Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Dec 15th, 2017)

[Popnfresh98]

See , here’s the thing.....

56% means more than half likes it.......

While it’s not a good score ....it’s still half of 220 million......

That’s something the people who hate it need to come to terms with.




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

AotC has 57%, making TLJ the lowest SW ever. Even Justice League has 80%. Come to terms with that.

 

[medicomsucks]

See , here’s the thing.....

56% means more than half likes it.......

While it’s not a good score ....it’s still half of 220 million......

That’s something the people who hate it need to come to terms with.




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Hey, 56% is nothing to scoff at, that's like 1/2.6 of people like this thing.

 

[Wor-Gar]

Losers gonna lose.

 

[Darkseed]

That’s because Campea is probably paid off by Disney.

That’s just damage control preparation for 2nd weekend.

Oh wait.... so should I or shouldn’t I take the fam to see it tomorrow....

I don’t want to skew the expected % drop and make more people angry that the decline wasn’t sufficient enough. Dammit.....

 

[Darkseed]

We will see what the SSF POLL says about the truth outside.

The damn Russian will hack it

 

[jye4ever]

Wor-Gar I know that you seriously don’t believe that this is a disaster scenario for Disney like JL was for WB.

 

[lttgtimaatisgdaicfi]

I just bought 4 extra viewings for TLJ 2nd weekend just to make up for Wor, Snikt, Clown and DiFabio not going again.

Got to ensure a healthy 2nd weekend drop to keep this machine well oiled for the long haul lol

How do I put you on ignore?

 

[Wor-Gar]

Wor-Gar I know that you seriously don’t believe that this is a disaster scenario for Disney like JL was for WB.

Nothing can be a disaster like that for Disney. They just spent 66 billion to tie up some lose knots.

But it will hurt. That's enough.

 

[higgins1989]

I'm not sure how someone can ruin questions that didn't even have answers. Abrams was the one who basically said "Yeah, I really have no idea who Rey's parents are, why Kylo turned, or why Luke is on the island, have fun with that" to Johnson.

Nothing in TLJ contradicts TFA. It simply fills in the gaps. It's not like TFA had a bunch of "Knights of Ren" running around that suddenly disappeared in TLJ (which takes place within a few days of TFA.)

TLJ was daring and bold and clever. Has any other movie with a big call to arms/lighting of the beacons moment had no one respond? That was yet one more moment in the film that was unexpected and cool.

Daring, Bold, and clever you cannot be serious. Removing a staple of the series lightsaber vs lightsaber battle, ignoring and not explaining numerous important questions, plot points with no value, ***** milking and superman space flying...

 

[jye4ever]

Nothing can be a disaster like that for Disney. They just spent 66 billion to tie up some lose knots.

But it will hurt. That's enough.

66 Billion Dollar Porg.

We can rebuild him.

 

[TurdFurgusonsHat]

So Rian Johnson revealed which scenes were cut out from the 3 hour+ version and will appear on the blu ray, and apparently one of them was a very emotional training scene with Luke and Rey.

Yet the Kennedy/Johnson diatribe featuring Finn and Rose about how guns, profits, and animal abuse are bad seemingly went on for hours. I would love to have heard the conversations on the cutting room floor about what stays and goes.

 

[jimminy]

The "you've discredited my theories" crap is stupid. I had no theories going in.

I just expected it to be a consistent SW movie. Stay in the universe. Surprise me......that's fine. Just don't insult me.

Yeah. Everyone is like, 'You just hate everything new, won't let go of the old', etc.

I didn't mind TFA. There were a couple of clumsy moments, and the rehashing seemed a bit over the top, but I understood that they had to restore confidence and prove that they were steering the ship in the right direction. Kylo Ren and the way they treat 'evil' is my favourite thing about these new movies.

I liked the ideas. Luke as a tragic fallen hero, King Lear style, is an interesting idea, and could have been quite tragic and moving. Moral greyness and arguments against goodies and baddies? That I can get behind. I liked that TFA humanised Stormtroopers (though they stopped doing that pretty quickly). Even 'an action movie about failure' I can get behind. All of these are tough to pull off in a family adventure movie, and especially in an established franchise, but it could, in theory, be done!

It's just that none of these ideas worked on screen or were properly executed. The movie pulled in too may directions. It contradicted its own stated themes too many times, and not in a clever deconstructive way. It contradicted or dropped several set-ups from the Force Awakens in a way that did not come across as 'Ooh what a twist!' or 'subverting expectations' or 'deconstructing Star Wars tropes'. It came across as sloppy writing. Why did Snoke want Rey again in TFA? Why was Luke leaving his trail of bread crumbs in case he was ever needed? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I feel like as people rewatch the movies together later they will notice these things more, and their estimation of TLJ's quality might suffer as a result.

There were far too many plot holes, so that the movie unravels when you think about it. I'm not even going to get started here because this thread points out so many of them. Sure, all Star Wars movies have plot holes, but these came thick and fast. Actors who were good in the last one were weirdly wooden here. Character chemistry was barely there. There were strange narrative choices that slowed things down, in a way that you could try to pass off as subversive deconstruction, but again, I don't think it can honestly be claimed that the deconstruction worked.

It seems like Screenwriting 101 not to strand your main character on an island for most of the movie and tell major plot points in flashback on top of that, all while your other main plot is a really slow space chase that lacks all tension (and makes little sense, in-universe) ... and you spice that up with a subplot that is largely pointless except you use it to introduce a codebreaker, because you want him to state a theme, and a kid, because you want him to symbolise something at the end? I mean that is a broken movie right there. Everything positive you can say about what those various settings and plot points symbolised or said thematically ... well, the same points could have made more efficiently. The different perceptions of our old treasured heroes, with Kylo and Luke's variant memories ... Luke (and the franchise) not wanting to move from the past ... All that kind of stuff. You could have said it without stranding the narrative in molasses. There is the theme of being stuck and then there is making the audience feel like they are stuck in a tedious scene. This isn't a Werner Herzog movie ... though if it was, the themes might have been consistent! I'd actually be down with full art-movie Star Wars. But yes. The movie tries to be too many things at once, gets diluted, and fails at being most things, and it is hard to tell what is intentional and what is accidental.

And there are too many MacGuffins, some of which are very convoluted, and rely so much on assumption and coincidence. I am fine with a bit of coincidence in my fairy-tale Star Wars movies, but when the rest is not working, those coincidences become much more obvious and painful. 'Shoot the exhaust and save the galaxy' is a straightforward MacGuffin. Finn's MacGuffin mission was not straightforward. 'Get to the planet to find the guy to come back and switch off the thing we assume is on the ship that ... And you can't get the guy but luckily there is another guy there with the exact same skills ...' Unless it's a deconstructive joke about MacGuffins? I mean maybe, because the whole plan fails. But if it was, shouldn't we have been winking along with the movie? If you have to wonder whether the movie is trying to actively undermine itself, or if it is accidentally undermining itself, that is not a good sign. That would be like not being sure whether or not a movie was a parody. If the movie was just being really, really clever, then shouldn't mention of 'it was a joke about MacGuffins' make most of us go, 'Ohhhh' as we see all the pieces fall into place? It was not intentionally silly. It was accidentally silly. I want to be like, 'Oh yeah! Joke about MacGuffins, and MacGuffin fails.' I want to see that Star Wars movie. This was not that Star Wars movie. Everyone claiming clever subversion at every single level is very wilfully ignoring a few red flags here to make things fit their own interpretation.

I get it. Poe is trying to play the classic, outdated, selfish action hero, and it fails at every turn, because such ideas are silly. Until it doesn't fail, when Luke or Laura Dern do it. But Luke is the old guard so ... the old guard is good suddenly, after the whole movie told us they have failed us? They can sacrifice, as long as the new guard don't? Or Laura Dern has to sacrifice because Poe made a mistake, thus subverting pat redemption arcs, and showing the actual collateral cost of failure? But if Laura Dern had mentioned her plan, Poe would need no redemption? But was Poe selfish to not trust, and did he actually need her plan? But then also why not tell him the plan? Where's the harm?

I get it. Goodies and baddies are silly. Weapons dealers sell weapons to both sides, and get rich. We should solve problems in another way. Cut to scene of BB8 mowing down a hundred cartoonishly evil Stormtroopers for comic relief.

I mean if people want to point out how every statement in this movie is consistent ... or is that the point? It's postmodern? There is no consistent art, and all messages conflict in real life and so should in art, and heroes can be villains and vice versa ... so it's just meant to be a frustrating mess, as a postmodern statement?

The timeline of the universe makes little sense, especially considering the last movie happened over a few days and this one continues directly after.

I love Rey being a regular person because I want to get away from the Skywalker stuff eventually. Everyone being related to Skywalker makes the universe seem too small, in the long run. I want us all to imagine we could be Jedi. But while Rey's parentage could have been a cool revelation, it came across as writers trying to dig themselves out of a hole Abrams had left them in, and then the kid imagining himself as a Jedi at the end was an unimportant character from a tedious subplot. If the point was that the kid was an unimportant everyday nobody, you could still have introduced him more efficiently.

The humour was too fourth-wall-breaking and self-referential. They were jokes about Star Wars as a movie franchise, rather than jokes which came from characters, for the most part. The characterisation was inconsistent, barely existent, or focused on fleshing out minor and unimportant characters at the expense of major. I liked Rose but what was the point of her, narratively speaking, again? Characters withheld information for no reason other than that the plot demanded it. You can say 'it was a lesson about how Poe should have trusted his level-headed superiors' and sure, but when the mutiny started Laura Dern sure could have saved some time by telling people what was happening. I don't understand why she wouldn't, in-universe. Her actions only make sense as a meta-narrative 'lesson'.

Several things that happen raise problems with our existing understanding of how this universe works. 'Bold new directions' and 'letting go of the past' are one thing, but if you introduce hyperspace kamikaze-ing as being that effective, for example, then you have caused future writers some headaches too.

So much stuff just didn't make sense or was contradictory or pulled you out of the universe and the drama, and this weakened all the attempts at saying bold new things or exploring new themes. I liked the ideas they tried to put on the screen. Those ideas just didn't come across very well, or were diluted, because TLJ is a badly written movie. Without the Star Wars label, what would anyone think? Not much, and especially because TLJ relies on being a statement about Star Wars for most of the things it does to have any meaning. The franchise is disappearing into its own navel.

The self referentiality on its own is neither bad nor good, though. But TLJ just didn't really work as a deconstruction, except in the most brute force, real world way. 'It deconstructed because it subverted tropes and expectations AND didn't really work as a movie!' Great. It wasn't confidently executed enough to suggest to me that it was trying not to work as a movie, in order to make some genre-defying statement. It just felt sloppy and inattentively structured. As I said earlier, it was no Cabin in the Woods or Twin Peaks: The Return in terms of deconstruction or subversion.

All we wanted was a solid movie that worked on its own merits and fit the broad strokes of how we understand this existing setting to work. What we got felt like a first draft of what could have been an interesting movie seven drafts later, mixed together with about five other first drafts and several pages of corporate notes demanding 'Star Warsy' things. Lucas might have been trying to sell toys too, but at least Ewoks contributed to the plot. Unless porgs are a clever meta joke about toy marketing in films, while they also market toys in films?

Part of the frustration with this movie is that there are interesting ideas lost in the mess.

My brain is breaking trying to even sort through this mess. Sorry if the above feels disjointed, but this is me trying to work out what this movie is trying to be. Those who love it and claim it is being cleverly subversive are seeing something there, sure. They are just ignoring part of the picture to make that interpretation work.

 

[Wor-Gar]

What if they bought Fox just to get the original Star Wars so they could.... BURN the entire original trilogy print masters!!!!

 

[aa909]

See , here’s the thing.....

56% means more than half likes it.......

While it’s not a good score ....it’s still half of 220 million......

That’s something the people who hate it need to come to terms with.




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

56% doesn't mean half like it. the question is not a 0 or 1 score, it's on a scale so a score of 56% means it's average or below average in the context of all other movies. here's RT historical scoring of all movies over time. TLJ ranks towards the bottom of this trend line.

 

[JAWS]

Remind, me which side has been claiming since yesterday that Russian trolls/hackers are responsible for the negative audience reviews? Which side has been posting articles like "Toxic Masculinity Is the True Villain of Star Wars"?

Besides, you, Darth Snoopy, Pixletwin, and others keep belittling critics on a personal level, whereas the detractors are overwhelmingly focused the perceived flaws or relative quality of the film.

You've made some good faith attempts to engage the criticisms, but the others mostly not.

I don't know about the others but I don't think Khev has been belittling critics.. If he has its only because he knows how wrong he is about this movie..

 

[lttgtimaatisgdaicfi]

At least JJ is back in the chair to right (some of) the wrongs.

Is he going to make another Death Star? **** JJ. I hope to see some more milk creatures.

 

[Wor-Gar]

56% doesn't mean half like it. the question is not a 0 or 1 score, it's on a scale so a score of 56% means it's average or below average in the context of all other movies.

Yeah, last I remember if you got a 56% in school on a test that's basically an "F".

 

[Popnfresh98]

The damn Russian will hack it

***** milking and superman space flying...

Yeah, last I remember if you got a 56% in school on a test that's basically an "F".

 

[aa909]

Yet the Kennedy/Johnson diatribe featuring Finn and Rose about how guns, profits, and animal abuse are bad seemingly went on for hours. I would love to have heard the conversations on the cutting room floor about what stays and goes.

so freakin true. amazing how most folks missed this

 

[lttgtimaatisgdaicfi]

I didn't mind TFA. There were a couple of clumsy moments, and the rehashing seemed a bit over the top, but I understood that they had to restore confidence and prove that they were steering the ship in the right direction.

Everyone says this same thing...LOL TFA was uninspired and a total rip-off. How about giving us something new and fresh? People jerking off JJ for giving us the same old formula.