Poll of the Day > I don't understand why people didn't like The Last Jedi.

(+) Yeah! (+)

This isn't a bait topic at all.
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It was ok. The dumbest part was the Holdo part at the end and only because it was thrown in there arbitrarily. Not to mention it makes no sense to do that yet they didn't do it during the Galactic War.
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ernieforss posted...

I didn't like it because it didn't feel like anyone grew as a person. but maybe in the overarching story it's great. we just got to wait and see what happens.

The problem is there IS no overarching story. Rian Johnson openly admitted that when he took the job they didn't give him any directives that "Plot Point A has to pay off in such-a-such way, Plot Point B needs to be set up for the next movie, etc.". And that when he asked about that sort of thing, they just kind of shrugged and said "Ehh, do whatever."

Episode VII built a house of cards out of nostalgia and potential future plot points, and then Episode VIII burned the entire thing down because no one had any idea how anything was supposed to pay off. So now Episode IX is pure after-the-fact damage control where they're going to try and cobble a plausible narrative out of the ashes and hope they don't torpedo the lucrative Star Wars merch revenue.


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What did you(the people who liked Last Jedi) specifically like about the movie?
What made you really enjoy this film?
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Metriod42 posted...

You don't run out of gas in space it's just bad science and a horrible problem to have for a plot device.

If that's your biggest complaint about Star Wars's abuse of space-physics, you might want to watch literally any other Star Wars movie, because there's far, far more egregious examples that you're ignoring.

Revelation34 posted...

It was ok. The dumbest part was the Holdo part at the end and only because it was thrown in there arbitrarily. Not to mention it makes no sense to do that yet they didn't do it during the Galactic War.

I've posted several times why the tactic wouldn't be used, except in extreme circumstances. Boiling it down to a single sentence, the Rebels wouldn't use it because every capital ship they lose is an enormous loss, whereas the Empire could weather a war of attrition easily (and they would need to be using decently-sized ships for this tactic - starfighters don't have enough mass, based on comparing the relative sizes of the Raddus and the Supremacy); and the Empire wouldn't use it because it was an enormous waste - they enjoyed military superiority, so they'd get much better results out of using their warships like actual warships rather than really big battering rams.

This is more or less the same reason why kamikaze attacks never caught on in the real world - even Japan stopped using them halfway through WW2 after they realized it left them depleted of both planes and skilled pilots.
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I'm sorry darkknight... but that's BS. Here's the problem. If this technology exists there's literally NO reason to even consider making things like capitol ships in the first place. To quote a certain person 'Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest sunnovabitch in space'.

Assuming you took a baseball and threw it at MERELY 90% the speed of light you'd end up with what would basically be an atomic bomb going off. There would be no need for things like proton torpedos when you could just get super-powered pitching machines strapped onto fighters and end up shooting nukes. The military has even considered weaponizing this sort of thing on a lower scale (see 'Rods from God').

So this begs the question. Why not just slap a hyperdrive on an asteroid, put it on auto-pilot, and shoot it towards Yavin or wherever the Rebels want to hide? You're literally hitting it with the force of a meteor strike if you *just* let gravity do the rest. Nevermind if you hit it at light speed or however fast hyperdrive has them going. Episode IV would have ended not with a trench run but with them loading 3P0 and R2 into a pair of X-wings and setting them to hyperdrive into the Death Star. V would have had the Empire just launching a Star Destroyer into the Hoth base (why they didn't do this in the first place is baffling). VI would have just had Ackbar accelerating his ship to hyperdrive right into the Death Star which would have almost certainly destroyed it or at least crippled it; nevermind that the Empire could have just done the same. Remember, they're the mother****ing empire. They've got Star Destroyers out the wazoo. Losing one or two to completely destroy the rebellion is an EXTREMELY worth-while trade. And this is assuming that they didn't just make a ship designed to be droid/remote/auto-piloted that was super-dense and had as big a hyperdrive on it as they could slap. There would be no need for a Death Star. They could easily mass-produce far cheaper ships that would basically obliterate the entire planet with no chance to resist or even warning that it was coming.

So yea. Holdo's maneuver really DOES throw things off. It would be like watching The Two Towers and reaching Helms Deep only for Gandalf to ride to the rescue with the riders of Rohan... driving tanks. And then going 'Oh these. We've always had these. Never had a reason to use them until now and have you seen the damage they cause to the roads? Yup. And now we're going to just put them back into storage and ride to Gondor on horse-back because there couldn't possibly be another reason to use these things.'
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Unbridled9 posted...

I'm sorry darkknight... but that's BS. Here's the problem. If this technology exists there's literally NO reason to even consider making things like capitol ships in the first place. To quote a certain person 'Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest sunnovabitch in space'.

This would be an excellent point, but for one enormous point you have glossed over:

Star Wars - and the idea of a "hyperdrive" more specifically - does not obey real world physics.

One of the fundamental truths of the universe is that you cannot accelerate something with mass to the speed of light. If you could, you would have infinite energy. Ramming a ship while going at lightspeed (or faster, which is also not a thing) into anything else wouldn't destroy it, it would create a singularity that would collapse the universe. That plainly doesn't happen and never has, or else:
a) Hyperdrives would be controlled the same way nukes are in real life, not dolled out to any idiot who has the funds for one
and;
b) Honestly, Star Wars wouldn't exist, because someone simply researching hyperdrives for the first time would have invariably created an accident that would have resulted in the above scenario.

Fortunately, Star Wars itself indirectly solves this little dilemma. Hyperdrive isn't simply raw speed like you're assuming - it's an entirely separate dimension. It has to be, or else faster-than-light travel would be impossible (and relativity would fuck up a bunch of other things that happen in the films). Now we know from as early as ANH that objects in hyperspace still interact with realspace in *some* fashion (Han references flying through stars or supernovae as a potential calamitous outcome of jumping to hyperspace without doing the proper calculations beforehand), but - based on TLJ - the kinetic energy is substantially less ("infinitesimally less," if we're being technical about it) than it would be if they simply were just accelerating like you're assuming.

(Also, please don't get me started on railguns - that section from Mass Effect that you're quoting is so painfully wrong it's not funny. I'm familiar with the military's research on them - wrote a couple of papers in my university days about the one the US navy was working on, actually - and they're a long ways removed from what sci-fi treats them as).
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Also, just to pick on some stuff.

Unbridled9 posted...

Episode IV would have ended not with a trench run but with them loading 3P0 and R2 into a pair of X-wings and setting them to hyperdrive into the Death Star

Your scale is way, way off. The Raddus is approximately 0.3% of the volume of the Supremacy (which, assuming roughly analogous construction and materials, equates to 0.3% of the mass) and even its attack didn't completely destroy its target - crippled it, yes, but there was more than enough ship there to salvage and repair. If we assume that you'd need three Raddus's to completely destroy a ship the size of the Supremacy (reasonable, considering the scale of the damage), that means you'd need about 1% of the mass of an object to destroy it in a hyperspace strike. An X-wing is about 12.5 metres long, whereas the Death Star is 160 km in diameter (giving it a volume of 2.14 x 10^15 cubic metres). Not only would one X-wing barely scratch the paint, you could slam the entire rebel fleet into it and not destroy it.

Unbridled9 posted...

V would have had the Empire just launching a Star Destroyer into the Hoth base (why they didn't do this in the first place is baffling).

I'm assuming you forgot about the planetary shield. Or why the Empire would bother to waste a Star Destroyer in such a fashion instead of just using its guns.

Unbridled9 posted...

VI would have just had Ackbar accelerating his ship to hyperdrive right into the Death Star which would have almost certainly destroyed it or at least crippled it

Home One was 1.3 km long, maybe 400m wide if we're being generous, and roughly cylindrical, for a total volume of ~1.63 x 10^8 cubic metres (less, actually, due to the tapering of its design, but it's good enough for an approximation). The second Death Star was 200 km in diameter, giving it a volume when completed of 4.19 x 10^15 cubic metres. Even if we assume that it only had 3/4 of its mass, one Home One would not be enough to seal the deal - in fact, you would need over 200,000 of them to do the job.

Unbridled9 posted...

nevermind that the Empire could have just done the same. Remember, they're the mother****ing empire. They've got Star Destroyers out the wazoo. Losing one or two to completely destroy the rebellion is an EXTREMELY worth-while trade

Again, why the fuck would they waste money doing this instead of just using them like actual warships? A Star Destroyer beats any individual ship the Rebellion can bring to the table and, unlike using them as a ram, you can use them more than once that way.

This is the fundamental flaw in the kamikaze argument that everyone ignores: The side that has fewer resources can't make widespread use of it, because it involves them in a war of attrition that they will inevitably lose; the side that has greater resources doesn't need to make use of it, because there are far more efficient ways to use those resources to achieve the same ends.
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Star Wars - and the idea of a "hyperdrive" more specifically - does not obey real world physics.

Well yes. And that's exactly why Holdo's maneuver is so damned stupid. Because it shouldn't have worked since she wasn't going 'fast' but entering into hyperspace. It's a maneuver that would only work if she WAS going fast. But if she was going fast (as opposed to entering a different dimension) then there's no reason that they shouldn't be building hyper-space missiles. So she was either going fast (at which point the entire combat philosophy of Star Wars falls into question) or she shouldn't have done the type of damage she did on the scale she did.
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Unbridled9 posted...

Well yes. And that's exactly why Holdo's maneuver is so damned stupid. Because it shouldn't have worked since she wasn't going 'fast' but entering into hyperspace. It's a maneuver that would only work if she WAS going fast. But if she was going fast (as opposed to entering a different dimension) then there's no reason that they shouldn't be building hyper-space missiles. So she was either going fast (at which point the entire combat philosophy of Star Wars falls into question) or she shouldn't have done the type of damage she did on the scale she did.

I already addressed this.

ANH tells us that objects in hyperspace still interact with the real world, so clearly they're not *completely* separated from realspace. TLJ just shows us what happens when a ship that is already in or is in the process of entering hyperspace does when it meets another object still in realspace.

Simple economics explains the rest and why this isn't a widely used tactic.
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darkknight109 posted...

Unbridled9 posted...

Well yes. And that's exactly why Holdo's maneuver is so damned stupid. Because it shouldn't have worked since she wasn't going 'fast' but entering into hyperspace. It's a maneuver that would only work if she WAS going fast. But if she was going fast (as opposed to entering a different dimension) then there's no reason that they shouldn't be building hyper-space missiles. So she was either going fast (at which point the entire combat philosophy of Star Wars falls into question) or she shouldn't have done the type of damage she did on the scale she did.

I already addressed this.

ANH tells us that objects in hyperspace still interact with the real world, so clearly they're not *completely* separated from realspace. TLJ just shows us what happens when a ship that is already in or is in the process of entering hyperspace does when it meets another object still in realspace.

Simple economics explains the rest and why this isn't a widely used tactic.

But that doesn't solve the problem. It just moves it. There's still no reason why they couldn't design a ship specifically to destroy enemy ships while in hyperspace and have it auto-piloted. Nevermind how Holdo KNEW she'd get any sort of reaction as opposed to either jumping right past them or diddly (since her plan revolved around the jump at least being able to hit for more than 'ramming speed').

If you ask me it would make perfect sense if we assumed hyperspace allows for ships to travel but is so delicate that even being near a star can throw it off and doesn't make the ship actually move 'fast' so much as serve as a short-cut. That way ramming a ship from hyperspace into normal space would be as effective as ramming a ship in normal space. Would remove the issue of hyperspace weaponry entirely. Course, it still doesn't explain one bit about how the hell Holdo's plan worked or why an X-wing couldn't make the jump and just blow up a Star Destroyer in an identical fashion. And...

Ultimately...

This is YOU trying to explain and justify the plot and details. You are not Ryan Johnson. You are not the plot. You are looking for ways to fill in something in the plot that doesn't make sense with something that does. You're writing the script for him. So no, it doesn't excuse his laziness and ineptitude or make the moment any better even if it is, somehow, both realitistic and faithful. Because in order for it to become either of those things you had to go out and write massive bits of script and science to make it work.
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darkknight109 posted...

Metriod42 posted...

You don't run out of gas in space it's just bad science and a horrible problem to have for a plot device.

If that's your biggest complaint about Star Wars's abuse of space-physics, you might want to watch literally any other Star Wars movie, because there's far, far more egregious examples that you're ignoring.

Revelation34 posted...

It was ok. The dumbest part was the Holdo part at the end and only because it was thrown in there arbitrarily. Not to mention it makes no sense to do that yet they didn't do it during the Galactic War.

I've posted several times why the tactic wouldn't be used, except in extreme circumstances. Boiling it down to a single sentence, the Rebels wouldn't use it because every capital ship they lose is an enormous loss, whereas the Empire could weather a war of attrition easily (and they would need to be using decently-sized ships for this tactic - starfighters don't have enough mass, based on comparing the relative sizes of the Raddus and the Supremacy); and the Empire wouldn't use it because it was an enormous waste - they enjoyed military superiority, so they'd get much better results out of using their warships like actual warships rather than really big battering rams.

This is more or less the same reason why kamikaze attacks never caught on in the real world - even Japan stopped using them halfway through WW2 after they realized it left them depleted of both planes and skilled pilots.

No it was clearly just a retconn. Also the biggest issue it was just really bad writing. They did a sacrifice just to have a sacrifice.
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Unbridled9 posted...

But that doesn't solve the problem. It just moves it. There's still no reason why they couldn't design a ship specifically to destroy enemy ships while in hyperspace and have it auto-piloted.

Sure there is and it's the exact same one.

Yeah, you could design a ship as a hyperspace ram and use it (which would cost you the resources used to build the ship, including the hyperdrive, which is the most expensive part of a ship judging by TPM)... or, you could design a ship as an actual warship and use it like one for better returns and more than a single use.

You'd still run into the same issue - Imperials have no need for it, because they can spend the same amount on fighting ships and not have to worry about constantly replacing them, while the Rebels can't use it because they are constantly being pinched for resources and need to scrape out every ounce of usefulness from their ships that they can, not waste them on one-off suicide strikes against a numerically superior foe.

Unbridled9 posted...

Nevermind how Holdo KNEW she'd get any sort of reaction as opposed to either jumping right past them or diddly (since her plan revolved around the jump at least being able to hit for more than 'ramming speed').

Again, ANH shows this is common knowledge - common enough that even a smuggler on a far-flung world in the outer rim knew about it.

Unbridled9 posted...

That way ramming a ship from hyperspace into normal space would be as effective as ramming a ship in normal space.

Physics don't allow for that to work, though. Hyperspace allows for faster-than-light travel; the kinetic energy of an impact alone would be literally infinite.

Unbridled9 posted...

Course, it still doesn't explain one bit about how the hell Holdo's plan worked or why an X-wing couldn't make the jump and just blow up a Star Destroyer in an identical fashion.

X-Wings don't have the mass for it. See my mass comparisons above.

Unbridled9 posted...

Ultimately...

This is YOU trying to explain and justify the plot and details. You are not Ryan Johnson. You are not the plot. You are looking for ways to fill in something in the plot that doesn't make sense with something that does. You're writing the script for him. So no, it doesn't excuse his laziness and ineptitude or make the moment any better even if it is, somehow, both realitistic and faithful. Because in order for it to become either of those things you had to go out and write massive bits of script and science to make it work.

No, I'm not "writing" anything. This isn't my creativity giving birth to an entirely new idea, this is just me pointing out observations based on TLJ and stuff that's been in the franchise for decades and explaining why the stuff you're complaining about isn't actually complaint-worthy, because it's logically consistent with what's come before.

This would be like if I complained about Rey being able to use the Force untrained, then if someone pointed out that Anakin was able to pilot a pod-racer - a feat no other human, Force-sensitive or no, had ever accomplished - with no formal training, I responded "Yeah, well, now you're just excusing the plot and you're not the director, so it doesn't count."
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Yeah, you could design a ship as a hyperspace ram and use it (which would cost you the resources used to build the ship, including the hyperdrive, which is the most expensive part of a ship judging by TPM)... or, you could design a ship as an actual warship and use it like one for better returns and more than a single use.

It may be a 'single use' but that capitol ship you just blew up cost, like, 6,000,000 times more, had full crew and fighter compliment, and got precisely 0 uses compared to your 1. Capitol ships are only worthwhile if they aren't blown up in the first five seconds of the battle... or before they even arrive onto the field. For a more real-world comparison... A Sidewinder missile costs ~600,000. An F-35 Lightning II costs $94,600,000. Assuming it hits the Sidewinder can kill the F-35. Even if you just lobbed them willy-nilly it would take ~157 Sidewinders to equate in cost to ONE F-35. You can't possibly tell me that, say, twelve hyper-space X-wing missiles cost MORE than a single Star Destroyer. If you slapped a hyperdrive onto an asteroid you wouldn't even need to factor in a cost for the ship. So tell me, when does this stop being 'cost efficient'? Because a hyperdrive engine for an entire star destroyer or even super-star destroyer sounds pretty cost efficient to me.

See, the thing is that the Radish wasn't even DESIGNED for what it did; yet look at how much damage it caused. There's no question as to who won that cost/destruction ratio. Now imagine what sort of destruction could be unleashed if they, ya know, actually built a ship designed specifically to do that. Capitol ships would be obsolete in as long as it took to build the ships. Your opponents literally wouldn't know what hit them as there wouldn't even be light to see until impact. There would be no point in building anything larger than a frigate because the cost would just be too high for a ship that would be blown up or at least neutered in the opening salvo. Heck, space combat itself might be rendered entirely obsolete since who the fuck would dare start a war when you'd suddenly have your capitol planet smashed to bits by sixty hyperspace missiles that you have little to no method of stopping vaporizing your planet?

You'd still run into the same issue - Imperials have no need for it, because they can spend the same amount on fighting ships and not have to worry about constantly replacing them, while the Rebels can't use it because they are constantly being pinched for resources and need to scrape out every ounce of usefulness from their ships that they can, not waste them on one-off suicide strikes against a numerically superior foe.

Have you SEEN the imperials and what they do? They THRIVE on spending money to build massively powerful superweapons capable of destroying entire planets and star-systems. This isn't just 'right up their alley' it's 'inside their home, cooking them dinner, and asking how work went'. And it's COST EFFECTIVE to boot!

And also... Bullshit. The First Order was a fringe group while the Dumb-Names were a powerful organization that had their own freaking capitol planet. It's only because Ryan didn't give an F that things suddenly got flipped in 8. But... Let's put ALL that aside and ask one simple question...

Why the hell didn't the other two ships do the Holdo maneuver? No BS 'they ran out of fuel' because nothing was stopping them from evacuating early and smashing into the imperials. Heck, had they done that the plot would be nowhere near as bad as they would have taken out the tracker or at least reduced the number of star destroyers trailing them. If this tactic existed. If it was known (and there's no way such a relatively simple thing could be missed). Why didn't the other two ships do it? Holdo could have told the other captains what to do and, instead of dying uselessly, they could have damaged the imperials.
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Or, alternatively, why didn't Hux do this? Sacrifice a star destroyer, sure, but you KILL OFF THE ENTIRE RESISTANCE/REBELLION! That's a good trade! And you outnumber them anyways. Heck, you could easily evacuate said star destroyer to minimize the losses. Basically, this manuver requires everyone in the galaxy since the invention of hyperdrive to completely overlook this blatantly obvious thing, including top-tier engineers and generals, only for one woman in the entire galaxy to suddenly realize it could be done and no one else. And the imperials will never use this technology despite it basically allowing them to win any battle (especially since, as you claim, they have resources to spare). And the Resistance will never use it despite it basically allowing THEM to win any battle (especially since, as you claim, they DIDN'T have resources and need to make the most of what they've got).

Both sides should be pouncing on this for the exact same reason and it's going to need to be written out by episode 9 since, otherwise, the whole point to any kind of war is gone.

Physics don't allow for that to work, though. Hyperspace allows for faster-than-light travel; the kinetic energy of an impact alone would be literally infinite.

Argument A or Argument B. Either A) Hyperspace lets you at speeds faster than light at which point there's no reason an X-wing traveling at light speed wouldn't impact with the force of a nuclear bomb. Or B) It doesn't at which point basically everything Holdo did made no sense especially given the resulting fallout which couldn't have happened UNLESS she was going super-fast.

Make you choice. Either the plot's dumb because it basically gave machine guns to people still mastering this 'iron' thing or the plot's dumb because there's no way Holdo could have possibly known her plan would work and no way the result could have happened. Pick your poison.

No, I'm not "writing" anything. This isn't my creativity giving birth to an entirely new idea, this is just me pointing out observations based on TLJ and stuff that's been in the franchise for decades and explaining why the stuff you're complaining about isn't actually complaint-worthy, because it's logically consistent with what's come before.

It's not been in the franchise for decades. In fact I'm fairly certain Ryan never even watched the originals or else he should have remembered that the imperials HAD the tracking devices that were so central to the plot all the way back in ANH. Meanwhile you're equating Han basically saying 'you need a skilled pilot or else you end up smacking into a sun and gravity will still mess with you' with 'It's perfectly fine for Holdo to completely wreck that massive ship with hyperdrive because it can affect things in the normal world'. So yes, you ARE writing Ryan's script for him. Because this wasn't in the movies before, makes no sense in multiple layers of context, but you're trying to provide a justification to try and make it work despite no sense of logic allowing it to do so.
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This would be like if I complained about Rey being able to use the Force untrained, then if someone pointed out that Anakin was able to pilot a pod-racer - a feat no other human, Force-sensitive or no, had ever accomplished - with no formal training, I responded "Yeah, well, now you're just excusing the plot and you're not the director, so it doesn't count."

Anakin was fortold by prophecy to be the chosen one. He had no clue how to utilize the force and basically operated on instinct. He couldn't even do a basic force push until after joining the order. Rei pulled off things like mind trickery when just a short while ago she didn't even know the Force was a real thing. So no. They aren't the same at all.

It's not that I can't accept someone figuring out the force on their own. It's that I can't accept someone basically having just figured out that computers aren't demon boxes with imps slapping the words up on the screen suddenly turning into a master hacker overnight.
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Unbridled9 posted...

This would be like if I complained about Rey being able to use the Force untrained, then if someone pointed out that Anakin was able to pilot a pod-racer - a feat no other human, Force-sensitive or no, had ever accomplished - with no formal training, I responded "Yeah, well, now you're just excusing the plot and you're not the director, so it doesn't count."

Anakin was fortold by prophecy to be the chosen one. He had no clue how to utilize the force and basically operated on instinct. He couldn't even do a basic force push until after joining the order. Rei pulled off things like mind trickery when just a short while ago she didn't even know the Force was a real thing. So no. They aren't the same at all.

It's not that I can't accept someone figuring out the force on their own. It's that I can't accept someone basically having just figured out that computers aren't demon boxes with imps slapping the words up on the screen suddenly turning into a master hacker overnight.

It's always sort of been part of the franchise right from A New Hope that The Force tends to manifest in untrained people as pure instinct or luck. The greater the Force potential in someone, the more likely they are to have those traits. This is why Luke was such a great pilot (by his own boasting) before he ever heard of the Force, and why Obi-Wan spends most of the movie telling him to stop thinking and start feeling. It's also why it's been repeatedly implied that Han has a fair amount of Force potential (he's a great pilot and damned lucky), which in turn is why his and Leia's kid(s) wound up being powerful Force users - they were getting it from both sides of the family.

But we're also shown that the Force is rarely anything MORE than lucky "coincidence" or instinctive skill without training. Luke gets a bit of training and can barely move his lightsaber, then he gets more and finally starts to be able to do kewl trickz. Yes, that training seems to take all of 20 minutes because Lucas kind of sucks at expressing the passage of time in a concise manner, but it DID happen.

Whereas Rey starts having visions the moment she touches a lightsaber, blocks Kylo's attempt to read her mind, basically starts trying to influence him, telekinesises the lightsaber into her hands, and otherwise does almost every trick Luke ever learns without a single second of teaching. It's mainly the result of lazy/sloppy scripting and a much faster pace geared to people with way shorter attention spans (as opposed to BLATANT SJW AGENDA INFECTING MAH STAR WARS, BY GOD!), but it does lay most of the groundwork for the "WOMG REY IS A MARY SUE!" complaints. She basically IS the bestest Force user EVAR in the movies as they currently stand. Better than the literal Chosen One.

And then she proceeds to do mostly nothing of substance as the entire plot just sort of happens around her. Very little happens in the two movies that actually requires her to actively be there and doing things, as opposed to being something that would have happened even if she'd be left behind on Jakku. Which ironically makes complaints about her character stronger ("Why emphasize how awesome and special she is if she doesn't actually wind up DOING anything?"). At least Luke got to directly blow up a Death Star even at his whiniest, and Anakin got to bone Padme and murder a bunch of kids.


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Ignore the physics of the situation, but the motivation; The nuances of her acting implies that this was the plan all along, that they put the ability to be tracked on their own ship (via a double agent or something)...

...All she needed to do at this point was shout "Admiral AKBAAARR" before her suicide bombing.

It was a vile plan.
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Unbridled9 posted...

It may be a 'single use' but that capitol ship you just blew up cost, like, 6,000,000 times more

First off, it's "capital ship", not "capitol ship". A capitol is a building; all other uses of the word are "capital".

Secondly, the fact that the attacker wins the cost tradeoff doesn't actually mean much, because even if the Rebels kill 6 million times their credit value, the Empire has billions more in resources (source: they built a moon-sized battlestation that was an order of magnitude larger than the entire rebel fleet at its peak; then they built a second, even bigger one when the first one blew up).

Unbridled9 posted...

You can't possibly tell me that, say, twelve hyper-space X-wing missiles cost MORE than a single Star Destroyer. If you slapped a hyperdrive onto an asteroid you wouldn't even need to factor in a cost for the ship.

Well, first off, a Star Destroyer is roughly 1.92 x 10^8 cubic metres in volume, while a roughly X-wing-sized pyramid of metal would be about 300 cubic metres. If you wanted to use those to blow up a single Star Destroyer (of which the Empire has literally tens of thousands, nevermind their other ships) you'd need roughly 6500 X-wing missiles per Star Destroyer.

Or, you could use a single squadron of twelve, armed with much more easily replaceable proton torpedoes, and blow up said Star Destroyer *without* losing any ships. Which sounds much more economical.

I've heard the asteroid idea before, and that's even less feasible than most, because no one bothers to take into account the logistical hurdles that immediately present themselves. The first issue is that, as previously mentioned, the hyperdrive makes up a pretty substantial portion of a ship's cost (judging by TPM and the negotiations with Watto) so the cost savings are already questionable. Secondly, unless you're using these to defend a base that's already located at or near an asteroid field, you'll need to bring the asteroids to their targets. That will require some form of a carrier ship (more cost), along with tugs of some sort to move the asteroids onto or off of the carrier ship (still more cost), manoeuvring jets for the asteroid to make sure it's pointed in the right direction (even more cost), plus a droid brain/autopilot to actually run the calculations and make the jump (yet another cost), and most of those costs (carrier and tugs aside) are for a single-use weapon. It's not even clear that this would result in a feasible weapon - if we're factoring the EU into this debate, it's established that the transition into hyperspace exerts enormous forces on the ship that it has to be carefully engineered to withstand; it's debatable whether an asteroid would even survive the hyperspace transition without simply disintegrating.
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Unbridled9 posted...

Heck, space combat itself might be rendered entirely obsolete since who the fuck would dare start a war when you'd suddenly have your capitol planet smashed to bits by sixty hyperspace missiles that you have little to no method of stopping vaporizing your planet?

Here's the problem with this as a complaint - TLJ didn't introduce anything that wasn't already there. FTL travel was already a thing. Missiles were already a thing. Why has no one combined the two to create WMDs? Who knows? Maybe something about gravity wells stops it from happening (in the old lore, ships would get pulled out of hyperspace if they passed too close to a gravity well - something like that apparently still exists in the new, as Interdictors are still a thing, though Han's manoeuvre in TFA seems to suggest it's less strict than before).

Basically, though, from Star Wars - most universes with FTL travel, honestly - always have that question hanging over their head: given the immense, destructive potential of something moving that fast, why has no one tried to weaponize it yet? Only thing that I can say is that clearly *something* must be preventing it, or else someone would have come up with it by now.

Unbridled9 posted...

Have you SEEN the imperials and what they do? They THRIVE on spending money to build massively powerful superweapons capable of destroying entire planets and star-systems. This isn't just 'right up their alley' it's 'inside their home, cooking them dinner, and asking how work went'. And it's COST EFFECTIVE to boot!

It's not cost effective - that's exactly what I've spent the last few posts explaining. You could have the same destructive potential for far less cost in something like the Dreadnought, which can one-shot enemy capital ships *without* relying on single-use hyperspace rams.

Unbridled9 posted...

The First Order was a fringe group while the Dumb-Names were a powerful organization that had their own freaking capitol planet. It's only because Ryan didn't give an F that things suddenly got flipped in 8.

This is not correct. The Resistance and the New Republic were not the same thing, the First Order isn't a fringe group, and J.J. Abrams is the one who wrote both of those facts, not Johnson.

Basically, after RotJ the Empire collapsed and was steadily driven out into the unknown regions of space. The Rebellion pursued them for a while then, once they were too weak to be considered a threat anymore, refocused their efforts on rebuilding the Republic. As part of their transition to the new governing body, the New Republic deliberately disarmed in order to prevent a dictator like Palpatine from ever rising to power by seizing control of the military.

This turned out to be a bad decision, because the remnants of the Empire wound up settling on previously unsurveyed planets and discovered a significant trove of natural resources that they used to rebuild and re-arm, turning themselves into the First Order. When this came to light, the leading elements of the New Republic were in favour of a detente, a sort of "you don't bother us, we won't bother you" type of truce - that became official policy, which some members decried as dangerous. Those members broke away and started re-arming themselves, becoming the Resistance - they were allied with the Republic, but not officially part of them, since their raison d'etre basically went against the Republic's whole philosophy of peace. As such, the Resistance didn't have access to the Republic's (considerably more sizable) cache of resources and was basically funded by independent donors.

That was all set up in the lore surrounding TFA and was what Johnson was working with when he came onboard.
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Unbridled9 posted...

Why the hell didn't the other two ships do the Holdo maneuver?

Because the ships would have wasted valuable fuel - which you might recall they had limited amounts of - and it wouldn't have helped all that much considering how much they were outnumbered by. Destroying the tracker would have done nothing (Poe points out the flaw in this plan directly in the movie itself - another ship would start tracking instead) and neither of those ships had the mass to take out the Supremacy anyways.

Keep in mind Holdo's plan - which would have worked, had Poe not blabbed the details in earshot of a slicer with no particular loyalty to the Resistance - was to lull the First Order into a false sense of security by stringing them out on the chase, then secretly launching cloaked transports to make for Crait. The Holdo Manoeuvre was only done when that plan fell apart.

Or, alternatively, why didn't Hux do this? Sacrifice a star destroyer, sure, but you KILL OFF THE ENTIRE RESISTANCE/REBELLION!

.....or he could have just blasted them to pieces normally, with his significantly larger fleet, and not wasted one of his Star Destroyers taking out three ships that he massively outgunned.

Argument A or Argument B. Either A) Hyperspace lets you at speeds faster than light at which point there's no reason an X-wing traveling at light speed wouldn't impact with the force of a nuclear bomb. Or B) It doesn't at which point basically everything Holdo did made no sense especially given the resulting fallout which couldn't have happened UNLESS she was going super-fast

Or, Argument C: What actually happened in the movie and what I already spelled out in my last set of posts. Specifically, that ships travelling in hyperspace clearly have much less energy than they should (else, as you say, a single X-wing would have been sufficient to wipe out not just the Supremacy but the entire fleet it was with, the Resistance fleet, the nearby planet, and everything else in the universe)

Hyperspace, being the black-box, physics-defying thing that it is, can pretty much do whatever it wants.

And perhaps that's exactly why this idea has never taken root. Perhaps it is too unreliable or random, or the results too difficult to predict or control. Maybe Holdo, in her desperation attack, simply got lucky

In fact I'm fairly certain Ryan never even watched the originals or else he should have remembered that the imperials HAD the tracking devices that were so central to the plot all the way back in ANH

Except there were no tracking devices in TLJ. That was the whole point. The First Order didn't install a tracking device on the Resistance ships (as was done in ANH and AotC), they were able to track the ships remotely, which is something that had not been done prior to that point. That's exactly why Vader was so disappointed at the end of ESB - when the Falcon made the jump to hyperspace, the Empire lost them; had they been able to track them, they would have just jumped after them

Meanwhile you're equating Han basically saying 'you need a skilled pilot or else you end up smacking into a sun and gravity will still mess with you' with 'It's perfectly fine for Holdo to completely wreck that massive ship with hyperdrive because it can affect things in the normal world'

You might not want to make accusations of someone not watching the originals when you're plainly misremembering them yourself. The line I'm referring to is not Han pointing out they need a skilled pilot in the cantina, it's this one from when they're fleeing the Star Destroyers above Tatooine:

"Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"
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struggles to breathe under mountain of paragraphs
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rian johnson is a hack and thats all that needs to be said.
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Why is fuel such a big deal all of the sudden? No one in the previous movies never had this problem before so why now?

And honestly, aren't there more interesting plot points a movie can have than the protagonists just being low on fuel?

Like how about some backstory for Snoke? It would've been nice to know at least something about him before he got killed by his own apprentice.

Out of all the new characters they introduced in Force Awakens, Snoke was the most interesting IMO and I was looking forward to know more about him.
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We are dealing with the absolute most basic of light sci fi concepts and people don't get it XD

The mechanics of Star Wars have never made sense and should not be a priority. Otherwise we'd get meta gaming Jedi using the force to blow up people's hearts mid combat.

There is a lot wrong with The Last Jedi. Fuel and space bombers aren't the issue though.

Snoke is more subjective. A lot of the basic elements of how the Galaxy is set up dont make a lot of sense within TLJ (and didn't make sense in TFA either). This isn't necessarily a problem but it's something that causes direct issues when you try and treat the series as a sequel to Star Wars. Almost nothing feels like it's logically connected. It might as well be a thousand years later with completely new characters (which subjectively I would have preferred and I think would have given Disney a lot more freedom within their own story).

Of Luke, Leia and Han, only Luke feels like he had a meaningful character arc within the story and it's one that's completely at odds with his character in RotJ.
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MICHALECOLE posted...

Ive loved every Disney Star Wars movie a lot.

This for me as well.

Mead posted...

Far from a perfect movie but the reaction to the movie is beyond overblown.

This also for me.

It's fine if people dislike it, but the dislike for it is way overblown. The only bad thing about the movie for me was Finn and Rose's subplot on the casino planet. Even with not liking that part, Rose was just fine.
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AllstarSniper32 posted...

MICHALECOLE posted...

Ive loved every Disney Star Wars movie a lot.

This for me as well.

Mead posted...

Far from a perfect movie but the reaction to the movie is beyond overblown.

This also for me.

It's fine if people dislike it, but the dislike for it is way overblown. The only bad thing about the movie for me was Finn and Rose's subplot on the casino planet. Even with not liking that part, Rose was just fine.

My problem is being called a misogynist for not liking the movie as a whole... when the women were the only remotely good parts anyways
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I don't even care about the greater implications of the physics inconsistencies brought up by the Holdo maneuver. I'm just irritated she waited until like 2/3 of the escape pods had been shot to shit to pull it off, especially since she knew she was effectively boned anyway. She just started out the viewing window for a long time. Should've done it the second the last escape pod was launched. But movie drama.

Also Leia and Holdo refusing to tell anyoe on the ship their plan was just stupid movie logic to give the audience the idea that Holdo may be a villain or inept, and so they could have the big heroic revelation followed shortly by a sacrifice. There is zero reason Holdo could not have told Poe immediately what Leia ended up telling him anyway after they had abandoned ship.

Also who is Snoke, really? He's clearly very old and this movie only takes place about 30 years after the first one. He would have been alive at the time of the previous films and possibly the prequels as well, so why are we just now learning he exists? Someone that powerful surely should have been a prevalent character in the world before, even if he wasn't shown on screen in any other films.

Also the bombing run in the beginning is a bigger physics clusterfuck than the hyperspeed bomb. Why do the bombs fall out without gravity? There's no mechanism forcing them out. Why do they explode when hit? Why can't space movies ever learn that there is no fire in space? And even if there is magical sci fi fire, why are all the bombers so close that one of them blowing up causes a chain reaction which blows most of them up? What kind of idiotic formation are they flying?

I could keep rambling but basically the whole movie reeks of lack of script editing. It's like the first idea that anyone came up with was storyboarded and put on film without ever checking with anyone else if it was a good idea or even made sense.
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When I first saw it I liked it, but didn't love it. Then I saw it again and my opinion of the movie has just been unraveling further and further ever since.

Let me just put it this way. When I look deeper into any good movie, I get a sense of wonder for the world depicted in it. On repeat viewings, I realize themes that I may have not realized previously, interwoven intricacies that aren't immediately apparent, and just cool stuff that makes the whole thing a better experience.

The more I think about The Last Jedi, the more I hate it. The more plot holes, bad writing / storytelling, universe breaking logic, poor story decisions and just problems that I realize. The movie gets worse with repeated viewings, not better.
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man101 posted...

Also Leia and Holdo refusing to tell anyoe on the ship their plan was just stupid movie logic to give the audience the idea that Holdo may be a villain or inept, and so they could have the big heroic revelation followed shortly by a sacrifice. There is zero reason Holdo could not have told Poe immediately what Leia ended up telling him anyway after they had abandoned ship.

I can think of several reasons:

1) Poe was not part of the command staff and, therefore, had no right to that knowledge.
2) The Resistance was having trouble with morale and desertion (Rose comments on this in her opening scene), so the more people that know the plan, the better the chance it winds up leaking back to the First Order from someone who is either opportunistically trying to save their own skin by selling out the Resistance (I.E. the exact thing DJ did) or someone who gets captured during an escape attempt and blabs about it during interrogation.
3) Poe wasn't exactly in anyone's good graces at that point of the movie and for good reason. The last time he ran into a plan he disagreed with, he ignored a direct order from the beloved leader and got half their starfighter wing (including all of their bombers) destroyed, been demoted as a result, then lied to his new CO by pretending that demotion never happened. In a real life military, Poe wouldn't have gotten a slap in the face and a demotion for that, he would have been arrested and brought up on charges of insubordination and dereliction of duty and, depending on how strict the Resistance's military code of justice is, he would have been looking at either a long time behind bars or a summary execution.

Lo and behold, when he does wind up finding out about Holdo's plan and decides he doesn't like it, he conspires with Finn and Rose about a new one, which leads directly to the Resistance nearly being annihilated as a result. Had Poe actually done as ordered, the Resistance could have gotten away largely intact (minus the loss of their ships), waited for the First Order to pass on, confident that their job was complete, then started broadcasting from Crait with far more time to rally allies than they wound up with.

man101 posted...

Also the bombing run in the beginning is a bigger physics clusterfuck than the hyperspeed bomb. Why do the bombs fall out without gravity?

Apparently they're "magnetically charged" to "fall" away from the bomber. I don't really like that explanation myself, but it isn't even Star Wars's worst abuse of space-gravity physics (that title goes to Episode III's opening battle, where a tilting ship somehow causes gravity to shift, despite the fact that "down" on a ship is always relative to the ship itself).

Blighboy posted...

The mechanics of Star Wars have never made sense and should not be a priority.

This has always been my view as well. If you think too hard about Star Wars and its mechanics - any of it, right back to the originals - you will wind up seeing some pretty glaring holes. None of the movies are immune to this and they all suffer for it to greater or lesser extents.
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GameReviews posted...

Let me just put it this way. When I look deeper into any good movie, I get a sense of wonder for the world depicted in it. On repeat viewings, I realize themes that I may have not realized previously, interwoven intricacies that aren't immediately apparent, and just cool stuff that makes the whole thing a better experience.

It feels like this doesn't happen much anymore though.

Good movies seems to have gone almost extinct.

We need more movies with the quality and passion put into them like with Infinity War.
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It's a poor movie with strange humor, inconsistent tone, inconsistent character actions, and subverted expectations that were handled so poorly I am legitimately still shocked to this day.

But hey, whatever you need to do to justify your liking it.

AllstarSniper32 posted...

The only bad thing about the movie for me was Finn and Rose's subplot on the casino planet. Even with not liking that part, Rose was just fine.

I think the problem there is actually the same problem with Jar-Jar.

Jar-Jar was annoying, but the hate for him was definitely overblown. Because he became the focal point for all of the OTHER dissatisfaction with the movie. People who on some subconscious level understood the movie was shit but couldn't necessarily articulate all of the reasons why tended to lock on to either Jar-Jar or Anakin as the most blatant problems. Even if you took them both out of the movie, it would still have a ton of flaws... but the vast majority of complaints you'll hear about it is how Jar-Jar sucks or how Jake Lloyd is terrible.

So in that sense, the massive backlash against Rose isn't necessarily because her character is bad (though it is), or because her actress doesn't do a very good job (though she doesn't). It's because she's basically become the focal point for ALL hate for the movie, regardless of the actual reason. She's the avatar of everything wrong with the movie, a convenient target for all the visceral hate for a movie that fails on multiple levels. So the vast majority of complaints about Last Jedi get boiled down to "Rose sucks" or "that Leia scene is stupid", when those are only a tiny fraction of the problems with the movie.

Phantom Menace actually has one other thing in common with Last Jedi. Jake Lloyd has admitted that he was so bullied over his role and how much people hated him in it that he stopped acting entirely and he hates Star Wars now. He's pretty strong evidence that all of the hate directed at Rose's actress isn't just misogyny or racism (even if it's often expressed that way). She's just eating the same shit sandwich that Jake Lloyd got fed 20 years ago, because she was cast in a major role in a bad movie that has an incredibly visceral, emotional effect on a ton of people because of what it represents to them.



darkknight109 posted...

the Empire has billions more in resources (source: they built a moon-sized battlestation that was an order of magnitude larger than the entire rebel fleet at its peak; then they built a second, even bigger one when the first one blew up).

This argument kind of falls down when you realize that the First Order (which only has a fraction of the resources the Empire did) somehow manages to build a superweapon far more massive and powerful than the Death Star ever was, while the Resistance (which is part of the New Republic and presumably has access to far more resources than the Rebellion ever did at any point in its existence) apparently can't afford to buy fuel. The math doesn't even remotely add up.

Which is actually another problem with the new movies to some degree - they want to recapture the feeling of the original movies where the Rebellion were the underdogs, yet apparently couldn't come up with a clever way to do so with the assumption that the Empire was overthrown and the New Republic exists, so they half-assed the entire concept and went with a paper-thin scenario that disintegrates the second you actually start to think about it.

It's a VERY sad day when the logic of the prequels actually holds together better than the sequels, but that's the world we live in. The sequels tend to hide this by going for a more visceral, emotional response than the prequels did, and by relying on the power of nostalgia into fooling us into thinking it's better than it actually is, but the moment you actually start to think about it everything falls apart like a house of cards.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

which is part of the New Republic

The Resistance isn't part of the New Republic, though. That's kind of *why* there's a Resistance.

The New Republic was a largely pacifistic entity - the Resistance formed as a militant group because they felt the Republic was not taking seriously the threat the New Republic posed.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The math doesn't even remotely add up.

I fail to see how that in any way disproves my argument.

I mean, the Empire controlled most of the core worlds in the galaxy, had a massive military, and was fighting against a rebellion that cobbled together whatever they could from planets - largely in the outer rim - where they had influence. You haven't disputed that. The First Order has a massive fleet, filled with multiple king-sized ships like the Dreadnought or the Supremacy while the Resistance only has three capital ships to their name. That part's not even debatable.

Saying "It doesn't make sense that the First Order can build bigger stuff than the Empire and the Resistance is smaller than the Rebellion" doesn't disprove anything I said.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's a VERY sad day when the logic of the prequels actually holds together better than the sequels, but that's the world we live in.

Strongly disagree. Not in the sense that you're shortchanging the sequels (there are some obvious logical issues there), but in the sense that I think you're forgetting just how completely nonsensical the prequels were. The Phantom Menace relied on some massive leaps of logic just to keep the plot going, Attack of the Clones didn't have logical gaps so much as no logic at all, and the overarching storyline - which was supposed to be this brilliant chessmaster-gambit by Palpatine - was so incredibly stupid that it could have been found out in two minutes had anyone on either side of the conflict had more than two brain cells to bang together. Revenge of the Sith is the only movie that manages to make some sort of logical sense if only by dint of the fact that Lucas basically took the end of Attack of the Clones and the start of A New Hope, drew a straight line directly between them with no twists or turns, and called it a movie (and even then Anakin still manages to toss in a few incredibly bizarre decisions, just in case we were worried that these movies might start making sense).

The sequels have their issues, but let's not pretend that the prequels weren't steaming dumpster fires, *especially* when it comes to logical consistency.
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darkknight109 posted...

The Resistance isn't part of the New Republic, though. That's kind of *why* there's a Resistance.

Technically, yes, but it actually still has support from senators in the New Republic, and they still draw funding from the wealthy core worlds which the First Order no longer can.



darkknight109 posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The math doesn't even remotely add up.

I fail to see how that in any way disproves my argument.

Because it kinds of underlines the fact that overthinking the implied finances as if it actually means anything in terms of narrative or setting is generally a flawed argument, because the people in this topic have now spent more time thinking about it than literally anyone ever involved in writing or directing a Star Wars movie ever has.

The only people who ever really obsessed over the details like that were people who wrote for the EU... but that's also part of why the EU writers were mostly insane and why most of what they wrote was hot liquid shit (and is now entirely uncanon).



darkknight109 posted...

Strongly disagree. Not in the sense that you're shortchanging the sequels (there are some obvious logical issues there), but in the sense that I think you're forgetting just how completely nonsensical the prequels were.

No, I think I remember full well how completely nonsensical the prequels were.

But I also think you're willfully ignoring how completely nonsensical the sequels (as they currently exist as a whole) are.



darkknight109 posted...

The sequels have their issues, but let's not pretend that the prequels weren't steaming dumpster fires, *especially* when it comes to logical consistency.

I would agree 100%.

Which is what makes it so absolutely tragic that The Last Jedi somehow winds up being worse.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

overthinking the implied finances as if it actually means anything in terms of narrative or setting is generally a flawed argument, because the people in this topic have now spent more time thinking about it than literally anyone ever involved in writing or directing a Star Wars movie ever has

So? Whether or not the Rebellion and Resistance's relative sizes makes sense doesn't in any way detract from that argument (maybe warships are more expensive in the sequel-era than in the OT era, or maybe the Resistance wasn't able to recruit enough crew from a war-weary populace to man more ships, who knows?) - it's the relative sizes of the Rebellion/Empire or the Resistance/First Order that drives the argument, and those are spelled out pretty unarguably. Are those two sets consistent with each other? No, but there's a lot of inconsistencies between all three trilogies, so that doesn't really mean much.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I would agree 100%.

Which is what makes it so absolutely tragic that The Last Jedi somehow winds up being worse.

The characters in TLJ generally behave rationally, though, and when they don't (like Poe/Finn/Rose's Hail-Mary to try and disable the tracking device or Rey deciding she can turn Kylo Ren back to the light side), it generally ends in disaster, as one would reasonably expect.

I mean, to contrast, let me make a brief list of completely brain-dead decision various characters make in Attack of the Clones, in roughly chronological order:

-Jango Fett and Zam Wesell, supposedly two of the greatest bounty hunters in the galaxy, attempt a big, flashy assassination using a bomb, then decide to - their words - "try something more subtle", even though that's the reverse order of the way things are supposed to be done (subtlety when they don't suspect anything, big explosions when they realize what's going on). Because everyone in this movie is a moron, this actually almost works. Between the two of them they manage to come up with the only method of killing Padme that the Jedi can thwart given its reliance on unpredictable living creatures (for some completely inexplicable reason), whereas if the droid used a bomb or a blaster or even a knife, it would have killed her before the Jedi even realized anything was wrong.

-Because the Jedi and Padme's security team are just as bad at their jobs as the bounty hunters, they come up with the most slipshod security plan imaginable. Instead of moving Padme to a secure location and/or using another decoy in her place, having additional security personnel watching the building from the outside, etc., her security is essentially entrusted to a horny teenager and his surrogate father. When she disables the security camera in her room - AKA, the only thing that allows the Jedi to monitor the situation from afar - instead of knocking on her door and telling her to fix it, they just kind of shrug their shoulders and start arguing with each other instead, nearly getting her killed in the process.

-When the assassination fails, Obi-Wan makes the questionable decision to leap onto the droid, despite not knowing if it's armed or whether it can support his weight. But instead of self-destructing, carrying him off into the night, or running him into traffic, it obediently flies directly back to its owner. During the subsequent encounter, Wesell decides to attack the Jedi in the middle of a crowded bar instead of getting the fuck out of dodge (the fact they saw her isn't even all that important, given she's a shapeshifter) and when Jango decides to silence her, he opts to use the single weapon in his considerable arsenal that can be traced back to his base of operations, a secret planet that he and his employer have spent considerable time and effort trying to keep hidden.
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-The Jedi spend a few minutes talking about how emotionally unstable Anakin is, then decide to send him to a nice private getaway with the woman whose leg he's been busily humping nonstop since he met her, instead of sending someone who is less emotionally attached and/or has more experience. Even in-universe this is seen as a bad idea, as Obi-Wan and Typho see them off while swapping bets about which one will put their hand down the other's pants first. Also worth noting that Padme's security team has now been downgraded to a single Jedi trainee, since the whole Coruscant deal showed that having two Jedi guard her was clearly overkill.

-Obi-Wan eventually makes his way to Kamino, a planet that has been conspicuously deleted from the Jedi archives, and discovers a clone army, ordered in the name of a dead Jedi, paid for by unknown means, and ready for delivery to the Republic just in time for a pan-galactic war to start. That no one in the entire Republic seemed at all bothered by this alarmingly-convenient series of events points to ineptitude on a truly massive scale. Palpatine's entire plot that he's spent decades formulating could have been easily undone by anyone with more than three neurons firing at this point. Instead, despite the clear presence of someone with enormous influence and resources working at cross-purposes to the Jedi and the Republic, no one bothers to follow up on this in the years that the Clone Wars raged, else they might have discovered the secret Jedi kill-code that all the Clones had hardwired into their brains.

-Finally, when Jango flees from Obi-Wan, he heads to Geonosis of all places, despite there being no reason for him being here and every possibility Obi-Wan had bugged his ship. Again, for all the mystique, Jango Fett is clearly terrible at his job and it's frankly astounding that he's trusted as much as he is by all the bad guys.

And that's just the highlights! I could write a fucking book about everything nonsensical that happens in the prequels, and I'm sure other people have. Say what you will about the way some parts of the sequels were sloppily set up - whether that's Abrams failing to really explain where the First Order and Resistance came from or why they have their respective resources, or Johnson being hamfisted with his "running out of fuel" plot - but at least the characters behaved mostly rationally for the circumstances that were set up for them (and in cases where they didn't behave rationally, there was a reason for it and it led to expected ends, rather than the prequels where people make completely nonsensical decisions that somehow work out, because that's what the plot needed to have happen).

I'll never claim that the sequels are without flaw, but to suggest that TLJ is more nonsensical than AotC or TPM is so wrong I'd almost call it falsehood.
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Phantom Menace had Darth Maul, Attack of the Clones had Christopher Lee as a Sith and Revenge of the Sith had a Jedi-cyborg with four arms though.
They looked really cool at least : P
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Attack of the Clones had some serious, serious internal logic flaws.

My favorite is:
Anakin - "Shoot him down!"
Clonetrooper - "We're out of rockets!"

...Dude, did you forget you have like 20 laser cannons on that thing?
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LeetCheet posted...

Phantom Menace had Darth Maul, Attack of the Clones had Christopher Lee as a Sith and Revenge of the Sith had a Jedi-cyborg with four arms though.
They looked really cool at least : P

The problem was all three were completely unimportant to the plot.

Maul looked cool, but you could have replaced him with a few cardboard boxes with a frowny face painted on them a lightsaber taped to them for all the difference it would have made to his role. Dooku was probably the biggest waste of a big name actor in the PT (his only real competition being Samuel L. Jackson) as he seemed like an intriguing character that would have some interesting insight on the Jedi, the Sith, the Republic, and the Confederacy (having been involved with all of them at various points), but the films hastily got rid of him before he could ever get around to doing much. Grievous was a completely ridiculous and pointless character who didn't even have the wow factor of the other two and seemed to have been hastily shoved into Episode III when Lucas realized he didn't have a new character he could use to sell toys yet.

None of them had any buildup or gave the main characters (or the audience) any reason to have them or cheer for their defeat beyond them being the designated bad guy, which is partially understandable given that none of them lasted for more than half a film's worth of runtime. Considering that Lucas created two of the most iconic villains of all time in the OT in Palpatine and (especially) Vader, the fact that the PT's villains were so painfully lacklustre and misused becomes all the more glaring as one of its more notable pratfalls.

Mover_of_Zigs posted...

Attack of the Clones had some serious, serious internal logic flaws.

My favorite is:
Anakin - "Shoot him down!"
Clonetrooper - "We're out of rockets!"

...Dude, did you forget you have like 20 laser cannons on that thing?

Personally, I like the way they ended the subsequent fight scene with Dooku trying to drop a rock pillar on Anakin and Obi-Wan. Yoda could have quickly pulled the much-lighter Kenobi and Skywalker to safety or slammed the pillar into Dooku's ship after catching it in order to disable it and prevent his getaway, but instead he just takes an agonizingly long time tossing it to the side so that Dooku is given enough time to escape.
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darkknight109 posted...

LeetCheet posted...

Phantom Menace had Darth Maul, Attack of the Clones had Christopher Lee as a Sith and Revenge of the Sith had a Jedi-cyborg with four arms though.
They looked really cool at least : P

The problem was all three were completely unimportant to the plot.

Maul looked cool, but you could have replaced him with a few cardboard boxes with a frowny face painted on them a lightsaber taped to them for all the difference it would have made to his role. Dooku was probably the biggest waste of a big name actor in the PT (his only real competition being Samuel L. Jackson) as he seemed like an intriguing character that would have some interesting insight on the Jedi, the Sith, the Republic, and the Confederacy (having been involved with all of them at various points), but the films hastily got rid of him before he could ever get around to doing much. Grievous was a completely ridiculous and pointless character who didn't even have the wow factor of the other two and seemed to have been hastily shoved into Episode III when Lucas realized he didn't have a new character he could use to sell toys yet.

None of them had any buildup or gave the main characters (or the audience) any reason to have them or cheer for their defeat beyond them being the designated bad guy, which is partially understandable given that none of them lasted for more than half a film's worth of runtime. Considering that Lucas created two of the most iconic villains of all time in the OT in Palpatine and (especially) Vader, the fact that the PT's villains were so painfully lacklustre and misused becomes all the more glaring as one of its more notable pratfalls.

Mover_of_Zigs posted...

Attack of the Clones had some serious, serious internal logic flaws.

My favorite is:
Anakin - "Shoot him down!"
Clonetrooper - "We're out of rockets!"

...Dude, did you forget you have like 20 laser cannons on that thing?

Personally, I like the way they ended the subsequent fight scene with Dooku trying to drop a rock pillar on Anakin and Obi-Wan. Yoda could have quickly pulled the much-lighter Kenobi and Skywalker to safety or slammed the pillar into Dooku's ship after catching it in order to disable it and prevent his getaway, but instead he just takes an agonizingly long time tossing it to the side so that Dooku is given enough time to escape.

Yeah that's why I said at least they looked cool : P
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OhhhJa posted...

This topic again

Also... that's bait

poor quality bait at that.
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LeetCheet posted...

Yeah that's why I said at least they looked cool : P

About the only one that looked genuinely cool was Maul. Dooku looked like... well, Christopher Lee. And wishing no disrespect to Christopher Lee, he's not my go-to definition of cool. Grievous just looked dumb - a badly-CGId asthmatic, storky cyborg whose big thing was twirling blades like propellers (aka a move that five-year-olds think is amazing and pretty much no one else).
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We need a movie about Christopher Lee's Nazi hunting days
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Mover_of_Zigs posted...

We need a movie about Christopher Lee's Nazi hunting days

Your Sister is a Werewolf
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Lokarin posted...

Your Sister is a Werewolf

That's beside the point.
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darkknight109 posted...

man101 posted...

Also the bombing run in the beginning is a bigger physics clusterfuck than the hyperspeed bomb. Why do the bombs fall out without gravity?

Apparently they're "magnetically charged" to "fall" away from the bomber. I don't really like that explanation myself, but it isn't even Star Wars's worst abuse of space-gravity physics (that title goes to Episode III's opening battle, where a tilting ship somehow causes gravity to shift, despite the fact that "down" on a ship is always relative to the ship itself)..

That battle was taking place in the airspace above Coruscant, well within the planet's gravitational field. I have not seen the film recently enough to remember if there was ever some mention of artificial gravity being disabled or destroyed, but the ship certainly should have tilted and affected everyone on board.
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I am so fucking tired of Star Wars.
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Whether you like the film or not, the continuation of the story seems to be in a pickle right now for Episode 9.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtyDg-cm2yI" data-time="
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man101 posted...

darkknight109 posted...

man101 posted...

Also the bombing run in the beginning is a bigger physics clusterfuck than the hyperspeed bomb. Why do the bombs fall out without gravity?

Apparently they're "magnetically charged" to "fall" away from the bomber. I don't really like that explanation myself, but it isn't even Star Wars's worst abuse of space-gravity physics (that title goes to Episode III's opening battle, where a tilting ship somehow causes gravity to shift, despite the fact that "down" on a ship is always relative to the ship itself)..

That battle was taking place in the airspace above Coruscant, well within the planet's gravitational field. I have not seen the film recently enough to remember if there was ever some mention of artificial gravity being disabled or destroyed, but the ship certainly should have tilted and affected everyone on board.

No, no it could not. I know what you're saying seems like it makes sense, but orbital physics do not work anywhere close to that way.

There's so much wrong with that scene physically, I don't even know where to start taking it apart.

I'll do my best to try to explain it without diagrams. Basically, as you probably already know, "orbit" is not so much weightlessness as it is "going forward so fast that your fall toward the planet is offset by the curve of the planet itself". Now, the ships above Coruscant are not going nearly fast enough to be in orbit, so they're clearly using some other method to stop from dropping into the planet's atmosphere. Now the Invisible Hand sustains damage and that method fails, so the ship starts falling towards the planet. Problem is, that fall wouldn't be a slow, leisurely fall like the movie depicts; it would be a sudden plunge akin to being dropped out of an airplane. And in that instance, even if the planet's gravity was overriding the ship's internal gravity, the dominant force there would not be gravity, but inertia. Depending on atmospheric specifics, Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Palpatine would have either been flung to the back of the ship (if it was outside the atmosphere and not affected by atmospheric resistance) or they would have suddenly been weightless, like someone riding the "Vomit Comet" (if the ship was inside the upper atmosphere) since the ship and them would be falling at the same rate.

Regardless, nothing about that scene makes any sense at all from a physics perspective.
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