LogFAQs > #921124093

Entity13 posted...

Finally Solo came out with some questionable choices of its own, but was a fine film. People just lost interest, dooming it.

Whether or not it was a "fine" film was immaterial (though that's itself debatable), because it was a movie that no one wanted, and literally nothing about it changed people's minds on that score. Rogue One introduced new characters, and told a minor story point we already knew in a way we didn't know - Solo recast a character we loved and went out of its way to tell a bunch of stories we already knew in the lamest possible way, completely demystifying the character, conflicting with prior characterization and making the character less cool (the exact same sin that the Prequels committed).

Solo was the "Greedo Shot First" of modern Star Wars films.

Even people who enjoyed it were usually willing to admit that it was relatively mediocre, and relied far too heavily on the "HEY, REMEMBER WHEN THAT ONE GUY SAID THAT THING IN THE MOVIE YOU LIKE? HERE IS THE LAZIEST POSSIBLE WAY WE COULD SHOW YOU THAT THING HAPPENING! WHY DON'T YOU LOVE US YET?!" method of script writing. It certainly didn't help that "Hey, there's that actress I recognize from Game of Thrones!" has literally never been a good actress in any movie she's ever been in, or that Solo was coming directly after the shitstorm that was TLJ. Or that most people heard tons of stories about how the filming was a disaster and expected nothing from it. Or saw Youtube videos telling them how terrible it was and how annoying the feminist robot was. Or any number of other factors that a mediocre movie was never going to overcome solely by word of mouth.

But if Solo had come out and it was the best Star Wars movie ever, if Alden Ehrenreich somehow managed to channel Harrison Ford as well as Ewan McGregor channeled Alec Guinness, if it managed to tell a moving and compelling story in a way that drove everyone who saw it to go tell all their friends how fantastic it was and how they all NEEDED to see it, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Because Solo would have succeeded wildly in spite of being the fourth Star Wars movie in 2 1/2 years, and the 10th overall.

It isn't the number of Star Wars films that's the problem. Or even how often we're getting them. The real problem is that we're hoping for The Matrix and we're getting The Matrix Revolutions.



Entity13 posted...

Then came Ep. VIII, which was also polarizing, stuffed with a needless sequence in the middle no one wanted or cared for, but people generally liked most of the rest, even with a couple oddball decisions for the remainder.

Ehh. "Polarizing" implies more than one pole.

"It's terrible" and "There are a few good parts, and you can kind of see a worthwhile movie in there somewhere, but yeah, the movie as-is is definitely terrible" are pretty much the same opinion, and it's the opinion that nearly everyone had about that film.

People shredded it because it was easily the most "prequel-esque" of the modern films in terms of being a catasterfuck - and because "Okay, the Rey/Kylo parts weren't terrible, even if they were kind of poorly handled, and killing Snoke off like that was still a total waste, and I didn't mind Luke being a bitter old asshole, it was kind of cool" doesn't really counterbalance "but literally everything with Finn and Rose was liquid hot shit, and Poe's entire storyline was incredibly stupid, so I still feel like I wasted nearly two hours of my life I am never getting back."

People didn't rip into TLJ because they were tired of Star Wars movies. They ripped into TLJ because it was terrible.


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