We saw a Star War! Last Jedi spoiler thread

Joker said:

No, we didn't see different movies. We just have differing opinions on what significant means. Barring some minor changes, the characters and the story are still in the same position as they were before the movie started.
Speaking of story. I personally feel that a convoluted chase throughout the film is a poor way to create tension.

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Ovinomancer said:

The Destroyers weren't what was bombarding the Resistance ships -- it was the Sovereign with it's similar-to-the-dreadnought class cannon. They were shown on-screen firing at least once, and never from the Destroyers. I figure the Destroyers were just hanging out as escorts while the Sovereign did the work. We already know that a Rebellion-era Cruiser could go toe to toe with a Destroyer, perhaps a Resistance-era one was even more of a match? In which case, why engage with smaller ships when it's just a matter of time.

We keep considering that the 1st Order military is incompetent when, in reality, their tactics are very straightforward and make sense so long as the longshot risks the Resistance takes don't strangely pay off with huge dividends. There were no fighters but the one when the dreadnought was firing on the Resistance base, and they did launch fighters as soon as the single fighter began engaging -- after using a bolted on afterburner to close from outside of engagement range to point-blank in moments. Should they have flushed their fighters as soon as they hit system? Probably, but we're armchair quarterbacking from the safety of our own far, far away galaxy. The tactics on display there weren't egregious, even if not paranoid enough.

The stern chase made even more sense, tactically. It was a done deal, and even worked exactly as intended. Had the Sovereign not started blasting the fleeing transports and instead pounded the Cruiser first before engaging the transports, the kamikaze run wouldn't have been possible. But, again, the astrogation invovled in setting up that jump and disengaging the mass sensors was a pretty huge undertaking -- Holdo must have been near Solo level good at by-the-seat-of-the-pants astrogation.

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epithet said:

I left the theater feeling a general unease, an unfocused anger that took me a while to understand. Now that I've slept on it, I think I have a handle on the source of my ire.

The new movies have deconstructed and destroyed the heroes of the original trilogy.

The OT heroes were Luke, Leia and Han. Luke was defined by being a jedi, and his purpose was to "pass on what [he had] learned." He failed, then gave up, then cut himself off from the force and went into hiding. Leia was defined by her belief in the Republic and her struggle to restore it. Despite the Republic prevailing over the remains of the Empire, Leia was forced out of the Republic Senate and driven into a sort of exile while the Republic disregarded the threat of the New Order to its peril. In The Force Awakens, the Republic is effectively destroyed when the Senate and the Republic fleet are blown up, and in The Last Jedi her failure becomes complete as the resistance is decimated and her allies abandon her. Han Solo was not an idealistic crusader, what mattered to him were the people in his life. Han didn't care much about the Jedi, but he cared about Luke. He didn't burn with Republic patriotism, but he loved Leia. What do they do to Han? His marriage is ruined, his only child estranged, and even his fellow scumbags seem to have all turned against him. Only Chewy and Maz seem to want to have anything to do with him, and when he tries to reach out and mend his relationships his failure becomes tragically complete, as he is contemptuously cut down by his own son.

The message is clear: the "heroes" of the Rebel Alliance are abject and complete failures, and it is up to Mary Sue and the fresh-faced millennials to clean up the mess they've made of things.

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Ryujin said:

So the loss of literally every one of the Rebel bombers gained them absolutely nothing in the long run.

How many times does someone have to say, "It's only a [ insert innocuous object here ]. Ignore it" only to have things go badly sideways, before it becomes incompetence? you're fighting Guerrillas. Their business is making innocuous things dangerous.

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Ovinomancer said:

Charitably, I'm having trouble reading this as anything other than 'but they didn't WIN'.

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Joker said:

Well, that would be completely misrepresenting my position.

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Ovinomancer said:

I'm inviting you to expound. As it is, it seems you only rate change as significant if the material and plot position is different. Well, at the start of the movie, the Resistance still had 3 capital ships and allies. At the end, everyone was fast worse off plot and materially, and all they had was the Falcon and maybe another old Rebel base.

So, if much worse off wasn't good enough for you, that left being better off, I thought. What other position have I failed to consider?

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epithet said:

The more time I have to reflect on the movie, the more it bothers me. Luke Skywalker was an iconic hero, a character that had faced temptation and rejected the dark side to remain strong with the light. Rian Johnson retconned all of that by making Luke a complete failure as a jedi and a teacher, who had an episode of utter weakness that led to the destruction of the jedi he was responsible for training. He then gave up, went into hiding, and severed his connection to the force. Rian Johnson rewrote Luke Skywalker into the worst Jedi he possibly could. He didn't introduce new threats or challenges, he just used his episode to tear down the heroes of the previous generation and crap all over their legacy.

He did the same thing to Leia. JJ had already exiled her from the Senate and casually destroyed the Republic she had fought so hard to restore, but Rian had to go one further and show us how Leia was an ineffective commander, whose subordinates disregarded her orders and followed their own plans. We saw how Leia's resistance was utterly decimated by her failure to evacuate the base in a timely manner as well as the culture of insubordination she fostered. Then, as a last insult, we saw that the allies Leia counted on had abandoned her and left her and her resistance to be finally snuffed out by the New Order.

Luke is a bad Jedi that caused the destruction of the new Jedi Order. Leia is a bad leader who failed to motivate the Republic to oppose the New Order and failed to lead the resistance to anything but annihilation. We'd already established Han Solo as a failed husband and father, and even a failed smuggler who had lost his ship years before and had every gang of organized criminals he'd worked with hunting him down to kill him. The only reason he got his ship back was that the hero of the new generation brought it back to him.

It's not like this is part of some overall trend of making all the characters in Star Wars "nuanced." Rey, Poe, Finn, and Kylo are all super iconic archetypes. No, the objective here seems to be just to wreck the image of the heroes that George Lucas provided to my generation; to single out their iconic strength and strip it from their character. These characters who grew into heroes by developing character strengths and prevailing over adversity slipped, after the credits roll on Return of the Jedi, into a 30 year pattern of "suck, fail, die."

I'll admit that when Disney bought Lucasfilm and wiped the slate clean of all the Expanded Universe fiction, I was enthused. I thought the entire Vong story line was horrible, and even though I would have liked to keep or canonize the Knights of the Old Republic lore I agreed that it was best to just start over, picking elements of the "Legends" material to use as the new story lines called for it. Now, however, I'm looking at the Legends as being a better overall treatment of the GFFA, simply because those stories didn't undermine the iconic heroes of the original trilogy.

To be honest, one of the things that is making this more difficult for me to handle gracefully is the fact that a fair number of commenters seem to actually like the fact that the heroism of Han, Luke, and Leia has been undermined and invalidated. Kylo Ren's call to burn down the past seems to resonate with many in a way I cannot relate to. Some are crowing in exultation over the dubious, anticlimactic, and (in my opinion) misleading assertion that Rey is the offspring of morally bankrupt junk scavengers instead of (as all the hints from TFA suggested) related to Luke Skywalker. It's not enough, apparently, to move on after Ep 9 to stories beyond the Skywalker saga... for some it seems to be immensely satisfying to retroactively strip away the importance and destiny of the Skywalkers and minimize their role in shaping galactic events.

Maybe these are just the times in which we live, I don't know. Maybe JJ Abrams, who is only a few years older than I am, has an amazing plan that will restore my enthusiasm for the franchise. I am afraid, however, that I've lost something that I've managed to hold on to since childhood, and it's something I'll never be able to find again. Maybe this is what it means to get older.

I don't like it.

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Ovinomancer said:

I think you have a strangely high assumption of what guerrilla forces success rate actually is. We're watching the exceptions, fergoidnesssake, not the norm, else what would be the point? The Resistance would have innocuoused the Order to death by now.

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