All of the post Disney SW movies seem to have this issue.
That said, I’ve enjoyed all of them. I think TLJ suffered the worst for me.
Solo was just a good campy heist movie with some Star Wars back story shoehorned in.
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Isn’t this a JJ Abrams thing in general, though?
The Star Trek reboots had it.
The Force Awakens definitely had it – it’s a good job I decided to wait until that thing was on DVD to see it, because I spent the whole time yelling things like, “wait, so the Millennium Falcon was abandoned with those giant creatures locked in the hold for who knows how long, and they’re still alive???” at the screen the whole time.
All of them just seem to be a string of set pieces linked by short banter scenes, with a vague nod in the direction of Joseph Campbell.
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so, you missed the part where Han and Chewie were smuggling the giant creatures on board their ship, but then transferred them to the Falcon when they got control of it again? those things were not on the Falcon the whole time.
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Apparently. By the time that happened I’d done a lot of yelling at the screen, and was losing interest. I was probably second-screening this board.
Given I’ve used that as an example at least a dozen times in conversation and this is the first time someone has filled the plot hole, that’s not saying much for the film.
(How did Han and Chewie have time to do that? This is Star Wars – no teleporters!)
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it’s been a long time since i saw it, but i seem to recall them trying to herd them onto the Falcon, but something going awry. i’m not sure they ever DID get them on board.
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Han and Chewie are smuggling the Rathars and they are released as the crime syndicates catch up to them and Han, Chewie, Flynn, and Rey all make their escape to the Falcon
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You put very nicely why the new films aren’t actually good films like the original first two are. They definitely work as films - they aren’t complete messes - but aren’t tight enough in any sense.
I liked Rogue One quite a lot though. I wish we could see more of several of the characters. I liked The Last Jedi too, more than TFA although I thought the desert planet scenes were pretty good there (seemed like a direct repudiation of the wasted-opportunity prequel desert scenes). I like Return of the Jedi - it was my favorite as a kid - but I recognize its shortcomings as a film now. I haven’t seen Solo yet; I like Donald Glover but I’m conflicted about doing well-known characters with different actors. It feels unnecessary when there are so many other stories they could tell.
But the point is that they are all entertaining still; for someone who doesn’t care about super hero movies there isn’t a whole lot else coming out in the broadly-defined genre Star Wars fits into that is interesting to anyone who isn’t 13 years old (I haven’t seen the new Jurassic Parks but they look really dumb to me - the original is one of my favorites; I had the good fortune of being I think 7 when it came out with parents who took me to see it in the theater).
I think what we need is a great filmmaker to do one to reset expectations. I mean, even Spielberg could do one (though I don’t know, I didn’t see Ready Player One - but Lincoln was exceptional so I know he still has it). But Christopher Nolan would be killer - witness how he transformed and transcended super hero movies with his Batmans, plus his poetic sense of flight and air combat in Dunkirk. Lucas took the trench run from The Dam Busters - it boggles to imagine what Nolan could do using the same original source material Lucas did (largely WW2 and samurai movies) to recapture but also redefine the Star Wars feel we long for. Abrams is fine for entertainment, and he respects the source material (for the most part; his Treks lose parts of the core of Trek) but is not particularly visionary IMO.
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By the way Donnie Yen, who plays Chirrut (one of the greatest Star Wars characters of all time), is fantastic in Ip Man from 2008 (the sequels are fine, but not great - he’s still great, but the movies overall aren’t). It’s one of the most entertaining kung-fu movie performances ever. It’s certainly not underrated, but if anyone hasn’t seen it, I highly recommend it.
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ahh, yes – that sounds right. i had forgotten the name of the creatures, too. and they intentionally released them to take out the crime syndicate guys.
i have liked ALL the new movies, particularly The Last Jedi. i’m an original generation SW fan, seeing it when i was 10 in 1977, and i’m so surprised at people my age who hate, hate, HATE the new movies as if they are some sort of betrayal. i think they are wrapping up the major characters as they can, and are putting things in place to FINALLY allow people to play in the SW universe on film (but it’s gonna take a few more movies to finally get to that point). what could be more exciting than that?
i didn’t particularly like the way Han Solo’s story ended, but it fits, and honestly if Harrison Ford had has his way we would’ve lost Han Solo back during Empire, so anything extra with him is a bonus in my book. i think Luke’s story was brilliant, full-stop. i’m worried about what they will be able to do with Leia’s story now that Carrie is dead, but hopefully they will come up with something satisfying. i’m thrilled that they have found a way to move beyond the Jedi = Good, Sith = Bad, black and white narrative, and showing the Force as something more subtle. i would prefer if they stuck to a one-movie-a-year schedule, though, to keep everyone from getting burned out on them.
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While it was a fun B movie with a top effects and acting budget there were scenes that had me going wait a minute how the fuck did this shit happen cause by the scenes leading up it or right after it should not be fucking possible. Then again I have seen a lot of bad cinema and notice things more often than most people.
ETA The book had similar but different plot fuckups that made me roll my eyes hard.
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i love the Jurassic Park movies for what they are: let’s watch dinosaurs fuck shit up and eat people. doesn’t need to make any more sense than that as a popcorn eating vehicle for me.
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I was sad to see he wasn’t playing Sun WuKong in Monkey King 2.
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I get the hate for the Lucas prequels. They were legit bad movies, but the trolling of the recent movies presages a three decade dearth of taste and creativity in American art. This Nazi shit is the most projective nonsense. They decry political correctness by pushing the laziest line of politically centrist dross they could dredge up out of the last 150 years. They whine about PoC because they just want them shoved out of the real world and yet they can’t get it done because they’ll get their asses beat.
Again.
So they never get to any non-stupid critiques of the Abrams era because they keep wanting the Rebel Alliance to be the confederate disrupters while the Nazi Empire Imperium is also the good guys because will-to-power? I’m not sure what these idiots want. Probably the same old equivocating Straussian shit that keeps them at the same level of artistic appreciation targeted in the past by John Wayne and Leni Riefenstahl.
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yeah, there’s precious little worth keeping from the prequels, that’s true. and i don’t know what those idiots want, either. some people are never happy, that’s for sure.
I was seven when the first movie came out, and like so very many of my contemporaries in the movie and TV biz, Star Wars was what made me want to work in Hollywood.
I don’t hate any of the new movies, myself, but I have been quite disappointed in differing ways by them. I knew there was no way Disney would allow them to be made with such stupid scripts as the prequels had. They spend $4 billion on this IP, and Disney execs can read the internet just as well as we can; they knew precisely what it was about the prequels that everyone hated. Not the VFX (top-shelf for their era, as always), not the production design, not the costumes, not the sound, not the cinematography. All the prequels lacked were good scripts and solid casting, and those are really the cheapest and easiest things to make sure you have before you start shooting… and the most vital as well.
Abrams was a safe enough bet for TFA, and it was a good thing they got Kasdan back as well. It was unfortunate that somebody thought it a good idea to re-create too many story beats from the original Star Wars, however. That was wholly unnecessary, and kept the movie from being as interesting as it could have been. Rogue One was a movie I was highly excited to see; a story hinted at from the very first movie that I knew could be gripping and dark. But it suffered from second-guessing at every turn of production, and a lack of a solid plan. That movie was built in post production and reshoots, which is a crime that they barely got away with. And I was quite annoyed by The Last Jedi when Rian Johnson decided to unilaterally shake things up more than he should have. I had a lengthy discussion about this somewhere else a couple weeks ago, so I won’t belabor the point, but I really think he did betray the character of Luke Skywalker and made him do things that were simply out of character.
I like the casting of all the new films just fine, for what that’s worth, and I enjoy and applaud the added diversity of the galaxy far, far away these days. I do think Kelly Marie Tran was wasted in a part that didn’t help things out a whole lot. She deserved better, and for that matter, so did John Boyega this time around. I was annoyed by the sublightspeed chase of the two fleets, as if half the First Order fleet could not have just performed a wee microjump through hyperspace to get in front of the fleeing Resistance ships (a maneuver that would not have been considered new or revolutionary in any of the old EU Legacy books). I was frustrated by Holdo’s unwillingness to give Poe Dameron just enough information so he could understand that he didn’t actually need to mutiny, but whatever; he deserved every slap he got, and then some. I wasn’t bothered by Leia’s newly-revealed Force abilities, but I sure was by Force-Ghost Yoda’s ability to blow up a tree.
Jeez, every time I think about that movie I get more annoyed by it.
It’s a big galaxy. There was always room for more characters and more stories. TFA at least did a decent job of introducing new young characters to carry on the stories. With TLJ, Johnson thought he ought to burn down a bunch of existing mythology while adding his own new stuff. There was no call for that.
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yeah, i hear this sentiment a lot. i took it totally a different way: i saw it as a passing of the torch movie, and it echoed the first movie specifically as a way of introducing the themes to a whole new generation who may have not seen the original trilogy yet. i felt it was fine, and every time something came up that was a callback to old fans like me it felt like a little side smile in my direction. i thought it was great. it wasn’t entirely a movie for the old fans, it was made for new ones.
yeah, this is the thing i don’t understand. how is it a betrayal of his character, when it makes so much SENSE? it had been decades, and he was a starry-eye youngster when we last saw him. he had gone through so much, and then felt like such a failure… who wouldn’t become jaded and bitter and want to just GTFO and die somewhere in obscurity? i thought it made all the sense in the world.
as for Rose, i am waiting to see where she goes from here. this was her introduction movie. now that we have a sense of her, we can see what they do with her. i thought she was great, but yeah, i am betting she’ll get a lot more detail later.
the whole sub-lightspeed chase thing, meh, it was sort of lame, but the payoff made it worth it (but i do wonder if using entire ships as a weapon now isn’t going to paint themselves into a corner later, but anyway). i don’t have any problem with force-ghost yoda being able to blow up the tree… there are lots of force abilities we’re just learning about. plus he’s YODA. he’s special. maybe he can do some special, unusual things.
i’m glad Rian Johnson burned down a bunch of existing mythology, but i don’t really see it as “burning down” as it is expanding the frame. we always thought it was so simple, but the real picture is much bigger, and that’s super exciting.
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Aw, fiddlesticks. How many people watched The Force Awakens who had never seen a Star Wars movie before? Who comes in on Episode VII? They’d be all, “What’s the Force? Who’s this Luke guy everyone’s looking for? Why is everyone clapping about this General Leia character who has, like, twelve lines delivered in a wooden monotone? Why is that junky old spaceship so fast?” Nah, TFA wasn’t made for people who are brand-new to the franchise. They’d never get up to speed. It’s Episode 7, says so right up front, and if you don’t watch at least Episodes 4 through 6, you’ll never understand what’s going on.
Well, this always takes me a while to explain. Luke Skywalker was born when the Jedi Order died. The old Academy was razed, and nearly all of the Jedi Knights and their padawans were murdered. Their training methods, historical records, and holocrons were scattered and/or destroyed. By the time Luke reaches adulthood, plenty of people have come to regard the Jedi as mythical. Luke was too old to begin Jedi training at the traditional age (we’ll remember from TPM that Anakin, at 9 years old, was also considered by Yoda to be too old). He ended up with fewer than 24 hours of training from Obi-wan between Mos Eisley and the escape from the Death Star before Obi-wan was reduced to Force Ghostness.
Then, after the destruction of the first Death Star, Luke is busy helping out the Rebellion for the next three years. As far as we can tell he has no training during that period. (His only Force usage we see before he gets to Dagobah is retrieving the lightsaber from the snow in the Wampa’s cave, and that took buckets of concentration and all the willpower he could muster. If he’d been training at all during those years, he’d have gotten that lightsaber a whole lot sooner.) Then he goes to Dagobah and trains with Yoda for… what, a week? However long it took the Falcon to limp over to Bespin with a bad hyperdrive, anyway.
After the escape from Bespin, Luke recuperates from his wounds and then tells Lando “I’ll meet you at the rendezvous point on Tatooine.” Doesn’t go back to Yoda, but rather spends six months planning Han’s rescue. Maybe he trains with Obi-wan’s Force Ghost in the meantime, but at any rate by the time he visits Jabba’s palace he’s built his own green lightsaber and effectively believes his training is more or less complete. After Jabba’s dead and Han’s rescued, Luke finally goes back to see Yoda just in time for Yoda to die.
Yoda and Force Ghost Obi-wan give Luke the Cliff’s Notes history of their Clone Wars-era mistakes with Anakin. Obi-wan thought he could teach Anakin as well as Yoda could, and failed miserably at it, as the prequels make abundantly clear. By the time of Order 66, the Jedi Order had become hopelessly arrogant and hidebound, inexplicably blind to the rise of Palpatine as Darth Sidious, stuck to stupid rules that forced their membership to lead lonely, ascetic lives when the order itself enjoyed vast wealth and influence, and basically deserving to lose the Clone Wars as they did. Yoda and Obi-wan were somewhat chastened by this, though they stop short of confessing full responsibility for it to Luke. Still, they went into hiding, and both knew that someday Luke and/or Leia would be needed to come to power and make things right.
And yet Obi-wan did nothing to train Luke until it was almost too late. Luke knows this, and it has always rankled with him. No doubt Obi-wan impressed upon him the need to keep his existence and abilities a secret from Darth Vader, but Luke has always been one to trust his own instincts over what Obi-wan tells him, especially after the “certain point of view” conversation.
Both Yoda and Obi-wan mishandled the training of their most powerful apprentice, leading directly to the creation of Darth Vader. Luke knows this. He also knew, contrary to the opinions of his ancient “masters,” that the proper way forward was to redeem Anakin Skywalker, to bring him back to the light. Not having been reared and brought up in the hidebound traditions of the Jedi Academy, Luke had always had a rather ad hoc and a la carte education when it came to the ways of the Force, but by the end of ROTJ even Yoda and Ben have to admit that Luke was right where they were wrong. They had both tried to convince Luke not to confront Vader until he was ready to defeat him in battle. They had disbelieved that Anakin could still have good in him, and that Luke should try to appeal to that side of him. After the Battle of Endor, Luke had the benefit of the acquaintance of Force-Ghost Ben, Force-Ghost Yoda, and even Force-Ghost Anakin to hammer home the idea that a very powerful Jedi apprentice CAN and SHOULD be saved. If there’s one mistake an older, wiser Luke Skywalker would not repeat, it’s the mistake his masters made with his father. Luke would not have considered murdering the young Kylo Ren for being too powerful and potentially on the dark side. Luke, of all people, would not have fallen into that trap.
No wonder Luke hid in exile. He’d have been utterly ashamed of himself for even contemplating such a cowardly, out-of-character act. Luke has never been perfectly heroic, and I have no doubt he’d make many, many mistakes while trying to re-found the Jedi order. But that one mistake with Ben Solo was not a mistake his character would have made, had he been written true to his history rather than just forced into what Rian Johnson thought was a compelling moment.
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well, i’ve met people who have never seen the original movies, and yet still get dragged to new ones by friends. and little kids don’t have to be familiar with the original trilogy at all, if they grew up watching the Clone Wars on TV. but anyway. i just read it all differently. i don’t think it was all as “lazy” as internet people like to say – i think it was a conscious retelling of the mythology, you know, like Joseph Campbell, passing it on to a new generation.
hmm, you make an interesting case. i think considering his failure in the cave on Dagobah (choking in the face of his fear), and the fact that he’s just self-taught almost entirely, it just seems more believable to me that he would be fallible and continually struggling with his darker impulses sometimes. surely his Kylo Ren moment was one of the biggest tests of his entire life, and even though he didn’t kill Kylo, he felt he had failed. i wouldn’t blame him for being haunted by that. it’s like when he gave into his anger briefly during ROTJ and the lightsaber fight with Vader. he almost killed him, too, and if he had his fall to the dark side would have been complete. it’s just a reoccurring theme with him.
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Well, yeah. That’s a more generous reading than I would give it, but it amounts to the same thing: telling the same essential story, and repeating the mythological beats. After all, it wasn’t like the 1977 Star Wars was in any way original, as far as story beats go.
But to me that still smacks of laziness, of a mindset that believes that such a rehash is all the audience deserves, because it’ll be good enough for the likes of them. But really? Is that all Star Wars is? A talented orphan in a desert with a strange power versus a comparably-powered evil opposite who has fallen to the “dark side” but still contains the germs of hopeful redemption, set against a galactic civil war involving scrappy rebels against a totalitarian Empire with a planet-destroying superweapon with a fatal vulnerability to a small party of dedicated heroes? Sigh. Yeah, that’s all the first one was, but none of the rest needed to follow those beats so slavishly. It really got unbearable when we had to watch the Battle of Hoth play out again at the end of TLJ.
The whole point of a character arc is that the character learns and grows. He was a whiny impulsive kid in the first movie. He had some hard-won wisdom and gravitas by TLJ… or at least he should have. As I said, he would certainly make many mistakes in his life, some very grave indeed. But the Kylo Ren mistake was the one mistake I can’t imagine him making. At his most hotheaded impulsive age, when he gave in to his rage against Vader at the thought of Vader getting to Leia, he almost killed him… but did not. That was Luke’s moment, his finest hour when he passed the test and proved his correctness about his approach. That moment more than any other is what made him a Jedi master, and indeed The Last Jedi.
He wouldn’t throw that away because he was nervous about the burgeoning talents of Ben Solo. That kid may have been Darth Vader’s grandson, sure, and risky for any master to teach. But Luke was Vader’s own son, and by that point in his career would never have approached the boy in such a cowardly, tentative, half-assed fashion.
I’m pretty sure this argument is the crux of why Mark Hamill disapproved of TLJ’s treatment of Luke as well.
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If I gave a shit about Star Wars, I would find the lack of spoiler tags on this (non-specifically Star Wars) thread disturbing…
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