> without any plot fundamentals that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.
1. Luke went from the most optimistic and positive Jedi in the world, who found the good in Darth Vader, to a dude who tried to kill his own nephew without any explanation on how he got to that point aside from "I had a bad dream". Pathetic even if you ignore he also had dreams about becoming Darth Vader himself, and overcame those.
2. They completely destroyed any sense of time or speed with their "this turtle is so slow but too fast" race as the main plot point
3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???
4. They kept the elderly Leia around, instead of having her do a hero's sendoff at the end. Instead, they killed the only good character that was set up perfectly to be the new cutthroat cunning but likable leader of the rebellion.
5. They ruined every other fight in star wars with the hyperspace joust. Why was any other fight a big deal when they could have just rammed a few ships with jump drives into the star destroyers, or hell, the death star.
6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.
And this is just what I can remember on my phone while sitting at this bar. If you think this movie wasn't a deep betrayal to the universe, you didn't pay any attention to it.
"Lightspeed skipping" was just offensively absurd. They're teleporting around at random, but wherever they wind up, they're dodging between things on a planet's surface? Flickering through the galaxy like a slideshow? I don't even know why spaceships have chairs. You're never going to travel long enough to need to sit down. It was a fun visual spectacle that made no sense and flew in the face of all the worldbuilding and scene setting they'd been doing over the last 40 years of star wars movies.
I'm picturing someone else at the bar, watching you as you furiously, dejectedly type away on your phone whilst your facial demeanour slowly degrades...
"Say, man, what's up?"
"Someone just made me think about the myriad ways in which The Last Jedi not just sucked, but sucked the rest of the life from the 40-year history of Star Wars"
"oooof! Here, I'll shout you a bottle of Jack's, but I know it's not enough by far".
Dear hyperhopper .. please get out of my head and where did you get that recording of ranting about this movie to my friend drunk at a bar in 2018ish?. :)
Don't forget about the pointless plot of the animal racing with John Boyega's character that went no where.
Also, don't forget the whole dressing down of Poe Dameron by Leia and Vice-Admiral Holdo as lol guy dumb. But the action gets ignored because she decides lol ship danger ram into bad guy.
I found that I hated the movie more and more as I explained the plot to a friend. I went from this is a solid dud to I really hated this when I went and described the action in the film.
0. they're running away in space and the imperials can't catch up.
unless the two ships are exactly the same then at some point there will be a power to weight difference and one will catch up or get away.
fuel was never an issue in any other SW story.
also why didn't the imperials just hyperspace jump in front?
7. why bomb the base they're escaping from and not the ship they're flying to?
8. they only launch about 5 tie fighters against poe at the beginning and the ship only has about 6 self defence lasers. Rogue One showed us just how many Tie fighters could be launched to defend an important base.
9. the rebel bombers. nuf said.
1. Luke had a knack for hitting things right where it matters most, a product of his ability to focus. Forget the long winded rituals and attack the target dead on. That’s Luke above everything. In spite of the weight of the galaxy, he doesn’t loose focus. Him thinking about killing his nephew was almost his failure in keeping target. He knows something else is more important to focus on which this won’t solve. He has a focus no one else in the story does. It’s again seen in his last moments of force projecting. No other user sustains that amount to focus in the movies, look at his face and for how long he did it. I’m tired of this innocent always positive Luke trope. That’s not his main quality. He was a crack shot and that’s his method of the force. Him reconciling with Vader is mainly about a one on one, how to topple the Empire with a single interaction, he just has to get close enough. Not goodness, which of course he does have. Only Sidius has comparable focus. Luke’s time in seclusion is rest and preparation for past and future unsustainable effort.
I think the parent poster agrees with you, but wrote somewhat ambiguously. I think he meant something like “a movie that was visually very striking, [but] without any plot fundamentals[,] that [therefore] felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.”
For what it's worth, I agree with him. When I saw the movie and even just the promotional materials I thought it was visually striking and had very strong color themes. But wow, it was a train wreck in terms of plot, characters, faithfulness to the series, etc. I could go on for hours.
But to be fair, I also think The Force Awakens was terrible and painted the story into a dumb direction. Instead of “what if the Nazis came back to power in Argentina”, they should have moved the story into a direction more like “the alliance against a common enemy is fractured”, like what actually happened after World War 2, or “there are now many factions of ambitious warlords rising among the widely deployed and still incredibly powerful imperial military”, or some of both. The Mandalorian did the setting much better in that sense.
They should have picked a direction at all, and TFA should have been anything other than a pandering remake of ANH (except this time the Death Star is even bigger.) There was no plan for the trilogy, so it wound up being Rian Johnson sabotaging JJ Abrams, then Abrams desparately trying to salvage things, and Palpatine thrown in at the last second in hopes people would show up.
>3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???
>4. They kept the elderly Leia around, instead of having her do a hero's sendoff at the end.
I don't want to get into a long drown out fight about Star Wars on HN so I'll ignore most of your points, but this complaint has always really bothered me because it shows such a huge lack of human empathy. A real person died, a person that was one of the 4 or 5 most important people to the success of Star Wars. And it has become the standard opinion of her "fans" that her last performance should have been largely thrown away to slightly improve the overall narrative arc of the movies. It really puts into perspective what fans care about. It is all about the product on the screen. Anyone involved in making the product is meaningless. Their only significance is in their role of servicing the product.
I'm glad they didn't re-edit the movie after Carrie Fisher's death even if it created new challenges for the next movie.
Want to respect Carrie Fisher? Shut down production, and give her family time to mourn, then reconsider the second half of the trilogy. Having her come back to life in a silly way after she fucking died in real life is offensive.
I agree that they shouldn't have re-edited the movie based on Carrie Fisher's death IRL, but that scene is a masterclass in bad writing.
Rian's intention was to demonstrate some semblance of humanity remained within Kylo. But the optics are that he is truly weak and in the end isn't even bothered much by the (for all he knows at the moment) imminent death of his mother. Had Kylo fired the shot he at least would have surpassed Vader in evilness, whether or not Leia saved herself.
I agree with the "fans" that she should have died in that scene, but since Rian was too scared to snuff Leia before Luke the scene shouldn't have been written in the first place.
The general audience does not care about any of that though. Star Wars is beyond ridiculous in the first place - I mean how does "light-sabers" make any sense? What matters to the general audience is there are relatable characters doing cool stuff which feels plausible in the moment. The space ramming was cool and emotionally satisfying, so it works.
For most of the audience, if they know Luke at all, it is as the whiny kid with the bad haircut from the old movies. So its fun to see him as old and grumpy. They do not care if he is some kind of space-Jesus in the expanded universe or whatever.
A "deep betrayal to the universe" of Slave Leia, Jar-Jar Binks, C3PO?
> 3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???
I didn't think she was fully unconscious. Also, "magically"? She used the Force. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together. In this case, given she was in a vacuum, just a slight pull on the ship is all she needed to fly back to it.
> Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training
Well, that is the premise, though. Luke himself grew immensely powerful with much less training than Anakin. Some people are just born with stronger Force. Something something midichlorians
Isn't Luke the same story? He went from zero to Darth Vader rival in a couple of years maybe? Yoda thought that kid Anakin was already too old for training, but Luke was a young adult.
Rey's rise was sillier still, but both heroes are the story of an "even more special individual" superseding the efforts of prior generations by virtue of their intrinsic personal connection with the force - pure genetic destiny.
Luke went to dagobah for training with Yoda for a long time, then spent years more training after that. And then then he was no match for Vader and palpatine, they were still toying with him just trying to turn him to the dark side. What he really did was make Anakin look inward and redeem himself by killing the emperor. He became a competent Jedi but never became stronger than everybody else before him like Rey did.
>1. Luke went from the most optimistic and positive Jedi in the world, who found the good in Darth Vader, to a dude who tried to kill his own nephew without any explanation on how he got to that point aside from "I had a bad dream". Pathetic even if you ignore he also had dreams about becoming Darth Vader himself, and overcame those.
Luke was always fragile. He barely trained with Yoda, then he basically failed up to celebrity status. His weakness has always been his impatience, and his preference for the quick and easy out.
He became an icon, he got old and disillusioned, he realized his naive view of the world and the Force didn't apply to reality, as he saw the Jedi being just as corrupt as the Sith, and just as the Jedi did he fell back into a rigid orthodoxy that led him to repeat the cycle of generational darkness that he never took the proper effort to address because he was never properly trained. And in the end, he regained a truer and more grounded faith in the force than he had before. What Yoda literally said would happen, happened.
That isn't pathetic, it's an actual character arc. Unfortunately, people like yourself only wanted Luke Skywalker to remain a cardboard cutout.
>3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???
Leia is the sister of one of the most powerful Jedi in history. She has the Force, too.
It's weird how many people completely missed that.
5. They ruined every other fight in star wars with the hyperspace joust. Why was any other fight a big deal when they could have just rammed a few ships with jump drives into the star destroyers, or hell, the death star.
I've never understood this argument. Why don't we simply kamikaze aircraft and submarines into our enemies now? Why bother with guns and missiles?
I mean, it's a risky (potentially deadly) maneuver that a rebellion lacking in personnel and equipment can scarcely afford to lose through normalizing. It's not something you do all the time even when it is effective. Japan only resorted to kamikaze missions out of desperation.
And I'm curious what exactly you think the effect of ramming into one ship with another ship transitioning into hyperspace should be, and why it shouldn't be an effective weapon at all?
No, this is just finding shit to nitpick about.
>6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.
It was established that the Force is a constant, distributed amongst all Jedi. The fewer Jedi there are, the more powerful each becomes because they have access to a greater portion of the whole. Rey was as powerful as she was because, as one of the few Force users left, she had potential access to nearly all of it.
>If you think this movie wasn't a deep betrayal to the universe, you didn't pay any attention to it.
I don't know, it seems like you're the one who didn't pay attention. Did you even see any of the new trilogy or just jump on the hate train when it was popular? Because I've seen all of your criticisms, verbatim, repeated ad nauseum, by people who just seem to be repeating memes.
It was established that the Force is a constant, distributed amongst all Jedi. The fewer Jedi there are, the more powerful each becomes because they have access to a greater portion of the whole.
I believe what the parent comment meant was that, when someone dies he/she will become "one with the force" (cosmic force) and will bring additional power to the force (living force). I forgot what comic or series I read or watched that from but that's how it worked if you watched all Star Wars, including the stupid animated ones.
No, I meant what I said, it was one of the things they changed about the way the force worked in the new movies, but I'll be damned if I can actually find a source to prove it. So there's a chance I Mandela Effected myself but I'd swear it was a thing.
Even then, assuming I'm full of shit... she's a Palpatine. Secret legendary bloodline. I hate it but it still works in universe.
They established this in Episode 1, when Qui-Gon talks about becoming "one with the force". It was implied to tie in with the Originals when the holograms of Obi-Wan and Anakin show up in the ending of ROTJ.
I'm not sure what changed with the fewer Force users thing in the new series shrug.
I disagree with much of your post, but the first point bothers me the most. If the trilogy were about Luke's disillusionment and fall, I would have been much more interested. You are filling in a ton of back story that I can see making sense, but you can't just handwave it in, especially with a character as important a Luke Skywalker. I can see a creative and emotionally compelling series about how he deals with impostor syndrome and I could even see it ending very badly for him. Treating that character arc as a sidebar misses the point of the entire saga.
The intent was there, even if it was poorly executed on. That lack of coherence is one of the most frustrating elements of the new trilogy for me. It had a lot of good ideas but no sense of direction.
It wasn't executed on at all. The story was not about Luke, it was about the new class. Which could have been fine as well, but they ruined Luke's character with no explanation. Some people care about that.
> And I'm curious what exactly you think the effect of ramming into one ship with another ship transitioning into hyperspace should be
It has to be nothing, or else none of the other movies make sense at all. Kinetic energy attacks (accelerate a mass to a great velocity) are the most obvious attack there is, from the dawn of time with throwing rocks to bows and arrows to muskets to cannons on up. And in a universe where you can accelerate a mass immediately to light speed, nothing else will really compare.
So yes, at some level it makes obvious sense that a kamikaze of one starship to another "should" work. But in the Star Wars universe we had had to suspend that disbelief (in some ways justified because light speed jumping isn't real, so maybe it just doesn't work that way) because otherwise X-wings could take out Star Destroyers and the Death Star is unnecessary because you can just strap the hyperspace drives to large hunk of rock.
You have to take into account that Star Wars is not an attempt to simulate realistic space battle strategy and tactics, it's pew-pew space battles and laser swords and pulp adventure. It was never realistic. The Death Star is a patently ridiculous, extremely inefficient weapon, since there's no need to entirely explode a planet to destroy it, as is it needing to wait until the moon of Yavin is out of the way when it could easily destroy Yavin from any axis, as is the trench run, which only exists at all because George Lucas ripped off a World War 2 movie, scene for scene, as is the plot twist of the exhaust port. Yes, it's been retconned (like the parsecs thing) but it's still goofy as hell that two torpedos could cause a chain reaction big enough to blow up an entire moon-sized ship even if it hit the reactor dead on. People accept it because it's the OT and they have nostalgia glasses on but it really is kind of bullshit.
The Empire was just that arrogant and self-confident that they never noticed such an obvious flaw until it was too late? Still bullshit.
Sabotage? Better, and it got us Rogue One, which was a great movie. But even then it stretches credibility.
The walkers in Empire Strikes Back are ridiculous, no one would actually build those, with their obvious (and easily exploited) weakness. And in a universe with blasters, no one would ever be using lightsabers. Hell, if you can force choke someone, which even Luke did with that Gammorean guard, why not just force pinch an artery in your enemy's brain or heart? Why bother with all the spinny flips and shit? Just force heart attack from a concealed location, done.
Realistically, you wouldn't even have dogfights in space at all, much less with plane-shaped ships that bank through turns, you would have fully automated, spherical droids attacking from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away or just, as you mentioned, toss a big FU asteroid through hyperspace into the orbit of a planet. And yes, the elephant in the room is that any FTL drive is by definition a weapon of mass destruction.
None of it makes much sense. It never has, because it has always been more important that things look cool than make sense. But the point is, ramming a ship with another ship while going into hyperspace makes no less sense than anything else. The transition to hyperspace isn't instantaneous, you can see the ships zooming in and out of hyperspace and see the starfield warp. So logically there must be a point at which it works. Maybe the margin of error for that is so razor thin that it's not worth trying most of the time. Maybe the particular shape of the ships involved made it an optimal strategy that one time. I don't know, but one can come up with excuses a lot less goofy and contrived that the "maze of black holes" that justifies the parsec line about the Millennium Falcon to justify it.
People are just being particularly nitpicky about this one element while they're willing to forgive the decades of patent ridiculousness that came before.
...with the addendum that it's still possible to dislike the silliness of the prequels and the new trilogy, while embracing the silliness of the OT. Rose-tinted glasses? You betcha! The OT meant the world to me when I was young.
I like Rey though. I think the accusations of her being a Mary Sue are mysogynistic -- isn't Luke's journey in the OT essentially the same? -- as is some of the backlash against the new trilogy. Which I also find boring, but not because the main characters are women or whatever.
What undid the new trilogy, in my opinion, was a couple of things:
- As a reaction against the worst excesses of the prequels, they instead stayed too close to the OT, especially during the serviceable but uninspired The Force Awakens, basically a remake of A New Hope.
- Then, it's clear JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson didn't see eye to eye (or their creative teams didn't, same thing), and so the rest of the new trilogy is essentially a flamewar between the two, with each saying "what happened before didn't matter, THIS is what matters now!" and undoing what the other did. Which was... embarrassing. Again, the OT was also full of retcons -- e.g. it's obvious Leia wasn't Luke's sister in Episode IV -- but at least it wasn't a glorified flamewar of writers actively undoing what others before had done.
> I like Rey though. I think the accusations of her being a Mary Sue are mysogynistic -- isn't Luke's journey in the OT essentially the same?
Not even close. Luke had flaws, we saw real loss with Luke that motivated him, Luke spent a lot of time training, and even then couldn't compete with his enemies, he even lost his hand for trying!
I don't even know where you're bringing misogyny into this, seems like a crazy amount of virtue signalling to bring that up out of nowhere. I hate Gary Stu's just as much, that's what ruined Dune for me.
Can't agree more. SW is just popcorn fun, brain better left elsewhere. I think people are being too harsh and pedantic, Lucas never bothered to make every single aspect of the universe and story infallible and scientifically correct.
I mean if I start taking apart every single aspect, logical issues are there. Why use useless troopers who can't hit barn when robots are so much better? Space bombers that drop bombs in WWII style doesn't make any sense at all. Empire of first 3 movies is bunch of incompetent idiots who couldn't run a local 7/11, not a galactic empire. Literally pick any aspect, it doesn't make much sense in real world.
I had blast watching new trilogy in cinema, simply because I expected same level of brainless fun as original movies, and it delivered. And that's enough, making SW into some infallible religion is as stupid as other religions.
> 6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.
In Star Wars, there are "force sensitive" Jedis and not sensitive. I believe Rey was force sensitive just like the Skywalkers. Rey comes from a bloodline of Palpatine too. Thus, this explains how other Jedis' are "quick" to learn, etc.
In reference to Luke not really knowing what the heck he is doing, see also The Mandalorian season 2.5 (BoBF) - (summarized) "Hey little green guy, you can either join my weird cult and never see your friends again, or you can go ahead and f*ck off"
1. Luke went from the most optimistic and positive Jedi in the world, who found the good in Darth Vader, to a dude who tried to kill his own nephew without any explanation on how he got to that point aside from "I had a bad dream". Pathetic even if you ignore he also had dreams about becoming Darth Vader himself, and overcame those.
2. They completely destroyed any sense of time or speed with their "this turtle is so slow but too fast" race as the main plot point
3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???
4. They kept the elderly Leia around, instead of having her do a hero's sendoff at the end. Instead, they killed the only good character that was set up perfectly to be the new cutthroat cunning but likable leader of the rebellion.
5. They ruined every other fight in star wars with the hyperspace joust. Why was any other fight a big deal when they could have just rammed a few ships with jump drives into the star destroyers, or hell, the death star.
6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.
And this is just what I can remember on my phone while sitting at this bar. If you think this movie wasn't a deep betrayal to the universe, you didn't pay any attention to it.