We saw a Star War! Last Jedi spoiler thread

[Majoru Oakheart]

The kind of movie where you see something clearly on screen and some licensed product contradicts it?

I mean, I’m making the official Judge Dredd RPG. If I mistakenly say his first name is Boris in it, does that override what was seen in the actual comics?

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take the position that what we saw in the film is what happened. Otherwise things just get silly.

The movie literally contradicts itself. While looking up at the sky and seeing things blow up on two different planets someone says "The Hosnian system is completely destroyed. There's nothing left." That couldn't be true in they were IN the Hosnian system, they'd all be dead. Plus, one of those planets was the Resistance base they were trying to get to and the other one was the planet Han stopped at in order to switch ships before heading to the other one.

It's not that the licensed products and the movie disagree. It's that what happens in the movie doesn't make any sense and isn't explained and you need the licensed products to even make sense of it. It is all explained so that it makes (some) sense in the books. It makes zero sense without them.


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[Flexor the Mighty!]

It's also not unreasonable to realize that JJ Abrams has no functional concept of astronomical distances*. We learned that with Star Trek: Into Darkness. We can choose, instead, to appreciate the movie for its visuals and style without assuming that the ability to see things in the sky means something about how far away they really are.

That is along with what I was implying earlier, GL had the same issue. Scale of the galaxy was not his strong point.

 

[Morrus]

T
It's not that the licensed products and the movie disagree. It's that what happens in the movie doesn't make any sense and isn't explained and you need the licensed products to even make sense of it. It is all explained so that it makes (some) sense in the books. It makes zero sense without them.

But it does make sense. If those books weren’t around to confuse matters, the movie, by itself, makes perfect sense: they’re in the same system. No question.

If those licensed products didn’t exist, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation; we’d all agree we’d clearly seen several planets in the same system.

Those books don’t clear anything up - they confuse the matter by claiming they’re not in the same system, contrary to what we saw on screen, and justifying their dubious claim with some new technobabble.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

But it does make sense. If those books weren’t around to confuse matters, the movie, by itself, makes perfect sense: they’re in the same system. No question.

No they don't, like I said, in the movie they are staring up in the sky saying "The Hosnian system is completely destroyed". If they were in that system, that would include them, so it means even the movie said they weren't in the Hosnian system. But they shouldn't be able to see the explosion if they aren't in the Hosnian system. The two things disagree with each other and just don't make sense.

The people I was with all walked out of the theater specifically discussing the fact that it didn't make sense. We talked about it on Facebook afterwards and none of us could come up with a reason for it. It wasn't until a friend of mine found people talking on a forum where someone posted an excerpt from the novelization that said that you could see the explosion at faster than light because...technobabble, that we all jointly agreed that the explanation was stupid, but at least we HAD an explanation.

As a side note, this issue about not explaining anything is my major beef with both the new movies. JJ Abrams likes to build his "mystery box". His philosophy on all his movies is to NOT explain anything on purpose.

For those people who haven't heard his theory: https://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box

But basically, his idea is that if you set up the frame of a mystery but then never reveal the answer, the "inside" of the mystery box, then the audience will fill in the box with whatever they think the "best" answer is. If you give them an answer, there's a chance they won't like it. If you let them figure the answer out on their own, however, whatever they came up with is "right". As long as you never contradict them, they'll be happy that the movie gave them the answer they wanted...all the while not realizing that the answer was never given.

I really hate it as a movie making philosophy. It shows repeatedly in TFA.

For instance, somewhere(I think it was at a panel), JJ Abrams mentioned that it was their idea that the "map" to Skywalker was a map of Jedi temples that the Emperor had in the Imperial archives and that R2 had the map because he downloaded the entire Imperial archive when he interfaced with the Death Star. The Emperor either didn't have part of the map or purposefully removed part of it, which is why it was missing a piece.

Skywalker found the piece, didn't give it to anyone and then left to find The First Jedi Temple.

Someone asked him why they didn't put that information into the movie since a lot of people were confused as to where the map came from and exactly why there was a "map to Skywalker" in R2. He said that they didn't want to "get into it" in the movie since it wasn't really important and they wanted to keep the movie moving.

Of course, the article where that was located was the same place I learned that the entire plot of the first movie was written because they didn't want the movie to be about Luke.

They said that they had written 5 more drafts of the movie before the one that became TFA. One of JJ's primary goals was to give each and every old character a "proper entrance" since fans were going to want each one showing up to be a big deal. That's why R2 was "asleep". The original idea was the have C3-P0 and R2 show up simultaneously but they felt that was shortchanging R2 since he didn't get his own "awesome introduction".

However, the problem is that they wanted the movie to firmly focus on Rey and Finn and Kylo. They didn't want any of the old characters to "take over" the movie. It wasn't about them. They got awesome introductions, but then they needed to leave and get off the screen. In the other 5 drafts, they found that after Luke's introduction he would immediately take over the movie. He was the hero, not this Rey woman. So, no one would care about anything going on except what Luke was doing.

After 5 rewrites and trying to lessen the effect Luke had on the movie, they decided to scrap every last idea they had for the movie and instead get rid of Luke. They rewrote the plot so that Luke was missing and no one had any idea where he was...but there was a map to him. That's what everyone was after. That way Luke could have his "awesome introduction" but it would happen at the very end of the movie where it wouldn't overshadow anything else going on.

And I really get the impression that since this idea was added at the last minute...no one stopped to think about what to do with Luke after that.

I really do get the impression that they just gave RJ no information at all and said "Just write what you think happens next".

 

[Morrus]

No they don't, like I said, in the movie they are staring up in the sky saying "The Hosnian system is completely destroyed". If they were in that system, that would include them, so it means even the movie said they weren't in the Hosnian system. But they shouldn't be able to see the explosion if they aren't in the Hosnian system. The two things disagree with each other and just don't make sense.

As I recall, you see the beam split and destroy a handful of moons of a gas giant, one of which is presumably Hosnia Prime; a Jovian system, rather than a solar system. Totally works without any need for any arcane inventions by licensed products. You don’t need to resort to that to make the movie work. What’s on screen is perfectly cromulent, and shows a single solar system. It’s right there!

I mean, should I doubt that Han died? I mean, I saw it on screen, but I haven’t read every book, comic, or toy packaging. Does Vader wear black, or is there a book out there which says he really wears pink?

I have to take what I see on screen at face value. Otherwise the act of film-watching becomes a homework chore.

In the long run, I doubt Abrahms cares. But I’m happy to accept what I saw on screen.

 

[pukunui]

The thing about them watching the destruction of the Hosnian system from Takodana is one of the few things that irks me about TFA. The whole truncating of space seems to be a signature of JJ's, as he did it in the first Star Trek reboot too, where we see a flashback of old Spock watching Vulcan implode from that ice planet. Even if the ice planet had been in the Vulcan system, it wouldn't have loomed that large in the sky unless the ice planet was actually one of its moons, in which case it probably would've been sucked into the singularity created at the heart of Vulcan.

Going back to the TFA, if you look at the official Star Wars galaxy map, not only is Takodana halfway across the galaxy from the Hosnian system, in which case they shouldn't be able to see anything, it's also on the wrong side of the trajectory from SKB to Hosnian Prime (that is, the beam should've been going across the sky on Takodana in the other direction).


EDIT: This map hasn't got the Starkiller Base's final location on it (I can't seem to find the one I was thinking of), but it has got some interesting extras in the sidebars.




/rant

 

[Morrus]

Here’s Starkiller firing. This is what’s in the movie. A single beam fires, splits, and destroys a number of bodies in very close proximity to each other. The guys outside Maz’s castle see this in the sky. They’re very clearly in the same solar system, and Starkiller destroyed a bunch of moons around a gas giant. It doesn’t need any weird hyperspace technobabble to explain it.

https://youtu.be/-HmWDdmTAE8

 

[Morrus]

Going back to the TFA, if you look at the official Star Wars galaxy map, not only is Takodana halfway across the galaxy from the Hosnian system, in which case they shouldn't be able to see anything, it's also on the wrong side of the trajectory from SKB to Hosnian Prime (that is, the beam should've been going across the sky on Takodana in the other direction).

Exactly. The map is clearly nonsense. The Lucasfilm licensing department is clearly not doing its oversight role properly.

 

[pukunui]

Exactly. The map is clearly nonsense. The Lucasfilm licensing department is clearly not doing its oversight role properly.

I think it's more that JJ Abrams doesn't care about how big space is, because he did a similar thing in Star Trek, as I pointed out.

 

[Morrus]

I think it's more that JJ Abrams doesn't care about how big space is, because he did a similar thing in Star Trek, as I pointed out.

He didn’t make that map. I doubt he ever saw it. He made his film; if the map contradicts it, the map is wrong, not the film.