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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7878112" data-attributes="member: 4937">Mine as well.I hated that too.Ok, stop there, because there is a huge difference here at it lies in the writing. Let me give you a lesson in screen writing. Why does the audience buy into Luke blind firing the torpedoes that kill the first Death Star? It's not because of some vague explanation about magic or the The Force. It's not because you can retroactively work it out using things in the larger Star Wars canon. The audience that first saw 'Star Wars' knew nothing about The Force and had no larger Star Wars canon to draw on.No, we buy that because practically the whole movie has been carefully constructing that moment and building up to it and foreshadowing it. We buy it because the writer has spent several minutes of careful exposition in other dramatic scenes developing the audience to expect that scene and be mentally waiting for it.  If it had just come out of nowhere, it would have been terrible lazy writing that the audience wouldn't have bought it. But the writer did an excellent job setting up that scene in such a way that really any one seeing the scene would know that was the only right way the movie could end and any clever writer that knows the stories work would have been expecting it and would have fist pumped when it happened.How was this achieved? Well, way back when we first meet Obi Wan, he tells Luke, "You must learn the ways of the force." In doing so, he's telling the audience what the story is going to be about. He's put a gun on the wall that will have to be fired. Then we see Obi Wan in several scenes displaying his mastery of the force and doing extraordinary things. Then we also see Obi Wan explaining to Luke what The Force will enable him to do, and we have a training scene where Obi Wan gets Luke to blindly deflect a blaster bolt with a lightsaber. Note the importance of the fact that it was done blindly. Then later, we have a scene where Obi Wan is fighting Vader, and Obi Wan allows himself to be slain after telling Vader he cannot win. Then, after dead, Obi Wan tells his distraught pupil, "Run Luke!"So in the context of all this set up, there is no other right way to conclude the movie. If Luke doesn't destroy the Death Star using the force with his eyes closed and with the help of Obi Wan's force ghost, then it's a bad movie that wasted time building up plot points irrelevant to the conclusion and fails to deliver on its themes.None of that happens in the case of the lightspeed ram. Now, it would have been a terrible idea, but you could set up the lightspeed ram as the appropriate ending to the movie. Think about a movie like "Ghostbusters" that spends an incredible amount of time telling the audience that you should never ever cross the streams, and spends a lot of time telling the audience how bad that would be. Why? Because it's going to use that idea to Deus Ex Machina save the day when all else seems lost, and by telling the audience how terrible that idea is, when the heroes decide to it, the audience has been primed to believe that it is a brave thing for them to do and satisfied when it is used to solve the problem. If on the other hand none of that setup had been done and faced with a problem they had invented on the spot crossing the streams, it would have been a terrible way to end the movie that would have felt lame. So they could have put the heroes in bad situation after bad situation where they told the audience that light speed rams would never work and were hopeless or otherwise done something to set up the action, and then the audience might have had buy in, but that isn't the movie that was made or the script that was written.And originally it was going to be Ackbar that performed the light speed ram, and that would have at least made it somewhat meaningful because Holdo was just introduced to the story and we hadn't had time to build a relationship with her and like her, where as Ackbar has despite his low screen presence in the original trilogy was already a fan favorite whose you could have built on. And originally, in the story Ackbar was going to be something of a foil, almost a villain in the movie, so that his self-sacrificial act had the added pathos of being redeeming. But Holdo was just there, and when Holdo took over Ackbar's role in the script, they wrote out most of the conflict between her and the protagonists because they didn't think the audience would respond well to a woman in the role of a foil/antagonist because they didn't trust the audience to accept a complicated character if it was a woman, and because they wanted to have a theme of 'strong women'. So while it was always a bad idea, a lot of the wounds here were self-inflicted, because the original script developed that scene a whole lot better than what they ended up with.And, I think I'm done.   I've wasted enough emotion and time on this.  If you don't understand why Luke blind firing the photon torpedoes is a total contrasting moment in cinema and why it works so well, and why it completely undermines your defense instead of bolsters it, then I'm never going to be able to explain this to you.   Just go ahead and believe it's all just movie magic and there is no craft to writing well and just keep believing that everyone that says the script to TFA and TLJ as filmed are dog turds, really has just some unrational reason for saying that that probably has to do with them not liking strong women or whatever crappy rationalization makes you happy.</blockquote>

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