Order your Star Wars films
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lowkey13
Guest
*Deleted by user*
I don't know what any of that means.
You've never seen the movie Amadeus? Youngster.
Sounds like a lame justification....but at least they try I guess.
And, that was one of the things I listed, not the only one......
Celebrim
Legend
Agreed. Or all the unnecessary script bloat that surrounds all that stupid.
A lot of people who defend TLJ seem to think that the main problem the critics have with the movie is conceptual, and they spend a lot of time defending the concepts. And, sure, in a different movie those concepts could have made for a great movie. This wasn't that movie.
As just one of many examples, there is nothing wrong per se with Luke being a failure as a Jedi Master. In a lot of early post RotJ fan fiction, Luke turns to the Dark Side because a lot of fans thought that Luke's choices would haunt him - "once you start down the Dark Side...". The problem isn't with seeing Luke as a failure, it's with seeing him as a failure based off of such a thin, vague and unimaginative backstory.
The problem with both TFA and TLJ is the same - execution. They are just both dumb. They are dumb and feature dumb characters even by the standards that would hold up at an average RPG table where PCs are infamous for their stupidity. When you have characters repeatedly this stupid as protagonists, it's hard to root for them. This is stupidity that borders on and often becomes immorality. And likewise, when the antagonists are relentlessly stupid, then it's hard to feel any sense of drama. As just one of dozens of examples, imagine Darth Vader in the role of General Hux for the first 5 minutes of TLJ. You would consider that a parody, and you'd be right.
TPM was haunted by a relentlessly stupid and useless character in the form of Jar Jar Binks. But the new trilogy gives every character the Jar Jar Binks treatment.
And other problem, and I guess this is as close as you can get to a real conceptual problem the movies have, is that they are obviously completely unplanned and without a core story. They are obviously making it all up as they go with no overarching goals other than to make 3 movies and make some money. A lot of fans of TFA blame the director of TLJ for messing everything up, but the truth is that there was nothing to mess up in the first place. If there had have been, then there would have been some story guidance as to what plot points to hit and secrets to reveal and what the twists were supposed to be. There were not.
You can retroactively sort of make a core idea out of them if you squint, but the text of the script itself won't support that idea. Supporting some cherry picked idea about what the movies are actually about or what theme that they supposedly have invariably involves fan speculation and referencing things that are not only not in the script but in some fanon backstory, but contrary to the actual script. All of this is just rationalizing away what is obviously true, that there is no overarching theme, no grand story arc, and no journey each character is going to go through because they never thought that far ahead.
Why for example does Poe have so little relationship to Rey? Well, because in early versions of the script he died when his Tie Fighter hit the sand, and he was written back in at a late point in production. And this lack of planning and vision is the real reason for almost everything, including all the stupid.
Defenders of TLJ seem to think problems like this are just nitpicking, but the implications of this thoughtless bit of Deus Ex Machina where you invent a solution to the dead end that you've written your characters into, utterly overturns all of Star Wars star ship combat. Star Wars star ship combat deliberately references World War II air combat in almost every respect to create a visually compelling and mythic form of story telling. None of it makes sense if you think about it too hard, but it is internally consistent provided you don't introduce any obvious technical changes to the conceits.
The implications of the light speed ram doing such tremendous damage to the enemy fleet are not less than:
a) You have just made all capital ships obsolete except possibly the space equivalent of submarines and guided missile cruisers.
b) You have not only made Death Stars obsolete, but you've actually made obsolete any need for Death Stars.
c) This isn't new technology. So for the last 1000 years or so, all factions on all sides of all wars have just been doing it wrong.
With star fighter scale missiles that can perform light speed rams you can destroy anything up to the scale of planets from virtually anywhere in the galaxy simply by skip jumping. There would have been no need to attack Star Destroyers with X-Wings. You could have fired missiles from bases in the outer rim, light jumped them into Imperial Systems, and then light speed rammed whatever you found. One missile would suffice per Imperial Cruiser/Carrier.
Any defense of, "You aren't supposed to think so hard about it." is ridiculous. It's Star Wars. It's been obsessively thought about for decades. RPGs, video games, and novels have been written assuming the conceits of Star Wars naval combat as presented for decades. Minor characters that weren't named in the movies got their own short stories, and characters with no more than a few minutes of screen time got whole novelized series devoted to them. To break one of the rules of Star Wars combat that egregiously breaks the entire structure of the setting. Star Wars at this point is to big to sacrifice to one writers failure to think through the implications of how they write themselves out of a trap that resulted from their own poor planning.
And what's bad is how often they pull these technobabble answers out. Because let's not forget, this wasn't even the first movie where they broke the rules to deus ex machina themselves out of a writing trap. TFA saw them pull off a lightspeed jump into the atmosphere of a shielded planet. Rumor has it that the next movie has them pulling off a series of superfast precision lightspeed jumps as easily as "dusting crops".
COBRA is a better run and led military than The Resistance in TLJ.
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I'm not quite as distasteful of the movie as your, I just don't like it as much as I fell I should, given the parts I really liked. Again, not trying to change minds here....
Celebrim
Legend
I'm a notoriously harsh critic. I get that most people don't like it as much as I dislike it. You don't have to.
Yes, that statement is correct.
