Disney Star Wars Is It Actually That Bad?

[Snarf Zagyg]

Hey, this is what The Last Jedi's critics wanted. I take no pleasure in any buyer's remorse they may have over it.

The fans knew what they wanted, and they deserved to get it good and hard.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Hey, this is what The Last Jedi's critics wanted. I take no pleasure in any buyer's remorse they may have over it.

I think either having her as the emperor's or as obi wan's descendent could have worked if it was handled properly. They also could have just kept it as her family being junkers like Kylo said and maybe her finding out more about them. The issue with the emperor's return is it looked like zero thought went into it, no real attempt was made to make it connect cleanly with previous movies, etc. This is another part of the movie where I think better dialogue and more thought would have gone a long way. If we really had a chance for her and Kylo to get into why Kylo lied, that would have been interesting. I don't think we really got that. Everything zipped by so quickly it is like you didn' even process it until after it happened. Just way too much going on in this movie.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The fans knew what they wanted, and they deserved to get it good and hard.

This is the problem with not doing things out in advance. They could have done a cohesive trilogy following either Johnson or Abrahms visions. But starting on one, shifting to another, then veering back towards something like the first one started could never work. Now the trilogy as a whole is only interesting for how much of a disjointed and strange it is (maybe in twenty years that will look very compelling to people I don't know).

 

[Mercurius]

I tend to think describing Rey as "Luke but without any faults" is pretty damn uncharitable too. I get that there's a line between a fictional character and living human person, but when 95% of this "debate" boils down to vitriol based in real-world biases and bigotry, I'm more inclined to see that line as blurrier than it might otherwise be.

Bingo. You should have stopped there - rather than basically accusing me of "vitriol based in real-world biases and bigotry," or at least adjacent to that.

What have I said that entails biases or bigotry? Absolutely nothing. You're either making assumptions, or you lump everyone together that disagrees with you, and then insult them with nasty accusations of bigotry and bias. That's an ad hominem.

Now you soften it somewhat later on, but only somewhat; you're still connecting what I'm saying with whoever you think is actually biased and bigoted.

So where's the conversation? Can we have one without such nastiness?

As for Mary Sue, ironically I didn't even initially use the term - you did. And in doing so, you followed a red herring, completely missing what I was saying - which really had nothing to do with whether Rey is a Mary Sue or not, and more how I speculated the characters were conceived. So I have no interest in a straw man argument about whether or not Rey is Mary Sue, because that wasn't (at all) my point.

Again, re-read what I wrote: I didn't say Rey is Luke without faults, I was making a point in how I imagined the character was conceived: in relation to Luke, yet more competent. You latched onto the erroneous belief that I was saying "Rey is a Mary Sue" and skipped over what I was actually saying.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I tend to think describing Rey as "Luke but without any faults" is pretty damn uncharitable too. I get that there's a line between a fictional character and living human person, but when 95% of this "debate" boils down to vitriol based in real-world biases and bigotry, I'm more inclined to see that line as blurrier than it might otherwise be.

But this is part of where we go off the rails. I don't think the majority of this debate is because of bigotry. I think it is mostly to do with taste and people not liking the way a newer movie handled an older franchise (if you have older fans of a franchise they are going to have complaints when it gets rebooted). Look Disney is a very, very powerful company. I think they used this to deflect criticisms of the movies and to help generate online discussion at the same time. I don't think people who disliked Last Jedi are bigots, and I don't think people who loved it are bad either. Nor is one side more virtuous and the other less so. There are always bad actors in online discussion but most people I know who had criticisms of any of the movies, just were giving honest opinions they had about a film. It is just a movie. It is a distraction from real problems that exist in the world. Disney is still making tons of money off of it. And lets not forget Disney itself nixed both a gay relationship and an interracial one, largely for concerns of how that would play in markets outside the US. Most of us debating the merits of the movie with one another are all in a similar boat in terms of how much power and money we have in the world. No good for us to be turning against one another over characters in a film.

 

[Gradine]

Now see, I also found most of the comedy in the movie quite, but I'll admit that the prank call was a little... distracting. I think the other line that tends to take me out of it a bit was the whole "the Queen is dead, long live the Queen" bit. On the other hand, I love myself some Hux, by which I mean to see I love seeing his whiny, entitled self getting consistently trolled and otherwise put in his place. He actually I thought had the most interesting arc in the 3rd film, but again I love seeing him being (a) petty and (b) paying for it.

It's far from a perfect movie. It just can be hard differentiate legitimate disagreement with the kinds of bad faith rhetorics that drove the original wave of hatred toward the movie in the first. And it's not fair to folks who legitimately didn't care for the film, and I acknowledge my role in it. But the bad-faith trolls have torn a hole in a fandom I cared about by drawing their line in the sand and filling their side with hatred and bigotry.

I'm still mad about it.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I tend to think describing Rey as "Luke but without any faults" is pretty damn uncharitable too.

I felt Rey had plenty of faults. Some of them not explored deeply enough but by the second and third movie they are pretty clear (as they were with Luke). But these are also not really meant to be super flawed characters like in the walking dead. They are space heroes. What the group needed was one really flawed character like Han. But Rey was fine as she was. One of my big complaints in these kinds of movies is the actors don't look strong or physical enough to do what they are doing but she really seemed physically ready for that role.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Now see, I also found most of the comedy in the movie quite, but I'll admit that the prank call was a little... distracting. I think the other line that tends to take me out of it a bit was the whole "the Queen is dead, long live the Queen" bit. On the other hand, I love myself some Hux, by which I mean to see I love seeing his whiny, entitled self getting consistently trolled and otherwise put in his place. He actually I thought had the most interesting arc in the 3rd film, but again I love seeing him being (a) petty and (b) paying for it.

I just felt they had this really frightening villain (someone who seemed potentially more dangerous than Kylo Ren because he believed in the empire). Turning him into a joke just didn't add anything to the movie for me. I get the whole tradition of Hogans Heroes and stuff. But this is a movie where you want a frightening empire that puts the heroes in true peril. It just felt so goofy to me.

It's far from a perfect movie. It just can be hard differentiate legitimate disagreement with the kinds of bad faith rhetorics that drove the original wave of hatred toward the movie in the first. And it's not fair to folks who legitimately didn't care for the film, and I acknowledge my role in it. But the bad-faith trolls have torn a hole in a fandom I cared about by drawing their line in the sand and filling their side with hatred and bigotry.

I'm still mad about it.

I can't tell you what to think. But I think a lot of what was going on is they were trying to paint any criticism of the film as being a product of vitriol and hate and I just don' think that was what was going on. It is clever marketing. Anger, ironically enough, is one of the surest drivers of clicks and views in our current environement. But I think it is actually pretty dangerous to generate buzz around a movie in this way by getting the fanbase to turn on one another and to fear one another. Definitely there are always going to be bad people who say terrible things. But most of this was people just not liking a movie or a character in a movie. And for all of Disney's posturing about this stuff, in the end, it didn't really do anything to support the actors it had expressed concern for. Rose was a great character and they should have stuck with her in the third movie. But they didn't. Which is a shame. I would personally blame the company that made these decisions rather than people who just weren't fans of a film.

 

[Gradine]

Bingo. You should have stopped there - rather than basically accusing me of "vitriol based in real-world biases and bigotry," or at least adjacent to that.

What have I said that entails biases or bigotry? Absolutely nothing. You're either making assumptions, or you lump everyone together that disagrees with you, and then insult them with nasty accusations of bigotry and bias. That's an ad hominem.

Now you soften it somewhat later on, but only somewhat; you're still connecting what I'm saying with whoever you think is actually biased and bigoted.

So where's the conversation? Can we have one without such nastiness?

As for Mary Sue, ironically I didn't even initially use the term - you did. And in doing so, you followed a red herring, completely missing what I was saying - which really had nothing to do with whether Rey is a Mary Sue or not, and more how I speculated the characters were conceived. So I have no interest in a straw man argument about whether or not Rey is Mary Sue, because that wasn't (at all) my point.

Again, re-read what I wrote: I didn't say Rey is Luke without faults, I was making a point in how I imagined the character was conceived: in relation to Luke, yet more competent. You latched onto the erroneous belief that I was saying "Rey is a Mary Sue" and skipped over what I was actually saying.

If I made a leap of logic or misunderstood what you were saying or putting words in your mouth, I apologize. I read more into I was reading than what was actually there, and went off completely half-cocked. I didn't ever think you, yourself were actually some kind of misogynist.

All that said, I stand by that the driving force behind the criticisms of The Last Jedi and the way fans have treated many of its characters/cast members was rooted in a particularly nasty brand of politics, and that many, including myself, have unfairly lumped those with legitimate complaints with the film. It's just such a good movie in my eyes that it's hard to reconcile the middle ground between where I'm at and the alt-right trolls crying "Mary Sue".

I'll also stand by that anyone who would claim that this is anything close to a Mary Sue doesn't have a leg to stand on, but I'll accept that I don't think anybody's doing that here.

Apologies, again, for treating you unfairly.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Now see, I also found most of the comedy in the movie quite, but I'll admit that the prank call was a little... distracting. I think the other line that tends to take me out of it a bit was the whole "the Queen is dead, long live the Queen" bit. On the other hand, I love myself some Hux, by which I mean to see I love seeing his whiny, entitled self getting consistently trolled and otherwise put in his place. He actually I thought had the most interesting arc in the 3rd film, but again I love seeing him being (a) petty and (b) paying for it.

It's far from a perfect movie. It just can be hard differentiate legitimate disagreement with the kinds of bad faith rhetorics that drove the original wave of hatred toward the movie in the first. And it's not fair to folks who legitimately didn't care for the film, and I acknowledge my role in it. But the bad-faith trolls have torn a hole in a fandom I cared about by drawing their line in the sand and filling their side with hatred and bigotry.

I'm still mad about it.

You're not the only one.

TLJ wasn't perfect, but at a minimum it was interesting and provided a fresh way forward. It made me excited again. Rise ... killed all interest I had in Star Wars movies for the foreseeable future. I would rather watch a new trilogy that only had Gungans than watch Disney make another movie with the current brain trust that chose to go forward with Rise.

 

[MGibster]

I'm only going to do the movies.

S: Empire, New Hope, Jedi (Yeah, all three and only a sith would disagree)
A: Revenge of the Sith
B: The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Rogue One
C: Solo, Force Awakens
D: Rise of Skywalker, The Last Jedi

I'd rather watch Battlefield Earth than the Rise of Skywalker ever again.

 

[MGibster]

The fans knew what they wanted, and they deserved to get it good and hard.

I sure as hell didn't deserve it!

 

[Gradine]

I'm not going to lie, I walked out of Rise of Skywalker the first time somewhat pleasantly surprised. I'm an exceptionally easy mark, however. I tried to view it on its own merits, separate from how it tossed everything great about TLJ in the trash. And as that it's... fun, mostly. It almost moves too fast to not be, even though that pacing makes so much else about the film really, really rough.

Actually, Rise of Skywalker actually take one thing from TLJ and did something genuinely great with it: the astral projection lightsaber battle thing was, unironically, one of my favorite lightsaber fights in the franchise. And I'm including the one with the Pratorian Guard from TLJ.

 

[Gradine]

Tag yourself, I'm Martine

 

[Bedrockgames]

I'm not going to lie, I walked out of Rise of Skywalker the first time somewhat pleasantly surprised. I'm an exceptionally easy mark, however. I tried to view it on its own merits, separate from how it tossed everything great about TLJ in the trash. And as that it's... fun, mostly. It almost moves too fast to not be, even though that pacing makes so much else about the film really, really rough.

Actually, Rise of Skywalker actually take one thing from TLJ and did something genuinely great with it: the astral projection lightsaber battle thing was, unironically, one of my favorite lightsaber fights in the franchise. And I'm including the one with the Pratorian Guard from TLJ.

The pacing of Rise of Skywalker is deception. I was at first convinced I was enjoying it, and it is a ride, so its entertaining, but it just has so many problems and that ending isn't cinematic at all.

 

[Gradine]

The pacing of Rise of Skywalker is deception. I was at first convinced I was enjoying it, and it is a ride, so its entertaining, but it just has so many problems and that ending isn't cinematic at all.

Yeah, that's about where I landed after sitting with it for a while.

Still not as bad as any of the prequels though. Every time I think to myself "Maybe X-5 years ago me was being too harsh, I should give these another try". And every time I reach the same conclusion: "Nope, X-5 years me was right."

 

[Celebrim]

S Tier: Star Wars (A New Hope), The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi
A Tier: Rogue One
B Tier: Mandalorian*, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith
C Tier: The Phantom Menace, Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels, Solo
D Tier: Droids Cartoon, The Book of Boba Fett
F Tier: Star Wars Holiday Special, Ewoks Cartoon, Ewoks: Battle for Endor, The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi

(*Individual episodes of Mandalorian vary from S Tier all the way down to D- Tier, I'm giving here an average level of quality for the show thus far.)

I have not seen Rise of Skywalker, The Bad Batch, or Obi Wan at this point. I may decide to risk Obi Wan, but I've found myself sitting through Star Wars Holiday Special levels of stupidity so much in Disney Star Wars that I feel like it's torture to watch the garbage they spew out most of the time. And yes, I actually went back and re-watched the Star Wars Holiday Special just to see if I was being unfair with the comparison, and at this point I can't decide which was objectively worse, STHS or the second act of TFA, or the entirety of TLJ. Let's not blame Rian Johnson too much. He was told to make a sequel to an absurd movie that introduced a ton of ideas with no real ideas where it was going with them and no overall plan to the story with a creative team that seemed to objectively believe the original Star Wars was a bad movie that was saved in the edit so they could do that to.

Disney Stars wars hasn't been uniformly terrible. It's just that the showcase movies are so much inferior to the original trilogy in every respect, or inferior to even the sequel trilogy in terms of conception and creativity and ground breaking effects, that a few good episodes of The Mandalorian or Clone Wars and 95% of the movie Rogue One can't really make up the difference. Disney's handling of the property would be something other than risible if it was only minor properties that were as bad or worse than the Ewok made for TV movies and not the showcase sequel trilogy that was supposed to anchor the franchise and set the stage for future generations of fans. I can forgive them for The Mandalorian's very uneven writing, but not for the character assassination of Han and Leia in TFA followed by the character assassination of Luke in TLJ. The unmaking of the original trilogy by the sequels means that IMO, the world would be better off if those movies had never been made. The constitute a crime against the arts. And the absolutely hideous treatment of the property stands in stark contrast to the very respectful and overall masterful treatment of the Marvel IP.

So yes, on the whole, it really is that bad. This is the dark years of Star Wars fandom. This is worse than those years where we were waiting for a 4th movie. At least then we uber nerds had the wonderful job WEG was doing with the RPG, and some decent pulpy takes like the original Han Solo trilogy.

 

[Mercurius]

If I made a leap of logic or misunderstood what you were saying or putting words in your mouth, I apologize. I read more into I was reading than what was actually there, and went off completely half-cocked. I didn't ever think you, yourself were actually some kind of misogynist.

All that said, I stand by that the driving force behind the criticisms of The Last Jedi and the way fans have treated many of its characters/cast members was rooted in a particularly nasty brand of politics, and that many, including myself, have unfairly lumped those with legitimate complaints with the film. It's just such a good movie in my eyes that it's hard to reconcile the middle ground between where I'm at and the alt-right trolls crying "Mary Sue".

I'll also stand by that anyone who would claim that this is anything close to a Mary Sue doesn't have a leg to stand on, but I'll accept that I don't think anybody's doing that here.

Apologies, again, for treating you unfairly.

Thanks, I appreciate this. And I hear you - there are definitely those who seem to get upset with greater representation and diversity for rather nefarious reasons.

In a lot of—or at least some—cases, though, critiques of the Latest Thing are less malign than they seem. Take, for instance, the hypothetical idea of “Jane Bond.” I dislike the idea mainly because it is creatively lazy. And furthermore, because in a way it subtly exacerbates a problem (say, sexism) that it seemingly wants to address. So rather than simply take an old classic franchise and subvert it, why not start a new one, with a unique female super-spy that isn’t based on a male one? The real reason—most of the time and in my opinion—is not for feminist reasons, but economic ones. I personally don’t want to see female Bond — I want to see a film about that Cuban agent.

That was kind of my point with my comment about Oscar Isaac - but also Daisy Ridley and John Boyega. Rather than say, “Let’s make new, unique characters for the Star Wars universe that draw from your own personalities and abilities” they seemingly tried and more derivative and/or “ciphering” approach, sometimes even tokenism. In the end, it does the actors an injustice.

That’s my impression, at least. As I said, I do think Ridley in particular did a pretty good job, but that all of them could have been so much more. I think Boyega in particular was given the short stick.

 

[Zubatcarteira]

TFA and TLJ I found okay-ish, and didn't watch the last one, although I've seen enough people trashing it to know mostly what happened.

It's mostly a lot of very strange decisions, that only get worse when you get more info from the other movies (e.g. Leia sends muggle Han to talk to Kylo, when she's a trained Jedi, Luke goes to sulk on an island while his friends are being murdered, Finn is hyped as a possible Jedi then becomes a sidekick, Rey and Kylo romance at all, etc).

 

[Eltab]

Take, for instance, the hypothetical idea of “Jane Bond.” I dislike the idea mainly because it is creatively lazy. And furthermore, because in a way it subtly exacerbates a problem (say, sexism) that it seemingly wants to address. So rather than simply take an old classic franchise and subvert it, why not start a new one, with a unique female super-spy that isn’t based on a male one? The real reason—most of the time and in my opinion—is not for feminist reasons, but economic ones. I personally don’t want to see female Bond — I want to see a film about that Cuban agent.

Because of the requirements of the next assignment, introduce James Bond to Agent 004, who happens to be female and is able to get into places "a British businessman" would not blend in.

And/or Agent 001 whose family hails from a former British Empire nation (which conveniently is the exotic locale du jour) and also can blend into crowds where Bond will stick out like a sore thumb.

There are presumably nine Agents 00x, but we don't see the others in the movies. Introduce one and tell an interesting story.

Expand the worldbuilding, don't over-write what was written before.