We saw a Star War! Last Jedi spoiler thread

[Morrus]

And if the Washington DC was just nuked, it wouldn't be easy for, say, the Taliban to just take over the States.

I guess it's not quite the same, in that there are no borders in space, unless people are building vast 3D spheres hundreds of light years across.

That always bugs me, those star maps of sci-fi universes with wavy lines of territory. The only territory is the systems themselves, and they are pinpricks in an ocean; the stuff in between doesn't matter, and you can't block that space. At least, not with the sort of tech in Star Wars. You need Q-level tech for that. Even if you have line of space stations between systems, you'd need millions of them to connect just two systems in 2D. Trillions in 3D.

 

[Jester David]

I guess it's not quite the same, in that there are no borders in space, unless people are building vast 3D spheres hundreds of light years across.

That always bugs me, those star maps of sci-fi universes with wavy lines of territory. The only territory is the systems themselves, and they are pinpricks in an ocean; the stuff in between doesn't matter, and you can't block that space. At least, not with the sort of tech in Star Wars. You need Q-level tech for that. Even if you have line of space stations between systems, you'd need millions of them to connect just two systems in 2D. Trillions in 3D.

There's precious few borders in real life. There's a small wire fence dividing the USA from Canada from kilometres and kilometres that you can just hop over. But I agree with space maps being weird. I was looking at Star Trek maps recently and it occurred to me that the Federation must be filled with holes, as there are planets inhabited by less advanced people in the middle of their territory. Or people who just don't want to join the Federation.

I'm more thinking of actually taking control of said pinpricks in the ocean. Which is implied to be the First Order now that the New Republic has been blown away.

They dance around that works in A New Hope with Tarkin's "the Galactic Senate has been dissolved" bit where they talk about how to keep control over their systems. With the local governors in charge and presumably reporting to the Emperor rather than their senator. So the governors likely had their own police and security forces to maintain order.
(Almost a feudal type system.)

If you blow up the heart of the Republic, you don't take control. That's dissolving the senate... with lasers. But the people in charge locally are still in charge and aren't going to automatically bow down to the First Order, whom even a coalition of one or two local forces will presumably outnumber.
Again, without a Death Star, fear of which would keep the smaller systems in line, there's nothing stopping the former Republican worlds from flipping the First Order the bird or quickly uniting to re-reestablish the Republic. We've never seen a First Order world or what territory they have. It's likely not that much compared to the sheer size of the former Republic (after all... if they had more ships, wouldn't they have called reinforcements in to cut off the Resistance?).

And, for that matter, what happened to the Republic fleet? Was it really all parked around the single system?

 

[pukunui]

And, for that matter, what happened to the Republic fleet? Was it really all parked around the single system?

That was the "home fleet" - the bulk of their forces but not all of them. Presumably there are other, smaller fleets around the galaxy.

 

[Morrus]

There's precious few borders in real life. There's a small wire fence dividing the USA from Canada from kilometres and kilometres that you can just hop over.

Exactly. And then compound the difficulty with it being:

a) billions and billions of times larger

and

b) in 3D

The whole border in space concept just doesn't work. You can control a system, but not the space between them.

 

[Mercurius]

I finally saw the movie. I was underwhelmed and to be honest it was worse than I thought it would be. I liked it less than TFA, which at least had the novelty of the "we're back!" effect. This just took the fan-fictiony feel further and I didn't get any of the originality that some have talked about.

My biggest problem with Disney Star Wars is that it just feels like they're trying too hard - on so many levels - to re-create some semblance of the magic of the original series, and the more they try the farther they fall away from being something new and interesting in its own right. They just don't have the magic and drama of the original series, or even the Lucas knack with imaginative visuals that the prequel trilogy had which, in hindsight, would have been fairly decent films with different Anakin Skywalker actors (especially one with better chemistry with Natalie Portman than Hayden Christensen...ugh).

I am reminded of the impact that the third X-Men movie had on the first trilogy...it just kind of killed it. X2 was such a good movie and set up Dark Phoenix perfectly, and then the Last Stand was an utter train wreck.

Disney Star Wars isn't quite that bad, but it has a similar impact, imo. It really diminishes the original series in a way that the prequel trilogy--by virtue of being a prequel--didn't and couldn't.

I have the distinct desire to want to say, "None of this is really what happened after Return of the Jedi - it is just one possible version of what could have happened."

You can pretty much run through the characters and see how most of them are lesser versions of original series characters. I mean, none of the villains have any real gravitas. As with Adam Driver, I like Domhnall Gleeson as an actor (he was great in About Time and Ex Machina), but he's just horrible as Hux. Snoke was utterly worthless, a total mockery of the Emperor. And don't get me started on Darth Emo or Boba Phasma.

I'm still wondering what Finn adds to the story. I guess Poe Dameron finally came alive in this one, but even Rey seemed to lose a step from TFA. She kind of felt like a cypher in this one, without any real personality. And Luke? It felt a bit like Mark Hammill was being held at gun-point to play a role in a way he didn't really want to play it.

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I feel The Last Jedi was just not very good. The bottom line (for me) is that it fulfilled little or none of the promise of TFA, and just magnified its mediocre and poor elements. I'd rank it well below the original series and definitely lower than TFA and Rogue One, battling it out with Revenge of the Sith for 6th place.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I was a bit confused about that too, but on subsequent viewings it became more clear. I don't think Poe/Finn/Rose ever use the term "cloaked" in front of DJ, but Poe does tell them that Holdo is fueling up the transports and abandoning ship. I suppose DJ just put two and two together and figured that the transports would have to be cloaked in order to have any chance of escaping.

As an aside, this is an interesting example of the advancement of technology in the GFFA, since the transports can be cloaked, whereas just 30 years before, we are told that ships the size of the Millennium Falcon can't have cloaking devices.

In fact, the new sequels definitely suggest that technological advancement in Star Wars is still happening a lot, and it kinda makes KOTOR and the like look less believable IMO, since they clearly suggest a very slow technological advancement. And of course, KOTOR's ideas were based on the claim of the age of the old republic and the many generations of Jedi that served it. KOTOR I can take or leave, it's not part of the (new) canon, of course, but it makes me wonder how the Jedi Order or the republic really looked 200 or 500 or 1,000 years ago.

I could explain away the Death Star with not being a major technological, but more a major logistical advancement - only the Empire had the resources and the will to build a planet-destroying moon-sized starbase (and also do it in a manner that kept it out of the public's spotlight for a long time.) But things like cloaked transports or hyperspace tracking seem a bit different.

 

[PunsAndDragons]

When a destroyer is 'destroyed' why does it 'fall' from the edge of the film. There is no gravity. Yes, the explosion would produce a force - but it seems funny that the ships always 'fall down' when destroyed - when there is no 'down' in space.
Other than that, a good film!

 

[Morrus]

When a destroyer is 'destroyed' why does it 'fall' from the edge of the film. There is no gravity. Yes, the explosion would produce a force - but it seems funny that the ships always 'fall down' when destroyed - when there is no 'down' in space.
Other than that, a good film!

Star Wars Space combat has always been WWII dogfight physics. Well, up until Poe did some new maneuvers in TLJ.

 

[Joshua Randall]

I've seen the movie twice now and, what can I say: I felt the need to post about it on the Internet because [-]I have learned nothing since the Usenet days[/-] I am sure you will all find my unique perspective enlightening and life changing.

And that? That snarky sentence I just wrote up there? That's everything wrong with The Last Jedi: too much Internet style snark. Coupled with some unbelievably bad writing which is honestly shocking for a major studio production.

Consider the ending of The Force Awakens. Rey spends about half an hour climbing a mountain and then the camera swirls around her and Luke for another ten minutes while she holds out the lightsaber. OK, it's only a few minutes, but still: precious MINUTES of running time. You don't squander that on a nothing scene, right?

We get a compressed version of that scene in TLJ to remind us where we left off, Luke takes the saber, and... tosses it over his shoulder?

NO! No, no, no. This is HORRIBLE. This is like someone being a deliberate dick during an improv routine and deliberately nullifying something that a previous performer established. You wouldn't do this in Second City, you wouldn't do it in in a role-playing game, and you sure as hell shouldn't do it in a major motion picture.

Do you want Luke to refuse to teach Rey (at first) for reasons? Sure, that's fine. He can refuse the lightsaber, with words, or by reluctantly taking it and then giving it back, or something. Anything other than the petulant Internet snark.gif style way of throwing it over his shoulder like it doesn't matter. Remember, this was the saber that Mazz had in a mysterious box in the previous film, the saber that Kylo Ren demanded from Finn, the saber that Rey used to defeat Kylo after Finn failed to do so. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT SABER.

It's not a joke prop that Luke can just toss over his shoulder. (The only thing missing from this scene to make it a perfect 4chan meme is the 'whoops' sound effect from a Benny Hill skit.)

But let's back up to the actual first scene of the movie, the incredibly gripping... two unnamed Rebel flunkies discussing munitions during the evacuation. Are you FREAKING kidding me? You could have opened with anything you wanted to, and you chose THIS? My goodness. Please find a better opening scene than this first draft nonsense.

Also, in your next draft, please cut this entire terrible waste of a casino planet section. It's a fractal of bad writing. You waste a scene with Mazz telling you only one hacker can do the job, you waste a scene with that hacker at a craps table, and then another hacker who can also do the job just happens to be in the next cell? Oh, and he also kept his hacking gear when he escaped? I mean, what the HELL? This is awful, introducing extraneous new characters for no reason, on an extraneous side-quest that accomplishes nothing other than to pad the already bloated running time.

Others have already picked on the bad jokey lines like 'holding for Hux' or 'page turners'. I'll pile on -- that scene with Poe and Hux is going to age terribly. Again, this isn't an Internet skit about bad cell phone reception, this is STAR WARS! Poe could've found any way to stall Hux. He could've used a Star Wars-y insult like 'nerf herder', he could have pretended to negotiate surrender, he could have given a rousing Rebel speech. Instead we get conference call jokes and at the end, a 'yo momma' joke. Really? REALLY?! Who wrote this, a 16-year-old?

Allow me to offer up another line that, to me, proves we're looking at a first draft.

Snoke welcomes Kylo Ren and Rey to the throne room.

Snoke: "My faith in you in restored, my good and faithful apprentice."

See those bolded words? (faith / faithful) Repeating the same word in different forms is a common 'rough draft' thing that you fix when editing. You don't leave those words repeated like that; it weakens the setence. (OK, yes, in rare cases you can repeat words for poetic effect but this random Snoke line is not at that level.)

How about this one when Rose meets Finn.

Rose: "I'm doing talking to a Rebellion hero! Ugh, 'doing talking', what am I saying?" (paraphrased)

This is another classic sign of 'rough draft' writing: when a character calls out the bad writing directly! This is the writer's unconscious telling him, 'Hey, this sentence sucks. Please fix it so you don't sound stupid.' But he LEFT IT IN! This is terrible. This line wouldn't have made it out of the slush pile at Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and it should NEVER have made it into the production script of a movie.

I'm going to stop here because this is making me depressed. I wanted to like this movie, and I did like parts of it, but geez. Please hire a good writer. Please.

 

[MoonSong]

Nostalgia Critic on The Last Jedi

[video=youtube;J3gciAsltCw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3gciAsltCw[/video]

In short, the movie was a disjointed mess with editing problems an plot points that went nowhere. And it was awesome...