Re: Star Wars: The Last Jedi SPOILER DISCUSSION THREAD
Certainly would have helped to make that whole scene remotely palatable. Only reason it was there was for the ending with the kid.
Yeah and that ending with the kid ... It COULD have been moving. It COULD have worked. The young boy being inspired by the spirit of Skywalker, and seeing in Luke the hero Luke never felt himself to be ... The set up just wasn't there. The kid was only in it because of that pointless bit, as you say, which also dragged in the codebreaker, who had cool stuff to say about the weapons dealers, yeah, and he added to the moral greyness theme, but ... Surely kid, codebreaker speech, and moral greyness could have been squeezed in some other way. If the kid had come out of it a bit more organically maybe I would not have been tempted to roll my eyes at that ending. Maybe my eyes would been cloudy instead because, I dunno, must be dust in the theatre ...
I mean it's kind of amazing that the kid posing with the broom as a lightsaber after playing with his home made Luke Skywalker action figure DIDN'T send a little tear to my eye or a frog to my throat. I'm a cynic, so of course I am secretly hugely sentimental. But yeah. It just wasn't earned. It didn't gel. It felt artificial and unconnected to the rest. God damn. There were some cool scenes in isolation, for sure! The problems arose when they tried to link those scenes with others ...
I'm starting to feel a similar frustration as I felt with the prequels. You start thinking of so many ways they could have taken the same building blocks, characters, and key moments, and made a good movie, but somehow they went with what they went with ... There are things wrong with TLJ that seem like they are so obviously wrong they should have been easy to avoid. There are some great ideas buried in there, but ... And that's what makes it MORE frustrating. 'Just sidestep these obvious pitfalls, guys!' It must be mash up of about five different templates and stories, with fifteen corporate hands reaching in to make sure boxes are checked to boot:
'Add more porgs!'
'You can't do that thing you were building up to! Do this instead!'
'More scenes in space! The folks like the spaceships!'
'What about a space casino as a setting? That was in that earlier draft. Keep that in! I don't care that it makes no sense now we are doing the space chase we made you do because we wanted more spaceships! Do it! And Luke can't leave the island cause that's too many sets! These movies only make a billion dollars, you know.'
'Did you put more porgs in? Triple the porgs you have now! Test audiences love 'em!'
'I just snorted coke and thought, "What if BB8 was a war criminal?" Put that in!'
'But our movie is trying to say that good vs evil is a silly idea, and ...'
'No! Have the cute droid, who is basically a living weapon as a character, and probably sold by your amoral weapon merchants, murder all the people being clearly and cartoonishly evil by threatening to torture people to death, and make it a moment of comic relief! Screw your themes!'
Actually if the Resistance had reluctantly executed some captured Stormtroopers or Resistance deserters just like Phasma wanted to execute Finn and Rose, that could have added a layer to the half-hearted themes ... They hinted at stuff like that in Rogue One. I mean here I am advocating for more war crimes in a family film, but if that's where you wanna take your space adventure, you gotta embrace your message.
