Poll of the Day > Last Jedi did suck.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Not sure why people get so defensive of it. Sure, it's the best looking Star Wars movie (not hard), but the story is bad. All the characters are the same exact people at the end of the movie that they were at the start except Kylo. It's basically a two and a half hour movie where the characters say "Gee, the world is nothing like I imagined it....wait, no, nevermind. It's exactly what I thought it was and I'm going to go back to be the person I was earlier."

Rey being disillusioned by Luke and questioning her path? Nvm, this path was right after all.

Finn being disillusioned by the Resistance and thinking there could be other ways? Nah, at least the people I work for aren't Hitler 2.

Poe being knocked down a peg and told to take some responsibility? Lol the pink haired bitch is just a bitch, go do some more quips!

It does suck

but a few parts in it are kinda cool. Id say thats actually the whole trilogy in a nutshell

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If you cut out 2/3rds of the movie and then change some of the stuff in the other 1/3rd, there's potentially a good movie in there!
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7-9 ruined all of star wars for me. That story was so stupid it left a bad taste in my mouth for everything about the franchise.

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hypnox posted...

7-9 ruined all of star wars for me. That story was so stupid it left a bad taste in my mouth for everything about the franchise.

Basically this. 7 was a bad shinier remake of a New Hope. 8 was doodoo through and through. 9 had a couple decent moments, but sucked mostly. I don't know why they decided the only threat they could come up with, was planet busting weapons.

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TLJ is legit the worst sequel Ive ever seen. The whole deconstruction of the hero thing could have been interesting if they didnt do such a terrible fucking job. That entire trilogy was written by people who didnt care about respecting the legacy of the movies that came before or having any semblance of direction apparently.

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7 was a bad remake of 4, 8 was an even worse remake of 5 >_>

Finn's subquest was a complete waste of time. However, some of the Rey stuff wasn't terrible.

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Complete waste of time.
Rogue One and Solo were the only half-decent new movies and even they had problems.
Jyn was an even flatter character than Rey, in fact, all characters were boring as hell except for the droid which is probably the best character in the whole Disney era of Star Wars films.
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https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-6hWS7XsCYOYGo?format=jpg&name=large

The KOTOR remake writer disagrees with you greatly, fite her.

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Star Wars as a whole is trash, people just get horny with the setting as that's all they develop.
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Would have been cool if they did a switcheroo and had Kylo go good and Rey go evil.

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all three sequels sucked, made the prequels, well, some bits of the prequels, look good in comparison

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What_The_Chris posted...

all three sequels sucked, made the prequels, well, some bits of the prequels, look good in comparison

As bad as parts of the sequels got (and TRoS got really fuckin' bad at points), they will never plumb the depths of banality and utter putrescence that Episodes II and III reached. Episode VII was derivative but mindlessly fun, Episode VIII I still hold to be decent, and Episode IX was really stupid, but none of them were as aggressively bad as AotC or RotS.

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DirtBasedSoap posted...

That entire trilogy was written by people who didnt care about respecting the legacy of the movies that came before

No, Abrams (who directed VII & IX) cared about the legacy almost overmuch, in that VII was basically "let's just make the Empire come back and do IV over again". IX was...just trying to clean up and end things after VIII.

The big problem IMO wasn't him, though, it was that VIII/Last Jedi was directed by Rian Johnson who had more or less the complete opposite approach: respect nothing, end the Jedi, and end 'romantic heroism' in general in favor of flawed/unhappy characters. Star Wars without heroes is...I don't know, but it isn't Star Wars.

DirtBasedSoap posted...

or having any semblance of direction apparently.

That's certainly true, and Abrams has admitted as much.

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The main problem with the ST (for me) was that it took one of the sillier things from the old EU, but did nothing to build it up during the trilogy, it was just suddenly a thing during the opening crawl for 9.

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darkknight109 posted...

As bad as parts of the sequels got (and TRoS got really fuckin' bad at points), they will never plumb the depths of banality and utter putrescence that Episodes II and III reached. Episode VII was derivative but mindlessly fun, Episode VIII I still hold to be decent, and Episode IX was really stupid, but none of them were as aggressively bad as AotC or RotS.

VII would be viewed much better if VIII and IX weren't such trash imo

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Muscles posted...

VII would be viewed much better if VIII and IX weren't such trash imo

VII was fine at the time and it was a good way to get everyone settled down after the Disney purpose. It was a very "safe" movie - basically a soft reboot without looking like a reboot. I agreed with that approach at the time, even though I knew it wouldn't stand the test of time (because you can't remake a legend like ANH - one of the most successful movies ever - and hope to catch lightning in a bottle a second time; it would be like remaking Citizen Kane or Gone With the Wind).

And my predictions largely bore out. TFA is a fine movie on its own merits, but too derivative to hold my attention on repeated viewings. If I want to watch the story of ANH, I'll just go watch ANH.

wpot posted...

The big problem IMO wasn't him, though, it was that VIII/Last Jedi was directed by Rian Johnson who had more or less the complete opposite approach: respect nothing, end the Jedi, and end 'romantic heroism' in general in favor of flawed/unhappy characters. Star Wars without heroes is...I don't know, but it isn't Star Wars.

The lack of cohesion in the trilogy was a serious issue and the fact that the two directors had opposite views for how the trilogy should look definitely messed things up. I personally think the issue was with Abrams more than Johnson, though - he did what he usually does, which is set up a bunch of plot threads that seem really interesting on first blush, but which realistically have no satisfying conclusion (Rey's heritage being a prime example - I thought Johnson's answer to that question was far, far more satisfying than Abrams' and it annoyed me when Episode IX did a super-sloppy retcon so it could resurrect that particular plot point). If I had the choice between an entire trilogy directed by Abrams or an entire trilogy directed by Johnson, I would go with Johnson every time, because he was the one who actually brought something new to the series and made it interesting.

Not sure I get your complaints about VIII.

"Respect nothing?" What didn't he respect? Is this that line from a disenchanted Luke about the Jedi being a bunch of failures who allowed the rise of Vader and Palpatine through their own hubris? Because a) he immediately gets pushback on that view from the person he's talking to and b) that's not an entirely wrong view of what happened, even though it's not the whole story. I actually really liked that touch because one of the big disconnects between the OT and the PT is how Obi-Wan in the OT describes the Jedi as a group of enlightened warrior-monks bringing peace to the galaxy, but the PT shows them to be a bickering council more consumed with internal politics and bureaucracy than anything to do with the study of the Force (which is exactly why Qui-Gon is such a divisive figure in their ranks). Johnson just acknowledged that in-universe and gave Luke a overly-pessimistic view of the Jedi to contrast with Obi-Wan's overly-optimistic one, with the truth somewhere in the middle. I thought that was a nice touch.

"End the Jedi"? He literally did the opposite. The Jedi effectively didn't exist at the start of the movie, but they did by the end.

"End romantic heroism in favour of flawed, unhappy characters"? Hasn't that always been what Star Wars was about? The entire second half of the original trilogy was Luke fighting the temptation of the dark side and coming a hair's bredth from losing that battle. And how was Finn flawed or unhappy, beyond what we saw in Episode VII? How was Rey? How was Poe's arrogance any different from Han Solo's in the original trilogy (both of whom's overconfidence in their own abilities/connections put their friends in danger)?

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I am going to see this same stupid fucking topic every fucking month for the rest of my god damn life JFC

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DirtBasedSoap posted...

The whole deconstruction of the hero thing could have been interesting if they didnt do such a terrible fucking job.

It also might have worked better if it wasn't smack in the middle of a trilogy that had completely different intentions and tone, in a franchise that really wasn't built for that sort of introspection.

It would be like if you were watching the original LotR trilogy, and instead of The Two Towers you got Watchmen.



DirtBasedSoap posted...

or having any semblance of direction apparently.

This is probably the key problem. Farming each separate movie off to a different director without giving them a unified narrative vision or requiring them to follow a specific story thread led to the equivalent of a car crash. Colin Trevorrow pulling out after seeing the mess Rian Johnson left him with so that Abrams could come in and deal with Episode IX probably would have helped, but by that point Abrams was left doing so much damage control for Rion Johnson that there was hope in hell of that movie being anything worthwhile.

What they needed was a storyline and narrative arc from the very start, before they cast a single actor or filmed a single scene. From there coherence of directorial vision and storytelling could easily have been enforced by a competent executive producer.

The sequels needed a Kevin Feige. Instead they got Kathleen Kennedy.



LeetCheet posted...

Jyn was an even flatter character than Rey, in fact, all characters were boring as hell except for the droid

I think Rogue One works better if you view the characters more as mythic archetypes than characters.

Ironically, it's a story that could have benefited from being spread out across multiple movies - as-is, they try to cram too much plot and too many characters into a single movie, so there isn't enough focus on any of them. Make it a trilogy of its own and they would have had much more time to develop each individual, and thus make their sacrifice more impactful.

That being said, it's pretty much the only movie they've made since Disney acquired the franchise that's worth watching at all, so that's its sad legacy.



DANTE20XX posted...

The KOTOR remake writer disagrees with you greatly, fite her.

That bodes extremely fucking ill for the KotOR remake. This is going to be Beamdog levels of shit all over again.
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VII was alright. VIII was bad. IX was an abomination.

I'm of the opinion that VIII was the best of the trilogy but that's only realized after watching IX. As a standalone movie VII was the best and most enjoyable.

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LeetCheet posted...

Complete waste of time.
Rogue One and Solo were the only half-decent new movies and even they had problems.
Jyn was an even flatter character than Rey, in fact, all characters were boring as hell except for the droid which is probably the best character in the whole Disney era of Star Wars films.

Solo was terrible, but Rogue One was decent.

DANTE20XX posted...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-6hWS7XsCYOYGo?format=jpg&name=large

The KOTOR remake writer disagrees with you greatly, fite her.

Well, that remake is going to be trash.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Star Wars as a whole is trash, people just get horny with the setting as that's all they develop.

Some of the franchise is far, far, far better than other parts of the franchise.

What_The_Chris posted...

all three sequels sucked, made the prequels, well, some bits of the prequels, look good in comparison

Which is the crazy part of all this.

darkknight109 posted...

As bad as parts of the sequels got (and TRoS got really fuckin' bad at points), they will never plumb the depths of banality and utter putrescence that Episodes II and III reached. Episode VII was derivative but mindlessly fun, Episode VIII I still hold to be decent, and Episode IX was really stupid, but none of them were as aggressively bad as AotC or RotS.

I would sooner rewatch EPII or III any number of times than EPVII. I'm split on VIII.

I notice you don't mention TPM, and I agree we should pretend it never existed

darkknight109 posted...

VII was fine at the time and it was a good way to get everyone settled down after the Disney purpose. It was a very "safe" movie - basically a soft reboot without looking like a reboot. I agreed with that approach at the time, even though I knew it wouldn't stand the test of time (because you can't remake a legend like ANH - one of the most successful movies ever - and hope to catch lightning in a bottle a second time; it would be like remaking Citizen Kane or Gone With the Wind).

No, VII was always garbage. It just took some nice for people to wake up and smell the dumpster-fire. They were blinded by optimism.


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Zeus posted...

No, VII was always garbage. It just took some nice for people to wake up and smell the dumpster-fire. They were blinded by optimism.

My stance on it at the time was that it was exactly the sort of nostalgia-masturbation we needed to cleanse our palates after the shit sandwich that was the prequels. But that its overall value almost entirely depends on what came after. If VIII and IX were good, they would elevate VII by virtue of it being their foundation. If If VIII and IX were bad, they'd drag VII down by virtue of making it pointless.

My stance has not changed.

There were ways to build off of what VII presented to make a solid trilogy people would have actually liked. They chose to do the opposite of that. VII looks worse now because now we know that it was utterly aimless, pointless, and worthless. But if they'd treated Finn and Poe as true co-protagonists going forward (more akin to how the original films treat Han and Leia), and if anything they set up in the first film actually paid off in anything resembling a satisfying way later, it would have been a solid enough entry in the trilogy.

I don't think it would actually be that difficult to write "fan fiction" scripts for VIII and IX using VII as the starting point that wind up being far superior to what we actually got. In exactly the same way that I tend to feel the prequels were relatively salvageable if you completely ignore Phantom Menace and expand Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith over three movies instead of two (with a few tweaks here and there, and a bit more faithfulness to the original trilogy). VII isn't inherently flawed - the real problem is that VIII breaks everything and then IX pathetically tries to fix it all again (poorly).
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darkknight109 posted...

VII was fine at the time and it was a good way to get everyone settled down after the Disney purpose.

Agreed: that's was clearly the point of VII, yes.

darkknight109 posted...

If I had the choice between an entire trilogy directed by Abrams or an entire trilogy directed by Johnson, I would go with Johnson every time, because he was the one who actually brought something new to the series and made it interesting.

Agreed and disagreed, I guess. In the big picture I think both would have screwed it up. Abrams made feel-good movies with plot lines that didn't make much sense. Rian tried to move the series along...but it wasn't much fun. He destroyed the Jedi (burn the books: everyone can do force stuff if they want to!), made Luke unlikeable, made us feel bad about blowing up a star destroyer, and generally focused on everyone's negatives. Also, the "if you would only trust the female characters you would succeed" theme was so strong that the movie felt rather preachy to me. Yes, yes, it's a fine message: but the one thing that Abrams was correct about is that Star Wars should be FUN first and foremost.

darkknight109 posted...

Jedi being a bunch of failures

I don't need them to be perfect, but in the original series they were flawed individuals desperately trying to prevent planets from blowing up and greed from taking over the galaxy. They were unambiguously good guys, despite their flaws. Rian went with the modern "having 'good guys' is quaint: movies should be more realistic with kinda good guys fighting against kinda bad guys". Realistic? Sure. Fun/what I want from Star Wars? No! There is a lack of old-school fun movies out there these days: most everything is grittily realistic or preachy or both. There should be movies like that, but Star Wars should be able to fill the simple fun void! (Especially when owned by Disney)

I mean, I love Knives Out and Rian's willingness to change things, but his vision didn't move the series in the direction it needed to be moved IMO.

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my son liked it a lot when we saw it in theaters

Zeus posted...

I would sooner rewatch EPII or III any number of times than EPVII

That doesn't surprise me given your opinions on everything else.

Zeus posted...

I notice you don't mention TPM, and I agree we should pretend it never existed

TPM is, at worst, boring. People slag on it because it came after RotJ, meaning it's the biggest high-to-low quality jump across the entire saga to date. But remove the sky-high expectations placed on it from back when Star Wars was almost universally considered amazing and you find a movie that is... I don't know, competent, maybe? Middling? It's not good, but I don't find it horrible either. It features a bunch of good actors trying to breathe life into terribly-written characters engaging in a nonsensical plot. It's dull and sits comfortably in the bottom half of the Star Wars movies in terms of quality, but even in its worst moments it's not nearly as bad as its two successors.

Whatever Liam Neeson got paid for TPM, it wasn't enough. He managed to anchor that movie and provide an interesting protagonist despite a terrible script. Would that Episodes II and III had a similarly-talented actor playing the main character...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

My stance on it at the time was that it was exactly the sort of nostalgia-masturbation we needed to cleanse our palates after the shit sandwich that was the prequels. But that its overall value almost entirely depends on what came after. If VIII and IX were good, they would elevate VII by virtue of it being their foundation. If If VIII and IX were bad, they'd drag VII down by virtue of making it pointless.

I don't know if I fully agree.

Yes, part of how Episode VII's legacy was always going to be how the sequels used it (or failed to) as a base. But even if Episodes VIII and IX had been amazing, there's some parts of Episode VII that are just terrible. The way it fails to adequately link up to Episode VI, for one thing. I got so sick of seeing umpteen-zillion discussions on "Who are the Resistance and why are they different from the New Republic?" / "Who are the First Order and why are they so powerful if the Empire was defeated?" / "Who is Snoke and where did he come from?". All those questions got answered in the ancillary material, which is not where information like that belongs. At the very least, it should have been touched on in the movie itself, if only to provide some context. In Medias Res is how you start an original story, not a sequel. There's also the fact that Abrams made the awful decision to have the BBEG be the Death-Star-By-Another-Name for the third time in seven movies. It was questionable when Lucas did it in RotJ, but at least he added some new elements to keep things fresh (fleet battle with the Star Destroyers, ground battle to bring the shields down, climactic duel between Luke and Vader on the Death Star itself); Abrams not only recycled a superweapon we'd already seen before (twice!), he somehow managed to make it less interesting than the very first time we'd seen it.

I think Episode VII had a "ceiling" for the quality of how it was going to be viewed, regardless of how its sequels panned out, and I don't think that ceiling was particularly high.

wpot posted...

He destroyed the Jedi (burn the books: everyone can do force stuff if they want to!), made Luke unlikeable, made us feel bad about blowing up a star destroyer, and generally focused on everyone's negatives.

Um... what?

OK, he burned the "sacred texts" of the Jedi... which were books that didn't exist prior to this movie, never had established importance beyond historical value, and which even Yoda himself admits were not exactly of great value. Oh, and as we find out at the end of the movie, it turns out Rey saved them anyways, so they never got burned at all.

Anyone can do Force stuff? Since when? The only characters who use the Force in TLJ are characters who have already been established to be Force Sensitives.

Made us feel bad about blowing up a Star Destroyer? In what way? I'm not even sure what scene you're referring to with that one, because all the Star Destroyer 'splodin' that I remember happening were painted as heroic victories.

Generally focused on everyone's negatives? I'd say Empire did that as well and everyone fuckin' loves Empire. Half that movie was Yoda calling Luke an impatient, angry, whiny kid and Luke doing everything he could to prove him right, up to and including nearly getting himself killed in an ill-advised attempt to rescue his friends that didn't even work. Star Wars has never painted its heroes as perfect - Luke's temptations with evil are a major theme of the OT; Han Solo being a wanted criminal and an arrogant jerk with a hidden heart of gold is one of the reasons he's so popular; Lando goes from slightly-sleazy businessman to backstabbing traitor before eventually turning Face; so on and so forth. Even characters like Yoda and Obi-Wan have their flaws, even if those are more subtly presented (Yoda is dogmatic and an impatient teacher and he and Obi-Wan both fail to recognize that Anakin Skywalker hasn't quite been fully subsumed by the evil that is Darth Vader).

wpot posted...

I don't need them to be perfect, but in the original series they were flawed individuals desperately trying to prevent planets from blowing up and greed from taking over the galaxy. They were unambiguously good guys, despite their flaws.

OK... but what about that changed? Luke's statement on them is not objective fact, merely how he views them, which is heavily tainted by his guilt at his own failure to train the next generation of Jedi and how two out of the last three generations of his family have become galaxy-threatening monsters. Rey herself is quick to point out the problems with what he's saying and the fact that he's only presenting one side of the issue. Much as Obi-Wan in ANH only recalled the Jedi's good points (which you can explain using Doylian logic as Lucas not decided on what the Jedi actually were or the Watsonian logic of Obi-Wan still wilfully blinding himself to the failures of his order), Luke is choosing only to recall their bad, when in reality they had both. Neither depiction of them is wrong, just slanted, something the movie itself points out.

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It blew my mind after I watched it that anyone liked that movie. About 15 minutes in I was sitting in the theatre in awe "wow, they actually went with this? is this a joke? when is the actual movie going to start?" and it was only downhill from there. It actually completely killed my interest in Star Wars for a good few years after I saw it.

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papercup posted...

It blew my mind after I watched it that anyone liked that movie. About 15 minutes in I was sitting in the theatre in awe "wow, they actually went with this? is this a joke? when is the actual movie going to start?" and it was only downhill from there. It actually completely killed my interest in Star Wars for a good few years after I saw it.

I will say, even as someone who likes TLJ, the first ~20-30 minutes were awful. I thought the second half of the movie redeemed it, but even now I hate watching the opening.

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it still blows my mind the movie actually exists. when i first saw it, i almost thought i was having a fever dream, ok?

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darkknight109 posted...

OK, he burned the "sacred texts" of the Jedi...

No, nobody cares about the books, whether burned or saved. It's the symbolism, of course. "All of this training/etc stuff you have been doing is pointless, there was never any meaning to any of it". Luke straight out says "so it's time for the order to end". Rian would have us believe that anyone can do what the Jedi were doing if they wanted to without intense training. I didn't see him "refreshing" the Jedi: he ended them, buried their memory, and gave their powers away for free. My brain is blocking out large sections of IX, but even with Abrams I don't believe the term "Jedi" was much used there, was it?

It's disappointingly like society these days. Laws/government/traditions/etc? That stuff is all meaningless crap...and heck, it doesn't even matter if you're skilled at something or not as long as you seem confident. You can just make it up as you go along. Bleh. No, you don't see the other characters starting to use the force (other than Leia, I guess) but the message was clear.

darkknight109 posted...

Made us feel bad about blowing up a Star Destroyer?

Poe launches an attack on the star destroyer. They take losses. Heroic bomber gets through, drops bombs (in a sequence that makes no sense in outer space, but whatever), it explodes. Poe returns and is chewed out for disobeying orders and taking losses...and the movie makes it clear the criticism is justified. Buzz kill.

darkknight109 posted...

Half that movie was Yoda calling Luke an impatient, angry, whiny kid and Luke doing everything he could to prove him right

Yes, and Rian/Co wrote that. Weaknesses can and should exist, but to spend a movie wallowing in them...no. In the original movies the weaknesses were presented either for humor, the "cool rogue" factor, or as a backdrop for later great successes (overcoming darkness). Again, if the movies were written with one narrative in mind Rian might have pulled it out in IX...but even ignoring that he didn't do enough in VIII itself to outweigh the damage.

darkknight109 posted...

OK... but what about that changed?

At a high level maybe not much, but again: it's the focus. The movie spent the whole time focusing on how the heroes were flawed. If that was done in order to be the backdrop for an amazing effort to overcome them, maaybe OK...but there was way too much degrading and far too little redeeming. Luke did something vaguely heroic at the end, but it didn't nearly outweigh the damage. (I would also point out that 'slipping out the back of a cave' shouldn't work in a high tech environment, but also whatever) Not fun!

darkknight109 posted...

TPM is, at worst, boring.

For the record I agree there. The world was intact within Lucas' vision. There were bad characters and dumb segments, but it wasn't bad per se. II was a dumpster fire, sure. I thought III did pretty well despite Hayden, although yes: it was unfortunate that he was in the center of it.

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Rogue One should've been a 2 parter.. would've felt something when they all died at the end

I haven't given up on Star Wars yet thanks to The Mandolorian :D

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

There were ways to build off of what VII presented to make a solid trilogy people would have actually liked. They chose to do the opposite of that. VII looks worse now because now we know that it was utterly aimless, pointless, and worthless. But if they'd treated Finn and Poe as true co-protagonists going forward (more akin to how the original films treat Han and Leia), and if anything they set up in the first film actually paid off in anything resembling a satisfying way later, it would have been a solid enough entry in the trilogy.

I saw nothing there. I think my exact words at the time were "soulless, focus-grouped remake of EPIV". Given the terrible start, I can't imagine what they have done and ended with something I might have enjoyed.

And, as bad as the prequel trilogy was, it had its moments. Yes, the story was often garbage, but other things would make up for it. I kinda struggle to think of anything that redeemed TFA. Meanwhile TLJ had a few "yeah, okay, I liked that" moments.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

(more akin to how the original films treat Han and Leia),

I probably would have enjoyed it if Poe and Finn were shipped together, but that China would never let the movies air there if they'd done that.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

In exactly the same way that I tend to feel the prequels were relatively salvageable if you completely ignore Phantom Menace and expand Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith over three movies instead of two (with a few tweaks here and there, and a bit more faithfulness to the original trilogy).

I can see that.

wpot posted...

but the one thing that Abrams was correct about is that Star Wars should be FUN first and foremost.

There was nothing all that fun about TFA. It was the first SW movie where I stopped to check the time to see how much more was left (and each time I did, the answer was "too much")

darkknight109 posted...

That doesn't surprise me given your opinions on everything else.

In the catalog of your shitty opinions, I shouldn't be surprised in the least that you disagree and defend this crap. Blandly terrible and forgettable seem to be your favorite movie flavors.

darkknight109 posted...

TPM is, at worst, boring. People slag on it because it came after RotJ, meaning it's the biggest high-to-low quality jump across the entire saga to date. But remove the sky-high expectations placed on it from back when Star Wars was almost universally considered amazing and you find a movie that is... I don't know, competent, maybe? Middling? It's not good, but I don't find it horrible either. It features a bunch of good actors trying to breathe life into terribly-written characters engaging in a nonsensical plot. It's dull and sits comfortably in the bottom half of the Star Wars movies in terms of quality, but even in its worst moments it's not nearly as bad as its two successors.

Whatever Liam Neeson got paid for TPM, it wasn't enough. He managed to anchor that movie and provide an interesting protagonist despite a terrible script. Would that Episodes II and III had a similarly-talented actor playing the main character...

While TPM is worse than its sequels in every way, at least I feel like it could be salvageable, unlike TFA.

However, the story was a mess, the supporting cast was often just ugh with the weird accents, talking droids, how Anakin was used, and shoehorned pod race. Actually, if Anakin didn't feature at all (and they killed those accents), it might have been an okay-ish movie even without fixing the other issues.


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wpot posted...

"All of this training/etc stuff you have been doing is pointless, there was never any meaning to any of it". Luke straight out says "so it's time for the order to end". Rian would have us believe that anyone can do what the Jedi were doing if they wanted to without intense training. I didn't see him "refreshing" the Jedi: he ended them, buried their memory, and gave their powers away for free.

When did Johnson suggest intense training wasn't required to become a Jedi? Yes, Rey didn't go through that in Episode VIII (but did in IX, under Leia's tutelage)... but neither did Luke in ESB (he was on Dagobah an indeterminate amount of time, but considering that he left as soon as Han and co. reached Bespin, it was likely a period sometime between a few days and maybe a month or two at most), so that's not unprecedented (and Luke didn't even have the benefit of another living Jedi to study from, nor a set of texts to read through).

And he never got rid of the Jedi, even without Episode IX. Hell, one of Luke's final statements in the film, directed towards Kylo Ren, is "I will not be the last Jedi". It was fairly apparent that Luke had a change of heart midway through the film and decided the Jedi were worth saving after all and that Rey was going to continue them.

wpot posted...

It's disappointingly like society these days. Laws/government/traditions/etc? That stuff is all meaningless crap...and heck, it doesn't even matter if you're skilled at something or not as long as you seem confident. You can just make it up as you go along.

I'll point out that the, "Let tradition die; kill it, if you have to," lines are spoken almost exclusively by the bad guys in the film. That's not meant to be the message you take away.

Yoda probably expounded upon it best. Some traditions are good, some are bad. Just because messed up stuff happens doesn't mean you throw everything away. The role of every master is to take the old, preserve the parts of it that need to be preserved, and improve the rest so as to hand the next generation something even better.

Nowhere in TLJ does it give the message that "you can just make up what you like and everything will work out fine." Hell, Poe, Fin, and Rose did that in their plan to infiltrate the Supremacy - not only did it almost get them killed, it very nearly annihilated the entire Resistance. I actually found that quite refreshing, honestly - it's the only time in recent memory I can think of a big-budget film where the heroes pull the, "this is our plan - it's a million-to-one longshot, but if everything comes together, it just might work!" trick and it works out like it actually would in real life: in abject failure.

wpot posted...

Poe returns and is chewed out for disobeying orders and taking losses...and the movie makes it clear the criticism is justified. Buzz kill.

He wasn't chewed out for blowing up a dreadnought, he was chewed out for getting three-quarters of their pilots killed in the process, all for a kill that did not need to happen, because they were running away anyways. This isn't Luke and co. blowing up the Death Star and saving the Rebellion; this was Poe being a gloryhound and not seeing the greater impact of what he was doing.

This has parallels in the OT as well. When Luke decides to disobey the advice of his mentors Yoda and Obi-Wan and rush off to Bespin in an ill-thought-out effort to confront Vader, it costs him dearly. He learns from the experience, as Poe eventually does from his, and it becomes a moment of character growth. Do you consider that a buzz-kill as well?

wpot posted...

Yes, and Rian/Co wrote that.

But so did Lucas in ESB - do you think ESB over-accentuated the negative as well? And if not, what separates that from TLJ?

wpot posted...

At a high level maybe not much, but again: it's the focus. The movie spent the whole time focusing on how the heroes were flawed. If that was done in order to be the backdrop for an amazing effort to overcome them, maaybe OK...but there was way too much degrading and far too little redeeming.

Hold on, are we talking about the heroes now or the Jedi? The part of my post you quoted here is about how the Jedi are perceived, not the heroes.

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wpot posted...

For the record I agree there. The world was intact within Lucas' vision. There were bad characters and dumb segments, but it wasn't bad per se. II was a dumpster fire, sure. I thought III did pretty well despite Hayden, although yes: it was unfortunate that he was in the center of it.

Episode I was mired by a plot that doesn't make sense if you think about it too hard (yet still somehow manages to be more coherent than Episode II), characters that have no development over the course of the movie and seem to have zero emotion or motivation, and pacing that drags. It's OK enough if you shut your brain off and try not to think about things too hard and the action sequences somehow look better than either of its successors (the fact that they were a little more judicious with their CGI use probably helped). To my eye it wins the "best prequel" award pretty much by default, because it's the only one of the three that doesn't have its head planted firmly in its own ass.

Episode II is one of the worst movies I've ever seen, especially considering its stature. Just utterly irredeemable in every aspect other than the soundtrack, which was one of Williams' best and is completely wasted on this trash heap of a film.

Episode III manages to be better than Episode II in my eye, but not by much and only because it would be difficult for it to be any worse. It manages to have the most coherent plot of the three, but it does that by basically drawing a straight line between the end of Episode II and the start of Episode IV, checking all the boxes it needs to along the way and doing basically nothing interesting on the side. It features the same terrible cast as Episode II and a script that is just wretched, and it makes utterly bizarre uses of its run time. Anakin's fall to the darkside is basically completed in under a minute and his purge of the Jedi - one of the most hyped events in the entire PT and possibly the most anticipated scene in Star Wars history aside from his climactic duel with Obi-Wan - was conducted almost entirely offscreen, which is an absolutely unforgivable cinematic sin, yet it finds time to waste on pointless bullshit like the Battle of Kashyyyk, where absolutely nothing of any importance happens, and General Grievous, a villain nobody ever asked for or needed. The Battle of Coruscant is a strong contender for the worst space battle in the series, as its laden with terrible CGI that makes it impossible to tell who is winning at any given moment or by how much. The action scenes feel hollow, largely because they're being fought by two armies of automatons (clones and droids) which are both ultimately controlled by the same guy, meaning there's no stakes or tension to any of the combat, because the outcome is a foregone conclusion even if the movie wasn't a prequel. None of the dramatic points land, largely because the trilogy failed to set them up properly - the death of the Jedi is supposed to be a big tragedy, but we never got more than a few lines of dialogue out of any of them, so we're just watching a bunch of extras with lightsabers getting shot in the back, Anakin and Obi-Wan's duel doesn't so much feel like two brothers-in-arms whose friendship has been irrevocably sundered as it does the inevitable conclusion of a relationship that never felt particularly close or stable to begin with, and Anakin's maiming didn't put me in the mind of a hero-king laid low, but of an arrogant shit getting some comeuppance that was long overdue.

It's not Episode II bad... but it's still pretty bad.

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Zeus posted...

Blandly terrible and forgettable seem to be your favorite movie flavors.

Really?

Since you seem to be keeping track, what other movies do I like?

Zeus posted...

While TPM is worse than its sequels in every way

True, it is worse in every way... Except the acting. And the plot. And script. Visuals as well. Characters too, now that I think about it. Logical flow, consistency, sound editing, and special effects too.

Other than that, AotC and RotS are great.

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Zeus posted...

There was nothing all that fun about TFA.

I can agree with "all that". It TRIED to be fun, which I appreciate, but it had as many misses as it had hits.

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Phew...this is getting too long for me. I'll pick and choose:

darkknight109 posted...

It was fairly apparent that Luke had a change of heart midway through the film and decided the Jedi were worth saving after all and that Rey was going to continue them.

As with many things, there was a lot of too little too late. Or maybe to subtle. Too much trashing, not enough appreciating such that I really believe it's going to happen.

darkknight109 posted...

it's the only time in recent memory I can think of a big-budget film where the heroes pull the, "this is our plan - it's a million-to-one longshot, but if everything comes together, it just might work!" trick and it works out like it actually would in real life: in abject failure.

It depends on the franchise. This franchise is Star Wars. This is definitely a series where million to one odds come off. Can they change to something more realistic? They can do whatever they want, sure, but it's not going to fit in their context/world/themes well. Or please fans.

darkknight109 posted...

Do you consider that a buzz-kill as well?

No. Two differences:
1) Luke lost to villains, he didn't beat himself. It developed the villains.
2) Yoda doesn't berate Luke for doing something that appeared awesome and successful.

As for III...I don't disagree with most of that. Still, the events of the straight line from II to IV couldn't help but be fairly entertaining even if done in a subpar manner.

P.S. I love the Game of Thrones series (mostly the novels) for the record. There is no fixed morality, good/bad guys, etc in that series...and that's great...for GoT. It's not great for Star Wars. Star Wars is, at it's core, a fun franchise. Lucas came up with it based on old samurai movies, westerns, etc: it's really in the same genre as Quentin Tarantino stuff (minus, you know, the over-the-top violence). Epic comic stuff. Would anyone want a Kill Bill 3 where the Bride agonizes over the morality of what she's done?

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Disney

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I'll say it.

I'll watch the prequils again some day. I'll never watch the sequels again.

Every time I see this topic I resist the urge to make a song based on the lyrics/tune of Cry little sister, using these words.

This shows how strong my resistance is growing. In the past, a song would have already been posted.

I still want to though.

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wpot posted...

As with many things, there was a lot of too little too late. Or maybe to subtle. Too much trashing, not enough appreciating such that I really believe it's going to happen.

I mean, what did you want them to do? Luke's conversation with Yoda was basically him realizing he was wrong and his presence in the final battle further cemented that. That's pretty explicit and he even vocalizes these views.

wpot posted...

It depends on the franchise. This franchise is Star Wars. This is definitely a series where million to one odds come off.

But if that happens all the time, it really starts to strain credulity. The heroes can't win all the time for the series to remain interesting. They didn't in the OT, they certainly didn't in the PT, why should the ST be any different in that regard?

wpot posted...

2) Yoda doesn't berate Luke for doing something that appeared awesome and successful.

What's "awesome and successful" about losing half your interceptors and your entire bomber wing blowing up *one ship* in a fleet that had several more?

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I liked those creatures that Finn and Rose rode on Canto Bight. I think my pet donkey would like to hang out with one of them. We might get her another donkey, goat, or zonkey to hang out with instead though.

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darkknight109 posted...

Whatever Liam Neeson got paid for TPM, it wasn't enough. He managed to anchor that movie and provide an interesting protagonist despite a terrible script.

Hard disagree. He sleepwalks through that movie, and his complete and utter disinterest doesn't elevate the material in any way. Especially since nearly everything his character says and does is stupid.

My stance has always been that there are precisely two actors who even remotely give a shit in the prequels - one of them is Ewan McGregor, and the other is voicing a muppet. Everyone else is just cashing a check and putting the bare minimum effort in, which comes across even more wooden because they're acting out a Lucas script against mostly green-screen. No one was going to come out of that looking good, and it's a testament to how good an actor Ewan McGregor is and how much he cared that he actually feels like he's got passion for the role and is doing his best with it.

Ian McDiarmid is a distant third, but I tend to view that more as a case that he's stopped giving a shit so hard that it actually rebounds in the opposite direction. He's given up all pretense of taking the movies seriously and is overacting so hard that he's ridiculously hammy in every scene, so it's fun (eveb more so in contrast to how bland everything else is). It's the same reason why people remember Jack Nicholson so fondly for Batman - Nicholson himself admitted he basically didn't give a shit and was mostly just having fun with it (and gave the same advice to Danny DeVito for the second movie). But while that no fucks given overacting can be fun in and of itself, it doesn't really elevate the narrative as a whole, as much as it kind of detracts from it.



darkknight109 posted...

But even if Episodes VIII and IX had been amazing, there's some parts of Episode VII that are just terrible. The way it fails to adequately link up to Episode VI, for one thing.

That's just continuity porn, though.

When you're starting a new story, with new characters, even in an existing universe, you don't really need to explain every detail. Leave it a mystery to entice viewers. Half the appeal of the first Star Wars film was all the cool things Obi-Wan mentioned that we knew nothing about (and then the prequels and Solo went and showed us all of it and made it all suck).

Rey and Finn are clearly our main characters - and Rey grew up on a barren backwater planet while Finn was an indoctrinated grunt in an uncaring military. Neither of them would likely know or care what happened between RotJ and TFA, so you can afford a bit of mystery. Details that are directly important to the characters or plot can always be explained (either in exposition in TFA or later in VIII or IX), and details that aren't overly important can easily be established in secondary media (which is exactly what they did), especially because the concept of the EU was already an established idea and Disney was obviously going to want to replicate their own version of it.

I'll agree that some of that detail should have been in the first film (likely either delivered by Han Solo or Leia later, or even by Poe once they changed the script to make him a tertiary protagonist rather than a sacrificial victim), but I think most of it could easily have been established later - in a better-written Episode VIII or IX. Which, again, is why I think most of the flaws of TFA wouldn't necessarily BE flaws if better films had followed it.

The real problem is that JJ Abrams never had answers to those questions because JJ Abrams never has answers to questions (see also, Lost), and the people in charge did a piss-poor job of organizing their creative teams or keeping them on the same page. So rather than getting three movies that build on each other and support each other, we got three movies chaotically crapped out that immediately collapse into a smoking ruin.

The main purpose of TFA was to make a movie that FELT like Star Wars again, after the prequels kind of killed the magic. It's goal was to get an entirely new generation interested in Star Wars and make older, bitter, jaded generations optimistic about the future again. Which it mostly did, until TLJ came along and basically skull-fucked all the joy and wonder out of the franchise forever.



darkknight109 posted...

There's also the fact that Abrams made the awful decision to have the BBEG be the Death-Star-By-Another-Name for the third time in seven movies.

I'd agree with this, except the EU has been doing this for 25+ years without an ounce of shame. And power-creep means each unstoppable weapon of mass destruction is always more powerful than the last.

Death Star? Yeah, well, this secret Imperial project blows up suns! Yeah, well this secret weapon does the same thing, only it can fire pulses through hyperspace and hit targets halfway across the galaxy! Yeah, well this secret weapon eats suns and craps out robots and ships! Oh, and over here we have a device that utterly destroys planets in a completely different way!

How the hell did the Empire afford to build all of this shit in only about 20 years? And how did they manage to procure manpower and resources to work on all these projects simultaneously? And how the hell did they keep them all secret until about 20 minutes before they're ready to use them? Fuck the Jedi, if the Emperor is THAT good at logistics, he probably should be running the galaxy!

At least they never went full Halo and went "Yeah, well, this device kills all life in the galaxy!", but they probably would have eventually if the EU had kept going.

Sure, I could argue that originality is better, but I stopped expecting that from Star Wars years ago. Especially since when they try to be original they usually fuck that up even worse.
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Zeus posted...

I saw nothing there. I think my exact words at the time were "soulless, focus-grouped remake of EPIV". Given the terrible start, I can't imagine what they have done and ended with something I might have enjoyed.

Yeah, I remember at the time arguing more or less the same point with Cyborg in the geek topics. He kind of saw it the same way you did, but my argument was more that TFA needed to feel more like Star Wars, because the prequels had turned a lot of people off the franchise. With even more people worried about whether or not Disney was going to ruin everything even worse (especially once they pissed people off by gutting the EU wholesale), they basically needed SOMETHING that could remind people of why they fell in love with Star Wars in the first place.

Making a thinly-veiled remake of A New Hope is the cynical answer, but done well it absolutely does the job. It's nostalgia-porn of the highest order, but that's the entire point.

After watching TFA, it felt more like a Star Wars movie to me than any of the prequels did. It made me optimistic about what Disney could do with the franchise, when I'd basically spent 15 years being completely over the entire franchise (apart from KotOR, but then EA went and fucked that up too).

I know people had issues with Rey even in the first movie, but I was always fine with the idea of her, mostly because a) I assumed she might actually evolve as a character, and b) because it seemed like she was being set up to share time with Finn (and to a lesser extent Poe), and I was fine with both of those characters regardless of whether or not they deliberate diversity-casting. Kylo was an interesting character (people shit on him because he's a whiny wannabe rather than a badass, but that actually makes him more interesting if you write him well). Han's fate was pretty much inevitable (and the only way they were ever getting Harrison Ford back to play the role at all), but it set up a potentially interesting conflict for later movies. For all that it was rehashing, TFA also laid a lot of groundwork for future storytelling. The problem is that it was all completely disregarded and actively demolished to build the narrative equivalent of a garbage dump.

The other problem is, once you make that nostalgia-bait movie, you have to pay off on it. You can't just keep remaking the old films without people getting tired of it, but completely rejecting the past the way Rian Johnson did is just the wrong answer in the opposite direction. You need to use the nostalgia as the starting line for a new story.

(In a way, consider how Tolkien used Bilbo's party at the start of LotR as the thematic bridge between The Hobbit and the rest of LotR. One could argue that Bilbo's party wasn't actually necessarily and he could just have easily have started the story "in the present" with Frodo, but using it as a bridging narrative between old and new makes the overall story stronger.)

Personally, I think a brilliant way to set up the sequel trilogy might have been to lean into the idea of past/present/future as a storytelling mechanic. Make the first movie evoke the past, with tons of continuity nods and references to the older films. Then center the second movie on "the present", where the current threat becomes the most important factor, and you start to phase out the importance of older characters. Then the third movie represents "the future", with the characters looking forward to the new status quo and setting up potential threads for years to come. A structure like that would have vastly elevated TFA as a key part of the greater whole.

Instead, we got mostly shit, which makes TFA feel less important and utterly meaningless, so in retrospect it looks much worse than it did to begin with. Because now we KNOW it's all just smoke and mirrors.



Zeus posted...

And, as bad as the prequel trilogy was, it had its moments. Yes, the story was often garbage, but other things would make up for it. I kinda struggle to think of anything that redeemed TFA. Meanwhile TLJ had a few "yeah, okay, I liked that" moments.

I'm very much the reverse. I honestly can't think of a single moment in the prequel trilogy that means anything at all, because even in the coolest moments I can't stop thinking "Yeah, but this is just the cherry on top of a sundae made entirely out of shit."

And worse, even the cool moments tend to fall apart completely the moment you actually start thinking about them, or they go on WAAAY too long, or are ruined by the wooden acting of everyone involved.

Vader yelling "NOOOOOOO!" in the end is pretty much the perfect metaphor for the films. It's narmy and it undercuts everything that was cool about the character before. The prequels make the entire lore of the franchise's universe worse simply by existing, because they seem to give the worst possible answer to every possible question or mystery. We were much better off when we didn't know what the Clone Wars were or how Anakin became Vader. Or where Boba Fett came from. Or that there's a 1950s diner on Coruscant.

But, yeah, I mean, Anakin murdering the fuck out of the younglings was kind of cool, I guess. So... it was all worth it, maybe?

As for TFA and TLJ, I'd flip those two around as well. With TFA I had moments of "Oh, that's neat" or "I wonder where they're going with that?", and it wasn't until the two later movies ruin everything that TFA becomes retroactively weaker. Whereas with TLJ, I basically feel nothing but pulsating contempt and disgust in pretty much EVERY scene that doesn't involve Luke, Rey, or Kylo, and even in those scenes there's plenty of "Why the fuck would you do that?" or "Okay, yeah, I guess I don't give a shit anymore" moments that kind of detract from everything else.

I don't actually mind the Luke-as-cynical-burnout idea, or the idea that he gave into his fear and tried to kill Kylo (even though it's radically out of character for him and NEEDS a hell of a lot more in-universe justification to even remotely work), and I can even sort of think of interesting ways to work with the idea of the Snoke confrontation being a thing in Episode VIII instead of IX... but none of those things matter in any meaningful or interesting way because of how they're presented and the context around them. They exist solely to waste minutes of my life I will never be able to reclaim.
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Sequels > prequels

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Metalsonic66 posted...

Sequels > prequels

The idea of the prequels was good. The execution of that idea sucked.

The sequels had a shit idea. The execution was okay.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Hard disagree. He sleepwalks through that movie, and his complete and utter disinterest doesn't elevate the material in any way. Especially since nearly everything his character says and does is stupid.

Don't get me wrong, Qui-Gon the character is awful and, yes, behaves like he has early-onset dementia... but Neeson did what he could with the script and was pretty much the only one who made something out of that movie. Even McDonald, who turned in performances far better than Episodes II and especially III deserved, was a dud in this one.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

When you're starting a new story, with new characters, even in an existing universe, you don't really need to explain every detail. Leave it a mystery to entice viewers. Half the appeal of the first Star Wars film was all the cool things Obi-Wan mentioned that we knew nothing about (and then the prequels and Solo went and showed us all of it and made it all suck).

I agree you need not get bogged down in excessive detail, but TFA *isn't* a completely new story... or at least, it wasn't trying to be. If they'd set it 1000 years after the original Star Wars and none of the existing characters showed up, fine, do as you please. But even if Rey and Finn have no knowledge or interest of the time period between the trilogies, we, the viewers, do. When we are suddenly dumped into this new setting, there's a natural sense of, "Wait, why are all the familiar elements I'm used to gone? What happened to them?"

You need not dwell on it either - it can be a throwaway line of dialogue in most cases. Have Rey ask some question about the Resistance, like, "The Resistance? Aren't they just a wing of the Republic?" and let Finn or Han correct her. Have some First Order senior officers bemoan how things have changed since the days of the Empire and hope for better times ahead thanks to their new leader. Or something. Take 30 seconds of your run time and set things up.

As it is, it really does feel like a reboot... until the old characters show up and you're reminded that no, this is technically supposed to be a sequel.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

details that aren't overly important can easily be established in secondary media (which is exactly what they did), especially because the concept of the EU was already an established idea and Disney was obviously going to want to replicate their own version of it

The thing I dislike about this approach is that it assumes everyone is going to read that secondary media. Honestly, most people won't, if they're even aware it exists at all.

It's what always annoys me when people say, "Oh, well, the Clone Wars cartoons make the Anakin and Obi-Wan relationship from the PT so much better." Fine, good for the Clone Wars - that doesn't make the actual movies less shit as a result, especially if they've offloaded critical character development into an entirely different medium.

Now yes, if the details are not important to the story, by all means they can be relegated to an EU book somewhere... but I've seen too many franchises do that to elements of the story that really belong in the main story proper.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The real problem is that JJ Abrams never had answers to those questions because JJ Abrams never has answers to questions (see also, Lost), and the people in charge did a piss-poor job of organizing their creative teams or keeping them on the same page. So rather than getting three movies that build on each other and support each other, we got three movies chaotically crapped out that immediately collapse into a smoking ruin.

The main purpose of TFA was to make a movie that FELT like Star Wars again, after the prequels kind of killed the magic. It's goal was to get an entirely new generation interested in Star Wars and make older, bitter, jaded generations optimistic about the future again. Which it mostly did, until TLJ came along and basically skull-fucked all the joy and wonder out of the franchise forever.

TLJ skull-fucking aside, I agree with all of this.

As said, I think TLJ was a good movie. Not great, but enjoyable - best of the sequels, in my opinion (though given that IX was terrible and I consider VII merely OK, that's not really a high bar). That said, I completely agree the entire trilogy was terribly organized and disjointed and watching Abrams and Johnson get into a creative pissing match just sapped the enjoyment, along with any narrative cohesion. The general map of the trilogy should have been established far, far earlier than it was.

I don't think the issue with TLJ was so much an issue with its own quality (though YMMV on that one) so much that Abrams set up shitty plot hooks in TFA (and, as you observed, Abrams never seems to come up with decent answers for any of the questions he creates), Johnson ignored most of them in TLJ, then Abrams tried desperately to wrench the story back where he wanted it to go in TRoS, even after Johnson had already set it on a different path.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'd agree with this, except the EU has been doing this for 25+ years without an ounce of shame.

Which isn't really a defence, especially when one of the first things Disney did when they bought the franchise is dumpstered the old EU (and not without cause - that thing was a bloated mess by the end). Also, even in an EU that was all over the map in terms of quality, the Sun Crusher and the Galaxy Gun - the two superweapons I'm assuming you're referring to with your description - were two particularly stupid entries and the less said about them the better.

That's not a template Abrams had to follow and it's not a template he should have followed. Johnson managed to make more tension and a more compelling final battle with a couple of Star Destroyers and a battalion of AT-ATs (or whatever the new king-sized ones are called, if they have a different name) than Abrams did with his planet-gun or his super robot death fleet.

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Zeus posted...

I probably would have enjoyed it if Poe and Finn were shipped together, but that China would never let the movies air there if they'd done that.

I would have been fine with that as well. Or at the very least go with the "buddy cop/heterosexual life partners" sort of vibe where they're just cool chill dudes who hang out together and have quirky adventures and interaction. Or even go for a more complex sort of situation where Finn is clearly interested in Rey but she's got her own shit going on with Kylo, while Poe's just sort of friends with both and is supportive of whatever. Just play around with the Luke/Leia/Han dynamic from the original films, only with a twist. Then you can go back to the Lucas bullshit about how it's all poetry and it "rhymes". Archetypes echoing through history, repeating over and over, etc etc mythic epic shit yada yada yada.

But the three characters work best together, not separated off into three different and completely unconnected storylines, two of which massively suck. And where every new character not in the Rey storyline is a complete unlikable idiot.

The problem is Poe wasn't supposed to survive the first movie, and only got written back in because test audiences liked him so much and were mad that he just dies. Which means no one involved knew what to do with him, because he wasn't part of the plan.

Which is kind of telling. He's basically the Han Solo character of these films, and Han's pretty much everyone's favorite character from the originals because he's so cool. So in the sequels they kill off the real Han and then do fuck-all with Han 2.0. It kind of speaks of blatant ineptitude, or at least a complete and utter lack of vision.

If you want to salvage TLJ, cut Rose out entirely, cut out the casino planet and the stupid hacker, and drop Holdo and all her related bullshit. Then come up with a better B-plot adventure to send Finn and Poe on together, to counterbalance Rey (so you're basically getting the Luke on Dagobah/Han and Leia on Bespin dynamic of ESB or the Luke/Vader/Emperor storyline and the Han and Leia on Endor dynamic of RotJ). Two storylines instead of three gives you the opportunity to flesh each one out more effectively, and Finn/Poe get a fun buddy cop adventure to lighten the tone.

Even more bonus points if we start out with Poe as cool but aloof while Finn is clueless and inept but putting his heart 110% into everything he does, and each learns from the other so Finn slowly becomes more capable and less of a doofus, while Poe learns to look past the bigger picture and start caring about individuals more, and their lifelong friendship blossoms. Or, you know, they just make out.



Zeus posted...

I can see that.

I know at least once I suggested in the geek topics (years ago) that I was always tempted to just sit down and rewatch the original movies and write down every single reference (mostly from Obi-Wan, but also stuff like Leia saying she remembers her mother who died when she was young and who was mostly sad), and make a checklist of ideas that the prequels SHOULDN'T FUCKING CONTRADICT.

Then go back and try to write a plot outline for the prequels without changing literally everything, and mostly just sticking to Lucas' overarching ideas. But dropping Phantom Menace almost entirely, starting "Episode I" off with Obi-Wan as an already active Jedi Knight (fuck Qui-Gon, he's neither important nor necessary), and having him encounter Anakin as a hotshot teenage pilot (basically young Han Solo). Then going from there to try and tell the story of the Clone Wars and after spread out over three movies (with the first movie being the beginning, the second movie being the middle, and the third movie being the end), while trying to spread out Anakin's slow corruption and fall over a longer period of time (instead of starting him out as as whiny brat and a jerk who just spontaneously turns to evil because the story requires it). And maybe writing in a more realistic and long-term romance arc for Padme, rather than just having Anakin instantly fall in love with her forever and then she reciprocates after a couple terrible "romantic" scenes on Naboo (while potentially making Padme a more action-oriented character in her own right, maybe even someone else fighting in the Clone Wars, explaining how she and Anakin met in the first place).

I'd probably work in my other two pet peeves in the process - namely a) that in something called "The Clone Wars", the clones should be the BAD GUYS the Republic is fighting and not the ass-pull army they magic out of nowhere to fight robots because of tax disputes, because that's stupid, and b) that the Jedi shouldn't be a super-organized and ubiquitous order of magic ninjas who all dress like Obi-Wan on Tatooine, but a somewhat mysterious and small band of monks who wander from world to world setting disputes like the ronin samurai they were originally based on when Lucas stole his ideas from The Hidden Samurai. They should be the classic drifter archetype, mostly loners, known to each other but unconnected from any central authority, each one taking on their own (lone) apprentice as they travel, training them as individuals and not as part of "Jedi school". Which makes it a LOT easier to explain how the Emperor was able to completely wipe out their history and convince everyone the Force is a myth in the span of about two decades. If they were already a somewhat dying legacy of an older time (which would also help justify Obi-Wan's wistful musing about a more civilized age), it becomes far easier to hunt them down one by one and make people forget them.

Plus, that sort of rewrite would make it possible to use Darth Maul as an actual interesting villain spanning multiple movies, rather than as a throwaway cameo villain who exists solely to sell action-figures.

And, of course, no fucking Jar-Jar.

Ironically, at least some of that is the same things Mike from RedLetterMedia points out in his Plinkett reviews of the prequels, but it's not like most of it is rocket science.

I don't remember if I ever actually DID write that sort of outline, though (or anything more detailed that what I basically just wrote here), but I probably didn't because I'm lazy and that sort of project wouldn't really pay off in any meaningful way (not like I could monetize it).
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'm very much the reverse. I honestly can't think of a single moment in the prequel trilogy that means anything at all, because even in the coolest moments I can't stop thinking "Yeah, but this is just the cherry on top of a sundae made entirely out of shit."

And worse, even the cool moments tend to fall apart completely the moment you actually start thinking about them, or they go on WAAAY too long, or are ruined by the wooden acting of everyone involved.

Vader yelling "NOOOOOOO!" in the end is pretty much the perfect metaphor for the films. It's narmy and it undercuts everything that was cool about the character before. The prequels make the entire lore of the franchise's universe worse simply by existing, because they seem to give the worst possible answer to every possible question or mystery. We were much better off when we didn't know what the Clone Wars were or how Anakin became Vader. Or where Boba Fett came from. Or that there's a 1950s diner on Coruscant.

Fuckin' preach.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I don't actually mind the Luke-as-cynical-burnout idea, or the idea that he gave into his fear and tried to kill Kylo (even though it's radically out of character for him and NEEDS a hell of a lot more in-universe justification to even remotely work)

Whenever people bring this up, I always wonder if they missed the third flashback scene where Luke actually gives the full context.

He didn't "try to kill Kylo" - the person who thought that was Kylo himself, working off an incomplete set of facts. Luke went to Kylo to confront him over his embrace of the dark side, not to kill him. When Luke got there, worked his Force magic, and realized how far Kylo had gone, he had a moment of panic and pulled out his lightsaber, but the key word there is "moment". In Luke's own words, "He would bring destruction and pain and death, and the end of everything I love because of what he will become, and for the briefest moment of pure instinct, I thought I could stop it. It passed like a fleeting shadow, and I was left with shame... and with consequence. And the last thing I saw were the eyes of a frightened boy whose master had failed him." Emphasis mine.

Luke fucked up and he knew he fucked up. He freely admitted it. Him drawing his lightsaber was a panicked reaction, not a planned action, and he immediately realized it as wrong.

I also don't see it as the slightest bit out of character. Dating back to the original trilogy, Luke is someone who acts on feeling and emotion, not rational thought. He leaps before he looks and has faith in himself, his allies, and the Force. His emotiveness is simultaneously his greatest strength - it allows him to facilitate Vader's redemption - and his greatest weakness (it very nearly kills or corrupts him more than once). When he sees Ben's darkness and a vision of the damage he would cause, it would land particularly hard because Luke has already lived that life. He saw the galaxy under the last Skywalker to fall to darkness, knew firsthand the Herculean effort it took to turn him back to the light in his final moments of life, and understood the tremendous cost in lives and treasure that his evil inflicted. A bit of PTSD is more than understandable, given the circumstances.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

He kind of saw it the same way you did, but my argument was more that TFA needed to feel more like Star Wars, because the prequels had turned a lot of people off the franchise. With even more people worried about whether or not Disney was going to ruin everything even worse (especially once they pissed people off by gutting the EU wholesale), they basically needed SOMETHING that could remind people of why they fell in love with Star Wars in the first place.

Making a thinly-veiled remake of A New Hope is the cynical answer, but done well it absolutely does the job. It's nostalgia-porn of the highest order, but that's the entire point.

After watching TFA, it felt more like a Star Wars movie to me than any of the prequels did. It made me optimistic about what Disney could do with the franchise

For all my complaints about TFA, I completely agree with this. Even at the time I saw it for what it was... but damn if it wasn't fun.

Disney can absolutely nail this shit when they try. I remember going on the new Star Tours ride in Disney World just before Disney bought the franchise and remarking that it was the most Star Warsy thing I'd experienced in years.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

But dropping Phantom Menace almost entirely, starting "Episode I" off with Obi-Wan as an already active Jedi Knight (fuck Qui-Gon, he's neither important nor necessary), and having him encounter Anakin as a hotshot teenage pilot (basically young Han Solo).

So, fun story about this - years ago, I had a get-together with some fellow Star Wars nerds and we did two creative exercises. One was rewrite a plot map for the prequels from scratch, no restrictions - just toss everything and start fresh. What I came up with actually sounds surprisingly similar to yours. I think I had Obi-Wan and a Jedi love interest meet a young Anakin who was already a hotshot pilot somewhere, with the Clone Wars already in full swing rather than not being started yet.

However, the exercise I found more interesting was one where we had to make up to three *minor* changes to the prequels that would have the most payoff in terms of how much they could improve the film. In that one you weren't allowed to do anything radical like completely dumpster Episode I and give proper time to the clone wars rather than have it start right at the end of the fucking second movie and be over halfway through the third.

In this exercise, I actually came up with something that I still swear would have made Episode I roughly a billion times better: take the personalities of Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan (but *not* their roles) and switch them. Instead of being a Force hippie, make Qui-Gon the stern, dogmatic elder trying to reign in the wild and eager young Obi-Wan (i.e. not the by-the-book rookie of their buddy-cop dynamic that he was in TPM), who is chomping at the bit to make a name for himself and live up to the legendary reputation of the Jedi title. Instead of Qui-Gon going in to get parts in Mos Espa, he opts to guard the queen (or at least who he thinks is the queen) and sends his apprentice off for the supply run (which, really, kind of makes a lot more sense when you think about it).

Cinematically, it solves some of the issues with character focus and motivation in TPM. Now you're not wasting huge chunks of screen time on a character that's going to be dead before the end credits roll; instead, you're spending more time exploring Obi-Wan in his younger, brasher days. Watto pulling the "I'm the only guy who has the parts you need," routine and Obi-Wan not thinking of any alternatives is now youthful naivete and inexperience rather than Qui-Gon's seemingly early onset of senility. His attempted theft of the parts (i.e. trading them for worthless currency) becomes a brute force solution to a problem he is not yet crafty or experienced enough to handle properly. His discovery of Anakin takes on new light as he realizes (and is hubristically-blinded by) the fact that he could go down in history as the Jedi who discovered the Chosen One. His participation in the pod race and his bet with Watto to try and win both the parts and Anakin is not a really stupid plan that somehow works out, but is a deliberately reckless attempt at freeing Anakin and bringing him with them before Qui-Gon can catch wind of things and put a stop to it.

And it lines up nicely with what we hear of Obi-Wan's younger days in the OT. Obi-Wan paints himself as overconfident ("I thought I could train him just as well as Yoda. I was wrong.") and brash (Yoda: "Much anger in him. Like his father." Obi-Wan: "Was I any different when you taught me?" Yoda: "You are reckless!" Obi-Wan "So was I, if you remember."), which are not really traits we see in PT Obi-Wan. But give him Qui-Gon's personality and a chip on his shoulder and all of a sudden things start falling into place.

But the biggest gain would be that it would finally do justice to the friendship between Anakin and Obi-Wan that we hear spoken of in the OT. Instead of being just another Jedi who thought Anakin wasn't good enough, Obi-Wan becomes the only one who believes in him, the only one to support and champion him even when the rest of the Jedi looked down upon him and were ready to discard him. He becomes like a surrogate brother when he lifts Anakin out of slavery and takes him to the stars and the simple act of standing before the Jedi council and defending Anakin would give them an instant bond of camaraderie. And Anakin and his training, likewise, becomes a challenge that Obi-Wan's pride demands he pass, if only to prove that he was right about this boy and the rest of the Jedi were wrong.

Qui-Gon's death and Obi-Wan's promotion removes the last obstacle Obi-Wan faces to taking Anakin as his apprentice. In the actual story, it would make far more sense for the Jedi to assign Anakin to a more experienced master, especially since Obi-Wan wasn't really chomping at the bit to train Anakin before Qui-Gon's death and all of them - Obi-Wan included - recognized Anakin as dangerous, meaning his training would be difficult and particularly high stakes (and not something you'd really want to assign to a guy who himself was just a trainee not 24 hours earlier and whose biggest qualification to the rank of Jedi Knight is "just killed a Sith, woo!"). Obi-Wan's insistence that he will see Anakin trained, even to the point of wilful disobedience of the council's edicts, seems to come completely out of nowhere and contradicts everything the rest of the movie has shown us about his character. Yet in the alternate reality? Now it makes sense. Obi-Wan not only wants to train Anakin, he is veritably *demanding* that privilege, an unspoken acknowledgement of his role in finding the Chosen One with some youthful glory-hunting mixed in (a sign of the recklessness and inner-anger Obi-Wan refers to in the OT). He is willing to disobey the council because he sees the Chosen One and the fulfillment of the ancient prophecy as too important to be tossed away, no matter what anyone says.

And so Anakin and Obi-Wan become brothers in arms, sharing a chip on their shoulder and an "us against the world" mentality as they both seek to prove themselves to the Jedi for different, if related reasons. They become, in some ways, foils for one another - Obi-Wan is eventually able to rise above his pride and gain wisdom, while Anakin succumbs to his and falls to evil. And when that bond is finally destroyed in Episode III, it will be a legitimate brotherhood sundered, not like it actually felt like - the inevitable collapse of a mostly-antagonistic relationship that never seemed particularly stable or healthy to begin with.

......I may have spent too much time thinking about this.

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As a side remark to your Obi and Qui personality thing, we do have "Master and Apprentice" in current canon that focusses a lot on how their personalties clash.

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