone done it before? Its the perfect weapon for asymmetrical warfare, its cheap and its very effective. Imagine how a weapon like that could be used with a robot piloting a junk ship, why even build a death star just strap a bunch of garbage to a hyperspace drive and ram it into a planet. Its so effective that every fight in the future needs to consider it as well.
I’d defend this movie far more if it didn’t do this. But it didn’t only damage its own movie it damaged every story star wars has told retrospectively.
As I recall, hyperspace is like a pocket dimension. They just speed up a whole lot to enter hyperspace. So you can’t collide with things ‘in hyperspace’, but only as you’re going really fast while transitioning to hyperspace, which is quite a bit more limited in capability.
Hyperspace drives are expensive, and droids are sentient (so its still suicidal). Using it as a weapon would be like having an shotgun in an fps game, where the first 5 feet is extremely lethal to really big targets, whereas anything after that is a waste of time. Also each shot is $10k.
The real question would be why didn’t she just splat against the cruiser’s shields as they established that was a problem in the previous movie (when they need to hyperspace through the shielding of that planet), unless they had a Galaxy Quest moment where they forgot to flip the shields on.
I guess I am thinking of droids as not having free will even if they are sentient.
I don’t find the expense of a hyperdrive to be a valid point though mostly because even if they are expensive they can’t be that expensive. Han Solo has one and he never seemed like a character with money. I.e. an individual likely wouldn’t be able to try this but an army, with unquestioning soldiers and an immoral general would absolutely try it imo. 1 life/ship lost to kill a fleet is a worthwhile trade
So actually to add onto this, this was bothering me so I had to look into it further:
I was very incorrect - Hyperspace isn’t a pocket dimension per se and you can hit things while moving through hyperspace. The reason they ‘sometimes’ get past shields is because shields have a refresh rate so it may be able to phase through if you get it just right.
I’m more with you on this now, its a little ridiculous that no ones really tried to weaponize hyperdrive engines.
As far as I know all droids in Star Wars have free will.
Han Solo gambled and won the Falcon from Lando (who appears well off), it was definitely too expensive for him to have bought normally.
I think the hyperspace battering ram is funky, but I believe it was less that it was a good tactical idea and more of the First Order being extremely arrogant by not having their shields up, not using a tractor beam, and not just sending a smaller ship forward to close the gap and blowing it up.
I think the movie wanted to show that they were savoring the victory and were willing to draw it out as they believed the rebels were drowning in hopelessness.
I’m also pro-TLJ, but I do think it could have done with a few tweaks to the script to catch some stuff. In terms of how it looked and was acted on the moment-to-moment scale they nailed it though, so I’m not sure if that falls under “better execution”
I mean it’s a high budget Disney film, the script should be the only place for improvement.
True, but I would argue that TLJ actually did substantially better than the Disney and Star Wars averages on the visual front. Not necessarily in terms of the technical execution of the effects since they’re always basically as good as they get for the time in both Disney and Star Wars stuff, but in terms of the composition of shots
Never watched it, but am intrigued. How so?
Rian Johnson is a master of deconstructing genres.
if you went this long without watching it I won’t spoil it but to say the themes are not typical of the rest of the franchise and the fans hated it for that.
How Ben and Luke tell the story of how the latter nearly killed his nephew could’ve used better execution/storytelling, that alone would significantly reduce the amount of discussion on how the movie “killed his character”