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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joshua Randall" data-source="post: 7309040" data-attributes="member: 7737">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.</blockquote>

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