Not only that, but they did it all in one take. They went with the first shot that looked like a fight. No trial and error, it was just error.
Let it be known that Ghid said:
It was Rey, and it was worse than that. Not only does he stab her in the back with one dagger, he chops her head off with the other.
Let it be known that… Wait, this one isn’t ghid:
Because you can still like something even though you hate the direction it’s gone recently?
I am still a star wars fan. I’m just not a trash-ney SW fan.
I really don’t think the main issue was a lack of planning. Even as individual films, they can’t stand up on their own.
She did accomplish the same things as Luke - master of the force, expert lightsaber combatant, the story’s representative of all jedi past and present - with one major difference: she accomplished everything almost instantly the moment she tried it.
The other main issue with her, which DuneToa brought up indirectly, is that she almost never causes things to happen in the story, and as a result is a very passive protagonist. Rather than being the driving force for events in the story, she reacts to things that happen to and around her, and in the rare instance where she actively does something, she succeeds with almost no consequences.
As a result, she attains almost no status and therefore none of the more plot-focused accomplishments of Luke because she never actively earns them, making her both a shallow copy of Luke Skywalker and still failing at doing half the things he did.
Luke’s arc was primarily about living up to the legacy set before him by the jedi he believed his father to be - and, when that fundamental core of his worldview was brutally shattered, he chose to believe the good man he knew his father as could be redeemed if only he fought for it. Luke went from living up to legacy to helping the legacy live up to him, and as a result became the culmination of all he had seen Anakin as.
Rey’s journey started out as self-actualization - the idea that all she needed to complete herself was to find the capability within her - and ended with her effortlessly defeating Palpatine and rejecting the legacy he created. By choosing to bury the memory of what came before (even literally), Rey ends the last movie with her worldview of her moral upbringing shattered and chooses instead to hijack another man’s legacy to hide her own. She doesn’t redeem her lineage, or even find a way to define herself, but instead steals the honor of other people.
Is it possible that, perhaps, those arguments are right? That the film about flying x-wings into a giant superweapon capable of destroying planets in order to blow it up form the inside (which also kills off the old mentor right before the final act) might be too similar to the last time they did exactly that?
I’d like to point out that Poe being demoted means pretty much nothing in terms of consequences for the movie. Also, in the sequel he does whatever he wants anyway, so it means nothing in terms of consequence for the future either.
Unless that information was directly relayed in the movie, that’s entirely an assumption. Not a bad one, but, if it rally was a factor here, the filmmakers would’ve included it in some fashion.
Although maybe I’m misremembering and it did get mentioned somewhere. TLJ in particular I almost fell asleep watching.
Deus ex machina (God from the machine) is a trope or cliche or writing in which a seemingly unsolvable problem or obstacle is suddenly overcome by an unlikely and unexpected event or circumstance. There was absolutely no groundwork laid for General Hux to make this move, no indication that his faith in the new order or his fear of Kylo Ren had shifted at all, and his sudden turn towards treachery in favor of the rebellion felt very contrived, like the writers backed themselves into a corner and couldn’t think of another way out of the situation.
Although it may be more the trigger-happy nature of TRoS; the infamous pre-final cut which killed off every single legacy character in the last battle that made test audience leaves theaters is still something I can’t fully process the existence of.
That’s a false equivalence; bad movies are not equal. The sequels are not as bad as the Acolyte, which I would argue has so few redeeming factors it is almost entirely worthless as anything outside of a possible replacement for waterboarding.
I’m also not saying you can’t enjoy the sequels. I think the prequels are awful and I like them for it. I don’t pretend that my enjoyment of something makes it good, just that I’m allowed to like things I disagree with.
It’s also the cultural zeitgeist of the time was very different to the 2010s or even to now. The gap between RoTS and TFA was only ten years, whereas the gap between RoTJ and TPM was sixteen years. Yet the prequels were received at a fairly mixed percentage during their airing and the sequels were received positively at the start and utterly denounced at the end.
ANH actually does state Luke has had piloting and even aerial combat experience before, but only for fun (read: blowing rodents into a million pieces). It takes extra care to point out Luke’s sudden miraculous shot was a result of the force and not of his own capability.
Meanwhile Rey effortlessly flew the Millennium Falcon around through the junkyards of Jakku accomplishing some of the tightest turns ever seen in star wars with zero experience whatsoever (maneuvers which only Han and Lando have ever been shown coming close to, both expert pilots well acquainted with the Falcon).
The high emperor has spoken
the high emperor is going to have carpal tunnel at this rate
…and almost killing herself in the process. Right after she zapped him into oblivion, she collapsed on the ground and just lay there. If Ben hadn’t come back (which, admittedly, was also a WTF moment) and given her his life force, she would’ve died.
I don’t think there was ever redeeming Palpatine…
The honor that those people gave to her? Luke literally gave her his and Leia’s old lightsabers and watched in approval as she called herself a Skywalker. Clearly she had his and Leia’s blessing to hold their legacies.
Because by that point, he’s redeemed himself in the eyes of his superiors. The events of TLJ taught him a lesson, and TROS takes place a year later, giving him plenty of time to regain their trust.
Mmmm. I’ll give you that there wasn’t any direct foreshadowing, but from the start, Hux was always getting pushed around by Kylo Ren and Snoke. So it’s not entirely out of left field for him to betray them.
Thank you for justifying my love of Michael Bay’s Transformers films
No she didn’t. Literally right as she was taking off, she slammed right into the ground as she was trying to get a handle on the controls. And even then, she kept on bumping into things all throughout the first stretch of the chase.
perhaps it just seems more reasonable to give up on a franchise then still be a fan and literaily having to deal with said bad direction and having to suffer through it with no fix or (even tho my stomach still turns and I become depressed just thinking and feeling like I wasted my time it with as a child and seeing all the drama and discourse now just hurts even more…)
idk starwars discourse or any discourse just makes me exhausted
There wasn’t, but I doubt many audience members at the end of Empire thought there was much chance of redeeming Vader.
Rey not redeeming her lineage has little to do with whether or not she redeemed Palpy. Luke living up to the legacy of his father had very little to do with whether or not he turned into the exact same person his father was. It’s about character growth, the progression of the journey they go on; the end result of Rey’s journey is to (literally) bury the past, to live by Kylo Ren’s philosophy of letting the past die… And then take another man’s name to live off his legacy instead.
Now having a character’s journey end down a darker path than it started on isn’t necessarily bad; the story I’m writing on the boards right now, The Wild Masks, which stars several boards users, has had a lot of characters making very bad choices and living with the consequences they bring. The issue with TRoS is that it wants us to believe Rey doing this was the right choice and that she’s more heroic for it.
You have likely already heard the arguments on the topic of Luke’s character assassination, so I’ll just say this: Rey is a weaker character for abandoning her journey and riding off the established credit of someone else’s, regardless of whether it was offered or not.
Also Holdo is dead and the rebellion is so desperate for help they can’t afford to not let him do whatever he wants
Solving that problem off-screen is definitely a way to fix it, although a pretty cheap one. However that doesn’t solve the consequence-free life he lives in TLJ, where as DuneToa puts it:
And the demotion is so minimal in terms of hindering his ability in the film it’s almost identical to if nothing at all happened and Poe got away with it scot-free.
So was everyone else, for the most part. Hux betraying Kylo would’ve made more sense if there was some moment of weakness on Kylo’s part, making it evident his petulant behavior made the First Order more vulnerable, and with the threatening Snoke now dead a takeover of the military was practically begging to happen. Instead, he does it just to spite Kylo, which considering in the previous films he is made to be utterly terrified of him feels unbelievably out of character.
I would say fair point, except this is a franchise where experts pilots trained for military combat have smashed into things and died more times than I can count (I can count to four). Rey bumping into things over and over yet still making extremely skillful maneuvers against trained pilots through very cramped areas still smacks of her being effortlessly talented and would’ve made much more sense if it was Finn, and not Rey, who handled the flying, as he actually had some chance of having been trained as a pilot (and the hitting things could’ve been justified as trying to use tie fighter skills piloting the asymmetrical Falcon instead of a superficial means of explaining Rey’s inexplicable capability).
What do you mean, that was the best part of the whole movie: stand on a completely random piece of grass and hold a knife sideways at the remains of the death star (which if you recall didn’t have remains) to show the location of the pathfinder. Only a truly brilliant mind like Jenuine Jenius Abrams could’ve conceived such a brilliant way to get them that info.
cough retcon cough did you hear something fly through my ear and out the other?
Anyways to actually “contribute” to the discussion, as a casual fan of Star Wars, I was mildly impressed with the sequel trilogy upon first watch. Watched it on May 4th on my parents’ cable TV. Anyways, like I said, they were fun to play in the background while I did laundry/ate food, but after I went back to watch them a second time they fell to pieces for pretty much the reasons everyone else has already pointed out.
And sure, you can say that I don’t count for much because I’m not a dedicated fan, but gotta keep in mind that if Star Wars wants to succeed at all, EVER, it has to attract new fans who don’t necessarily come for the Star Wars name. So yes, while everything might be explained by some in-depth technical explanation of Star Wars lore, you can’t really use that as an excuse to justify all the illogical, half-hearted, half-witted attempts at mediocrity that the sequels display. In fact, I’d argue that the more lore something requires you to know, the worse it actually is.
I’ll add my two cents here since I feel that I have some thoughts that haven’t been represented yet.
Of course people are close-minded, they’d be stupid not to be. The sequel trilogy is currently seen as bad Star Wars, so a movie that is in the same era as that trilogy isn’t going to be met with excited fans. The era is a disaster, why would those fans want more of it? It’s up to Disney to gain their trust back step by step, the fans don’t owe them any chances. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Disney has been fooling around a lot more than twice.
For me, a big part of the problem doesn’t even have to do with the characters, but the aesthetic properties. Out of the 11 primary films, 8 of them have been aesthetically very similar. The antagonists have Stormtroopers, Star Destroyers, Tie fighters, and planet killing weapons. The protaganists have an undisciplined military, X-wings, Mon Cala Starships, guerrila tactics, and poor funding. I’m not not just sick of the sequel era, I’m sick of all these things in their entirety, which leads into my next topic.
The prequels are loved right now because the generation that grew up with them are adults now. The people who have the most nostalgia for these films are now the ones most predominantly online, and therefore influenced culture around those films. You can find a similar thing with the Pokémon community. Generally speaking a Pokemon fans favorite game/generation will be whatever one they grew up with. It’s entirely possible that within the next decade the sequel trilogy will get some love, although there are of course other factors that play into this aside from age.
Now on a more personal note, I like the prequel era partially I’m sure from nostalgia, but more so because of how unique it is. No Ties, no X-wings, no Rebels, no Empire. There’s a bit more nuance than just bad faction, good faction, and the militaries and surrounding characters are far less generic. The CIS really is the best example for this. 99% of the OT it stays the same visually between movies. The militaries aren’t evolving hardly at all. By contrast, the prequels change a lot. The secondary antagonist is different for each movie, the CIS in particular has multiple new droid variants every single movie. They continued that trend in The Clone Wars as well. Point is, there was constantly new stuff to look at in this era. It felt like an arms race scramble. Meanwhile every other film era looks the same. I’m simply bored of the other trilogies aesthetics.
Now this doesnt doom Starfighter for me, but the odds are stacked against it because of this.
If I may interject, why should that matter to you?
I believe I understand why it does matter to you (though correct me if I’m wrong). If it doesn’t do financially well, there’s less reason for Disney to greenlight and make more Star Wars stuff. And you’re a Star Wars fan, so you want more things in this universe. Perhaps as a bonus, financial success is also an indicator of acceptance or should be taken as valid because it did some numbers.
Now, I could explain to you why people say those films lost so much money on a business end. I could explain why losing money and going into debt is actually the point and makes more business sense than making profits sometimes. I could go on a long rant about how financial success isn’t the only indicator, and definitely not a good indicator or metric, for the validation of a thing. But without knowing that answer to my first question, why bother divulging?
When you say that, do you mean only discussions regarding media or chatter about anything? I’m going to assume just media for now, but why is that? Is it just the discourse being seen as negative-focused or not wanting to dedicate one’s self to something of this nature again?
I’m someone who has given up on Star Wars. The franchise has been dead for a long time to me. A slow death that started in 2008 with The Clone Wars animated movie, grew worse with the show, then the buyout by Disney caused the pulse to flatline, and then the confirmation of the EU being tossed out was death declared. But I didn’t stop being a Star Wars fan until Solo: A Star Wars Story.
And let me tell you, I was someone who could correctly identify the exact blaster model from someone’s badly written description of the weapon in Star Wars RPs. I didn’t just read almost every page on Wookieepedia, I had practically memorized so no one could pull a fast one on me. Not in RPs, not in debate, nor casual discussion. Can’t do that anymore, I need to look stuff up to verify vague memories, but I don’t regret the time I dedicated to it.
However, I am one of those people who isn’t really embarrassed by, or cringes at, my past works. Perhaps they weren’t necessary steps for my development, but they were the path I went down and how I learned my current skills and standards. Yeah, maybe kid me wasted all that time but it sure was a blast while it lasted.
Also on the topic of remaining a fan when so much of it is bad material, welcome to being a comic book fan. That’s just how these things roll. Lots of forgettable, bad, middling, and occasionally great stories. Just comes with the territory, you get used to it. Didn’t like something in a run? Don’t worry, chances are another writer at DC/Marvel didn’t either and it will get changed to something better later. If it’s good enough, maybe it will even stick. The great filter of time and memory is a mysterious thing that cannot be predicted.
That’s why I stuck it out so long. I didn’t like The Clone Wars because of how much it broke film canon. I didn’t like how much it trampled the EU (Dave absolutely ruined Mandos), but higher powers said it gets the rights to do that. But it still needed to adhere to the films, which it also didn’t do. And I can still go on ages how Dave Filoni doesn’t know Star Wars but that’s off topic.
And when Disney did buy it and stated they were deciding on what material would remain canon, I knew almost everything was going to be thrown out. It was either toss everything EU out or keep it all - cherry picking between would take too long and cause too many issues. It was honestly a surprise that they announced the Prequels would remain canon. I figured due to reception only the OT would remain so they could do everything fresh. I still suspect that The Clone Wars remaining was only due to it still airing at the time and would have been decanonized* if the show had ended prior to purchase.
Still, tossing everything into Legends made the most business sense. I couldn’t fault Disney for that move. But they had to prove that their new material was as good, or better than, what was made in the EU. For me, it wasn’t. And then they didn’t keep to their word and kept stealing stuff out of the EU when their content failed. That’s what truly killed Star Wars for me. If you’re going to be audacious, stick to your guns. Even if I don’t like the direction you’ve gone in, I will have a whole lot of respect if you keep going anyways. Disney proved to be a coward.
*Also fun trivia, when Disney announced what portions of Star Wars would still be canon, the 2008 animated movie was not among them. The only parts Disney said was canon were the six theatrical live-action films and Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated TV show. So officially, the animated movie isn’t canon. It technically has to be canon, but that’s also true for a lot of EU stuff abused by the show. Not that canon means anything under Disney (technically neither under Lucas either but the illusion was nice).
To clarify, that was more for the timeline of my fan status, the movie wasn’t the cause for the final nail being pounded into the coffin. No, The Last Jedi did that. Solo was just further evidence that we weren’t going to get much from Disney. It was also the last Star Wars movie Dad took the family to see in theaters. Never saw the Rise of Skywalker. I didn’t even have interest in seeing Rogue One, The Last Jedi, and especially not Solo, but Dad wanted to treat the family.
My overall opinion on Solo was that it was meh. It’s fine, I guess? Some portions were enjoyable, it was at least more fun and interesting than the two mainline Sequel movies. I liked L3-37 but I’m biased towards all droids and robots. But it also took a lot of bullet points of Han Solo’s stories from the EU and did worse versions. Broad strokes like an adventurous/criminal background as a kid, had a military career with the Empire where he meet Chewie through it and saved him, etc. But did worse things like giving the origin of his last name because…???
Look, fans like asking and getting the origins of everything. We like explanations. You don’t need to be in the Bionicle fandom and know every Ask Greg to get that. But we don’t need it. We especially don’t need stupid or bad ones like the last name, the Kessel Run, or why C-3PO says that one line about the Falcon’s computer having an attitude.
That sort of thing plagues the entire movie. You got everything you needed to know about Han from A New Hope as an origin. It should have been some adventure or story in Han’s life, not an origin for the OT. If you had to tie it into the OT somehow, maybe show Han’s various jobs for Jabba and then the eventual one that went bad and got him in trouble.
Also, for the love of Hoth, don’t tie it into The Clone Wars and Rebels with an ending teaser that won’t go anywhere.
To be fair, that line has always confused me, since that’s really the only time a shipboard computer has been described as acting against orders, so to speak. There’s something similar in the scene where everyone is evacuating Cloud City in the second movie, where the security mainframe attempts to electrocute R2-D2, but there it’s obviously a security countermeasure to prevent unauthorized use of the manual overrides for the blast doors.
Well worry not, we had answers for that long ago in the EU via guide books and other material. Starships of a certain size, and also manufacturer dependent, often had a main computer built into ships that were essentially just droid brains. They helped automate a lot of systems. Basically, think of it as a more advance smart car. Except, like all droids, you need to wipe their memories frequently. Otherwise they gain a personality that can be quite rebellious. In the Falcon’s case, Han had heavily customized his by splicing together several droid brains. This used to be canon since 1987.
But a simpler explanation is that’s just how people talk about machines. Printer given a problem and not printing correctly? Well it’s being a stubborn bugger that’s not listening. C-3PO is dealing with Siri and she’s not being helpful right now.
Also, did you know that hyperspace speed is not determined by ship size or engines? The original explanation for hyperspace speed was based on the fastest route the onboard computer could calculate. Not the size of the ship or the type of engines - those determined normal space speeds, not hyperspace. But that wasn’t the most clear take away from what was stated in A New Hope, so most of the EU based on it ship/engine design. And literally everyone else other than George Lucas. Imagine if Google Drive/Maps calculating the fastest route determined all speed limits in space travel. So if you’re wondering why Han is such a good pilot and why the Kessel Run is an accomplishment, that’s why.
I think you kind of answered yourself. It matters to me because if movies and TV shows keep underperforming, then the IP will die, and that’ll mean no more new content. And if something makes money, even if it’s bad, it’ll mean that it wasn’t a TOTAL waste of time.
That’s why I asked should it matter. Not why does it matter. There is a difference.
Should the financial success/failure of it be your concern? We already know it is but why isn’t that worry left to the people funding it? By the same token, should the money something produces determine value for you?
We know it does and you’re stated why it does for you. But should it? Why should dollar number hold that sort of validity?
Especially if more Star Wars stuff is the primary concern, then does that stuff need to be official? Or can fan works count or suffice?
Before the days of copyright, and especially long ago when it was harder to enforce, many famous and classic books today had all sorts of sequels and spinoff stories written by people other than the original author. They didn’t care, they wanted more and got more.
And if no, it needs to come from the IP holder, why? The IP holder stopping fan works isn’t going to count.
All corporations want to stop and control what they believe is theirs and that includes cultural items. Even the LEGO Group originally sicked their lawyers on stopmotion animators because they believed that any and all use of LEGO branded products belonged to them and they didn’t give approval of such things to be published. Luckily for us, more reasonable heads were eventually able to convince the LEGO Group to allow the animators to continue and even work with them as part of marketing.
Even then, suppose no new content is made by either the IP holder or fans for awhile. What determines that it’s dead? Only that it isn’t making money? Are things like Beowulf or Robin Hood dead until more/new content is made of them?
When you’re talking popular legends like these, they practically can’t be killed because they’re characters ingrained into culture. They aren’t an IP, they’re part of our zeitgeist and lexicon. Now, something like Zorro or Robinson Crusoe would be closer to an IP, as they are works of fiction that have numerous spin-offs. Robin Hood and Beowulf are legends, and don’t typically have spin-offs. The characters appear in other media, yes, but the majority of their appearances are in retellings of their original stories, not really “new” stories or media.
