this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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Nah, man. The scene people whine about is the equivalent of Luke wailing on Vader, getting that sweet, sweet hand vengeance, and then stopping to think about what it all means. In TLJ it's just compressed into like 3 seconds. In-universe, it's bad luck. In narrative terms, Ben was in a different point on his character arc.
I love The Last Jedi. It twisted ESB just enough not to be a carbon copy, it eliminated a very boring villain in a surprising way, it made the seductive power of the dark side seem almost plausible (one of a smallish number of things The Acolyte actually did pretty well), actually engaged with the prequels in a substantive and respectful way, and left things open ended enough that Episode 9 could have been really interesting. Yoda's appearance and interaction with Luke was amazing. That opening scene with Rose's sister in the bomber was extremely moving for how little we knew, a "tone poem" if you will.
On the negative side, Finn's arc was too subtly different from his Ep7 arc to make much difference. The logistics of the slow speed chase were a bit strained. We as the audience could have been clued into Holdo earlier than Poe was. The "your mom" joke didn't land. The pacing (and I maintain pretty much only the pacing) of Canto Bight was weak. Then, it could have used a line or two of handwavium at various points to keep the Ackshully's at bay: "The Raddus' navicomputer locked onto the hyperdrive tracker." Boom! Two birds with one stone.
It was still by far the best of the sequels and I'll live and die on the hill that they're all (yes, even THAT one) easier to watch than the acting and directing shitshow that was the prequels.
Nah, man. The scene people whine about is the equivalent of Luke wailing on Vader, getting that sweet, sweet hand vengeance, and then stopping to think about what it all means. In TLJ it’s just compressed into like 3 seconds. In-universe, it’s bad luck. In narrative terms, Ben was in a different point on his character arc.
If it worked for you, more power to you, I don't expect to change anyone's mind on this. But I can't help myself when I see the apologetics for the "Luke ignited his light saber over a bad premonition scene".
It's not just "bad luck", it's bad writing. Luke didn't just "wail on Vader" to get that "sweet hand vengeance". He initially turned himself in believing he could convert his father back to the light. He only attacked after extreme emotional manipulation from one of the most powerful Sith Lords ever, during an active battle to determine the fate of all his friends, all they fought for, and the literal freedom of the Galaxy. That is a far reach from a moment of pure safety where he had a bad premonition and the "threat" was sleeping.
The whole explanation of this scene (and by extension the plot point that the core of the ST hinges on) assumes Luke not only learned nothing from successfully turning Vader back to the light, but actively learned the opposite lesson.
I get that people can change over time, and not always for the better, but this is just hands down terrible character writing. Making such drastic changes in such an iconic character, without spending any time developing those changes, having those changes be directly counter to the lessons the character supposedly learned during his primary arc, and then using this unexplained change as the catalyst to the entire ST is awful writing.
And we are not even touching on his new found love of "THE SACRED TEXTS!", or how he completely gives up and goes hermit mode.
I'll give Rian credit for actually trying to innovate when it was his turn at bat, but his handling of Luke was honestly some of the most egregious examples of not understanding the characters you are writing, and having them pick up the idiot stick just to move the plot forward.
The whole explanation of this scene (and by extension the plot point that the core of the ST hinges on) assumes Luke not only learned nothing from successfully turning Vader back to the light, but actively learned the opposite lesson.
This really pisses me off and Disney have to carry that shit.
The jedi of the prequel/originals are wrong about emotions/feelings and Lukes prove then wrong when he saves Anakin. But because of this fuck up writing now Lukes is a dumb removed who got luck in the originals and is doomed to failed like the others jedis. We already saw that in the Boba Fett series when he gives up on Grogu because "too much attachment" come on dude.
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I'm with you 100% on everything you wrote here and I've had this argument with my brother countless times. He blames Rian Johnson for everything bad about the sequels and it's bs.
Personally I think the biggest thing TLJ suffered from was the split focus between Poe and Finn. It made both stories rushed or weak in various places.
And for that I blame Disney. Did you know that Poe wasn't even supposed to be a big character? He was supposed to be in the first scene of Ep7 and that's it. But execs saw his performance and insisted they needed his character to play a bigger role. As such, we get attention split between Poe and Finn and both suffer for it.
I feel awful for John Boyega who was such a massive Star Wars fan, got the role of his dreams, and then effectively got sidelined for a pretty-boy.
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Nah, man. The scene people whine about is the equivalent of Luke wailing on Vader, getting that sweet, sweet hand vengeance, and then stopping to think about what it all means. In TLJ it's just compressed into like 3 seconds. In-universe, it's bad luck. In narrative terms, Ben was in a different point on his character arc.
If they had chosen to show the dreams, Luke struggling with it for ages and that scene as a last resort failure I could agree with you. Like he wake up everyday and each day he go closer to Kylo's bed, the scene could be awesome. In the movie looks like the little shit Luke became a weak mind Jedi.
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As someone not interested in star wars I can't wait for in ten 10 years time when suddenly liking the sequel trilogy is cool just like how the prequels were hated then became cool to like.
It's like poetry, it rhymes
I think there's a difference between how they were hated and what parts people liked.
The prequels people hate because Jar-Jar, and some other comic relief characters, were annoying, and also (especially episode 1) how slow they can be. Overall, the stories were liked I think.
The sequels people like for the action and entertainment, but you totally have to ignore the story for them to not fall apart. It constantly contradicts itself (and the existing lessons, like the OP) and only works to weaken the universe.
Basically, their opposites to each other. I think the difference is people can come to enjoy the world of the prequels and get past the bad bits (or skip them), but the analysis and growing recognition of the failures of the sequels will only get larger with time as we spend more time with them.
It's not just Jar-Jar. The amount of CG and green screen was off-putting given how good Lucas was at practical effects, and those more modern techniques have aged much worse in a much shorter time frame. The movies may be slow, but the action sequences are actually quite long, drawn out, and pointless (the third act of Attack of the Clones is especially bad). The fight choreography was also extremely different, with the simple, grounded light saber fights being replaced with silly back-flips and summersaults.
There are also odd story elements that seem to contradict the OT; why did Obi-Wan say Yoda trained him? How did the Jedi go from being a powerful peace-keeping force known throughout the galaxy to a myth in 20 years? Why did Leah claim she could remember her mother? (I'm sure Lucas came up with explanations for these things, but they still stand out.) All in all, they are a huge tone-shift from their predecessors, in both storytelling and filmmaking.
In contrast, the sequel films are able to emulate the original trilogy much more faithfully in terms of practical effects and set design. The real problem was, where Lucas over-developed his prequel trilogy for 30 years, Disney under-developed their sequels, with no plan for where the story should go. Abrahams created a basic retread of the first film, Johnson threw everything out in the second, and the third film was just desperately trying to write itself out of a corner. Those movies had no idea where they wanted to go, so they went nowhere.
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I'd be curious indeed what people in ten years will say about the sequel trilogy. But I have a strong feeling that it will still be disliked, because it did not have a vision and is a jigsaw mess unlike the prequels. The latter has a vision at least (thanks to Lucas still being at the helm), in spite of the cringey parts. The sequels did not have him and Disney just simply wants to milk the Star Wars IP which made sequels such a bore.
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The prequels are bad movies. But they tell an interesting story and have a unique setting. The sequels are also bad movies, but they're a disjointed chaotic mess that just rehashes the original trilogy. There's nothing to redeem.
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I would have rather the first order take the place of the rebellion and committed terrorist attacks in Luke’s paradise
I wish they had kidnapped Kylo and disillusioned him
The rest of 7 could have played out the same
For 8 get rid of Holdo, it’s stupid to bring in a character that out ranks everyone and serves only to delay the plot
You can have silly casino planet in First Order occupied space to show they grew since the last movie. Make Rose more relevant, have them looking for a Jedi temple for Finn. Have her so she previously worked as a librarian in Jedi archives before the first order destroyed it. Now she knows all these locations and things about the force even though she can’t use them. Luke is hiding because he blames himself for the people the First Order killed and he doesn’t want to put anyone else in harm’s way, trains Rey but she still has dark visions and connects to Kylo. Have Rey turn evil, her and Kylo defeat Snoke (can be the same way) then take the first order to fight Luke because she knows where he is, the two of them together are enough to kill Luke
The last movie if you want Palpatine to return do it through Rey’s body and have her be the final boss. You can parallel 6 with the Skywalker turning good and saving Finn, this time have them team up against full Sith Lord Rey in the fight. Or have Finn take them on one by one while Rose stops their doomsday plans and Po deals with a space battle
On top of this, get rid of Snoke and have Thrawn lead the First Order. He forces Imperial holdouts to join him or be destroyed. He's smart enough to use Empire loyalists in the New Republic to dismiss his threat until he's strong enough to go on the attack.
I know they're building to this in Ashoka, but it should have been this way from the start.
On top of this, get rid of Snoke and have Thrawn lead the First Order.
One of the things that made the Thrawn trilogy work was the way it played out the inevitable decay of the old Empire, even with a brilliant strategist at its helm. The rot went too deep and the ideology that drove the Imperial movement couldn't hold it together. Militarism wasn't enough to keep the imperial regions united, while the New Republic offered allure that couldn't be easily rebutted.
The movies couldn't conceptualize this imperial decay or recognize the New Republic as a powerful political force drawing the fractured galactic planets together again. They had to reset the state of the setting to "Bad Guys Strong, because Big Lasers and Ships" while the Republicans were once again weak, scattered, and on the run.
I might say you could salvage Snoke (as a reskin of Joruus C'baoth) and Sloane and Hux and Kylo Ren, cast within this desperate grasping to Retvrn To Tradition. Then rename "The First Order" as "The Last Command", implying they follow the last words of the now-dead Emperor Palpatine. And you can even lean in to the ghost of Palpatine and the echoes of fascism that do provide some lingering cohesiveness to the dying Imperial movement.
But these climactic space battles that are decided by One Brave Starfighter Defeating The Big Imperial Machine aren't able to resonate in the final series, because they don't answer the question of what comes next. At some point, the New Republic needs to be a thing we care about and the conflict needs to move away from "How do we beat the Empire?" and into a "How do we make the New Republic do better than the Old One?"
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I actually liked TLJ as well. Like others said, I liked these Force Connection scenes with Rey and Kylo, I liked how it dispatched Snoke, dismissing the idea of yet another Star Wars conflict being controlled by an evil old wizard and instead gives sets the way for a new story by giving Kylo Ren the reigns of the new empire (which was thrown in the trash by JJ in ep 9, which is the gravest sin for me of that film), and gives a plausible take on the seduction to the dark side and to the light side. I know these ideas were poorly implemented e.g. the proposition Kylo makes to Rey "Hey, look, I've killed the evil emperor! Join me and we can take this whole thing over. Let's start by killing all your friends!". What a great offer, Kylo. But still I liked that this was something new and more than just a rehash.
What I also really loved is that not every character has to be related to the Skywalkers or another character of the other trilogies, again something JJ threw in the trash by ep 9. Why does Rey have to of some ancient magical lineage? I liked the idea that the force was running through people everywhere, even through slave kids on the casino planet. Everybody can be a hero, even if your parents or ancestors weren't. Wait, what's that, JJ? Everything was Palpatine all along? Never mind then.
To be fair to John Jonah, he had to work around the director of TLJ's narcissistic take on the 2nd episode of a trilogy, i.e. not giving a shit how the next director (whoever it was going to be at that time) could possibly come up with a good conclusion to two extremely disjointed prior movies. I mean it's neither director's fault, to be honest, it's Lucasfilm's, marketing this as "The next SW trilogy!!", not just "three more movies from that universe you guys seem to enjoy so much". Also he was too busy running a newspaper at the same time.
"Maybe we should have planned the trilogy" - JJ after RoS
Disney allocated a billion dollars to a trilogy of movies and didn't even ask for outlines of scripts first. I know JJ is "mystery box guy" and all but the amount of hubris to think they could just wing it on the strength of the IP is staggering.
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Funny thing is that with Vader it's not even in an indirect sense.
Mans absolutely could have canonically killed millions with his own two hands,
He got surrounded after crash landing on a dessert planet and the dude looks around and tells the commander calling for his surrender is "All I am surrounded by is fear, and dead men."
IDK how they'd fare against each other in a fight, but Vader is definitely putting in the work to compete on Kharne the Betrayer's million+ kill count, which we can only guess from that being how many people he's killed that he was in control of himself enough to retrieve their skulls to offer to Khorne.
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The one on the right is Jake Skywalker.
(credit: pixelatedboat from old Twitter)
That wasn't a dream, it was a vision of the future. Luke's a Jedi, the Jedi have faith in the Force. The Force showed him a vision, and he believed it. That's what Jedi are supposed to do. And you know what else? The Force wasn't wrong. Given what Ben would go on to do, Luke shouldn't have hesitated.
"always in motion, the future is"
Oh please, don't quote that ketamine-addled frog at me. The whole thing is his fault anyway, he fucked up literally everything he touched:
- First he opposed training Anakin at all. Because letting a kid whose Force sensitivity is off the charts run around unsupervised just after you've found out that the Sith are back is apparently a good idea...?
- Then he assigned him to wet-behind-the-ears Obi-Wan instead of a more experienced master who might be able to guide him better, despite knowing full well that Anakin was going to be difficult to train due to being too old.
- He didn't recognize Palpatine as a Sith lord despite frequently meeting him face to face.
- Failed to defeat Dooku.
- Dismissed Dooku's warning about a Sith being in control of the Republic as disinformation despite every word of it being true.
- Provided incredibly stupid, worthless, ineffective, and likely even outright damaging 'guidance' to Anakin in the throes of emotional turmoil.
- Decided that he and Obi-Wan should split up to fight the Sith individually instead of ganging up on one while the other was occupied, and then sent Obi-Wan after Anakin despite being explicitly warned that it wouldn't work.
- Failed to defeat Palpatine.
- Tried to stop Luke from going to rescue his friends, who would later prove instrumental in the defeat of the Empire.
- Tried to teach Luke the same "attachments bad" bullshit that he fed Anakin in order to get him to assassinate his own father; in the end, of course, it was precisely that attachment that proved key to victory. If anything, the Empire was defeated because Luke, unlike everyone else before him, didn't listen to Yoda.
So yeah. Every single thing this little green asshole ever said and did was wrong. If it weren't for him, the Republic likely wouldn't have even fallen in the first place. If Yoda says that the future is always in motion, the one thing we can be sure of is that the future is as solid as a rock.
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Idk, I'm nostalgic for the prequels because I grew up with them, but if they were released now and I had only seen the original trilogy I would've made the these comments about them too. Wat frustrates me the most about the sequels is that there's just no coherent plot. It's so obvious that everyone was just writing whatever without looking at the bigger picture. They could've went with this and actually gone somewhere. But 8 was just an exercise in doing everything the viewer didn't expect or want until it got way too frustrating without actually going anywhere and 9 was just a clusterfuck because it tried desperately to get an epic conclusion on a completely incoherent trilogy.
7 was already flawed, but if 8 and 9 had further established how the First Order got so large, who Snoke was, etc it could've been acceptable. I totally see the "Luke gets disillusioned and isolates himself" spin even if I'd prefer a "Luke slaps the shit out of everyone" story. It gave the new characters some space. But that space wasn't used.
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Fires randomly into the ceiling
Okay, let’s review: There was ONE Star Wars movie. One. And it was the greatest movie in the history of the universe.
Everything else is just fan fiction tacked on by LucasDisneyCorpMagicProductionsRanch because the original movie was too perfect for this world, and had to be destroyed by all means necessary.
You can take all that crap and GTFO. G’wan! Get!
Oh - ah, leave the original Kenner action figures, though. Those are cool.
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