Poll of the Day > Jesus fuck the first two thirds of that fucking movie

(+) Yeah! (+)

Hi I'm JJ Abrams, and here's the episode 5 I would have made, on fast forward.

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Can't wait

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Man people love to nitpick every little thing about star wars huh?

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FrozenBananas posted...

Man people love to nitpick every little thing about star wars huh?

To be fair, I did enjoy the movie, but it tried really hard to "fix" TLJ and essentially fits two movies into one.

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FrozenBananas posted...

Man people love to nitpick every little thing about star wars huh?

No, only the bad parts.

But I understand why you might see that as "every little thing". At least for the last 20 years or so.
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No Thankyou droid is better than porgs though I love him and want to pet him

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Jar Jar Watto the hack Abrahams, everything I touch turns to *****. TFA was **** too. Has he ever made a good movie?
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its becoming increasingly apparent that TFA was only good because it was a retread of ANH

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TheWitchMorgana posted...

its becoming increasingly apparent that TFA was only good because it was a retread of ANH

And it wasn't good, either, precisely for just being a retread. But at least it more or less functions as a movie, in comparison to the other 2.

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my son liked how kylo was able to bring rey back to life because thats the power anakin wanted to have but said they should have made rey the true chosen one of the prophecy instead of palpatines granddaughter

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

And it wasn't good, either, precisely for just being a retread. But at least it more or less functions as a movie, in comparison to the other 2.

I said at the time it would work well as a base to build on, and to redeem the bad taste the prequels left in people's mouths, if it led into the next two movies and helped set up an effective trilogy. So my ultimate opinion of VII was going to depend entirely on what they did with VIII and IX.

Considering how the following movies did absolutely nothing worthwhile with any of it, it sort of makes TFA much, much worse in retrospect. Because it wasn't nostalgia to set up a new beginning, it was hollow nostalgia with absolutely no substance, no direction, and no point. It wasn't world-building, it was masturbation.
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LaggnFragnLarry posted...

my son liked how kylo was able to bring rey back to life because thats the power anakin wanted to have but said they should have made rey the true chosen one of the prophecy instead of palpatines granddaughter

Vader was the chosen one. He did kill Palpatine at one point, and did bring balance to The Force, albeit temporarily.

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The whole prophecy idea was fucking dumb

I always looked at it as anakin bringing balance to the Force by going over to the dark side

i mean how can there be a balance to the Force when theres a whole shitload of Jedi nerds and just one sith old man that has to stay hidden all the time

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The phrase balance isn't really supposed to be taken literally. The force isn't a set of scales. It just means that things are in their natural healthy state.

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Blighboy posted...

The phrase balance isn't really supposed to be taken literally. The force isn't a set of scales. It just means that things are in their natural healthy state.

fuck that

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The reason the force is unbalanced is because Jedi don't use enough double bladed lightsabers. Their combined plasma tilts the galaxy too much in one direction.

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Blighboy posted...

The phrase balance isn't really supposed to be taken literally. The force isn't a set of scales. It just means that things are in their natural healthy state.

That only works if you consider the Dark Side to be unnatural.

But the thing is, you can't have life without death. Decay exists to recycle things into new forms. The brightest lights cast the darkest shadow, and conversely, light is meaningless without shadow to define it.

It's way more interesting to see the Dark Side as a natural (if terrible) aspect of the Force in itself, which has to exist in order for the Light Side to exist. Two sides of the same coin, each having a purpose, each being necessary. With the only problem being when one or the other of the two falls out of balance, growing too strong and potentially overpowering the other.

It also makes what happened in the prequels almost clever - the Jedi wind up getting blindsided because they mistakenly assumed the prophecy meant one thing, when it actually meant another. Too many Jedi (without an equal number of Sith to counterbalance them) had unbalanced the Force, so something had to come along to reset the scales. Cue the new balance - two Jedi in hiding, two Sith ruling.

Of course, something clever and interesting has no place in the prequels, so of course Lucas poo-pooed the idea. And then talked about how he wanted to double down on midichlorians if he'd done the sequels himself.
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But death and rebirth are a part of the light side as well, so that logic falls apart. The most unnatural parts of the force are always exclusively presented as dark side.

The jedi are more about going with the flow, while the dark side is focused on using the force to go against the natural order of things. It's worth noting that by default Star Wars is generally pretty dystopian, it's not like the jedi were teaching the galaxy their peaceful ways by force.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I said at the time it would work well as a base to build on, and to redeem the bad taste the prequels left in people's mouths, if it led into the next two movies and helped set up an effective trilogy. So my ultimate opinion of VII was going to depend entirely on what they did with VIII and IX.

Considering how the following movies did absolutely nothing worthwhile with any of it, it sort of makes TFA much, much worse in retrospect. Because it wasn't nostalgia to set up a new beginning, it was hollow nostalgia with absolutely no substance, no direction, and no point. It wasn't world-building, it was masturbation.

And if we'll recall, this is exactly the thing I pointed out from the get-go with TFA, and how it's slavish adherence to safe mediocrity would virtually guarantee the whole trilogy being tainted and doomed to fail.

The problem being, of course, was that TFA *wasn't* just a movie trying to play it safe in order to get the audience on board with a Lucas-less, post PT Star Wars. I agree that on some levels, nostalgia or putting the audience into a comfort zone was likely necessary. But that's not what TFA did- it wholesale ripped off ANH, and thus guaranteed we would be stuck with Rebels vs. Empire 2.0, superweapons power creep, shady Sith masterminds trying to recruit a budding Jedi with a powerful bloodline, etc. The writers were too shallow or too afraid to trust the audience, thus locking the whole series into a form of retread. Which made TLJ's attempts to buck the trend all the more jarring, and TRoS's attempt to tie the spaghetti noodles together make the whole trilogy look every bit like the trial-by-committee it was. It was quite obvious this is would happen.

That said, not even I could predict they could get Luke and the Force so wrong, or fuck up the lore in general so badly. Or do something as shamelessly hacky as bring the Emperor back.

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CyborgSage00x0 posted...

And if we'll recall, this is exactly the thing I pointed out from the get-go with TFA, and how it's slavish adherence to safe mediocrity would virtually guarantee the whole trilogy being tainted and doomed to fail.

And I disagreed at the time - and I still disagree now.

Nothing about VII makes failure inevitable. There are plenty of ways it could have gone that would have worked quite effectively. Fuck, give me a weekend and I could probably write a better spec script for Episode VIII and IX than what we got. This isn't rocket science.

The real problem was a lack of unifying vision. Allowing three different directors (even if one of them eventually backed out) to shoot three different barely connected movies written by three different people, and without a central authority directing traffic in any way, and with no attempt to rein in excessive deconstruction.

There are definitely elements of VII that made following up harder than it might otherwise have been (though ironically, they're not necessarily the parts aping New Hope the most). But there were multiple ways they could have built on that foundation, before Rian Johnson deliberately severed every single thread and then kicked over whatever was left before setting it on fire.

Last Jedi is the real poisoned well in this particular equation, not Force Awakens.
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I would say most of the problems with RoS had almost nothing to do with TLJ.

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FrozenBananas posted...

Man people love to nitpick every little thing about star wars huh?

Yup, and when a new trilogy comes out, they'll do the same thing.

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