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Ask Slashdot: Thoughts On Star Wars: The Last Jedi One Week Later? [Spoilers] (independent.co.uk)
AmiMoJo writes: After what feels like an eternity of waiting, Star Wars: The Last Jedi has finally reached cinemas, scoring a whopping $450 million opening weekend worldwide. While reviews have been unanimously positive for Rian Johnson's blockbuster, there's been huge backlash online, many fans expressing disappointment. There's no better place to see the great divide between critics and fans than on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critical consensus scores 93% while audiences score The Last Jedi 56%. The Last Jedi is apparently worse than Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith. Conversely, critics say The Last Jedi equals A New Hope and The Force Awakens, only falling behind The Empire Strikes Back.
One problem with Rotten Tomatoes' audience score, along with IMDB, is there's no vetting process. Instead, we should look to the movie's CinemaScore, an America-based exit poll system that scientifically works out an audience score. The Force Awakens earned an A score, with 90% of all respondents being positive, the average score being 4.5. According to Deadline, non-Disney sources are saying the backlash has been primarily online "trolling." The publication also points to one Facebook page titled "Down With Disney's Treatment of Franchises and Fanboys" who are claiming to use bot accounts to target the film's score. SPOILERS: With Star Wars: The Last Jedi being released one week ago, we ask you to share your thoughts of the film now that you've had some time to watch and digest it. How did you like Daisy Ridley's performance? Do you think Kylo will try and turn Rey again as Supreme Leader? How will General Leia's future be dealt with now that Carrie Fisher has passed away last year?
One problem with Rotten Tomatoes' audience score, along with IMDB, is there's no vetting process. Instead, we should look to the movie's CinemaScore, an America-based exit poll system that scientifically works out an audience score. The Force Awakens earned an A score, with 90% of all respondents being positive, the average score being 4.5. According to Deadline, non-Disney sources are saying the backlash has been primarily online "trolling." The publication also points to one Facebook page titled "Down With Disney's Treatment of Franchises and Fanboys" who are claiming to use bot accounts to target the film's score. SPOILERS: With Star Wars: The Last Jedi being released one week ago, we ask you to share your thoughts of the film now that you've had some time to watch and digest it. How did you like Daisy Ridley's performance? Do you think Kylo will try and turn Rey again as Supreme Leader? How will General Leia's future be dealt with now that Carrie Fisher has passed away last year?
It had corny pleb joke, a useless side plot, some entertaining space action, and cool CG.
I didn't like it enough to go out of my way to recommend it to just anyone, but I wouldn't take back watching it.
The modern fencing sabre bears little resemblance to the cavalry sabre, having a thin, 88 cm (35 in) long straight blade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I grew up in the 70s/80s and loved the original 4-5-6. Prequels 1 and 3 were okay, 2 can be wiped off the face of the universe for all I care, but I liked 7 and Rogue One. Episode 8 ... crap!!! What ruined it for me was all the stupid jokes. Han Solo made a wisecrack now and then, and those were funny because they were rare and witty. But it felt like Episode 8 had an idiotic joke every 10 minutes. And it's one thing if a new/younger character makes a joke, but Luke???? What will episode 9 bring, fart jokes? Cut the jokes and re-release it as-is, the movie would be 20 minutes shorter and then I can actually evaluate the plot. Extremely disappointed.
As far as I'm concerned, Star Wars ended after the original three movies.
If I wanted to see a cow being milked vigorously, I'd tour a local farm.
Never gonna change. Dysfunctional family needs therapy. Lots of explosions. Cute robots and critters (think: merchandising).
Money maker, cash cow, hard to see how they can change what's pretty much set in stone. Uh, I meant Carbonite.
Isn't it interesting the personal body guards serving an evil personified show such great loyalty to him even after he was dead?
It is three generations after Anakin was burnt completely except his head. And they were able to keep him alive. They can't to that to Snoke?
What is there that could burn with such nice orange and yellow hydro carbon flames in space ships?
How come the dreadnought class battle cruiser or whatever it is can be split into two but still there is breathable atmosphere for all?
Why do I get flash backs of Guns of Navarone like barrels and recoils? and why do spacecraft bank when they turn?
I was hoping for an ultimate plot twist like, Rey is the daughter of a long living space being being that is the "father" of Anakin with Shmi (and erased her memory after). Thus making Rey a step sister of Anakin and an aunt for Luke. No such luck. I don't believe Kylo. There is a story behind Rey's origins.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The movie was fine, but full of problems that detract from the story. The best review I've read discussing those problems is 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi': The Full Shapiro Review (spoilers). The review also discusses good parts and things that work toward the bottom, but that list is way shorter than the list of problems.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm just going to go ahead and not participate in this. Thanks anyhow.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Why didn't they use the Rebel Cruiser as a weapon the moment they abandoned it? (or as they abandoned it and save Adm. Holdo)
This probably ruins the entire Star Wars universe/canon as far as space combat..
Where are the hyperspace missiles? If a ship the size of the millenium Falcon can go lightspeed, a similar sized hyperspace missile is unstoppable:
" Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star.." - Han Solo
See also: https://www.theringer.com/2017/12/20/16800970/vice-admiral-holdo-maneuver-the-last-jedi
-ahb
have read reviews that say how great it is because how original it's. I disagree: the old Expanded Universe had more originality.
And those who criticize hardcore fans don't get it. The fans could accept that Luke&Co are no longer the main characters. The problem is that this movie doesn't offer closure. It desecrates the characters. It's what I call "genius complex".
This movie did a lot of things right, and I'm going to watch it again, but there are many things that make me question whether it should have been made as a Star Wars movie.
Visually it's great. It looks like a Star Wars movie, and speaking as a fan I'm glad they used so many practical effects instead of computer generated effects.
Plot-wise it is a bit of a roller-coaster ride. Ups and downs. Some funny moments.
But when you think about the overall story and what is going on, it's bleak and depressing, far beyond what is tonally appropriate for Star Wars.
Spoilers follow. This whole topic is spoilery anyway.
People didn't like how The Empire Strikes Back ended on a "down" note. Oh my gosh, this movie was at least a thousand times bleaker. Apparently after the big success of blowing up the second Death Star and the death of the Emperor, the Rebellion spent the next 40 years or so losing and losing and losing. The Rebellion starts the movie with one capital ship, a medical ship and some sort of freighter or something; and only a few dozen X-Wing fighters. Then they take horrific losses and end the movie with literally a couple of dozen surviving members on board a battered old freighter. The only senior figure left in the Rebellion is Leia. They have no resources, and no allies (the allies they thought they had did not come when they were needed the most).
This is so bleak and depressing that it's painful to think about. But at least we get Luke training Rey as a Jedi, right? Oh no; Luke is bitter, and instead of learning from what happened and moving on, he spent decades in self-imposed exile; he said, in so many words, that he went to that planet to die. And in fact he didn't give Rey any useful training. He promised three lessons, and gave two, and they were great lessons if her big problem was that she was stuck-up and had an inflated sense of her own importance; her actual problem was that she was truly gifted in the Force yet had no idea what to do or how to use the Force, in short that she needed good training.
Then there is the whole Finn and Rose sub-plot where they try to get a codebreaker. Their efforts are worse than useless. The codebreaker somehow figured out that the rebels were sneaking away and tipped off the First Order. (I really don't know how a codebreaker could figure this out; Finn couldn't have told him because Finn didn't know either.) The rebel plan to sneak away was working until the codebreaker tipped off the bad guys, so something like 90% of the surviving rebels died because of that codebreaker guy.
And why did they take the risk of the whole codebreaker thing? Because the Vice Admiral didn't tell Poe that she actually had a plan, and she went out of her way to let him think she had no plan and everyone was going to die. Was this to "teach him a lesson"? Makes no sense, and that lesson came at a horrific cost.
I hope that the writers have a plan already for Episode IX. The story is at such a low point that it will take a truly amazing plan to have the Rebellion come roaring back and defeat the bad guys.
Now, I'll briefly talk about stuff I liked.
I really enjoyed the bit at the beginning where Poe was all alone in an X-Wing in front of the First Order ships. Some people say all the comedy fell flat, but the bit where he was stalling for time by pretending he wasn't hearing anything was IMHO laugh-out-loud funny.
I think that one of the stupidest George Lucas ideas from the prequels is being redeemed. (Not midichlorians... that bit of stupidity is irredeemable.) There was this prophecy of "the one who will bring balance to the Force" and that whole thing went nowhere in the prequels. Well, maybe Rey is about to bring balance to the Force. She isn't afraid of the Dark Side and the Dark Side doesn't seem to be pushing her to do evil things... and Yoda seems to think she will do better without the historical teachings of the Jedi. Maybe she will be able to embra
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Just like the rest of these children's movies for stupid kids who don't know shit, especially not physics. Advertisement for action figures for children, it should be forbidden or at least called what it is.
Hell they didn't even get the name for the stupid light_sabers_ right? Sabers are _curved_, that's what differentiates them from a sword.
Firstly, sabers are swords just like a Ferrari is a car. Secondly, while the saber started out as a curved bladed adopted by Europeans through contact with the Ottomans, by the 19th and early 20th century sabers became progressively more straight bladed. The US Model 1913 Cavalry saber for example, had a completely straight blade as did many other contemporary sabers. but you are right in that the 'light saber' has nothing in common with any kind of saber. If the lightsaber is anything it's a kind of 'laser shikomizue' or something (one of the few straight bladed Japanese swords I can think of other than a Shinobigatana). Kylo Ren's weapon is more of a 'laser longsword' and he uses it a bit like one too. That was kind of interesting to watch because the 'light sabers' in Star Wars are used in a somewhat 'katana-esque' manner and it is always fun to see Talhoffer and Liechtenauer's ideas clash with the Japanese mindset. Mind you it's way more fun to watch at a HEMA event where the Longswordsman and the Katanna fanboy are both purists and both of them actually know precisely what they are doing.
The only reviewers whose opinion matters are those who have similar tastes to yours. That's the whole point -- to give you an idea if you, personally, would enjoy the movie or not.
That sure felt like a huge continuity gap, did they cut a scene?
Overall I thought the production values were first-rate, but the plot and script were mediocre and predictable. (And don't get me started about bad physics or bad tactics - I had to suspend A Lot of belief.)
1st viewing I had a fun time. It was a pop corn flick moment. So I'll say that for it. Didn't hate every second of seeing it. I'll still own this movie on blue ray I'm sure.
That being said - what a sad waste of potential on the story line of the character we all loved so much for those of us growing up in the 70s, 80s. I get that they wanted to kill the character off, ok. I can live with that - but make it glorious. He should have gone down doing something visually stunning. Saving the rebels by pulling a star ship out of orbit with the force. Or thrashing the whole ground attack crew with the force. And certainly shouldn't have been played as a grump old man, without the force, in depressed isolation. He was always a beacon of hope and should have stayed that way. We were robbed of seeing Luke the Jedi Master.
Been watching Star Wars for about 30 years. That said, it was a fun film despite the jokes, which I thought was a bit overboard. Anyway, I have come to accept there's nothing truly groundbreaking from them anymore so I just switch the old brain off and sit back and watch the film. Why am I so content with that? Because I have nothing to gain or lose from these films not being a stakeholder. It doesn't fix or ruin my childhood and I don't have a void to fill in my life with it.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Uh... because a fictional 'light sabre' is any less disconnected from old cavalry swords??
I'm going with the critics.
When we saw episode VII, we knew that the hopeful situation after Episode VI had fizzled. The Republic was once again threatened by the First Order, much like it was by the Empire. The new Jedi Order was a disaster, producing Kylo Ren and apparently not much else. The characters from the first movie (with the exception of Chewbacca) had been hurt by the intervening events, sometimes hurt badly. There are some new, upbeat characters (Rey, Finn, Poe) who resemble the original trilogy characters. That's the situation going into Episode VIII.
We see how badly Luke was hurt by what had happened. He's not acting like the Luke of the original trilogy, and there's darn good reasons why. He wants the Jedi Order destroyed. We see that the heroes can screw up, too, rather than having everything work out. Kylo Ren acts decisively when he can, and tries to subvert Rey, despite often looking like he really doesn't know what he's doing. This is Star Wars with more real characters. They have flaws. They often screw up. They keep going. The logic isn't all there, but that's Star Wars as a whole, not just Episodes VII and VIII.
We've got the visuals we'd expect from Star Wars. The story is bleak, but Leia claims they have everything they need to start a rebellion. We'll see how that goes in Episode IX. Finn and Rose have inspired some discontent and hope on the casino planet.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"Subtle undercurrent of man-shaming" my ass! It couldn't possibly be more overt!
Every male character in the movie was a failure, and needed a woman to guide him with her superior wisdom (apart from General Ackbar, I guess, but he didn't last long enough to count).
Luke is a failure who has decided to run and hide and let the universe die, and he needs Rei to guide him back to the path of caring.
Poe is so toxically masculine that he just wants to blow everything up, and he needs a purple-haired woman to have a better plan (which she keeps a secret for no reason), to reprimand him, to forgive him and say she likes him as she nobly sacrifices herself to save the day where he failed. And, apparently, Poe is only interested in seeming like a hero whereas she is only interested in being a hero.
Fin is a coward who wants to flee under pretenses of protecting Rei, only to be stopped by Rose who gives him a better plan and re-ignites his courage. Later on he is so eager to seem like a hero that he is ready to get himself killed, and needs Rose to save him and explain to him that saving what we love is better than fighting what we hate.
Kylo is, of course, falling to the dark side and needs Rei to pull him back to the light. I guess we will see the rest of that in the next movie (or rather, some of you will, because I sure won't).
Snoke and general Hux have no women to guide them, so they are just pure evil until the end.
The take-away is clear: men are violent and selfish and foolish, whereas women are wise and loving and competent.
I can't believe I'm saying it but the 1st and 3rd prequel may have been better than this. This one was just so tedious. There was no story telling, no character development, no plot to speak of. My son said it was like a bad video game campaign. Go here, blow up this gun, escape from these guys, go there get this thing. No epic story. Oh Chewie flew the MF through some hard to navigate thing that caused the pursuing tie fighters to crash because they're not as maneuverable again. Also the first order is so evil that even the snow foxes know to run from them.
It's a movie, get the fuck over yourself. I enjoyed it. Any Star Wars movie can be eviscerated by the plot holes. For fucks sake the death star could simply navigated to the correct position to destroy Yavin IV instead of waiting 30 minutes for it to be in range.
I liked some of what they did, but so much of the movie was just a series of straight-up 'take that's' at TFA and the prequels. Rey's parents? Nobodies. Luke's lightsaber? Tossed away, then broken for no good reason. From a certain point of view? Ben and Luke's different perceptions of that fateful night. Poe is a swashbuckling derring-doer and gets his whole squad killed? Fuck you, Star Wars is swashbuckling space opera, it's SUPPOSED to work like that.
My main problem with the Luke story is that it erased all of his growth from ESB and ROTJ, and turned him right back into a whiney little bitch who wanted to go to Tosche Station and pick up some power converters. They could have had him being an inscrutable old master who went into seclusion to discover where he went wrong, and figure out where to go from there, but instead, he was just running away and hiding. He should have been training Rey like an old kung-fu master, or like Yoda. Yoda's force ghost should have shown up and been like 'That bad, was I? So silly, my training techniques were?'
Having Luke's final interaction with Leia and Ben be nothing but an illusion robbed it of EVERYTHING. Luke should have shown up on the planet in person, kissed Leia, apologized for Ben, then strode out and called Ben out. The AT-ATs and what not should have been wiped away with a wave of the hand when they tried to interfere. Luke should have absolutely CLOWNED Ben, then simply turned off his lightsaber, said something like 'You see? Even though I'm far more powerful than you, I still failed. Strength alone is never enough' and Obi-Wan'd out. Rey should have been left on the Falcon, at the end, looking across all of the old Jedi texts, and one new one, written by Luke Skywalker. She should have been the inheritor of his new understanding, the one to actually put it into practice.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
It was a great Star Wars. Better than the awful prequel trilogy. It was certainly better than Return of the Jedi.
I basically knew where this was going—at the franchise level—the moment Rey had the telepathic dream sequence after first touching Luke's light saber (the whole point of which was to be profoundly pointless and thereby encourage mass Stockholm-syndrome cud chewing) and I haven't given a shit about the rest of that movie, about this movie, or about the next movie ever since, though I do find it amusing to check in on how others are reacting to the Disney Matrix.
Almost every big movie these days is a pastiche of three or more genres (sometimes obviously so, other times mildly concealed).
I was watching the commentary track for Russian Ark last night, and at one point the cameraman panics and tells the guy beside him "I can't do it", because he's got such a bad groin spasm that he worries he'll become crippled permanently. (The entire movie is a single 90-minute take, with a very heavy Steadicam.) But then he sees the 300 actors in period costumes all in perfect position through the next door and he gets a shot of adrenaline and heroically makes it to minute 84. Cut! This breaks a tension so thick that 1000 actors and 1000 assembled extras almost begin to cry.
Well, that lightsaber dream sequence was the screenwriting team confessing "we can't do it"—noooooo!—about finding a principled way to combine all the necessary genres together in the mandatory Disney stew pot.
Fuck it, we'll use telepathy.
A conversation with Martin Amis — 2 December 2016
Does writing get any easier?
Fuck no, not onerous at all, not after The Great Force Vending Machine in the Sky pukes out, faster than light, lady-in-waiting telepathic midichlorians (of course, this minor capability would have barely figured in the outcome until movie number eight).