What are your favorite (and least favorite) Star Wars sequences or scenes?

[Celebrim]

From the very first scene she's in.

I only watched TFA once (that was enough) but didn't she not really do any talking until 10 minutes after the character is introduced, except whatever she said in that foreign language to the droid smuggler thing? Granted, the best scenes in TFA were this sequence of her trying to survive, with the rappelling and the rehydrated food and so forth, but because of the way this sequence was developed any waifish pretty actress would do. After that, well, I'd rather blame it on the terrible script she was asked to perform. She wouldn't be the first actor/actress completely let down by the quality of the writing in Star Wars.

The one big weakness of the Force Awakens, is the Starkiller base plot.

Everything was well off the rails by that point. There are some issues of motivation in Kylo Ren, Finn, Poe, etc from the beginning that involve 'fridge logic (easy to accept when you're watching but when you get up and think about it, it doesn't make a lot of sense), but things don't really go off the rails until Han Solo walks into the screen and then it's all downhill from there. A lot of people blame The Last Jedi, but all the problems with The Last Jedi are predictable from the maelstrom of stupidity in TFA. The screen writer plays a little trick on people by doing a lot of foreshadowing and that delays people's judgment and gets you buy in from the audience, but speaking as a writer this sort of thing sets off warning bells for me because good writers don't telegraph the questions. They just quietly hang Checkov's Blasters on the wall and hope you don't notice. Invariably, if a writer is telegraphing the questions, it's because they don't know the answers. But that is just one of the scripts many many many sins.

NO. That is not my argument at all. I didn't want a movie with different tension, I wanted a movie with tension to begin with. A movie with stakes, likable characters... and actual characters to begin with.

Well, I liked it. I thought Jynn and Cassian Andor were the best SW characters introduced since the original trilogy, and I thought that the whole thing was incredibly tense and I was impressed when a I realized they really weren't going to make it out of there, because that was a bold decision to make for an IP known for franchising. I think that the movie had incredible high stakes, and if that didn't come across it's only because having scene 'A New Hope' you know that they have to succeed. But taken on it's own, it's probably the most tension filled SW movie ever made and the first movie since the original trilogy where my emotional experience wasn't being mostly governed by just how badly the movie was written and I wasn't spending time trying to convince myself that it wasn't terrible. Because it wasn't.

 

[Adam Crossingham]

Good scene:
The throne room fight in TLJ. The movie may have been pants but this scene was awesome IMO.

Bad Scene:
Our heroes escape from Jabba's barge in ROTJ. It was edited to be family friendly - in reality Luke would have left a trail of severed limbs, heads, and dismembered corpses in his wake.

 

[Celebrim]

Bit of an aside here on the notion of "well crafted"/"deep"/"believable"/"likable"/"life like"/etc. characters. I've known for about 20 years that of all the things that are subjective about literature, what is perceived as a three dimensional character is probably among the most subjective because it depends most on your own experience with people. The really eye opening conversation for me occurred discussing Kevin Smith's "Clerks" with a stranger.

"Clerks" was a funny well written movie, but myself and the stranger had a fundamental disagreement as to what it's weakness was. He voiced the opinion that the problem he had watching "Clerks" was that no one really had spontaneous intellectual conversations like the characters in clerks, and if they did they certainly weren't the sort of people stuck in dead end jobs. But to me, this was far and away the most believable part of Kevin Smith's movie, as it reminded me most of my own life experience. I knew a ton of 140-160 IQ people who had struggled to adapt to "real life" and the sort of conversations that turned up in Clerks, particularly the one about contractors working on the Death Star, struck me as both exactly the sort of conversation I would have with my friends, and simultaneously one that was highly original in that I hadn't heard that conversation before and so it had to be drawn from life. For my part, I could not believe that anyone actually used profanity with the ubiquitous of Kevin Smith's characters. To me, this was entirely over the top behavior, highly exaggerated for comic effect, and no doubt intended (as I verbalized it) to appeal to "the groundlings" in a much less subtle but still similar manner to the comic vulgarity in a Shakespearean play.

We were of course both wrong, which I came to realize when my cultural circles widened a bit and I discovered that all of Kevin Smith's characters in the movie were probably drawn from his own life experiences.