Board 8 > Metroid: Other M vs. Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi

(+) Yeah! (+)

I think TLJ misstepped with how long the casino planet was, because I thought it being an abject failure of a mission was very jarring and really set up the conclusion of the movie to be ambiguous which made it much more dramatic than a typical good vs evil movie. I bought in that the suicide run by Finn could actually result in death because of it.

I think the fact Luke lost against Vader in empire strikes back is part of the reason that movie was so good for instance.

If the casino plannet was half as long TLJ would be one of my favorite movies of all time.

Canto Bite is the single worst sequence in Star Wars films (disclaimer: haven't seen Solo yet).

And more than it being such a LARGE hole on the movie is that it helps to invalidate the best character from the previous film.

Also, you shouldn't be excited about the idea of ambiguity when one of the sides is literal Nazis.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

I'm apparently incapable of forming my own opinions while at the same time I compare movies that aren't typically compared to each other.

The comparisons are meaningless and unrelated like a game of Mad Libs so yes the original point still stands

HanOfTheNekos posted...

Also, you shouldn't be excited about the idea of ambiguity when one of the sides is literal Nazis

Not ambiguity of morals, ambiguity of victory

ah, gotcha

I guess something that just struck me as odd here was how it feels like TLJ is hated way more intensely than Other M, and how that might be because the latter completely botches what it sets out to do while the former mostly succeeds and some SW fans hate that because it isn't remotely what they want. Plus Other M's controversial story elements coming from someone who has been greatly involved in the series from the very beginning probably lends that an air of authority which prevents too much fanbase fracture comparatively speaking, vs. Rian Johnson getting painted as a pretender to George Lucas's throne. What really gets me here is that there's no evidence whatsoever for Johnson having any actively malicious intent behind making TLJ and he at worst seemed to be frustrated at having to meet fan expectations. In contrast to Paul Verhoeven actively making Starship Troopers spit in the face of its source material, while in the process making something considered by many to have held up far better than said source material - maybe if Starship Troopers was as big a deal as Star Wars Verhoeven would be similarly hated for it?

Likewise I'm mystified why Rian Johnson gets more hate for TLJ than Shane Black does for unleashing both Iron Man 3 and The Predator on audiences. And while not really related to TLJ, I still don't get how making a heroine go crazy because of her maternal instincts so that the titular male hero in Multiverse of Madness has to talk sense into her is 'woke' - maybe it has more to do with accusations of Strange being demoted to a "side character" in his own movie? But then the movie has three Doctor Stranges, so how can that be the case?

That's one reason I started realizing how full of crap those people are. Typically I would think "message before plot" would mean message taking priority over plot within a work, but they instead use "message" to mean behind-the-scenes agenda and "plot" to mean what they want. I hate this so much.

These people are so terrible and I definitely don't agree with any of their positions despite how much of their content I watch and talk about please believe me

LinkMarioSamus posted...

I guess something that just struck me as odd here was how it feels like TLJ is hated way more intensely than Other M,

Metroid: Other M was the third-best-selling video game in Japan during its week of release with 45,398 copies sold, ranking it behind Wii Party and Monster Hunter Diary: Poka Poka Airu Village.[95] An additional 11,239 copies were sold the following week.[96] It was also the ninth-best-selling game in North America during September 2010,[97] with 173,000 copies sold.[98] In the United Kingdom, the game failed to make the top 10 and placed 12th in its first week.[99] In November 2010, Fils-Aim stated that the game is "getting close to half a million" copies sold in the United States.[100]

Star Wars: The Last Jedi grossed $620.2 million in the United States and Canada, and $712.5 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $1.333 billion.[4] It had a worldwide opening of $450.8 million, the eighth-biggest of all time,

So basically "It's Popular, So it Sucks". Got it.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

So basically "It's Popular, So it Sucks". Got it.

Oh my god is this character growth

Leonhart4 posted...

These people are so terrible and I definitely don't agree with any of their positions despite how much of their content I watch and talk about please believe me

Yeah it's more me realizing just how deep it all gets.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

So basically "It's Popular, So it Sucks". Got it.

No, it's popular so there are millions and millions more people who have experience with it and can criticize it.

Very few people played Other M.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Yeah it's more me realizing just how deep it all gets.

No it's not

Star Wars is one of the biggest properties of all time, there is no mystery why any controversies over it would overshadow anything from any other franchise.

Yeah as much as I fault Disney for not having a fucking plan to start off a trilogy of movies, they were also in a lose-lose situation because Star Wars is too huge and means too many different things to all kinds of people.

It's absolutely impossible to make a Star Wars movie that will please everyone. There will always be haters.

Granted you can say that about any form of media.

Not having a f***ing plan is exactly the biggest problem about the trilogy though. No excuse for that one ever. Like, the best part of the whole sequel trilogy for me was theorizing and speculating about what would happen after watching TFA. That fell flat when it turned out they didn't even know themselves. I would have respected their decisions then.

After the Prequel Trilogy, I think people would have to be pretty naive to expect a Star Wars movie to be perfectly what they want.

Granted, there are many naive people in the world.

To be fair I hear the original trilogy wasn't all that planned out either.

In TLJ's defence and while I prefer TFA as a movie more (TFA > TLJ >>> ROS)... after finishing TFA in theatres I was already disappointed and I think it already set the ST up to suck by resetting the series back to do OT again. I wasn't at all interested in the theorizing which was so heavily focused on who Rey's parents are and that was just one of many dumb plotline retreads for me.

I thought TFA was a fine, modestly enjoyable movie on its own (not dragged down by terrible B & C plots like TLJ) but a horrible backstep for the franchise as a whole cohesive piece, which the ST continued to prove and now I don't want to see anything that follows. Even the enjoyable content in the in-between period like Mandalorian/Boba keeps in the back of your mind that it all has to eventually lead into the First Order garbage. Just fuck it and go to an entirely distant time period.

Rogue One, while clearly linked to the OT was still very much its own thing (until the last few minutes of New Hope fanservice) and I just got to sit back and enjoy it on its own.

Well, the first movie was basically a finished story in itself and then they expanded the story. TFA was a teaser movie through and through.

TFA at least set up some worthwhile things. Finn was a really good character, and brought out the best of the entire cast (Rey, Poe, Han). There were inklings of Force sensitivity in both Finn and Rey. And Kylo was decidedly not Vader, and that left him a lot of room. Coincidentally perhaps, Kylo was the only character to get anything in TLJ.

I do agree entirely that the First Order was a bad concept. Then sniping out 5 planets that comprised the New Republic, with virtually no exploration of what the New Republic was, was also just pointless. Those are pretty bad, along with some sloppy writing decisions (Leia hugging Rey).

But at least it's a fun movie and the homage paid to ANH is done with love.

yeah I will say while I think TFA was a huge narrative backstep I still at the time held hope that they could try to go somewhere with this new cast of characters but instead I got the detestable mutiny and casino plots

TLJ was awful mostly because it takes everything that was in TFA, curls it up in a ball and throws it away. Then it proceeds to make a Star Wars movie out of a slow-moving car chase, while our Mary Sue-ish protagonist is off on her own doing things that neither help nor hurt her case, but are definitely not progressing her story. It takes the entirety of the rebellion and reduces it to "these people on three ships," which seems statistically implausible and makes us wonder just what the hell happened between the OT and ep 7 to wind up here. It was unsatisfying in almost every meaningful way, took existing characters in unexpected directions simply for the sake of being unexpected and reductive (Hux, Phasma, OT characters), and contains Adam Driver.

It also leaves episode 9 in an absolute no-win situation where there was nowhere to go, so of course episode 9 was going to be awful because WTF did they have to work with? Honestly, the fact that RoS wasn't an even bigger dumpster fire is a freaking miracle.

Spoilers

Luke Skywalker is a Mary Sue

The biggest problem with RoS is that it spent at least half of the movie trying to reverse Last Jedi instead of actually being its own movie and thus it has no real identity as a result

pjbasis posted...

To be fair I hear the original trilogy wasn't all that planned out either.

That's exactly why Disney thought they could do the same thing and it'd work out fine. They figured it'd be easy enough to copy the OT's methods and just pick a different director for each movie to do whatever they wanted and it'd be no problem. They apparently didn't consider how much of a difference the internet would make in that process. Social media didn't exist to spread widescale speculation in the 70s.

Empire Strikes Back had a lot of hatred for it on first release as well.

masterplum posted...

Spoilers

Luke Skywalker is a Mary Sue

I don't think you know what a Mary Sue is.

To be fair the wing it approach CAN work, but not if each successive entry deliberately blows up everything the previous entry setup.

Right, I imagine there was a bit more communication between directors of the OT. Instead of Disney's approach, which was seemingly no collaboration whatsoever.

Using the last movie for extreme backpedaling also has to be the most cowardly thing they've ever done.

Luke stopped being a Mary Sue like 5 minutes in when he whined about going to tosche station to pick up some power converters.

Luke lost a hand, that's not Mary Sue ish

CassandraCain posted...

Right, I imagine there was a bit more communication between directors of the OT.

I mean lets not forget that even though he wasnt directing, Lucas was still very much hands on involved in the production of V and VI.

Very true. In a perfect world Disney would have hired Lucas to be their Kevin Fiege of Star Wars. Not actually directing anything but keeping it all together and focused.

Sure TLJ had its problems, but I don't like how in every topic B8ers talk as though it was considered a series low point right from the outset. Less than a quarter of the board rated it poorly on release:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/9/9/AAAB8RAADQvX.png
(this was from my Star Wars Week poll series, so those were the votes from everyone who saw it opening weekend)

I think TFA would've been rated over all PT films when it released by most people, but not as likely nowadays.

HanOfTheNekos posted...

I think TFA would've been rated over all PT films when it released by most people, but not as likely nowadays.

Episode III is the only one that might beat it and I don't think it would be a runaway

In all seriousness, I think I completely agree with the statement that the Last Jedi is a great movie and a Terrible starwars movie, and the Phantom Menace is a terrible movie and a great starwars movie. This is why there is a such a wide discrepancy between critic scores and user scores for those two movies

So I think your opinions of all these movies really depends a lot on how invested you are in starwars as a universe

masterplum posted...

In all seriousness, I think I completely agree with the statement that the Last Jedi is a great movie and a Terrible starwars movie, and the Phantom Menace is a terrible movie and a great starwars movie

I would agree if you replaced "great" with "bad" for both. The general idea makes sense though

No, it really doesn't.

Leonhart4 posted...

Episode III is the only one that might beat it and I don't think it would be a runaway

Yeah people were very positive about TFA

And they should be, TFA is good fun

HanOfTheNekos posted...

No, it really doesn't.

Basically it's a kinda dumbed down way to say Phantom Menace adds more to the "lore" of Star Wars.

What would Star Wars as a fictional property look like if The Phantom Menace never existed. It adds a bunch of characters, alien races, gimmicks like double bladed lightsabers and podracing. It makes the world setting more rich.

Now compare that to The Last Jedi which kinda just reuses things that already exist and arguably makes them worse. I don't think anything introduced in TLJ inherently has a Star Wars flair to it.

Like I don't like either movie but The Last Jedi is definitely better acted and has better production values and the like, yet Phantom Menace is by and large the more memorable movie in terms of things it adds to Star Wars.

TLJ does not stand as a movie without being Star Wars, is what I meant with my response.

I would go so far as to say that Phantom Menace would stand better than TLJ as a non-Star Wars movie, though it doesn't help that TLJ is a sequel and at that point it'd just be conjecture and though exercise.

Also Liam Neeson is great.

Oh uh, yeah, maybe. It's hard to me to think about it because it's a sequel. I feel like it and TFA combine to be vaguely passable generic Sci fi stuff but it's hard to think about "would I care about any of this at ALL if Star Wars hadn't done so much legwork in setting up the world setting" because it's pretty much all derivative (TPM reuses Tattooine but it's practically a completely different setting from the OT)

Ngamer64 posted...

Sure TLJ had its problems, but I don't like how in every topic B8ers talk as though it was considered a series low point right from the outset. Less than a quarter of the board rated it poorly on release:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/9/9/AAAB8RAADQvX.png
(this was from my Star Wars Week poll series, so those were the votes from everyone who saw it opening weekend)

I've been shitting on TLJ since day 1. I dunno if I took that poll, but I would have picked the bottom option if I had.

I wish Favslist was back so we could tell which of the 2 was higher over there

TheRock1525 posted...

Yes, nothing says "on life support" like a film making $2+ billion.

Creatively on life support. People saw TFA because it was a new Star Wars movie and had the potential to be good. Also, since when does box office revenue at all equate to quality?

azuarc posted...

TLJ was awful mostly because it takes everything that was in TFA, curls it up in a ball and throws it away. Then it proceeds to make a Star Wars movie out of a slow-moving car chase, while our Mary Sue-ish protagonist is off on her own doing things that neither help nor hurt her case, but are definitely not progressing her story. It takes the entirety of the rebellion and reduces it to "these people on three ships," which seems statistically implausible and makes us wonder just what the hell happened between the OT and ep 7 to wind up here. It was unsatisfying in almost every meaningful way, took existing characters in unexpected directions simply for the sake of being unexpected and reductive (Hux, Phasma, OT characters), and contains Adam Driver.

It also leaves episode 9 in an absolute no-win situation where there was nowhere to go, so of course episode 9 was going to be awful because WTF did they have to work with? Honestly, the fact that RoS wasn't an even bigger dumpster fire is a freaking miracle.

I would say that TFA set TLJ up for failure, and there's very little they could have done to save the sequels at that point. In terms of watchability, TFA > TLJ >>>>> ROS, but TFA is the movie that started the downward trajectory of Star Wars as a whole, and I cannot forgive it for that. Remember, TFA was the first real entry into the "new canon", which threw away decades of fleshed out story lines and characters for the absolute shit fest we received in return.

To this day I still do not at all understand any of the backstory of the sequel movies because they did such a horrible fucking job of explaining it

And don't forget that JJ Abrams created Lost. He knows how to set things up but he has no idea where they're supposed to go. Which is why he was only intended to do TFA and leave the answers up to the other two directors.

He never had the answers to begin with. Worse even still, all the resolutions (if you can call them that) came from reddit.

And that whole "RoS had nowhere to go" is a really lame criticism. All you need is imagination, I bet it would have been a way better movie if they had just stuck with the original director.

The original director...didn't they bring the original director back because directing-by-committee wasn't working?

TFA wasn't great, but it wasn't awful, and at least it left plotlines that the following director(s) could extend or subvert...instead of cutting off at the knees in order to make a bad car chase.

Considering how much this board hates Other M it can't say good things that it has almost 40% of the vote here.