Basically what was more cringey? to me episode 8 was more in the sense that Resistance fleet was so pathetic in comparison to size of the Star Wars galaxy
Episode was horrible in a lot of ways.. from the Star Destroyers all have a huge phallic like planet cracking mega-laser attached to them all, to Palpatine somehow still being alive, to Snoke being utterly worthless as an actual character.
The only saving grace to episode 8 was the scene where Rey and Kylo Ren fight Snoke and his royal guard
I Wanna say eight, yeah. There’s defying expectations, but it gets dumb when you just take every plot hook that was left for you and do the opposite of what people expect for every one and clip them all off.
I do feel because its Star Wars some people are way too quick to come up with some ridiculous thing to plug the plot holes, but then some people are way too critical saying it wasnt entertaining or atleast "cinematic"
AduroT wrote: I Wanna say eight, yeah. There’s defying expectations, but it gets dumb when you just take every plot hook that was left for you and do the opposite of what people expect for every one and clip them all off.
Yeah the issue wasn't doing the opposite. The issue was then also tying them into neat little bows that can't go anywhere. I remember when I came out of the theater for episode 8, while my opinion was still forming I said to my wife "I enjoyed watching that movie, but I have no idea where the franchise is supposed to go from here."
I think 9 is the cringiest. I was fully engaged while watching episode 8 and the movie fell apart for me afterward when I tried to discuss and analyze what happened and predict what was next. Episode 9 never engaged me in the first place, and we were engaging in a live episode of Rifftrax/MST3K while we watched.
Episode 8 is bad but I think 9 possibly surpasses it for cringeyness. Just in the first 30-40 minutes we have the pointless fan service of the Emperor, Leia and Lando all showing up (TBF, Leia at least serves a purpose in the plot). Then there's the whole thing with 3P0 that makes no sense, combined with a desperate attempt to give Poe some edgy back story. Also, there are two "mystery" plot points in the middle of the movie involving who the FO spy is and whether Chewie died when Rey zapped the shuttle and both seem to initially be played as straight-up cliffhanger moments only to be resolved really quickly. Then there's the sudden appearance of the Resistance fleet at the end and the cavalry charge from Finn and...some other character who is so instantly forgettable I can't even remember if they were male or female.
So Episode 8 makes no real difference to the franchise if it exists or not because it doesn't really tie to the film before it or after it in a meaningful way but Episode 9 probably has more cringe overall.
Episode 8 just makes a farce of the “resistance” and doesn’t really help set out the hazard of the first order. The original trilogy had a galactic empire, and a well organised rebellion from multiple planets with commensurate equipment provided. The resistance seems to be a bunch of guys that like camping with their pick up spaceships.
Empire strikes Back has the best sci-fi war scene ever put to screen for it’s depiction of a substantial and dug in defending force trying to hold just long enough for everyone else to escape. Episode 8 is just a bit crap by comparison. But the dust plumes look pretty I guess.
It is a hard call. On the plus side there are a lot more jokes that can be made about episode 9 (I like the one where the star destroyer they are standing on rotates 90 degrees and everyone falls off).
The royal guard fight scene in 8 was atrocious. There are bits when the extras actually manage to kill Rey so they removed the light sabre from the guards hands suddenly. Nothing like the fights in the previous set of bad but not as bad films.
I think arguing which worse is hard when even now I thankfully have forgotten much of them. I never figured out why the sides existed, how they existed and what else was going on in the galaxy.
Empire strikes Back has the best sci-fi war scene ever put to screen for it’s depiction of a substantial and dug in defending force trying to hold just long enough for everyone else to escape. Episode 8 is just a bit crap by comparison. But the dust plumes look pretty I guess.
I love Rogue One when they depict what happens when a raiding guerrilla force (the rebel fleet doing a hit and run on scarif) gets caught by an organised military force (the imperial Navy warps in and catches them in the act). I.e. massacred.
Something I dislike the mandalorian series for is the baddies being totally incompetent. There is zero peril. Disney doesn't seem to realise the baddies have to have some level of competence or whats the point?
None of the examples cited so far hold a candle to the sheer cringe factor of people who, without prompting, bring up these same tired arguments at the drop of a hat.
Like, seriously OP, what are you trying to dredge up here?
Anyway, as always, which movie it is depends on your priorities. TLJ gets a lot of criticism for 'subverting expectations for the sake of subverting expectations' which was the common critique of the hatemongering youtubers after its release, but it's pretty clear now most of those cited elements were in service of setting up a third movie that they ultimately didn't make. As such, it introduces a lot of surprise contradictions in the lore that Rise ended up frantically backpedaling on.
This wouldn't be as galling if not for the fact that TLJ is by and large the tightest actual movie of the sequel trilogy, and people resort to playing scenes in super slow-motion in order to point out technical issues - not something you need to do to see the many technical issues of the Prequel Trilogy.
Inversely, Rise is just awkward from start to finish. The whole movie is a long series of expo-dumps to justify shifting the narrative away from what TLJ had meant to be paid off in the Duel of the Fates treatment and towards the things that the loudest and most obnoxious fan groups were fixated on. So Kylo Ren goes from being a cruel, manipulative piece of gak who killed billions of people to a missunderstood wee puppy, the First Order goes from being an interstellar shadow-government to a bunch of yelping kids impressed by the idea of having a whole fleet when all supporting material says they already have several, and control the galaxy's main ship construction hubs, and just everybody in general loses all sense of agency and identity in favor of bowing and scraping before the older generation.
And you don't even need to play it at slow motion to see how dumb any of that is.
Still doesn't compare to Attack of the Clones, though. Yeesh!
Flinty wrote: Episode 8 just makes a farce of the “resistance” and doesn’t really help set out the hazard of the first order. The original trilogy had a galactic empire, and a well organised rebellion from multiple planets with commensurate equipment provided. The resistance seems to be a bunch of guys that like camping with their pick up spaceships.
My favourite thing about Episode 8 is the realisation that at the end, despite the hopeful scene with the little kid in the stables, the entirety of the Resistance now fits inside the Millennium Falcon. And that's precisely because they don't build them up to be anything other than this random bunch of guys.
Flinty wrote: Episode 8 just makes a farce of the “resistance” and doesn’t really help set out the hazard of the first order. The original trilogy had a galactic empire, and a well organised rebellion from multiple planets with commensurate equipment provided. The resistance seems to be a bunch of guys that like camping with their pick up spaceships.
My favourite thing about Episode 8 is the realisation that at the end, despite the hopeful scene with the little kid in the stables, the entirety of the Resistance now fits inside the Millennium Falcon. And that's precisely because they don't build them up to be anything other than this random bunch of guys.
What's even better is they end back in the situation they were in the start of the movie (except with even fewer resources). The enemy fleet is in orbit of the planet they're on, and they still have to escape.
They killed a lot of their own people, but they achieved... nothing at all.
Neither was particular 'cringe,' just poor filmmaking. 8 had the additional burden of being pointless.
EP 8 for me, because it was so bad it broke me of any new SW material. I saw it free and regret the time wasted. I won't give Disney any more money for SW.
I actually like 8. It's way way too long and would be well served by having some indulgences trimmed, but it has some of my favorite scenes in the franchise in a place where it could explore some new ground. I would have loved a real sequel to it that saw Kylo as the villain with a focus on the people fighting for themselves.
9 is just.... awful. I don't think anyone likes it. It's just boring, both rushed and too long, super cliche and fails to capitalize on anything interesting about the characters. I think 2 still sits at the bottom for the franchise, but 9 actually gives it a run for its money.
8 had some mis steps in it's pacing but 8 theme wise was a shot in the arm that starwars sorely needed in that it was breaking away from the traditional 1 or 2 blood lines of super jedi.
The idea that Rey was nobody, that the hero could be anybody. It was powerful and could be moved on to tell any number of other stories across the entire galaxy.
Instead, episode 9 placed us right back onto starwars street. Everyone knows and/or is related to everyone. The galaxy is as small as it ever was. And it was so ham fisted in it's doing of it.
Id agree with a lot of the opinions here, while 8 infuraited a lot of people (myself included) its not a badly made film, it just completely ran the series into a dead end storywise.
9 on the other hand is a horrible mess of bad dialogue, underwritten characters and a plot that well..im not sure if it has a plot at all really because theres so much going on so quickly I tuned out about 20mins into the film.
Admittedly it has one GREAT scene i will admit (Han/Kylo) which was very well handled, but the whole thing with chewie being resolved immediately in the next scene robs the moment of any form of impact at all. Similarly with Hux, in the Force Awakens, i kinda liked the idea that Hux and Kylo had a hate/hate relationship and vied for snokes attention, but last jedi turned Hux into a snivelling joke, and then 9 comes along and could have given us a great character momment for him, but the reveal is done in such a pathetic way that again, it loses any impact.
Thats my overall thoughts on 9, coulda been great, but everything was so rushed and muddled that nothing particularly stands out. Very possibly the most "5 out of 10" film I have ever seen, compared with The Last Jedi, which while I didnt like how it made me feel, at least managed to make me feel something about it.
8 had some mis steps in it's pacing but 8 theme wise was a shot in the arm that starwars sorely needed in that it was breaking away from the traditional 1 or 2 blood lines of super jedi.
The idea that Rey was nobody, that the hero could be anybody. It was powerful and could be moved on to tell any number of other stories across the entire galaxy.
Instead, episode 9 placed us right back onto starwars street. Everyone knows and/or is related to everyone. The galaxy is as small as it ever was. And it was so ham fisted in it's doing of it.
Great.
Yes. Its as if a big galaxy was too much. I await the revelation that Boba fett is Luke's cousins, mothers, tennis partner.
Rogue 1 was the last decent Star Wars movie made.
Episode 8 was so cringe worthy I didn’t even bother with 9.
Disney has taken the movie franchise and covered it in crap. The Mandalorian is SWs last saving grace, and even then, while it’s not great, it’s an acceptable Star Wars series.
I didn’t bother watching ep 9 after seeing 8, as I felt there was really no where to take the series, and rebooting the first two movies into worse versions was a terrible idea. So I can only speak about 8. But it was bad enough that I stopped watching all Star Wars movies that came after.
Definitely 9. 8 is bad, but "reasonably bad", I mean it's an average modern SW episode. To be fair I think 2,3,7,8 and 9 are basically all on the same level, with the last episode that was probably the worst so far. Ep1 was slightly better, but only because of Darth Maul.
But honestly I think anything SW related that was released after Return of the Jedi is cringey to some degree.
The Mandalorian in nice to watch but I think it's extremely overrated. Yes, compared to all SW stuff that was released in the last 35 years it's amazing, but there's a ton of sci-fi tv series that are vastly superior.
I would have actually really loved 8 if it had just ended with Rey and Kylo joining forces to try and use the resources of the empire for the good of the galaxy.
The fact that they wussed out at just that exact critical moment, but kept in all the subverting of the expected Star Wars moments destroyed any hope for the franchise. Ep 9 was just a shuffling around of the ashes.
Ep 8 would have been interesting if they'd actually stuck the landing. The themes were there - that in attempting to repress any possible negative emotion (fear, grief, anger) the old jedi order believed that they were enlightened but were instead incapable of understanding the natural, justified emotions Anakin had that then lead to his embracing the easy simplistic answers offered by palpatine. And that Luke and the Rebellion can't build a functioning, real society simply by attempting to destroy all of the vast military and civilian resources that had been claimed by the empire.
The moral of episode 8 could have been that to truly win, the good guys had to accept that they couldn't treat everything the empire had ever claimed or built as an irredeemable evil that needed to be destroyed, and they couldn't cede every feeling that could possibly lead to evil to the black and white 'dark side/light side' interpretation.
People ask 'where can you go from "rey's parents were nobodies who abandoned her for no higher purpose at all, just money because they needed to eat" and I'm just like...what do you mean, where do you go from that? That's the exact kind of morality that Star Wars has NEVER explored, NEVER stepped into.
Anakin happened because of the philosophy of the "Light Side" of the force, not because of the philosophy of the cartoonish evil of the Dark Side. He happened because the Light Side rejected strength and therefore the old republic allowed societies like Tatooine with child slavery to exist despite the Jedi knowing full well about it. He happened because the Light Side told Anakin he had to completely leave behind his old life and reject any kind of righteous anger he might feel about being born into fething chattel slavery, and then told him he had to reject the grief of his mother's death, and push down the fear that he might lose his only other loved one.
Rey's story being a mirror of Anakin's rather than Luke's would have made for a much, much better story, and the setup of her character - a child born into impossibly harsh circumstances who is handed incredible personal power and strength before they're fully emotionally mature - and then have the outcome reflect the contrast between the old, shortsighted jedi that failed Anakin and the new, more truly wise Jedi that could have been showcased by Luke and the spirit of Yoda.
They could have done all that, but they fethed it up right at the end. Rey could have realized that being the good guy doesn't always have to mean rejecting any kind of strength and allowing evil and injustice to roll over millions of innocent people, and Kylo realizing that strength is not something to be simply worshipped and followed regardless of what evils are done with that strength.
And then...I don't know, whatever, have Palpatine be still alive and trying to manipulate everything at the end and have the big climactic final battle be between Kylo and Rey and the very early stages of a reformed and unified galactic army versus the culmination of all of palpatine's schemes and plots and capital D Destiny.
I mean.... the First Order wiped out an entire star system of planets. That's not something that you just say, "okay, maybe there's two sides to this". I'd say one of the most well done scenes of the new trilogy is the nihilist hate of Hux's speech as they commit mass genocide. Shame the genocide itself is so confusingly depicted that you need to read a book to have it explained.
Personally, I don't think there's been a better opportunity for storytelling than the end of 8. The mystery boxes were never compelling and never the point. No one left 4 wondering who Vader was or who Luke's parents were (in part because Ep4 had answers already).
TLJ ends with an actual conflict. Kylo is a real villain, having accomplished everything he believed he needed to prove himself but ultimately robbed of the victory he most craved. All official organizations opposed to the First Order have been defeated, but the galaxy is still full of heroes, inspired by those who stood against tyranny before.
Honestly, the Treverrow script, while woefully unfinished and still full of problems, really shows how great the final direction for the film could have been. That's not to say it actually would have been great, just that the idea that there was no where to go after a movie that actually established a real conflict seems kind of ridiculous. Stories are not about surprise reveals; particularly of the brand that Star Wars has gotten stuck in.
I mean, 8 had those absolutely ridiculous and incredibly stupid bombers, i'm not even going to start on what was wrong with them.
Also, 8 makes fuel a major issue for the first time. the 8th movie of a triple trilogy is the first one that mentions fuel for ships and it's a major plot point? Luke's fighter effortlessly jumps from star system to star system with nary a thought for how much fuel it has in empire, suddenly a fleet is crippled buy fuel shortage. Waaay too late to bring that into the storyline by then especially since it was never even mentioned once in any of the movies before it.
Also, hyperspace ramming? Why not use it against a death star if it can be done? Again a major plot point that should have been mentioned long ago.
Yeah, 8 had enough stuff in it to cause concussion inducting facepalms, but in 9 ....
Ok, first palpy returns. Ok, i guess if obiwan, yoda and luke can force ghost maybe palpy had a dark side version, like maybe a lich has his phylactery, and maybe only a dark side user would be so adamant about staying on this plane to weidl power over it like, say, Xykon on order of the stick, and yes palpy did mention a sith overcoming death. Still, why not go with a new villain instead of recycling that cackling carrion?
The way the falcon was hyperskipping around. Yeesh, In the first movie solo said it took careful calculations to make a jump, now they're just a skippin' along at random, right into an inhabited planet's atmosphere even. Talk about star trek having consistency issues!
So now star destroyers have planet destroyer weapons. Great, I mean i know tech advances but the smallest planet destroyer we saw was the death star mk 1, now we've got planet killers on star destroyers, that's like what? reducing the size by a factor of 10,000 or so? If they had that why bother with starkiller base in the first sequel, it makes zero sens..oh, star wars. right.
Then hell, for a grand finale' palpy suddenly become full blown comic book uber villain and can immobilize an entire fleet, an armada of vessels ass by his hunched over saggy self with a god level force lightning gakstorm that cripples an entire fleet. Hell, why have a starfleet then? Just a royal yacht carrying 'is omnipotence around to enforce order.
Honestly i have to stop now, i;'m actually getting kind of dizzy contemplating the level of grand mal cringe inducing things in TROS, if i even start to bring up how kylo stupidly went to fight palpy after throwing away the only weapon he had or how chewie survived being on the shuttle rey exploded i'm going to lose consciousness and my face is going to fall right onto my keybowejhdpodpq2ddp23r-134q9ewqoe
Matt Swain wrote: the 8th movie of a triple trilogy is the first one that mentions fuel for ships and it's a major plot point? Luke's fighter effortlessly jumps from star system to star system with nary a thought for how much fuel it has in empire, suddenly a fleet is crippled buy fuel shortage. Waaay too late to bring that into the storyline by then especially since it was never even mentioned once in any of the movies before it.
After escaping Naboo with two Jedi, why did Queen Amidala's ship stop at Tatooine?
Matt Swain wrote: the 8th movie of a triple trilogy is the first one that mentions fuel for ships and it's a major plot point? Luke's fighter effortlessly jumps from star system to star system with nary a thought for how much fuel it has in empire, suddenly a fleet is crippled buy fuel shortage. Waaay too late to bring that into the storyline by then especially since it was never even mentioned once in any of the movies before it.
After escaping Naboo with two Jedi, why did Queen Amidala's ship stop at Tatooine?
Their hyperdrive engine was damaged. They needed parts for the engine. not fuel.
I think which you find cringier is less about the films themselves (they're both deeply flawed and unrewarding) but about what you type of flaws you find worse.
TLJ is, in theory at least, a fairly ambitious attempt to tell a different kind of story, and move past the "mystery box" storytelling of ROTF. It did things that we didn't expect, and showed us different sides of characters. OTOH... the main plot reads like fanfiction written by somebody whose only exposure to star wars was reading the plot summaries on wikipedia. It's got big "rough draft" energy. I found parts compelling, but I've had no interest in going back to watch any of them.
ROS was the safest, "play the hits" type of movie that could possibly be made. Palpatine returning seems to basically invalidate the entire original trilogy, and the rest of the plot is pretty much what you'd expect, only louder and brighter. It has big "this was the 45th draft by a dozen writers" energy. By shamelessly playing to nostalgia, there were dopamine hits (lando! realizing the droids are the common thread, palpatine taunting a jedi!) I've likewise had no interest in returning to them.
The fact that Force Awakens isn't on this list, despite also being a too cute, nostalgia ridden rehash, shows that the bar for ROS was low, and it failed to clear it. TLJ, while clearly a failure, at least tried to do something fresh.
For me, ROS being so boring and bad while playing safe is cringier than TLJs dumb plot.
Im really surprised people are comparing the cringe levels of 8 and 9 to 2 and 3.
I don't argue that 2 and 3 were more "entertaining" and "cinematic;" However, from a cringe standpoint 8 and 9 were FAR more cringey. 8 and 9 had some of the biggest plot holes and ridiculous world breaking rules introduced, sure they had good production values, but people are clearly citing all sorts of cringe in this post that came from 8 and 9 without really giving any examples from 2 and 3. No one has even introduced the point in 8 where suddenly now Star-ships can hyper-space ram other vessels, or that the Resistance "leader" had to stay sacrifice herself to do it while if she was important she could have delegated the task to a volunteer or a freaking droid.
I actually really enjoyed Rogue One and Solo, and I feel really let down by Disney that 8 and 9 were just so freaking cringey.
I think TFA being... fine? Pretty good? Some form of decent? Anyway, I think TFA being a competent movie that doesn't make us mad or confuse the hell out of us was seen as a sign that we could sort the star wars movies into three tiers: 4-6, which were great, the new ones, were are decent, and the prequels, which remain trash. Rogue one being legit good really fed into that view.
AS more new movies came out, the simmering embers of love for ROTS mad things muddier, and the complete lack of narrative focus in the sequel trilogy made the prequels, in comparison, seem neatly plotted.
When speaking of prequel cringe, I think it's just assumed. TPM is just a dumpster fire built around a good lightsabre battle and John Williams last great work, but Jar Jar provides all the cringe you could ever want. AOTC makes no sense, but also has "I hate sand," "deathsticks," and the indignity of watching Yoda turn into Sonic the Hedgehog.
Im really surprised people are comparing the cringe levels of 8 and 9 to 2 and 3.
Attack of the clones had the pure wtf of Anakin mass-murdering children and declaring that he'd rule the galaxy with an iron fist as an absolute tyrant. Some how that was the defining moment of their relationship and the point Padme 'gave into' her 'love' for him.
Its hard to top that moment as an absolute horror-show, and Lucas' frightening level of disconnect from the concept of romance and just... people in general.
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The relative lack of romance in the prequels was actually a relief. The few moments they tried were kinda bad, but nowhere near as gut-wrenchingly awful as 2 and 3.
I honestly feel like the straight hotness of Padme/ Natalie Portman in her prime was amazing, she was basically like my goddess for a long time. As far as killing younglings, it was really tragic for sure, but at the same time it would be "enough" basically to make Padme fall out of love with Anakin, and also be a good catalyst/catastrophe to introduce "the chosen one" into Darth Vader which was one of the most supreme dark-side users of all time.
Turnip Jedi wrote: But there's only 6, next you'll be trying to tell us there's 4 Indy films
You can't just make up three movies to help your point. There are only three: Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Everything is is a fever dream fan fiction.
Is anyone else shocked that MDG or Galef haven't come in here to tell us we're all wrong and Star Wars is amazing? I know I am.
To the topic at hand, I have to say 9 is worse. 8, for all its faults, and there are many, at least tried to do something that wasn't a straight up rehash of the OT and I must give credit for the attempt at telling a different story. There's still a lot of rehash in 8 too, but there are some nuggets of original ideas that I really appreciated after TFA basically just retold ANH.
I think Ep 9 is worse purely on the basis that the opening 10 minutes of the movie literally has Poe saying "Somehow, Palpatine came back". How is that an actual line in a movie? No exposition, no explanation. Surprise! Palpy is here! WOO. You have to actively search outside the movie and the weird Fortnite tie-in to see how he broadcast his return in the galaxy, which is ridiculous. This doesn't factor in how the main cast basically blunder their way into each macguffin that gets them to where they need to be, I was super bored with what I was watching and I felt like nothing was actually happening.
Also, love how they made force lightning, an advanced Sith technique that Darth Maul never used despite being a Sith himself, suddenly accessible because Rey got PMS/angry during her tug of war with Kylo Ren. Wtf. At least have her deal with consequences by letting Chewie die from that.
Similarly, ep 9 fundamentally undermines the entire prequel and OG trilogy of Anakin bringing balance to the force through his redemption thanks to Luke's efforts if Palpatine can just come back on a whim.
Ep 8 is another kind of mess altogether, but ep 9 has the sin of not only doubling down on the horrific writing of Ep8, but also for being incredibly boring. At least Ep 8 had some kind of stakes involved, even if it was poorly executed. Ep 9 just feels like everyone is following an invisible quest marker with no reason or rhyme to it.
Im really surprised people are comparing the cringe levels of 8 and 9 to 2 and 3.
Attack of the clones had the pure wtf of Anakin mass-murdering children and declaring that he'd rule the galaxy with an iron fist as an absolute tyrant. Some how that was the defining moment of their relationship and the point Padme 'gave into' her 'love' for him.
Its hard to top that moment as an absolute horror-show, and Lucas' frightening level of disconnect from the concept of romance and just... people in general.
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The relative lack of romance in the prequels was actually a relief. The few moments they tried were kinda bad, but nowhere near as gut-wrenchingly awful as 2 and 3.
Yeah, that's common in speilberg/lucas movies.
For even worse cringe, look at the awful "indiana Jones and the temple of doom" (Spielberg finally apologized for this, many years later.)
Basically indy kidnaps a woman, threatens her with a knife in her side, drags her into extreme perial, even helps lock her in a bodfdage rack so she can be slowly lowered into lava and incinerated alive, then 'rescues" her from the danger and terror he put her in, and when she goes off on him about what she suffered because of him and walks away he uses his WHIP on her to DRAG her back to him, and she ends up willingly kissing him after the unimaginable terror he caused her?
Yeah, she should have pretended to kiss him, rammed her knee into his groin so hard his nads flew out his ears at about mach 3, reminded him as he lay on the ground in silent paralyzed agony he dragged her into that whole mess and she owes him nothing for 'saving ' her from a situation he put her in, went over to a british officer, batter her eyes, smiled and asked him if he could help a woman get to an american embassy. Maybe offering to sing for his troops for a lift. You know those british gentleman can't decline a woman in need of a little aid. Yeah, that's a stereotype, temple of doom was full of them. What's one more?
Honestly, that was the worst male female 'relationship" i think i ever saw. My god, it makes 50 shades of grey look like a perfectly normal healthy relationship.
One thing, tho. Many people consider the "i know" scene to be cringeworthy, and, well, yes, it was. But it was topped years later.
On the battlestar galactica remake laura rosayln finally tells adama "I love you".
he says "it's about time."
My mom (RIP ) was walking thru the room when he said that. She stopped, looked at the tv and said "She should have kicked him right in the balls for that."
Oddly enough, even tho the "it's about time" line on the face of it seems more cringe worthy than "I know." the way it was done was so much better and the characters so much better that it, somehow, managed to be less cringeworthy overall.
bat702 wrote: Basically what was more cringey? to me episode 8 was more in the sense that Resistance fleet was so pathetic in comparison to size of the Star Wars galaxy
Episode was horrible in a lot of ways.. from the Star Destroyers all have a huge phallic like planet cracking mega-laser attached to them all, to Palpatine somehow still being alive, to Snoke being utterly worthless as an actual character.
The only saving grace to episode 8 was the scene where Rey and Kylo Ren fight Snoke and his royal guard
Not even that. The choreography was awful. If Snoke's guard were competent fighters you can identify three separate points where Rey SHOULD HAVE died, one within the first thirty seconds of the fight. Not watchin it frame-by-frame; as I was sitting there in the theater.
As far as 'most cringeworthy', I can only speak for myself. But for me it is Eight. It did the impossible. Walking into the movie I was excited to see where SW was going to go next and looked forward to seeing many more SW movies in the future.
Walking out I had zero interest in ever seeing another SW movie ever again.
And that was BEFORE I was told I was a racist misogynist pig for not liking it because (among other things) turning Finn into 'token black comic relief stereotype guy'.
I would say 9, primarily because of the horrible expansion of the Force. When you can project yourself to cause damage in remote locations, and teleport objects, it really is going to make it very difficult for subsequent films to find reasons the Sith don't just teleport a thermal detonator into the hero's bed while they're sleeping. Or for that matter, wreck up the flight controls of a fighter instead of spilling a lovely jar of marbles all over the floor.
Long range force teleports and force strikes are a terrible, terrible addition to the universe.
I would say the whole teleport thing was a weird bond between Kylo and Rey, but ya it was pretty absurd to see it teleport things across the galaxy and not just their weird mind meld situation. Wouldnt be surprised if Kylo got Rey pregnant somehow via the same method and we just didn't get to see the wet dream like event unfold via the cinema haha.. Im jk.. I hope..
Honestly, I am getting old. And expectations are lowering by the day.
So if it's just a binary 8 or 9 choice I will say 9 was better than 8. Yes it was an Eagles cover band playing the hits to a bar on a Wednesday night, but I find that superior to an almost-good, almost-great maybe, film whose script needed 2 more drafts.
The flaws in Last Jedi are many and, to its detriment, easily fixable. The slow motion chase, for example, could instead have been the Rebellion fleeing through hyperspace, having 5 minutes to catch their breath, then having to jump again as the FO arrives to kill them. (Think of the Battlestar Galactica episode 33). Their ships are running out of fuel, their hyperdrives overloading. A lot more tense and easier to explain than whatever the logic was of the chase. The rebels might have been unsure how the FO was tracking them, suspecting a traitor, thus Admiral whats-her-name keeping everyone in the dark and now the mutiny makes sense too. The Casino side-quest might have had a point.
Similarly the final battle might have been broadcast live around the galaxy as FO propaganda, but then done the opposite, the Rebels' courage inspiring resistance across the galaxy.
I liked the idea of Rey being no one, I liked them killing Snoke to return the focus to Kylo. I liked crazy old man Luke.
Even the hyperspace ram could have worked with a bit more handwaving. Han Solo could fly through a shield flicker because he was just that good. Build up Admiral whats-her-name as the only other pilot who could have pulled that off so her sacrifice is meaningful.
So I found 8 more frustrating just because I felt like a few hours with the script could have really made it a good film. It was like watching a talented team just fumble the whole game.
9 wasn't great but had enough crowd-pleasing moments like the Dunkirk fleet to make me smile. Palpatine back was good and gave us a clear villain across 9 movies. If only there'd been a clear direction for the sequel trilogy it could have been decent.
Low expectations from someone who saw Star Wars in the theater in 1977? Maybe. But I'll take my endorphins where I can get them.
PS The Scottsman has my vote for writing the next crop of Star Wars films.
Nine's issues came about mostly because of eight as you can tell that someone had been cutting inbetween the lines because the movie directors did not agree on a vision at all. Eight is pretty much the cause and effect worse of the three.
I feel like 9 had alot of plot holes, mostly in the sense that Palptatine definitely died in 6, and then making Snoke basically meaningless, however 9 was way more cinematic, I was actively cringing so hard throughout 8. The resistance was supposed to be this like grand-force that arised from a galaxy brought back together, instead the entire Resistance was just one capitol ship.
Episode 2/Episode 3 had personal writing/actor cringe. Basically its like watching a movie where none of the actors have any idea what's going on because theyre all just standing in front of green screens and given very poor direction, and the writing has so many just...awful, awful lines that are the main source of cringe.
Ep 8/Ep 9 have kind of 'meta movie cringe/plot cringe". They're both so painfully the new modern super-blockbuster designed by committee and recut/reshot/retweaked a billion times to the point where you've just got no clue as an audience member what's going on.
The actors are acting, but they're acting towards like 19 different plots youre seeing jumbled and spliced together into what a few focus groups thought would appeal to the most demographics, and you've got absolutely flying rodent gak moments like the aforementioned "apparently you can just destroy any spaceship ever by jumping to hyperspace' which absolutely make sense, physics-wise, but like...usually you don't explore that in science fiction universes? Like "if luke's X-wing can travel at faster than light speeds, couldn't they just fling an X-wing piloted by a droid into the death star? Anything moving faster than the speed of light would destroy anything made of matter but good." and the answer just has to be "shuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuushhhhhhhh"
For even worse cringe, look at the awful "indiana Jones and the temple of doom" (Spielberg finally apologized for this, many years later.)
Basically indy kidnaps a woman, threatens her with a knife in her side, drags her into extreme perial, even helps lock her in a bodfdage rack so she can be slowly lowered into lava and incinerated alive, then 'rescues" her from the danger and terror he put her in, and when she goes off on him about what she suffered because of him and walks away he uses his WHIP on her to DRAG her back to him, and she ends up willingly kissing him after the unimaginable terror he caused her?
To be fair to Lucas, that is pretty much how all "Pulp" movies and serials handled romance too. He was just following the template.
bat702 wrote: I honestly feel like the straight hotness of Padme/ Natalie Portman in her prime was amazing, she was basically like my goddess for a long time.
That's a little creepy, though irrelevant.
As far as killing younglings, it was really tragic for sure, but at the same time it would be "enough" basically to make Padme fall out of love with Anakin,
well, to be honest I was referring to 2, and his confession of murder of the Tuskens, but... honestly... I'm puzzled in what universe murdering children isn't 'enough' to make someone not be in love with the perpetrator. Actually, inconceivable is pretty much my take on that.
There's no rationale that makes just wandering in and slaughtering kids OK. There's no pass on that.
'Tragic' is running over a puppy. Deliberating travelling across a city for the sole purpose of murdering kids is purely monstrous.
Matt Swain wrote: the 8th movie of a triple trilogy is the first one that mentions fuel for ships and it's a major plot point? Luke's fighter effortlessly jumps from star system to star system with nary a thought for how much fuel it has in empire, suddenly a fleet is crippled buy fuel shortage. Waaay too late to bring that into the storyline by then especially since it was never even mentioned once in any of the movies before it.
After escaping Naboo with two Jedi, why did Queen Amidala's ship stop at Tatooine?
Their hyperdrive engine was damaged. They needed parts for the engine. not fuel.
Well snap, thats what I get for not rewatching before being all smug about it.
I know fuel gets brought up in the prequels though, where is it?
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bat702 wrote: Im really surprised people are comparing the cringe levels of 8 and 9 to 2 and 3.
I don't argue that 2 and 3 were more "entertaining" and "cinematic;" However, from a cringe standpoint 8 and 9 were FAR more cringey. 8 and 9 had some of the biggest plot holes and ridiculous world breaking rules introduced, sure they had good production values, but people are clearly citing all sorts of cringe in this post that came from 8 and 9 without really giving any examples from 2 and 3. No one has even introduced the point in 8 where suddenly now Star-ships can hyper-space ram other vessels, or that the Resistance "leader" had to stay sacrifice herself to do it while if she was important she could have delegated the task to a volunteer or a freaking droid.
I actually really enjoyed Rogue One and Solo, and I feel really let down by Disney that 8 and 9 were just so freaking cringey.
Thats the beauty of subjective experience I guess. To me even the worse of the Sequels don't compare to Hayden going from 0 to Life as a House over the course of one speech in Attack of the Clones or Christopher Lee walking around a hovering Ewan McGregor while giving exposition and just the really ropey greenscreen that permeates all three of those movies. But take solace in the fact that some 20 years from now people will be telling you how secretly brilliant the porgs are or how the message of the repeating mirror scene wasn't actually completely discarded by making her Palpatine's grandkid after all.
For me, TLJ was a deeply flawed movie that was enjoyable as a dumb space movie so long as I ignored its relationship to Star Wars (easier for me since Star Wars had been dead to me since TPM). But it was a movie.
TFA, especially the second half, was more of a collection of scenes that happened, lacking the pacing, structure, arcs or fundamental understanding of storytelling needed to be a movie. Combine that with the deliberate invocation of nostalgia, and the film feels like crude imitation of a film, a broom with a volleyball face dressed up like a movie.
TROS is the Cats of Star Wars movies, baffling choices piled ineptly on top of each other until all you can do is laugh. I feel bad for everyone involved in the film, except JJ Abrams.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Can we all finally agree that JJ Abrams is Not Very Good at His Job?
Nah. Problems like these are big and complicated and are caused by a lot of different people having their fingers in the pie. In hindsight it wasn't fair to blame George for all the problems of the Prequels and it certainly isn't fair to lay all the problems of the sequels at the feet of one person.
Well, in the Star Wars universe, killing Tuskens was probably seen no differently than killing Coyotes in the western US today. Look at the way Lars (and family) references them in the movies and a few other references in other SW sourcebook.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Can we all finally agree that JJ Abrams is Not Very Good at His Job?
He's an ideas guy with a great eye for cinematography. He's great at selling people on intriguing ideas and flashy concepts. What he doesn't have is follow through or long term story telling chops. Honestly, I thought getting him to do 7 and ONLY 7 was the best decision Disney made. Going back to him to finish things up after Trevorrow fell through was easily one of the worst.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Can we all finally agree that JJ Abrams is Not Very Good at His Job?
Nah. Problems like these are big and complicated and are caused by a lot of different people having their fingers in the pie. In hindsight it wasn't fair to blame George for all the problems of the Prequels and it certainly isn't fair to lay all the problems of the sequels at the feet of one person.
I mean, 8 had those absolutely ridiculous and incredibly stupid bombers, i'm not even going to start on what was wrong with them.
What was wrong with them? Because, yknow, every complaint I've seen about them to date ignores the fact that the same complaint is present in virtually every preceding Star Wars film.
Also, 8 makes fuel a major issue for the first time. the 8th movie of a triple trilogy is the first one that mentions fuel for ships and it's a major plot point?
So you've never watched The Clone Wars or read some of the most important EU novels of old, then? Because there have been several different and distinct fuel types in the past that served as major plot points in the EU. Star Wars fans have always said they wanted the movies to be more reflective of lore from outside of the films...
Also, hyperspace ramming? Why not use it against a death star if it can be done? Again a major plot point that should have been mentioned long ago.
Also covered in previous non-film Star Wars media.
The way the falcon was hyperskipping around. Yeesh, In the first movie solo said it took careful calculations to make a jump, now they're just a skippin' along at random, right into an inhabited planet's atmosphere even. Talk about star trek having consistency issues!
Also an issue (though not as extreme) in The Force Awakens.
So now star destroyers have planet destroyer weapons. Great, I mean i know tech advances but the smallest planet destroyer we saw was the death star mk 1, now we've got planet killers on star destroyers, that's like what? reducing the size by a factor of 10,000 or so? If they had that why bother with starkiller base in the first sequel, it makes zero sens..oh, star wars. right.
It was a new class of Star Destroyer that happens to look more or less identical to the ones in the original trilogy, only about 2-3x larger.
or that the Resistance "leader" had to stay sacrifice herself to do it while if she was important she could have delegated the task to a volunteer or a freaking droid.
That misses the point by a lot more than 12 parsecs.
I think TFA being... fine? Pretty good? Some form of decent? Anyway, I think TFA being a competent movie that doesn't make us mad or confuse the hell out of us was seen as a sign that we could sort the star wars movies into three tiers: 4-6, which were great, the new ones, were are decent, and the prequels, which remain trash.
Well... thats an opinion... I guess....
Attack of the clones had the pure wtf of Anakin mass-murdering children and declaring that he'd rule the galaxy with an iron fist as an absolute tyrant.
Thats Revenge of the Sith. Why is this a wtf moment? We knew he would become Darth Vader, and we know that Darth Vader kills pretty indiscriminately and also verbatim said the same thing to his son.
I think Ep 9 is worse purely on the basis that the opening 10 minutes of the movie literally has Poe saying "Somehow, Palpatine came back".
I prefer 8, but is that really worse than the fact that within the opening 10 minutes of 8 Poe literally says "Look, I can't hold forever. If you reach him, tell him Leia has an urgent message for him about his mother."?
Also, love how they made force lightning, an advanced Sith technique that Darth Maul never used despite being a Sith himself, suddenly accessible because Rey got PMS/angry during her tug of war with Kylo Ren. Wtf. At least have her deal with consequences by letting Chewie die from that.
The treatment of force abilities as discrete techniques with specific names that only certain individuals have access to is a creation of the fandom that has arisen as a result of a misconstrued understanding of its use in tabletop and video game mechanics. You will note that no force user ever once refers to any sort of ability by name or treats it as a video game skill that they unlock as they level up - you never once hear a jedi say "I'll use force speed to get beyond him and then hit him with a force push!" or anything to that effect. The only time any force ability is ever really given a name that I can think of is the jedi mind trick - but even then its only ever referred to as such by people who aren't force users. In fact, the entire existence of the Force as a tool that can be wielded is essentially premised on the idea that those who are capable of manipulating it can use it to do basically anything. In short, your displeasure with this is more of a you problem than it is a star wars problem.
Basically indy kidnaps a woman, threatens her with a knife in her side, drags her into extreme perial, even helps lock her in a bodfdage rack so she can be slowly lowered into lava and incinerated alive, then 'rescues" her from the danger and terror he put her in, and when she goes off on him about what she suffered because of him and walks away he uses his WHIP on her to DRAG her back to him, and she ends up willingly kissing him after the unimaginable terror he caused her?
To be fair thats the same exact problematic cringey gak that was common to the pulp serials which inspired the Indiana Jones. Its faithfulness to the source material.
You've also basically described the first 20+ James Bond movies to a tee.
One thing, tho. Many people consider the "i know" scene to be cringeworthy, and, well, yes, it was. But it was topped years later.
I have never met a single damned person in my life who thinks that scene is cringeworthy. Overwhelmingly its considered one of the best moments of improv in cinema history.
I would say 9, primarily because of the horrible expansion of the Force. When you can project yourself to cause damage in remote locations, and teleport objects, it really is going to make it very difficult for subsequent films to find reasons the Sith don't just teleport a thermal detonator into the hero's bed while they're sleeping. Or for that matter, wreck up the flight controls of a fighter instead of spilling a lovely jar of marbles all over the floor.
Long range force teleports and force strikes are a terrible, terrible addition to the universe.
Im just grateful it wasn't time travel - Filoni came pretty close to ruining that one for me.
The slow motion chase, for example, could instead have been the Rebellion fleeing through hyperspace, having 5 minutes to catch their breath, then having to jump again as the FO arrives to kill them. (Think of the Battlestar Galactica episode 33).
It was already a Battlestar Galactica episode, just instead of trying to constantly jump away from the pursuers they decided to proceed at sublight because reasons.
PS The Scottsman has my vote for writing the next crop of Star Wars films.
seconded.
Nine's issues came about mostly because of eight as you can tell that someone had been cutting inbetween the lines because the movie directors did not agree on a vision at all. Eight is pretty much the cause and effect worse of the three.
That was a choice made by 9s director (more likely by its producers) it has nothing to do with 8. We saw what 9 could have been and it was a cohesive and natural progression of the story... Disney fired the director and brought in a talentless hack at the last minute to rewrite the story virtually from scratch. In that talentless hacks defense though, they then forced him to rewrite about half of it while he was in the middle of filming.
The resistance was supposed to be this like grand-force that arised from a galaxy brought back together, instead the entire Resistance was just one capitol ship.
The resistance was never presented as any such thing, in fact from the very beginning we are told that they are a small ragtag group of guerillas with little support. Also, to be fair, the extent of the Resistance that we see in Episode 8 is not much different from the extent of the Resistance that we see in Episode 7, or 4, or for that matter 5. In fact, the Resistance is arguably more powerful, because they have one ship thats several times larger than the largest ship we had seen the rebels use in the original trilogy, and the other 3 ships serving alongside it are likewise significantly larger and more capable than the majority of rebel vessels seen previously.
well, to be honest I was referring to 2, and his confession of murder of the Tuskens, but... honestly... I'm puzzled in what universe murdering children isn't 'enough' to make someone not be in love with the perpetrator. Actually, inconceivable is pretty much my take on that.
There's no rationale that makes just wandering in and slaughtering kids OK. There's no pass on that.
'Tragic' is running over a puppy. Deliberating travelling across a city for the sole purpose of murdering kids is purely monstrous.
If you adopt the in-universe viewpoint that the Tuskens are little more than wild animals then slaughtering a tusken village is little more than running over several puppies. Also lets be clear - Anakin set out to save his mother, not to kill kids. It was only after he found his mom dead that he slaughtered the village, not just the kids, but the women and men too. While thats worse, its also "in the moment" easier to forgive because its your romantic interest acting out in grief rather than being a particularly sadistic donkey-cave getting his jollies by murdering small children.
Porgs are brilliant.
Hands down the greatest thing to ever come out of Star Wars, only baby Yoda comes close.
TFA, especially the second half, was more of a collection of scenes that happened, lacking the pacing, structure, arcs or fundamental understanding of storytelling needed to be a movie. Combine that with the deliberate invocation of nostalgia, and the film feels like crude imitation of a film, a broom with a volleyball face dressed up like a movie.
Can we all finally agree that JJ Abrams is Not Very Good at His Job?
I'm honestly surprised that people seem to think otherwise. The moment he was announced as director of TFA I had a bad feeling about how things were going to go, while everyone else was ecstatic as though his travesty of a Star Trek film and Lost never happened.
the real issue was the piss poor job Rian Johnson made of every single aspect of his job.
Aside from the fact that he never worked on Star Trek, i've seen every one of Johnsons films and I have to say hes an incredible filmmaker in every respect. If Episode 8 is the worst hes ever done, then hes far and away one of the best filmmakers on earth, period. The problem with 8 isn't Johnson, its Star Wars fans not knowing what they want and rejecting what they said they wanted when its given to them (not unlike a small petulant child).
Cringe more? 8, easily. It's a great idea for a movie wrapped up and delivered as a very bad movie. So many times it seems to be doing something interesting then.. nope, can't have any coherency, that would be predictable and we're here to smash the mould. But at least 8 tried.
9 isn't cringe worthy. It doesn't score that high. It is contemptuous. It is pathetic. I didn't cringe watching 9 because I didn't care.
And I'm only saying 8 because I wasn't given the option of 7 - crappy, lazy nostalgia crap makes me cringe more than anything 8 did, even though 7 is the better film.
Attack of the clones had the pure wtf of Anakin mass-murdering children and declaring that he'd rule the galaxy with an iron fist as an absolute tyrant.
Thats Revenge of the Sith. Why is this a wtf moment? We knew he would become Darth Vader, and we know that Darth Vader kills pretty indiscriminately and also verbatim said the same thing to his son.
Why in the world did you cut my quote short?
"Some how that was the defining moment of their relationship and the point Padme 'gave into' her 'love' for him." That's _kind of_ relevant. The issue isn't 'surprise, he's Darth Vader.' That isn't the complaint. Its that his romantic arc with this woman culminates in a confession of mass murder, and somehow she's OK with that. And he also mentions (again) his desire to rule the galaxy as an iron fisted tyrant, but her entire character is centered around a drive for democratic governance, which he considers worthless and stupid. Why is she interested in him again? Why does she not immediately walk the hell out and leave him stranded?
And also, again, no. The _first time_ he mass-murdered children was Attack of the Clones, and tells her about it. And she's somehow not horrified, but filled with sympathy. And somehow the second time he does it, she's surprised.
It was disturbing a bit to me the level the audiences really didn't care about Anakin killing the women and children of the tusken raiders, however, it was largely the case that the audiences really didn't care much about "Darth Vader" killing an entire clan of tusken raiders.
In comparison audiences were incredibly disturbed by Anakin killing a bunch of jedi younglings.
Arguably, 9 would not have been bad at all, if 8 would have spent the effort to set it up. Nothing would have been stupid abut Palpatine returning, if it was only been skillfully foreshadowed, rather than jammed into the opening crawl with a shrug worthy of Han Solo.
EPISODE IX
THE RISE OF SKYWALKER
The Dead Speak! Here's the deal....so, Palpatine never died, and evidently was behind everything.
Lucky for our heroes, he sent a warning out over every hyperspace channel.
bat702 wrote: It was disturbing a bit to me the level the audiences really didn't care about Anakin killing the women and children of the tusken raiders, however, it was largely the case that the audiences really didn't care much about "Darth Vader" killing an entire clan of tusken raiders.
In comparison audiences were incredibly disturbed by Anakin killing a bunch of jedi younglings.
The tusken raiders are pretty dehumanized with their tribal masks and general depiction as raiders rather than natives of Tatooine. The village massacre was also under the backdrop of Anakin basically going mad with grief from his mom dying due to their torture, so it's given a pass of it being a crime of passion. This is in contrast to Jedi being generally (even if on a lore-level they've lost their path a LOT) depicted as the good guys and thus when Anakin turns on them, specifically children that we actually get to see the faces of, it's a bigger "oh-gak" moment for the audience to cue in that Anakin is committing to something much more vast than killing a village of people.
I do agree that they should have written the whole tusken raider scene better though.
AegisGrimm wrote: Arguably, 9 would not have been bad at all, if 8 would have spent the effort to set it up. Nothing would have been stupid abut Palpatine returning, if it was only been skillfully foreshadowed, rather than jammed into the opening crawl with a shrug worthy of Han Solo.
EPISODE IX
THE RISE OF SKYWALKER
The Dead Speak! Here's the deal....so, Palpatine never died, and evidently was behind everything.
Lucky for our heroes, he sent a warning out over every hyperspace channel.
Wait wait wait wait wait... you're blaming Episode 8 for not setting up episode 9? You're blaming episode 8 for not setting up a movie which wasn't even *written* yet when they completed filming, and probably wasn't even written yet when it released??
Am I understanding this correctly???
I think what you meant to say is, "episode 9 would not have been bad at all if it would have followed through on the setup made in episode 8."
bat702 wrote: It was disturbing a bit to me the level the audiences really didn't care about Anakin killing the women and children of the tusken raiders, however, it was largely the case that the audiences really didn't care much about "Darth Vader" killing an entire clan of tusken raiders.
In comparison audiences were incredibly disturbed by Anakin killing a bunch of jedi younglings.
If a tribe of humans tortured my mother so badly she died in my arms when i came to rescue her, i'd go dalek on them all. I think annie gets a pass because of what the tusken did to his mother.
What gets me is that everyone is so down on kylo ren because -ERMUGHURD!- he killed (GASP!) Han Solo!
But no one seems to give a feth about him casually ordering his troops to "kill them all" earlier in the movie and they burned an entire village, many killed with flamethrowers.
"Oh, but we knew han, he was a main character! Those people, we didn't know them!"
Oddly enough Han seems to have forgiven kylo for killing him. I doubt those villagers ever forgave him, but hey, not main characters, don't matter.
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Gitzbitah wrote: I would say 9, primarily because of the horrible expansion of the Force. When you can project yourself to cause damage in remote locations, and teleport objects, it really is going to make it very difficult for subsequent films to find reasons the Sith don't just teleport a thermal detonator into the hero's bed while they're sleeping. Or for that matter, wreck up the flight controls of a fighter instead of spilling a lovely jar of marbles all over the floor.
Long range force teleports and force strikes are a terrible, terrible addition to the universe.
Um, yeah, luke projected himself over interstellar instances and even manifested a lightsaber, and died as an apparent result. it was self sacrifice, Apparently sith are to selfish to do something like that, jedi only in dire circumstances.
For even worse cringe, look at the awful "indiana Jones and the temple of doom" (Spielberg finally apologized for this, many years later.)
Basically indy kidnaps a woman, threatens her with a knife in her side, drags her into extreme perial, even helps lock her in a bodfdage rack so she can be slowly lowered into lava and incinerated alive, then 'rescues" her from the danger and terror he put her in, and when she goes off on him about what she suffered because of him and walks away he uses his WHIP on her to DRAG her back to him, and she ends up willingly kissing him after the unimaginable terror he caused her?
To be fair to Lucas, that is pretty much how all "Pulp" movies and serials handled romance too. He was just following the template.
How Indy treated willie was not only unforgivable, it was a set of serious felonies.
bat702 wrote: It was disturbing a bit to me the level the audiences really didn't care about Anakin killing the women and children of the tusken raiders, however, it was largely the case that the audiences really didn't care much about "Darth Vader" killing an entire clan of tusken raiders.
In comparison audiences were incredibly disturbed by Anakin killing a bunch of jedi younglings.
The tusken raiders are pretty dehumanized with their tribal masks and general depiction as raiders rather than natives of Tatooine. The village massacre was also under the backdrop of Anakin basically going mad with grief from his mom dying due to their torture, so it's given a pass of it being a crime of passion. This is in contrast to Jedi being generally (even if on a lore-level they've lost their path a LOT) depicted as the good guys and thus when Anakin turns on them, specifically children that we actually get to see the faces of, it's a bigger "oh-gak" moment for the audience to cue in that Anakin is committing to something much more vast than killing a village of people.
I do agree that they should have written the whole tusken raider scene better though.
There's also the fact that Tusken Raiders in all the movies till then were constantly attacking, killing, and stealing from others. It's a wee bit difficult to pop sympathy when the entire time they've basically seemed like they only want to destroy or enslave everyone else.
chaos0xomega wrote: I think what you meant to say is, "episode 9 would not have been bad at all if it would have followed through on the setup made in episode 8."
And episode 8 wouldn't have been so bad if it would have followed through on the set up of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.
bat702 wrote: It was disturbing a bit to me the level the audiences really didn't care about Anakin killing the women and children of the tusken raiders, however, it was largely the case that the audiences really didn't care much about "Darth Vader" killing an entire clan of tusken raiders.
In comparison audiences were incredibly disturbed by Anakin killing a bunch of jedi younglings.
I mean, I laughed at that scene. The timing of the dialogue and the lightsaber snap-hiss ignition is comedy genius. It was constructed like a Simpsons gag or even more like Paula Poundstone’s bit about how her cats always come to her for help when she sprays them.
chaos0xomega wrote: I think what you meant to say is, "episode 9 would not have been bad at all if it would have followed through on the setup made in episode 8."
And episode 8 wouldn't have been so bad if it would have followed through on the set up of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.
7 didn't have setup. It had a series of JJ Abrams mystery boxes before he stepped away and told whoever came in next to "figure it out".
the real issue was the piss poor job Rian Johnson made of every single aspect of his job.
Aside from the fact that he never worked on Star Trek, i've seen every one of Johnsons films and I have to say hes an incredible filmmaker in every respect. If Episode 8 is the worst hes ever done, then hes far and away one of the best filmmakers on earth, period. The problem with 8 isn't Johnson, its Star Wars fans not knowing what they want and rejecting what they said they wanted when its given to them (not unlike a small petulant child).
The pile of gak that was episode 8 was not a bad "Star Wars" film - it was a truely awful film full stop. The Original Star Wars films were good fun - nothing really special but entertaining. This was not.
The dialogue, plot, pacing, story - everything I had to sit through was absolutely terrible. I went to be entertained by a film - I was bored by a lazy, badly made incoherent film whose laughable script and plot seemed to be written in crayon by a bunch of illiterate chimps.
But as apparently you love his work without reservation, I can't expect you to be objective - I guess the same is true of the paid critics who lavished praise on it,.
chaos0xomega wrote: I think what you meant to say is, "episode 9 would not have been bad at all if it would have followed through on the setup made in episode 8."
And episode 8 wouldn't have been so bad if it would have followed through on the set up of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.
7 didn't have setup. It had a series of JJ Abrams mystery boxes before he stepped away and told whoever came in next to "figure it out".
The set up for 7 was the films before it. TFA didn't invent the idea of the Jedi/Sith/Rebellion ect: they had a world and history to work from. The sequel films lacked a coherent direction overall which lead to even good ideas being poorly done or completely ignored, beyond "make Disney money". Johnson had some good ideas but the eighth part of a nine part story was not the time try and change the course of the river. Then it is as you say with Arbams his inability to follow through on an idea.
The original work was a muddled up incoherent mess. The only reason the film worked at the cinema was because his THEN WIFE (Marsha) RECUT the film so that it made more sense. She and the editing team won an oscar for their work.
Star Wars was a film saved in the editing, and that's what made it the classic. If it had been left as George's work, it would have sunk without a trace.
ALL of the SW movies are cringey. In a 'buck rogers' cringey way. They're meant to be. But ALL of the ones where George wrote dialogue are specifically cringeworthy.
Gitzbitah wrote: I would say 9, primarily because of the horrible expansion of the Force. When you can project yourself to cause damage in remote locations, and teleport objects, it really is going to make it very difficult for subsequent films to find reasons the Sith don't just teleport a thermal detonator into the hero's bed while they're sleeping. Or for that matter, wreck up the flight controls of a fighter instead of spilling a lovely jar of marbles all over the floor.
Long range force teleports and force strikes are a terrible, terrible addition to the universe.
Um, yeah, luke projected himself over interstellar instances and even manifested a lightsaber, and died as an apparent result. it was self sacrifice, Apparently sith are to selfish to do something like that, jedi only in dire circumstances.
Ah, I understand your confusion. That happened in 8, and I don't have a problem with it- as you said, it kills the user, and is just an illusion, which built over the distance communication abilities we'd previously seen the Force used for.
What I was upset about was Rey and Kylo physically interacting with the environment around each other, despite being very far apart in Episode 9. Especially passing the lightsabre from Rey to Kylo for his fight with the Knights of Ren. It was a very cool scene, but if it's possible to teleport objects through the Force then.... it's really difficult to write something compelling. Imagine episode IV. Oh, I'll just teleport this proton torpedo inside of the Death Star from Yavin IV, it's cool. Jedi business, move along.
Or Vader rolls up on Hoth. Sir, there's an energy shield protecting the base.
It will fail them for the last time. And then Vader starts teleporting thermal detonators onto the generator until the shield falls.
Any starfighter duel is easily resolved by a force user waving their arms around and hitting lots of sensitive controls in their opponent's cockpit.
Even if it needs a personal connection anchor style thing- like Kylo and Rey, it's going to destroy that whole dynamic of many small battles with the big bad just gives them a target to teleport explosives to while the other one is sleeping.
chaos0xomega wrote: I think what you meant to say is, "episode 9 would not have been bad at all if it would have followed through on the setup made in episode 8."
And episode 8 wouldn't have been so bad if it would have followed through on the set up of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.
I think this is the fundamental problem: What people wanted was just "more star wars". A sequel doesn't just have to be 'the thing you watched before with better graphics on the next generation of Playstation'. The best sequels do things like play with genre (Aliens) contemplate new aspects of the world (Blade Runner) take a drastically new direction to the worldbuilding while maintaining similar themes to the original (Road Warrior) or in some way interrogate the themes of the original.
Star Wars was a franchise absolutely primed for the latter, and while it got undeniably mangled by the usual studio process, ep8 at least raised some of the relevant questions. We have a group (the jedi) who has been undeniably and uncritically been held up as good, correct, and perfect for 7 films, but the hundreds, more realistically thousands of them were destroyed by a single enemy, who a barely trained boy and his father were able to defeat in the OT.
There are so many signs littered throughout the prequels that indicate that the galaxy was this bizarrely anachronistic place. Enslavement of intelligent beings is a fairly commonplace practice. Women dying in childbirth is somehow a concern despite the existence of weird tanks of mysterious liquid that can bring you back from getting mauled by a yeti and frozen to death. Massive galaxy-wide wars have kept the entire setting in a state of technological stagnation or degradation for seemingly centuries.
"the Jedi's knowledge was far from perfect and in fact deeply flawed, The Force is something that can be learned by anybody even a complete nobody, and it only appeared to travel along familial lines because they'd of course teach their kids from a very young age how to tap into it, there is not a clearly defined 'light side' and 'dark side' of the force, you just tap into it with your emotions" is a really interesting, rich concept to explore.
But people just wanted Star Wars Again With Gooder Graphics. They wanted another x-wing vs tie fighter fight, in perfect crisp HD.
Gitzbitah wrote: I would say 9, primarily because of the horrible expansion of the Force. When you can project yourself to cause damage in remote locations, and teleport objects, it really is going to make it very difficult for subsequent films to find reasons the Sith don't just teleport a thermal detonator into the hero's bed while they're sleeping. Or for that matter, wreck up the flight controls of a fighter instead of spilling a lovely jar of marbles all over the floor.
Long range force teleports and force strikes are a terrible, terrible addition to the universe.
Um, yeah, luke projected himself over interstellar instances and even manifested a lightsaber, and died as an apparent result. it was self sacrifice, Apparently sith are to selfish to do something like that, jedi only in dire circumstances.
Ah, I understand your confusion. That happened in 8, and I don't have a problem with it- as you said, it kills the user, and is just an illusion, which built over the distance communication abilities we'd previously seen the Force used for.
What I was upset about was Rey and Kylo physically interacting with the environment around each other, despite being very far apart in Episode 9. Especially passing the lightsabre from Rey to Kylo for his fight with the Knights of Ren. It was a very cool scene, but if it's possible to teleport objects through the Force then.... it's really difficult to write something compelling. Imagine episode IV. Oh, I'll just teleport this proton torpedo inside of the Death Star from Yavin IV, it's cool. Jedi business, move along.
Or Vader rolls up on Hoth. Sir, there's an energy shield protecting the base.
It will fail them for the last time. And then Vader starts teleporting thermal detonators onto the generator until the shield falls.
Any starfighter duel is easily resolved by a force user waving their arms around and hitting lots of sensitive controls in their opponent's cockpit.
Even if it needs a personal connection anchor style thing- like Kylo and Rey, it's going to destroy that whole dynamic of many small battles with the big bad just gives them a target to teleport explosives to while the other one is sleeping.
...OK, but put it this way:
"If the force allows someone to telekinetically manipulate objects at a distance, heh, guess that means any 'duel' between two characters is just going to be one second long, because they're just going to do a quick force squish on the opposing combatant's brain."
....there is no aspect of the abilities demonstrated by using the Force from the very beginning of star wars that would not break if basic logic were applied to it. The very first time we see the force used in a star wars film is an ability that should have granted Darth Vader the ability to kill literally anyone at any time instantaneously by aiming his 'force choke' about one foot higher, where it would become "Force Stroke".
Mr Morden wrote: The 8th film is one of the worst movies I have ever had the misfortune to sit through
That's the worst part for me. As a generic sci-fi film it would have been pretty good (aside from the awful fight choreography). Maybe even VERY good. But as a STAR WARS film, with all that implies, it was absolutely awful. It breaks from the existing canon so much there's just no recovering from it.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Can we all finally agree that JJ Abrams is Not Very Good at His Job?
Sadly, no. His job is to make the studios lots of money... and he's VERY good at doing that. Even if we don't like how he goes about it.
I mean, 8 had those absolutely ridiculous and incredibly stupid bombers, i'm not even going to start on what was wrong with them.
What was wrong with them? Because, yknow, every complaint I've seen about them to date ignores the fact that the same complaint is present in virtually every preceding Star Wars film.
They do the same job as a Y-Wing only worse. And if you go with the extended material there was a Free Virgillia-class Bunkerbuster right there in the Resistance 'fleet'. It's faster than the bombers, more maneuverable, MUCH better protected, and can deliver a similar destructive payload - thus the name 'Bunkerbuster'.
Yes, that's how bad the 'starfortresses' were. They were slower and clumsier than a CAPITAL SHIP.
It stood a very good chance of making that run and surviving, instead of sacrificing the twenty-odd crewpeople plus who knows how many other much more valuable fighters and THEIR pilots. Those 'bombers' were just a bad purchase all the way around. A better use for those credits would have been... well, I don't know, maybe some MORE FUEL!?!
I swear, the Resistance logistics officer should have been shot. It's almost like he (or she) was working for the First Order...
(And doing that would have made a better plot than a random hyperspace tracker. Have the logistics officer be a spy reporting their position back to the First Order, then Holdo's paranoia and refusal to share information with Poe a lot more believable, especially if she was the head of Resistance counterintelligence...)
I mean, 8 had those absolutely ridiculous and incredibly stupid bombers, i'm not even going to start on what was wrong with them.
What was wrong with them? Because, yknow, every complaint I've seen about them to date ignores the fact that the same complaint is present in virtually every preceding Star Wars film.
They do the same job as a Y-Wing only worse. And if you go with the extended material there was a Free Virgillia-class Bunkerbuster right there in the Resistance 'fleet'. It's faster than the bombers, more maneuverable, MUCH better protected, and can deliver a similar destructive payload - thus the name 'Bunkerbuster'.
Yes, that's how bad the 'starfortresses' were. They were slower and clumsier than a CAPITAL SHIP.
It stood a very good chance of making that run and surviving, instead of sacrificing the twenty-odd crewpeople plus who knows how many other much more valuable fighters and THEIR pilots. Those 'bombers' were just a bad purchase all the way around.
I think we covered this from the 'why didn't they use Y-Wings instead?' angle but the Bunkerbuster is an angle I haven't seen analyzed before. Lets think about this:
The Y-Wing argument is a relatively simple one, the Starfortress is a heavy bomber and the Y-Wing is a fighter-bomber, the Starfortress takes 5 times the crew to man fully and delivers a payload of 1048 bombs, one-to-one that's 5 times the crew cost for 52.4 times the potential payload delivery - one Starfortress drops 10.48 times as many bombs as the same crew divided into 5 Y-Wings, meaning if you want to field the same number of bombs as those 8 starfortresses you need to field 420 Y-Wings and scrounge up an additional 395 people and droids to fly them.
The Free Virgillia though, that's a different beast, it's bigger and beefier than the Starfortress by degrees (as it should be, it's a frigate) but its armaments are nebulously defined (3 plasma bombs and 8 'heavy ordnance pods' of an unknown specific details) if we assume, generously, that the pods deal comprable damage to a single Starfortress' bomb bay then you have the destructive capacity of all 8 Starfortresses compressed into a single ship with a minimum crew of 23 - meaning if we're strictly limited by the number of people we can field to the same number of people fielded in the bombers it replaces, you are only getting the one. That's one frigate against the withering fire of the First Order fleet with the same fighter escort, if the FO forces were able to do enough damage to destroy 7 of the 8 bombers before delivering their bombs (damage incurred by the bombers being too close to each other still applying since we're talking about one ship after all) do they cause enough damage for the ship to not be combat effective before it can deliver its own payload? I think they would.
Do we have solid performance metrics on the frigate's speed and manevuerability relative to the Starfortress? I assume it is better since the bomber is noted as being slow and ungainly, but I'm curious as to how much?
A better use for those credits would have been... well, I don't know, maybe some MORE FUEL!?!
I had assumed they had the fuel, but hadn't had enough time to fully refuel before the FO showed up and destroyed the stockpile but either way, lol logistics.
I swear, the Resistance logistics officer should have been shot. It's almost like he (or she) was working for the First Order...
(And doing that would have made a better plot than a random hyperspace tracker. Have the logistics officer be a spy reporting their position back to the First Order, then Holdo's paranoia and refusal to share information with Poe a lot more believable, especially if she was the head of Resistance counterintelligence...)
Spoiler:
As they're captured on the FO dreadnought, Rose is revealed to be a First Order spy. She had planned to convince her sister it was too late to stop the first order and that she had found an angle to ensure they both got out safely. But her sister had to go and die. Distraught, she goes to the escape pod room to save herself, having planted a tracking beacon like the one Leia had for Rey somewhere onboard the ship - but then she runs into Finn. Finn the traitor, who the First Order want so badly. If she can convince him to come with her to the First Order, she can take him prisoner and turn him in. She feeds him and Poe this story about a hyperspace tracker aboard the dreadnought to justify sneaking over there, preferably not with an escape pod because the FO pretty much blowing up every piece of resistance hardware that floats towards them, but is regretting her choice more and more the more she and Finn get to know each other.
DJ clues in right away, space crime is pretty much built on the premise that hyperspace tracking isn't possible, he plays along just long enough to confirm it's all a big lie (leaves a little shield dropping surprise in their computer just in case the resistance tries something crazy and desperate) and the story proceeds as normal, Rose proving her redemption during the fight in the hangar bay where she has the choice to kill Finn or Phasma and chooses to save him. - and the movie continues.
I mean, 8 had those absolutely ridiculous and incredibly stupid bombers, i'm not even going to start on what was wrong with them.
What was wrong with them? Because, yknow, every complaint I've seen about them to date ignores the fact that the same complaint is present in virtually every preceding Star Wars film.
They do the same job as a Y-Wing only worse. And if you go with the extended material there was a Free Virgillia-class Bunkerbuster right there in the Resistance 'fleet'. It's faster than the bombers, more maneuverable, MUCH better protected, and can deliver a similar destructive payload - thus the name 'Bunkerbuster'.
Yes, that's how bad the 'starfortresses' were. They were slower and clumsier than a CAPITAL SHIP.
It stood a very good chance of making that run and surviving, instead of sacrificing the twenty-odd crewpeople plus who knows how many other much more valuable fighters and THEIR pilots. Those 'bombers' were just a bad purchase all the way around.
I think we covered this from the 'why didn't they use Y-Wings instead?' angle but the Bunkerbuster is an angle I haven't seen analyzed before. Lets think about this:
The Y-Wing argument is a relatively simple one, the Starfortress is a heavy bomber and the Y-Wing is a fighter-bomber, the Starfortress takes 5 times the crew to man fully and delivers a payload of 1048 bombs, one-to-one that's 5 times the crew cost for 52.4 times the potential payload delivery - one Starfortress drops 10.48 times as many bombs as the same crew divided into 5 Y-Wings, meaning if you want to field the same number of bombs as those 8 starfortresses you need to field 420 Y-Wings and scrounge up an additional 395 people and droids to fly them.
The Free Virgillia though, that's a different beast, it's bigger and beefier than the Starfortress by degrees (as it should be, it's a frigate) but its armaments are nebulously defined (3 plasma bombs and 8 'heavy ordnance pods' of an unknown specific details) if we assume, generously, that the pods deal comprable damage to a single Starfortress' bomb bay then you have the destructive capacity of all 8 Starfortresses compressed into a single ship with a minimum crew of 23 - meaning if we're strictly limited by the number of people we can field to the same number of people fielded in the bombers it replaces, you are only getting the one. That's one frigate against the withering fire of the First Order fleet with the same fighter escort, if the FO forces were able to do enough damage to destroy 7 of the 8 bombers before delivering their bombs (damage incurred by the bombers being too close to each other still applying since we're talking about one ship after all) do they cause enough damage for the ship to not be combat effective before it can deliver its own payload? I think they would.
Do we have solid performance metrics on the frigate's speed and manevuerability relative to the Starfortress? I assume it is better since the bomber is noted as being slow and ungainly, but I'm curious as to how much?
The Starfortress is just a rubbish approach all over. In the original trilogy we have pinpoint attacks by agile starfighters on the weakspots of capital ships to disable or destroy them. In Rogue One we see a single squadron of Y-wings deliver a volley of Ion torpedoes to disable the star destroyer as part of a combined fleet assault. It all contributes to the david vs goliath/death by a thousand cuts narrative of the rebellion versus the empire. Its elegant and sneaky and smacks of proper military planning and training.
In 8 we get horribly designed lumbering THINGS that carpet bomb their way through what is probably the most heavily armoured part of the dreadnought at zero range. There is nothing clever or elegant here. Its a meat grinder attrittion approach that does not mesh well with a resistance that is undermanned and under pressure. A properly planned assault shouldn't need 1048 bombs per ship. Also, the only purpose of the entire design of the Starfortress is for the things to heroically fail, except for the very last ship.
I swear, the Resistance logistics officer should have been shot. It's almost like he (or she) was working for the First Order...
(And doing that would have made a better plot than a random hyperspace tracker. Have the logistics officer be a spy reporting their position back to the First Order, then Holdo's paranoia and refusal to share information with Poe a lot more believable, especially if she was the head of Resistance counterintelligence...)
Spoiler:
As they're captured on the FO dreadnought, Rose is revealed to be a First Order spy. She had planned to convince her sister it was too late to stop the first order and that she had found an angle to ensure they both got out safely. But her sister had to go and die. Distraught, she goes to the escape pod room to save herself, having planted a tracking beacon like the one Leia had for Rey somewhere onboard the ship - but then she runs into Finn. Finn the traitor, who the First Order want so badly. If she can convince him to come with her to the First Order, she can take him prisoner and turn him in. She feeds him and Poe this story about a hyperspace tracker aboard the dreadnought to justify sneaking over there, preferably not with an escape pod because the FO pretty much blowing up every piece of resistance hardware that floats towards them, but is regretting her choice more and more the more she and Finn get to know each other.
DJ clues in right away, space crime is pretty much built on the premise that hyperspace tracking isn't possible, he plays along just long enough to confirm it's all a big lie (leaves a little shield dropping surprise in their computer just in case the resistance tries something crazy and desperate) and the story proceeds as normal, Rose proving her redemption during the fight in the hangar bay where she has the choice to kill Finn or Phasma and chooses to save him. - and the movie continues.
Something like that?
God, yes. Some actual drama, internal conflict and shades of grey.
I mean, 8 had those absolutely ridiculous and incredibly stupid bombers, i'm not even going to start on what was wrong with them.
What was wrong with them? Because, yknow, every complaint I've seen about them to date ignores the fact that the same complaint is present in virtually every preceding Star Wars film.
The Resistance Bomber is my favorite design from the film.
If you're upset by bombers in Star Wars you're 8 films too late.
Maybe 9
I like the Resistance Bombers, B29s in space is perfectly suited to Star Wars and makes for a different sort of drama among the crew than individual fighters can.
And if you need a handwave, just assume they're meant to his ground targets, or to fly in the envelope between a capital ship's shields and its hull.
A lot to complain about Episode 8, but really that ain't one of them.
For even worse cringe, look at the awful "indiana Jones and the temple of doom" (Spielberg finally apologized for this, many years later.)
Basically indy kidnaps a woman, threatens her with a knife in her side, drags her into extreme perial, even helps lock her in a bodfdage rack so she can be slowly lowered into lava and incinerated alive, then 'rescues" her from the danger and terror he put her in, and when she goes off on him about what she suffered because of him and walks away he uses his WHIP on her to DRAG her back to him, and she ends up willingly kissing him after the unimaginable terror he caused her?
To be fair to Lucas, that is pretty much how all "Pulp" movies and serials handled romance too. He was just following the template.
How Indy treated willie was not only unforgivable, it was a set of serious felonies.
Yup. Which was totally okay in the Serials Indy is based on. Heck, even the time they were made these serious "felonies" were considered acceptable in society for an action star. Watch any other action adventure movie of the time. James Bond, Han Solo, Conan, etc. Now-a-days, it is not how things are done and in hindsight it is super cringe inducing, but at the time it was pretty standard action movie/literature fare. I know as I was around and living my life at the time.
As for Tuskens, they were seen in universe as vermin and animals. It would be like getting mad at a guy for killing a nest of raccoons or coyotes in his barnyard. No one would care "in universe" about it.
And also, again, no. The _first time_ he mass-murdered children was Attack of the Clones, and tells her about it. And she's somehow not horrified, but filled with sympathy. And somehow the second time he does it, she's surprised.
Tusken Raiders are always portrayed as savages. Now whether that is a bias of the human settlers treating them like American Indians in old westerns or because in a pulpy sci fi story the 'always chaotic evil' race is still possible, that's up to you.
But the general feeling seems to be that killing a bunch of Tuskens is like saying you burnt out a wasps nest or drove off some wolves.
The fact that the film deliberately showed them as having a culture, art, women and children makes me think it was trying to move against the cliche.
My main issue with those bombers is that we regularly see non-military ships, like cargo freighters and shuttles, lifting off from the ground and flying up past high orbit in a shorter amount of time than it took the bombers to cross a small fraction of the distance. It would have been faster and less labor intensive to push the bombs out of the hatch of a YT-series cargo ship. We’ve already seen a Memphis Belle space right in the series—the Millennium Falcon plays the part in Star Wars, and scene was more exciting in every way.
chaos0xomega wrote: I think what you meant to say is, "episode 9 would not have been bad at all if it would have followed through on the setup made in episode 8."
And episode 8 wouldn't have been so bad if it would have followed through on the set up of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.
It did. It picked up every meaningful plot hook and story thread left for it by the previous films and trilogies. Arguably it picks up the narrative of the previous film better than any previous film in the series, as its the only one that starts literally moments after the prior film ends.
Episode 7 puts Finn in a coma because of his injuries. Episode 8 starts with Finn in a coma because of his injuries.
Episode 7 puts Luke in self-imposed exile on an island with special importance to the Jedi and the Force. Episode 8 has Luke in self-imposed exile on an island with special importance to the Jedi and the Force.
Episode 7 establishes that Rey is clueless about who her parents are or why they left her behind. Episode 8 establishes their identity and why they left her.
Episode 7 establishes that Kylo is a Vader wannabe who wants to fulfill whatever goal he thinks Vader wanted to accomplish. Episode 8 has him follow through and do what he thinks Vader would have wanted by overthrowing Snoke (in the same way that Vader wanted to overthrow Palpatine), destroying the Resistance/Rebellion, and ushering in his own interpretation of a new age of peace and order in the galaxy - except he falls a bit short and doesn't manage to turn Rey to his side, just like how Vader failed to do the same with Luke.
etc etc etc
That it took these plot threads in directions you didn't enjoy is really more of a "you" problem.
And really, you can't seriously make this argument when the main thrust of complaints against 9 is that it outright invalidates the core narrative arcs of the prior two trilogies. *eyeroll*
The set up for 7 was the films before it. TFA didn't invent the idea of the Jedi/Sith/Rebellion ect: they had a world and history to work from. The sequel films lacked a coherent direction overall which lead to even good ideas being poorly done or completely ignored, beyond "make Disney money".
Theres not much in the way of a coherent and continuing narrative or plot arc from episode 6 through to episode 7. In fact, this is one of the key complaints that was levied by many (myself included) against 7. To some extent this is to be expected when you have to engineer in a 30 year gap in time due to the aging of your talent, but even still the conclusion of the original trilogy leaves you with certain expectations about where you might find your heroes and the state of the galaxy as a whole in 30 years time, none of which are met by 7 (and indeed 7 basically leads you to believe that what whatever expectations you had leaving the theater after watching 6 basically only lasted for a brief moment before devolving in a completely different and IMO undesirable direction).
It breaks from the existing canon so much there's just no recovering from it.
It really doesn't though. It breaks from what *you* think the canon was or should be, but just about every complaint I've seen levied against the film can also be levied at one of the other films, or the Clone Wars series, or any number of things in the EU.
They do the same job as a Y-Wing only worse. And if you go with the extended material there was a Free Virgillia-class Bunkerbuster right there in the Resistance 'fleet'. It's faster than the bombers, more maneuverable, MUCH better protected, and can deliver a similar destructive payload - thus the name 'Bunkerbuster'.
Is there a citation on it being faster and more maneuerable? I'll give you better protected since it seems like a no brainer that a 300+ meter vessel would be better protected than. Fluff indicates that the Free Virgilias heavy plasma bombs were only usable for orbital strikes against hardened targets on the ground, could well be that the dreadnought wasn't a valid target. Considering the Free Virgillias also carried a squadron of 8 Resistance Bombers on board, it would seem that there was a reason to operate the bombers, wouldn't it? Per Poe Dameron in The Rebel Files, there also "wasn't a better bomber around" than the MG-100 Starfortress, which Poe describes as being superior to the B-Wing, which itself was already superior to the Y-Wing. In short - while you may feel that they do the same job as a Y-Wing (which they don't - the MG-100s payload is several orders of magnitude greater, and also has several times more defensive armaments. Your argument is akin to saying that a B-52 does the same job as an A-10), in-universe they have a very different take on matters, and the "in-universe" take actually matters more than yours.
Also, "it does the same job as x only worse" can basically be said about half the stuff in the setting.
It stood a very good chance of making that run and surviving, instead of sacrificing the twenty-odd crewpeople plus who knows how many other much more valuable fighters and THEIR pilots.
Maybe, if you ignore the part where there were 4 whole First Order capital ships, 3 of which still had their full compliment of turbolasers, and the dreadnought itself. *eyeroll* Sure, Poe took out the turbolaser batteries on the dread so that it couldn't attack the bombers, but its pretty well established that its a "fleet killer" - its fair to say those autocannons would have toasted the bunkerbuster, which it couldnt do to the bombers (because, yknow, they are a lot smaller).
The Starfortress is just a rubbish approach all over. In the original trilogy we have pinpoint attacks by agile starfighters on the weakspots of capital ships to disable or destroy them. In Rogue One we see a single squadron of Y-wings deliver a volley of Ion torpedoes to disable the star destroyer as part of a combined fleet assault. It all contributes to the david vs goliath/death by a thousand cuts narrative of the rebellion versus the empire. Its elegant and sneaky and smacks of proper military planning and training.
In 8 we get horribly designed lumbering THINGS that carpet bomb their way through what is probably the most heavily armoured part of the dreadnought at zero range. There is nothing clever or elegant here. Its a meat grinder attrittion approach that does not mesh well with a resistance that is undermanned and under pressure. A properly planned assault shouldn't need 1048 bombs per ship. Also, the only purpose of the entire design of the Starfortress is for the things to heroically fail, except for the very last ship.
So like someone else said, you wanted more of the same but in HD? Theres any number of reasons to justify why your approach wouldn't work, it could be in the 30+ years since the events you referenced the First Order figured out how to harden their ships electrical infrastructure to prevent ion attacks. Or it could be the fact that the dreadnought is several times larger than a Star Destroyer its a much tougher nut to crack owing to heavier armor and shields - after all, we never see them take out the Executor by delivering a volley of ion torpedoes, if the solution was that simple then the Executor wouldn't have been as much of a threat, would it?
What I was upset about was Rey and Kylo physically interacting with the environment around each other, despite being very far apart in Episode 9. Especially passing the lightsabre from Rey to Kylo for his fight with the Knights of Ren. It was a very cool scene, but if it's possible to teleport objects through the Force then.... it's really difficult to write something compelling. Imagine episode IV. Oh, I'll just teleport this proton torpedo inside of the Death Star from Yavin IV, it's cool. Jedi business, move along.
Or Vader rolls up on Hoth. Sir, there's an energy shield protecting the base.
It will fail them for the last time. And then Vader starts teleporting thermal detonators onto the generator until the shield falls.
Any starfighter duel is easily resolved by a force user waving their arms around and hitting lots of sensitive controls in their opponent's cockpit.
Even if it needs a personal connection anchor style thing- like Kylo and Rey, it's going to destroy that whole dynamic of many small battles with the big bad just gives them a target to teleport explosives to while the other one is sleeping.
The ability for matter to be transferred through the Force shows up in 8 to a very limited degree. I'm not sure I like it, but Rebels has an interesting solution to this and a lot of the Force in general. In the final season there's a Jedi Temple that leads to a world between worlds. It's never outright stated, but if you take it as a the Force itself, it kind of implies the whole thing is a kind of space/time singularity where everywhere and everywhen exists simultaneously. Ezra uses it to pull Ahsoka out of the duel with Vader, but it takes a huge ancient structure to access it with any real ability to control it. It feels very familiar to the way we see visions in the Force; snippets of other points in time with no real context of where and when and how they're happening, but almost entirely of people that characters have a connection with. Arguably what we see in 8/9 is two characters connected directly at the same point in the singularity to the point where matter can enter and exist the Force around them without getting lost in the infinite.
The Starfortress is just a rubbish approach all over. In the original trilogy we have pinpoint attacks by agile starfighters on the weakspots of capital ships to disable or destroy them. In Rogue One we see a single squadron of Y-wings deliver a volley of Ion torpedoes to disable the star destroyer as part of a combined fleet assault. It all contributes to the david vs goliath/death by a thousand cuts narrative of the rebellion versus the empire. Its elegant and sneaky and smacks of proper military planning and training.
In 8 we get horribly designed lumbering THINGS that carpet bomb their way through what is probably the most heavily armoured part of the dreadnought at zero range. There is nothing clever or elegant here. Its a meat grinder attrittion approach that does not mesh well with a resistance that is undermanned and under pressure. A properly planned assault shouldn't need 1048 bombs per ship. Also, the only purpose of the entire design of the Starfortress is for the things to heroically fail, except for the very last ship.
So like someone else said, you wanted more of the same but in HD? Theres any number of reasons to justify why your approach wouldn't work, it could be in the 30+ years since the events you referenced the First Order figured out how to harden their ships electrical infrastructure to prevent ion attacks. Or it could be the fact that the dreadnought is several times larger than a Star Destroyer its a much tougher nut to crack owing to heavier armor and shields - after all, we never see them take out the Executor by delivering a volley of ion torpedoes, if the solution was that simple then the Executor wouldn't have been as much of a threat, would it?
Yes, I would have much preferred more of the same if by that you mean decent squadron tactics undertaken by a semi-believable and vaguely competent paramilitary force, rather than Poe showboating followed by the most boring and suicidal attack run... ever? The Only point that the Resistance are shown as a viable military threat to the first order is when the xwings come in at the end of episode 7. Every other time, it’s not really clear why the first order is even bothering to do anything to them.
The Starfortress is just a rubbish approach all over. In the original trilogy we have pinpoint attacks by agile starfighters on the weakspots of capital ships to disable or destroy them. In Rogue One we see a single squadron of Y-wings deliver a volley of Ion torpedoes to disable the star destroyer as part of a combined fleet assault. It all contributes to the david vs goliath/death by a thousand cuts narrative of the rebellion versus the empire. Its elegant and sneaky and smacks of proper military planning and training.
In 8 we get horribly designed lumbering THINGS that carpet bomb their way through what is probably the most heavily armoured part of the dreadnought at zero range. There is nothing clever or elegant here. Its a meat grinder attrittion approach that does not mesh well with a resistance that is undermanned and under pressure. A properly planned assault shouldn't need 1048 bombs per ship. Also, the only purpose of the entire design of the Starfortress is for the things to heroically fail, except for the very last ship.
So like someone else said, you wanted more of the same but in HD? Theres any number of reasons to justify why your approach wouldn't work, it could be in the 30+ years since the events you referenced the First Order figured out how to harden their ships electrical infrastructure to prevent ion attacks. Or it could be the fact that the dreadnought is several times larger than a Star Destroyer its a much tougher nut to crack owing to heavier armor and shields - after all, we never see them take out the Executor by delivering a volley of ion torpedoes, if the solution was that simple then the Executor wouldn't have been as much of a threat, would it?
Yes, I would have much preferred more of the same if by that you mean decent squadron tactics undertaken by a semi-believable and vaguely competent paramilitary force, rather than Poe showboating followed by the most boring and suicidal attack run... ever? The Only point that the Resistance are shown as a viable military threat to the first order is when the xwings come in at the end of episode 7. Every other time, it’s not really clear why the first order is even bothering to do anything to them.
You basically just described the problem with every Star Wars film. At no point in any film are decent semi-believable tactics undertaken by anyone suggestive of an actual competent military or paramilitary force. Many pages of real and digital ink have been spilled analyzing every battle in both the original and prequel trilogies and picking them apart piece by piece to illustrate the contrived nature of the battles and how they are ultimately cinematic exhibition for the sake of exhibition rather than functions of military necessity.
The Resistance bombers would have made more sense if the vertical wing was just a stack of torpedo tubes that fire a big volley of proton torps. Essentially a missile boat.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: My main issue with those bombers is that we regularly see non-military ships, like cargo freighters and shuttles, lifting off from the ground and flying up past high orbit in a shorter amount of time than it took the bombers to cross a small fraction of the distance.
And when you realize the Dreadnaught was moving forward to pursue the Resistance fleet as well, the PAINFUL slowness of the bombers become even more apparent.
Their tinfoil shields don't help either.
A Y-Wing or TIE bomber, by contrast, are FAR faster and more maneuverable. Their shields might not be any stronger. Heck they might not even be AS strong. But their superior maneuverability gives them a chance to dodge incoming fire that the wallowing Starfortresses cannot, and their superior speed means they're exposed to fire for far less time. Thus, their shields become a far less important part of their defenses.
EDIT: The title of the thread is "What is more cringey, Star Wars episode 8 or 9?" Tells you right up front this is NOT a thread for fans of these movies. We get that there are, indeed, some people out there who like the movie. That's fine, different tastes and all that.
But don't come here and post about how great the movie is thinking you're going to change any minds, either. We've all had time to consider all the angles. Those who like it won't change the minds of those who do not, and vice versa. So... perhaps a thread about 'what were your favorite parts of SW 8 and 9' or some such might be started for those who wish to praise the sequels? And those of us who don't like them can just avoid that thread? Prevent the same arguments from being rehashed yet again, y'know?
8 was probably the worst.
Elevating / heroizing the completely toxic leader, breaking the universe vis a vis toxic leader kamikaze manuever, random side trips to find random guy as an excuse to include about "The evil rich", "military industrial complex", and "animal liberation" themes rather than foucs on a story. The absolutely horrible joke/throwaway treatment of what might have been an interesting character if they decided to do something with Phasma other than knock her out all the time and then killer her. All the deliberate writups alienating fans who were unhappy, etc. etc.
I think we wouldn't be having this discussion if they'd have just given everyone (in partiuclar the old coots who were invested in the story since being kids) something more like this:
TBH i thought Rouge One and even Solo was superiour on about all fronts.
Tne rebel bomber had so much off axs load it6 was simply impossible to believe.
The TIE bomber was kinda cool and was clearly firing warheads at the asteroid, plus it was no so off center loaded it was impossible to accept.
Plus the tie fighter crews wore air masks and tanks, the rebel bomber crews apparently breathed space air.
And yes i get that most imperial forces wore helmets and masks to dehumanize them for the audience while the rebels had visible faces to personalize them for the audience...
Matt Swain wrote: Plus the tie fighter crews wore air masks and tanks, the rebel bomber crews apparently breathed space air.
And yes i get that most imperial forces wore helmets and masks to dehumanize them for the audience while the rebels had visible faces to personalize them for the audience...
I mean, it's Star Wars, invisible force fields that keep atmosphere in and let solid matter pass through are such a thoroughly solved problem that it's the industrial standard for space hangers the galaxy over.
Matt Swain wrote: Tne rebel bomber had so much off axs load it6 was simply impossible to believe.
The TIE bomber was kinda cool and was clearly firing warheads at the asteroid, plus it was no so off center loaded it was impossible to accept.
Umm what? Not only is this inaccurate (the resistance bomber carries its load underneath its main fuselage, the bomber to its side), but itignores the fact that most ships in the setting can be described in similar terms.
Plus the tie fighter crews wore air masks and tanks, the rebel bomber crews apparently breathed space air.
Just like the Millennium Falcon? and X-Wings and Y-Wings and B-Wings and A-Wings? Its called environmental controls.
I mean, it's Star Wars, invisible force fields that keep atmosphere in and let solid matter pass through are such a thoroughly solved problem that it's the industrial standard for space hangers the galaxy over.
Yeah, I mean we've seen pretty much exactly this in almost every film to date. A New Hope? The Death Stars hangar bay doors are completely open to space - yet Luke, Han, etc. run through it without any sort of breathing apparatus. Why? Because its magnetically shielded to keep the atmosphere in or whatever. Return of the Jedi basically the same thing on the second death star, as well as in the hangar bay on the Home One. Likewise seen at various points in all three prequel films, also in pretty much every star wars video game ever.
Its complaints like these that really lend credence to the idea that people are hating for the sake of hating and lookig for bs to justify their gakky opinions rather than having legitimate complaints.
Go back and rewatch the various movies. Anytime an opening to space has a bright, glowing rim that's the 'magnetic shield' holding the air in while allowing vehicles to freely transit at low speeds.
The 1-3 episodes at least had a thought out tech set up with the equipment making vague sense (why does the first order have a tracked bike?). 7-9 just doesn't make any internal sense.
But the original films? Watch them again, the first is OK by todays standards, the second is a good film showing a high degree of peril and why the rebel have a real chance of losing, the third... has good points but has everyone forgotten the ewoks? That should be the point you realise they are kids films.
Sadly even kids aren't that gripped by 7-9, as they are objectively poor films if you strip out the star wars associations.
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Matt Swain wrote: Plus the tie fighter crews wore air masks and tanks, the rebel bomber crews apparently breathed space air.
And yes i get that most imperial forces wore helmets and masks to dehumanize them for the audience while the rebels had visible faces to personalize them for the audience...
Cost savings. Cheaper to wear a pressure suit than pressurise a TIE cockpit. The first trilogy and even the second had a bit of thought into logistics and economics which might not have been amazing but did deepen immersion.
Not really, the first trilogy had hero pilots whose faces could be seen verse faceless villains whose death would garner no sympathy. All the stuff about cheaper cockpits or whatever was invented after the fact by people trying to force rules on that really didn't have anywhere near that much thought put into them. Most of what people consider the logical consistency of the Star Wars universe was inserted after the fact by Alan Dean Foster in the novelizations.
The_Real_Chris wrote: The 1-3 episodes at least had a thought out tech set up with the equipment making vague sense (why does the first order have a tracked bike?). 7-9 just doesn't make any internal sense.
I gotta be honest, this really reminds me of the one guy who made a fool of himself for claiming the sequels sucked because BB-8 could never exist because it would be impossible for it to move - only for it to turn out that BB-8 is a physical prop and can, in fact, move under its own power. Because, yknow, treaded motorcycles have actually been built in the real world, they aren't as far-fetched as you seem to think. That, and snowmobiles exist too.
LunarSol wrote: Not really, the first trilogy had hero pilots whose faces could be seen verse faceless villains whose death would garner no sympathy. All the stuff about cheaper cockpits or whatever was invented after the fact by people trying to force rules on that really didn't have anywhere near that much thought put into them. Most of what people consider the logical consistency of the Star Wars universe was inserted after the fact by Alan Dean Foster in the novelizations.
I would argue the RPG by West End also had a LOT to do with the "Consistency".
Very true. That's also where you start getting into the gamefication problems with the franchise as well, which is where a lot of the problems with the fanbase really cement themselves.
This is one of my ongoing bugbears with criticism of the sequel trilogy.
Much as I enjoy the films, I do get they’re flawed and imperfect. But a lot of the repeat criticism (as in those who just can’t seem to let it go) focuses on stuff not directly described in the films, whilst forgetting that an awful lot of Nerd Knowledge comes from outside the main 9 films.
For instance, TIE Fighters not having shields, environment or hyperdrive. All well known, yes? And it does seem odd that Kylo Ren salvaged a Rebellion era TIE to get back to Exagol. Except....nowhere in the original trilogy is ever stated TIE Fighter’s don’t have hypderdrive. So that’s outside of the movie knowledge.
Han Solo being Correlian? Never once mentioned in the films.
Obi-Wan chopping Anakin to bits before Hot Lava? Not mentioned in the films, seems that came from a spin-off novel.
Hell, come to think of it I’m not even sure Boba Fett is named until Return of the Jedi, let alone 4-LOM, Bossk, IG88, Dengar or Zuckuss are named onscreen.
Resistance Bombers? I well recall people harping on about No Gravity In Space. Turns out in canon? Gravitic Racks. Just enough to give them a wee hurl toward their target.
Dislike the films all you want, just please don’t invent stuff.
Resistance Bombers? I well recall people harping on about No Gravity In Space. Turns out in canon? Gravitic Racks. Just enough to give them a wee hurl toward their target.
Were those mentioned on the film? I do not recall?
Nope. It is covered in canon media though. It’s the expectation that the sequels need to explain everything right there and then, when none of the other two trilogies did any such thing.
TIE fighters not having hyper drives probably comes from “It’s a short range fighter.” However, in the same conversation, “It must have been part of a convoy or something.” This just raises so many questions. Fortunately, that’s speculation from the least-informed character, so fairly ignorable.
TIEs not having shields probably comes from the way they explode into puffy clouds compared to X-Wings, which explode into chunky meteors. However, that could also be the result of TIEs having a pair of teeny-tiny practical guns while X-Wings sport twice as many f-huge cannon. Also, X-Wings are bigger and slabbier.
I forget if we’ve seen a Y-Wing asplode-a-kill a TIE in the OT.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: TIE fighters not having hyper drives probably comes from “It’s a short range fighter.” However, in the same conversation, “It must have been part of a convoy or something.” This just raises so many questions. Fortunately, that’s speculation from the least-informed character, so fairly ignorable.
TIEs not having shields probably comes from the way they explode into puffy clouds compared to X-Wings, which explode into chunky meteors. However, that could also be the result of TIEs having a pair of teeny-tiny practical guns while X-Wings sport twice as many f-huge cannon. Also, X-Wings are bigger and slabbier.
I forget if we’ve seen a Y-Wing asplode-a-kill a TIE in the OT.
"Short Range Fighter" doesn't have to mean it's incapable of hpyerspeeds. It could just mean it's weapons don't have longer ranges.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: TIE fighters not having hyper drives probably comes from “It’s a short range fighter.” However, in the same conversation, “It must have been part of a convoy or something.” This just raises so many questions. Fortunately, that’s speculation from the least-informed character, so fairly ignorable.
TIEs not having shields probably comes from the way they explode into puffy clouds compared to X-Wings, which explode into chunky meteors. However, that could also be the result of TIEs having a pair of teeny-tiny practical guns while X-Wings sport twice as many f-huge cannon. Also, X-Wings are bigger and slabbier.
I forget if we’ve seen a Y-Wing asplode-a-kill a TIE in the OT.
I suspect the no jumpdrive and/or shields came from either the previously mentioned West End RPG and / or the excellent X-Wing / TIE fighter PC games of the mid 90's
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: This is one of my ongoing bugbears with criticism of the sequel trilogy.
Much as I enjoy the films, I do get they’re flawed and imperfect. But a lot of the repeat criticism (as in those who just can’t seem to let it go) focuses on stuff not directly described in the films, whilst forgetting that an awful lot of Nerd Knowledge comes from outside the main 9 films.
For instance, TIE Fighters not having shields, environment or hyperdrive. All well known, yes? And it does seem odd that Kylo Ren salvaged a Rebellion era TIE to get back to Exagol. Except....nowhere in the original trilogy is ever stated TIE Fighter’s don’t have hypderdrive. So that’s outside of the movie knowledge.
This is a weird response to criticism....
If out of movie knowledge doesn't count, then man takes spaceship to go somewhere in space is... fine?
Han Solo being Correlian? Never once mentioned in the films.
Doesn't matter. Literally nothing hinges on Han being Correlian. I can't think of any 'criticism' that complains about it.
Obi-Wan chopping Anakin to bits before Hot Lava? Not mentioned in the films, seems that came from a spin-off novel.
Ok? Again, so what? What criticism hinges on this?
Hell, come to think of it I’m not even sure Boba Fett is named until Return of the Jedi, let alone 4-LOM, Bossk, IG88, Dengar or Zuckuss are named onscreen.
And?
Resistance Bombers? I well recall people harping on about No Gravity In Space. Turns out in canon? Gravitic Racks. Just enough to give them a wee hurl toward their target.
Dislike the films all you want, just please don’t invent stuff.
Unlike everything else you listed, this is something that is happening on screen, isn't explained, and actually matters for the scene to make sense.
People complaining about Rey being a pilot (despite her clearly stating she’s a pilot whilst they’re legging it), but Luke being able to jump into an X-Wing and fly it with no training.
Remember, the scene where he meets Biggs at Yavin is Special Edition. The T-16 having the same controls isn’t mentioned in the films at all. Nor is that both machines are made by Incom. But nobody cared at the time.
Resistance Bombers? I well recall people harping on about No Gravity In Space. Turns out in canon? Gravitic Racks. Just enough to give them a wee hurl toward their target.
Dislike the films all you want, just please don’t invent stuff.
Unlike everything else you listed, this is something that is happening on screen, isn't explained, and actually matters for the scene to make sense.
And yet you didn't bat an eye at basically the same thing occuring during the first two films of the franchise? Arguably it occurs a third time in RotJ when the Executors bridge gets taken out and it suddenly takes a 90 degree turn and careens downscreen out of control as though it was just shot down like an airplane.
Resistance Bombers? I well recall people harping on about No Gravity In Space. Turns out in canon? Gravitic Racks. Just enough to give them a wee hurl toward their target.
Dislike the films all you want, just please don’t invent stuff.
Unlike everything else you listed, this is something that is happening on screen, isn't explained, and actually matters for the scene to make sense.
And yet you didn't bat an eye at basically the same thing occuring during the first two films of the franchise?
Didn't I? Or did I?
Is this about my specific reactions? Or the actual criticism?
Either way, the 'hyper-detailed' line drawing illustrating an arc (the behavior of the actual torpedo is even weirder) or the directed energy weapon is very much not 'basically the same thing.'
Arguably it occurs a third time in RotJ when the Executors bridge gets taken out and it suddenly takes a 90 degree turn and careens downscreen out of control as though it was just shot down like an airplane.
Arguably, that was the gravity of the moon or the death star operating on a starship that is no longer fighting the pull of gravity.
But that scene was crap for a whole lot of reasons before it even gets to that point. It is worth remembering that RotJ didn't get a pass on a whole _lot_ of stuff in its day.
But anyway, nitpicking criticism of the criticism is far too far down the intensely silly rabbit hole for me.
I actually only had a problem with the caterpillar-slowness of the Resistance Bombers, than anything else. Like all the other parts of the squadron dogfighting of Star Wars, it was supposed to evoke WW2 dogfighting, in this case B-17 style bombing runs through flak and fighters.
Resistance Bombers? I well recall people harping on about No Gravity In Space. Turns out in canon? Gravitic Racks. Just enough to give them a wee hurl toward their target.
Dislike the films all you want, just please don’t invent stuff.
Unlike everything else you listed, this is something that is happening on screen, isn't explained, and actually matters for the scene to make sense.
And yet you didn't bat an eye at basically the same thing occuring during the first two films of the franchise?
Didn't I? Or did I?
Is this about my specific reactions? Or the actual criticism?
Either way, the 'hyper-detailed' line drawing illustrating an arc (the behavior of the actual torpedo is even weirder) or the directed energy weapon is very much not 'basically the same thing.'
Its a ballistic arc, the kind that can only be produced under the effects of gravity (in fact the entire illustration is basically an illustration of the concept of toss bombing, something that can only be done while under the influence of gravity), just like the arcs taken by the turbolasers in TLJ. BTW, calling turbolasers, blasters, etc. directed energy weapons kinda distracts from their true nature - they are as much an energy weapon as they are a projectile weapon in that they typically fire bolts of magnetically ionized gas - but some of them fire other types of projectile as well:
BobtheInquisitor wrote: TIE fighters not having hyper drives probably comes from “It’s a short range fighter.” However, in the same conversation, “It must have been part of a convoy or something.” This just raises so many questions. Fortunately, that’s speculation from the least-informed character, so fairly ignorable.
TIEs not having shields probably comes from the way they explode into puffy clouds compared to X-Wings, which explode into chunky meteors. However, that could also be the result of TIEs having a pair of teeny-tiny practical guns while X-Wings sport twice as many f-huge cannon. Also, X-Wings are bigger and slabbier.
I forget if we’ve seen a Y-Wing asplode-a-kill a TIE in the OT.
I suspect the no jumpdrive and/or shields came from either the previously mentioned West End RPG and / or the excellent X-Wing / TIE fighter PC games of the mid 90's
Interesting thing ...
The WEG material had to fit into the "Writer's bible" that lucasfilm gave to prospective writers for their EU. This was the same writer's bible that Timothy Zahn used while writing his Thrawn trilogy way back when star wars was pretty much a dead property. All of this stuff got collected up and put into the archives ("The holocron" at the Story Group) as a collection of reference material and was also used later on in Dave Filoni's Clone wars and Rebels (with a little tweak here and there) as well as in Solo (there's a bunch of references on Voss' desk to the older EU stuff in addition to some throwaway lines from Lando in his "captain's log" diary entries) and in the mandalorian.
Indeed although its a bit of a chicken/egg situation as a lot of that material originated in the writers bible before appearing in the WEG RPG or in the Thrawn trilogy, etc. though over time the interpretation of many things shifted to align to the WEG/Zahn version vs its origins in Lucas production notes.
The_Real_Chris wrote: The 1-3 episodes at least had a thought out tech set up with the equipment making vague sense (why does the first order have a tracked bike?). 7-9 just doesn't make any internal sense.
I gotta be honest, this really reminds me of the one guy who made a fool of himself for claiming the sequels sucked because BB-8 could never exist because it would be impossible for it to move - only for it to turn out that BB-8 is a physical prop and can, in fact, move under its own power. Because, yknow, treaded motorcycles have actually been built in the real world, they aren't as far-fetched as you seem to think. That, and snowmobiles exist too.
Sure, but given the speeder bikes of the Empire, WHY has the First Order gone with the earlier technology of TRACKED bikes instead of using the far more common speeder bikes?
I mean, you can't argue it's an economic measure. They could afford the Supremacy and all those Resurgent class Star Destroyers. Next to that the cost of speeder bikes vs. tracked bikes is insignificant compared to the tactical advantages of the faster and more maneuverable speeder bikes.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: This is one of my ongoing bugbears with criticism of the sequel trilogy.
Much as I enjoy the films, I do get they’re flawed and imperfect. But a lot of the repeat criticism (as in those who just can’t seem to let it go) focuses on stuff not directly described in the films, whilst forgetting that an awful lot of Nerd Knowledge comes from outside the main 9 films.
For instance, TIE Fighters not having shields, environment or hyperdrive. All well known, yes? And it does seem odd that Kylo Ren salvaged a Rebellion era TIE to get back to Exagol. Except....nowhere in the original trilogy is ever stated TIE Fighter’s don’t have hypderdrive. So that’s outside of the movie knowledge.
Aside from Obi-Wan calling the TIE fighter they encounter at the remains of Alderaan a 'short range' fighter, and the only OTHER Imperial fighter we see in those movies is Vader's personal fighter and the later Interceptor. I'll grant you the Interceptor might well have an in-movie hyperdrive, but we never see it used.
Han Solo being Correlian? Never once mentioned in the films.
Not until Solo, anyway, but that's a fair point.
Editing out some other good points...
Resistance Bombers? I well recall people harping on about No Gravity In Space. Turns out in canon? Gravitic Racks. Just enough to give them a wee hurl toward their target.
Which is fine. That was never my problem with them in the first place. My problems were
1) Aside from selling a new toy, there's no reason to go with new bombers instead of Y-Wings,
2) Dropping 1000 bombs in such tight patters means the first one detonates, and either sets off all the rest in a chain reaction AWAY from the target, or the explosion of the first bomb starts scattering the rest all over creation instead of focusing the destruction in one point like we see in the movie.
3) And that's even before considering how slow the bombers are. Remember that as slow as they appeared on screen moving toward the Dreadnaught? The Dreadnaught was also moving toward them AND the Resistance Fleet behind them, meaning they were EVEN SLOWER THAN THEY APPEAR ON SCREEN.
4) Last but not least, they're so fragile just using them in combat is a suicide mission. Leia should have slapped the logistics officer who procured them instead of a proven ship-killing design like Y-Wings and ion torpedoes; not Poe.
Dislike the films all you want, just please don’t invent stuff.
Strip out the Star Wars trappings and it's not a terrible generic sci-fi movie. What makes it a terrible Star Wars movie is that it ignores the seven previous movies of precedent and keeps the outward trappings of a Star Wars movie.
People complaining about Rey being a pilot (despite her clearly stating she’s a pilot whilst they’re legging it), but Luke being able to jump into an X-Wing and fly it with no training.
Remember, the scene where he meets Biggs at Yavin is Special Edition. The T-16 having the same controls isn’t mentioned in the films at all. Nor is that both machines are made by Incom. But nobody cared at the time.
By and large, my complaint was not that Rey could fly a stock light freighter, but that she could use that 'garbage' stock light freighter and use it to outmaneuver fighters. It's like dogfighting Mig-29s in a 737 when you've never flown in combat before. At least Luke had an F-15 when he went up against MiG-29s.
And never forget, the scene where Biggs tells Red One that Luke was the best bush pilot in the Outer Rim occurred in the original movie, not the later revisions. We may not know who Biggs is, or what his relation to Luke is, but clearly he's an established Rebellion pilot and yet he vouches for Luke's skill as a pilot.
Not to mention Obi-Wan saying that he's heard Luke's become a pretty good pilot when they're talking about Luke's father Anakin.
In short, before Luke gets into an X-Wing we hear twice that he's a decent pilot. Where do we hear about Rey's amazing piloting skills again?
Quadjumper is a tugboat not a light freighter. The Falcon while a freighter is also heavily after marketed with 2 quad turbolasers and missile launcher. So it's more akin to a Me109 taking on a B-25 Mitchell or a B-26 Marauder. The 262 would be closer to something like the Silencer in comparison. So it's not out of the realm that she and Finn could make do with the Falcon against F/O Tie Fighters.
Also Luke never flew in combat until Yavin. Even with the T-16.
Also the Resistance bombers wouldn't even need gravitic racks, they'd drop out at speed into space because of the 1:1 artificial gravity in the bomber, because there's no friction.
TIEs not having shields probably comes from the way they explode into puffy clouds compared to X-Wings, which explode into chunky meteors. However, that could also be the result of TIEs having a pair of teeny-tiny practical guns while X-Wings sport twice as many f-huge cannon. Also, X-Wings are bigger and slabbier.
One of the funny things when you go back to ANH is although shields are specifically mentioned on the X-Wings, they really don't take a hit any better than the TIEs. Certainly nothing like the soaking of damage you see in most media. If a TIE gets a shot off, they tend to explode all the same.
I think the more realistic answer of the difference in explosions is just that bad guys go poof so everyone cheer. Good guys have to have some time for the audience to garner sympathy.
I never actually saw 8 or 9. And frankly. I feel rather blessed. I have a rough idea what all happens but I was on the fence after 7. Everything I heard about Last Jedi made me not want to watch it.
chaos0xomega wrote: The no gravity in space thing went out the window in ANH, pay close attention to how the death star trench run works... heres a hint:
You’re not getting that one. Proton torpedoes are guided. The fly straight forward when launched, and then turn to hit the target.
chaos0xomega wrote: The no gravity in space thing went out the window in ANH, pay close attention to how the death star trench run works... heres a hint:
You’re not getting that one. Proton torpedoes are guided. The fly straight forward when launched, and then turn to hit the target.
Tie bombers are fair game.
Depending on your source (made more difficult by the fact that current canon doesn't really seem to specify in any way shape or form) ,the proton torps fired by T-65B X-Wings were unguided and the whole point of the targeting computer was to identify the release point at which their trajectory would place them on target (in this case down the exhaust shaft). In any case, in the instance of the successful shot Luke turned off his targeting computer, which leads one to believe that they were, in fact, fired in an unguided mode.
There is when they are *dropping* bombs straight down as though they are under the influence of gravity when they are in a microgravity/zero-g environment, according to the thesis that resistance bombers are bad on the same basis.
Resistance Bombers? I well recall people harping on about No Gravity In Space. Turns out in canon? Gravitic Racks. Just enough to give them a wee hurl toward their target.
Which is fine. That was never my problem with them in the first place. My problems were
1) Aside from selling a new toy, there's no reason to go with new bombers instead of Y-Wings,
2) Dropping 1000 bombs in such tight patters means the first one detonates, and either sets off all the rest in a chain reaction AWAY from the target, or the explosion of the first bomb starts scattering the rest all over creation instead of focusing the destruction in one point like we see in the movie.
3) And that's even before considering how slow the bombers are. Remember that as slow as they appeared on screen moving toward the Dreadnaught? The Dreadnaught was also moving toward them AND the Resistance Fleet behind them, meaning they were EVEN SLOWER THAN THEY APPEAR ON SCREEN.
4) Last but not least, they're so fragile just using them in combat is a suicide mission. Leia should have slapped the logistics officer who procured them instead of a proven ship-killing design like Y-Wings and ion torpedoes; not Poe.
"Aside from selling a new toy, there's no reason to go with B-2 Spirits instead of P-47 Thunderbolts".
Basically your argument in a nutshell. You're comparing a modern heavy bomber to a 60+ year old fighter-bomber. Completely different roles, completely different capabilities, etc. etc. etc. Its well-established in dialogue when Poe is doing his attack run that its impossible for an X-Wings weapons to penetrate the Mandators armor, the Y-Wings bomb load is only moderately more capable than the X-Wings, its fair to say that it wasn't going to happen.
CANADY: That 'puny ship' is too small and at too close range. We need to scramble our fighters! Five bloody minutes ago.
GONERIL: He'll never penetrate our armor.
CANADY: He's not trying to penetrate our armor. He's clearing out our surface cannons.
The rational conclusion is that an 8+km long dreadnought is well beyond the capability of the Y-Wings which were principally used to attack 1.6km star destroyers 3 decades prior, not that the Y-Wings are capable of handling threats which we've never seen them used to tackle. Keep in mind that thanks to the square-cube law, the dreadnought is something like 125 times more massive than an Imperial Star Destroyer, despite only a 4-5x increase in length.
That being said, your complaint is basically wholly irrelevant because its a narrative plot point that using the bombers was unnecessary to begin with - that Poe used them in the attack, and in the process lost them all, is basically the key point of conflict between him and Leia/Holdo. They may have been the right or wrong tool for the job, but the job never had to be done in the first place - there was no tactical or strategic need or advantage to be had by destroying the dreadnought.
With regards to the bombs being in too tight of a pattern - thats not how bombs/detonators work, especially not in a fictional setting where they can use all sorts of handwavium to justify why sympathetic detonation isn't occurring. It is possible to design bombs and munitions to minimize and eliminate sympathetic detonation for applications exactly like this - or did you just think it was magic that real world bombers can deliver dozens of bombs onto a single target in tight patterns without the first bomb cooking off the rest?
You kind of got me on the slowness though, yes they were very slow - but its also incorrect to say that the dreadnought was moving forward, theres nothing to suggest that it was and a lot to suggest that it was stationary/holding position. In fact, the entire initial scene of Poe sitting in his X-Wing alone in front of the dreadnought is only actually possible if its stationary. The X-Wing is powered down, and the Mandator isn't getting any closer to him.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Nope. It is covered in canon media though. It’s the expectation that the sequels need to explain everything right there and then, when none of the other two trilogies did any such thing.
My examples are people not questioning things in the preceding films that are only explained in spin-off canon (books, comics etc), whilst demanding the prequels explain everything there and then.
Resistance Bombers? I well recall people harping on about No Gravity In Space. Turns out in canon? Gravitic Racks. Just enough to give them a wee hurl toward their target.
Were those mentioned on the film? I do not recall?
They were not, but honestly, I don't think a tech explanation is even necessary beyond what we see in the film: Multiple shots of people walking on board the bomber showing that they have gravity on board, driven home further by Paige Tico having to climb up, and falling down the ladder through the bomb bay shows that section of the ship, and when she releases the bombs they too fall through that same space until they leave the ship, continuing to move because an object in motion stays in motion.
Alternatively, genuinely weird stuff, like the way the Supremacy's turbolasers arc to hit the fleeing rebel fleet would be worth an explanation in a book somewhere.
Honestly, Star Wars is at its best when they don't explain the technical aspects at all. I still cringe when I think about the TFA visual dictionary attempting to explain how Starkiller Bases deathbeam was visible in real time from the other side of the galaxy thanks to phantom energy opening up a tear in sub-hyperspace.
KingmanHighborn wrote: Quadjumper is a tugboat not a light freighter. The Falcon while a freighter is also heavily after marketed with 2 quad turbolasers and missile launcher. So it's more akin to a Me109 taking on a B-25 Mitchell or a B-26 Marauder. The 262 would be closer to something like the Silencer in comparison. So it's not out of the realm that she and Finn could make do with the Falcon against F/O Tie Fighters.
Also Luke never flew in combat until Yavin. Even with the T-16.
Also the Resistance bombers wouldn't even need gravitic racks, they'd drop out at speed into space because of the 1:1 artificial gravity in the bomber, because there's no friction.
We hear Luke claim to 'bullseye womp rats' in the desert. And we've also seen that sandpeople like to hang out in the desert. We don't know that he hasn't been shot at while flying before. We do know he's done some shooting while flying before.
Again, where is this established for Rey? Where does she learn to fly that B-25/26 like it's a fighter? Hmmm? We can speculate that she did this or that or the other... but where's the on screen mention that she did ANY of those things that would justify her flying the Millennium Falcon as good as Han or Lando who'd been flying it for years?
Every Star Wars movie that isn't the Phantom Menace being shown on the big screen in 1999 is absolute peak, premium, platinum, depleted uranium-tipped cringe, objectively speaking, and you cannot and will not change my mind.
We hear Luke claim to 'bullseye womp rats' in the desert. And we've also seen that sandpeople like to hang out in the desert. We don't know that he hasn't been shot at while flying before. We do know he's done some shooting while flying before.
Shooting what amounts to a big rabbit and being in war are entirely different things. Yavin is Luke's first actual battle in a war. It's a military engagement the likes of which he has only ever heard stories about. Not only does he handle himself in that situation in a way no reasonable person should be able to, he is the single most important person in the entire conflict and delivers the fatal blow that turns the tide of the battle and the rebellions place in the galaxy.
Lets not pretend that ANYTHING in Luke's history prepares him in any capacity for that engagement or explains how cool he handles every aspect of it, including watching friends and comrades die in explosions as their ships smash into the side of a moon sized battle station.
The basic argument that Rey is a mary sue or that 7-9 do a bad job of setting up the skills of it's characters is terrible. SW has always had characters just learn random gak in the moment the plot demanded and the explanations for why have always been flimsy at best.
My examples are people not questioning things in the preceding films that are only explained in spin-off canon (books, comics etc), whilst demanding the prequels explain everything there and then.
But your examples are all things that don't matter to the films in any way at all.
Nothing in any movie changes if Han is Correlian or not. Or if we know the names of the random bounty hunters (especially the ones that don't even show up again).
You're bizarrely conflating 'knowledge of random trivia' with criticism, and they're not even related concepts.
There is when they are *dropping* bombs straight down as though they are under the influence of gravity when they are in a microgravity/zero-g environment, according to the thesis that resistance bombers are bad on the same basis.
Except that there's gravity IN the ship. Otherwise Rose's sister wouldn't have fallen down in the first place. You don't even need the hand wave of 'gravitic racks' just letting the bombs go inside the thing WITH gravity would drop them at acceleration out into space, which HAS NO/VERY LITTLE FRICTION so they'd plow down at the same pace a bomb dropped from a regular bomber would on Earth.
Tie Bombers though actually do shoot their bombs downward, so they hit faster then the target can avoid similar to how dive bombers like Stukas or a Dauntless did by diving to rapidly drop it. So there's absolutely no issue with the bombs on EITHER one.
Also the Resistance bomber would be carpet bombing with those bombs and that's something real world bombers do and they don't have to worry about 'sympathetic detonation' so that's not an issue either.
There is when they are *dropping* bombs straight down as though they are under the influence of gravity when they are in a microgravity/zero-g environment, according to the thesis that resistance bombers are bad on the same basis.
Except that there's gravity IN the ship. Otherwise Rose's sister wouldn't have fallen down in the first place. You don't even need the hand wave of 'gravitic racks' just letting the bombs go inside the thing WITH gravity would drop them at acceleration out into space, which HAS NO/VERY LITTLE FRICTION so they'd plow down at the same pace a bomb dropped from a regular bomber would on Earth.
Tie Bombers though actually do shoot their bombs downward, so they hit faster then the target can avoid similar to how dive bombers like Stukas or a Dauntless did by diving to rapidly drop it. So there's absolutely no issue with the bombs on EITHER one.
Also the Resistance bomber would be carpet bombing with those bombs and that's something real world bombers do and they don't have to worry about 'sympathetic detonation' so that's not an issue either.
I think you've entirely missed the point of the discussion as you and I seem to be on the same side, just talking around eachother... although it does need to be mentioned that TIE Bombers - and TIE series craft in general - do *not* have artificial gravity generators on board. Nor do TIE Bombers "shoot" their bombs. They have a bomb drop chute, but thats not the same thing. They do have a missile launcher in the forward section of the pod - but thats for launching concussion missiles, proton torpedoes, etc. *forward*, it doesn't fire them downward.
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BobtheInquisitor wrote: The whole “dropping” issue seems like a strawman. The complaint is the bombers are uncharacteristically slow for Star Wars ships. Ridiculously slow.
Now the turbo laser shots later in TLJ that follow a ballistic arc, those make space gravity a problem.
You can't cherry pick your problems. Either there is space in gravity to drop a bomb and arc a turbolaser shot, or there isn't. Theres no "handwave one problem away but not the other" option.
And its not really a strawman, its an actual complaint generated by someone who is using it to justify their dislike of the film. If they are going to use that as the basis of their complaint, I am going to pick apart their so-called argument until its clear that its not an argument at all and that they are hating for the sake of hate and not because they have a legitimate issue with the film.
But yes, they are painfully and inexplicably slow.
I've seen 8th, it was okay. I've not seen 9, but from clips and reviews it definitely sounds way worse. Like..."we've given up all hope of salvaging this mess" bad, therefore it is probably more "cringe".
Vulcan wrote: Again, where is this established for Rey? Where does she learn to fly that B-25/26 like it's a fighter? Hmmm? We can speculate that she did this or that or the other... but where's the on screen mention that she did ANY of those things that would justify her flying the Millennium Falcon as good as Han or Lando who'd been flying it for years?
After they escape the ties, she says "I've flown some ships but I've never actually left the planet." Finn also repeatedly asks if anyone has trained her because he can't believe she's not been trained, their dialogue doesn't really match up too cleanly but they are supposed to be talking over each other coming down off the adrenaline.
Shortly after, Han asks where she got the ship, and she says "I stole it, from Unkar Plutt. He stole it from the Irving Boys, who stole it from Ducain." and when Han comes back complaining about the compressor on the ignition line she says Plutt did it despite her insistence that it was a bad idea.
Combine that with knowing that Plutt had the Quad Jumper, and knowing enough to prefer it as an escape vehicle to the Falcon, the fact that we see that she was left with Plutt as a child. She clearly did fly jobs for Plutt, and almost certainly was involved with stealing and modifying the Falcon, probably other ships too.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: The whole “dropping” issue seems like a strawman. The complaint is the bombers are uncharacteristically slow for Star Wars ships. Ridiculously slow.
I don't agree - their slowness is acknowledged in-universe as a problem the ships have and that part people seem generally able to accept, I see a lot more people arguing that it doesn't make sense to drop the bombs out into space because 'there's no gravity in space', which is both factually wrong and entirely misses the point.
chaos0xomega wrote: You can't cherry pick your problems. Either there is space in gravity to drop a bomb and arc a turbolaser shot, or there isn't. Theres no "handwave one problem away but not the other" option.
Again, the bombs are accelerated by the artificial gravity inside the ship, while they are inside the ship, once they leave the ship they continue moving in that direction because they're already moving at that speed and direction and there's nothing acting on them to make them slow down.
The turbo-laser arcing doesn't work though, because at that point they're showing a curve while they're well into open space - that needs some kind of magnetic attraction or maybe some exotic behaviour caused by it passing through specially modulated shields or something. It's legit weird and worth speculating over.
We hear Luke claim to 'bullseye womp rats' in the desert. And we've also seen that sandpeople like to hang out in the desert. We don't know that he hasn't been shot at while flying before. We do know he's done some shooting while flying before.
Shooting what amounts to a big rabbit and being in war are entirely different things. Yavin is Luke's first actual battle in a war. It's a military engagement the likes of which he has only ever heard stories about. Not only does he handle himself in that situation in a way no reasonable person should be able to, he is the single most important person in the entire conflict and delivers the fatal blow that turns the tide of the battle and the rebellions place in the galaxy.
Lets not pretend that ANYTHING in Luke's history prepares him in any capacity for that engagement or explains how cool he handles every aspect of it, including watching friends and comrades die in explosions as their ships smash into the side of a moon sized battle station.
The basic argument that Rey is a mary sue or that 7-9 do a bad job of setting up the skills of it's characters is terrible. SW has always had characters just learn random gak in the moment the plot demanded and the explanations for why have always been flimsy at best.
That's fair, to a point. But let's further face the fact that Lucas does a far better job with Luke than he does with Anakin, or Disney does with Rey.
There is when they are *dropping* bombs straight down as though they are under the influence of gravity when they are in a microgravity/zero-g environment, according to the thesis that resistance bombers are bad on the same basis.
Except that there's gravity IN the ship. Otherwise Rose's sister wouldn't have fallen down in the first place. You don't even need the hand wave of 'gravitic racks' just letting the bombs go inside the thing WITH gravity would drop them at acceleration out into space, which HAS NO/VERY LITTLE FRICTION so they'd plow down at the same pace a bomb dropped from a regular bomber would on Earth.
Tie Bombers though actually do shoot their bombs downward, so they hit faster then the target can avoid similar to how dive bombers like Stukas or a Dauntless did by diving to rapidly drop it. So there's absolutely no issue with the bombs on EITHER one.
Also the Resistance bomber would be carpet bombing with those bombs and that's something real world bombers do and they don't have to worry about 'sympathetic detonation' so that's not an issue either.
Go to 1:17 and watch the bombs fall. See how fast they separate? That's the speed of the B-52, air resistance, and... well, the B-52 isn't trying to drop 1000 bombs within a footprint no larger than itself.
Go to 0:45 and watch the bombs fall. See how tight the pattern is? The bombs are exploding right on top of each other, not separated by fifty feet or more. That's MORE than close enough for sympathetic detonation, or at the very least the blast front of the first bomb throwing a couple hundred of the follow-on bombs off like shrapnel.
Not getting into the gravity argument. That's not my problem with the scene, not even a tiny bit. Be it internal gravity, gravity from the nearby planet, or some sort of linear accelerator built into the bomb racks, whatever.
Far bigger problems are the ones I've addressed and rarely get answered satisfactorily.
I have some sympathy with the writers of episode 9. They were dealt such a bad hand with episode 8 there wasn't a great deal they could do. However, bringing back Sheev was a terrible move and they should have had faith in Kylo as the bad guy.
I prefer not to think of the sequels as canon, in the same way as far as I'm concerned Darth Maul died in TPM
chaos0xomega wrote: You can't cherry pick your problems. Either there is space in gravity to drop a bomb and arc a turbolaser shot, or there isn't. Theres no "handwave one problem away but not the other" option.
Again, the bombs are accelerated by the artificial gravity inside the ship, while they are inside the ship, once they leave the ship they continue moving in that direction because they're already moving at that speed and direction and there's nothing acting on them to make them slow down.
The turbo-laser arcing doesn't work though, because at that point they're showing a curve while they're well into open space - that needs some kind of magnetic attraction or maybe some exotic behaviour caused by it passing through specially modulated shields or something. It's legit weird and worth speculating over.
On the Resistance Bomber, yes. This doesn't explain the same behavior on a TIE Bomber (which lacks internal gravity) or unguided proton torpedoes from an X-wing parabolically arcing themselves into an exhaust port.
Again, you can't cherry pick your problems. If The proton torpedoes can arc, and the TIE Bombers bombs *drop*, then the turbolasers can arc too.
Go to 1:17 and watch the bombs fall. See how fast they separate? That's the speed of the B-52, air resistance, and... well, the B-52 isn't trying to drop 1000 bombs within a footprint no larger than itself.
You've picked a video pretty favorable to your stance here (even still a lot of those explosions are falling a lot closer to one another than you seem to realize). Try this:
In both sets of ground views you can see bombs coming in within just a few feet of eachother, especially the second closeup on the tank around 10-15 seconds in.
Go to 1:17 and watch the bombs fall. See how fast they separate? That's the speed of the B-52, air resistance, and... well, the B-52 isn't trying to drop 1000 bombs within a footprint no larger than itself.
You've picked a video pretty favorable to your stance here (even still a lot of those explosions are falling a lot closer to one another than you seem to realize). Try this:
In both sets of ground views you can see bombs coming in within just a few feet of eachother, especially the second closeup on the tank around 10-15 seconds in.
I think those bombs are a wee bit larger than you realize, which is causing you to underestimate how close together they're landing. At that distance, the bombs dropped from a starfortress would only be visible because there were so many of them so tightly packed together.
On my screen, the still frame of the B-1 is roughly 100mm long, and the bomb that has just been dropped from the front bomb bay is 5mm long, so the bomb is 1/20th the length of the bomber. (The measurements will probably be different on your screen, but the proportion will be the same.)
A B-1 is 146' long, making the bomb approximately seven feet long (likely making it a 500 lb bomb, with an outside possibility it's a 750 lb bomb instead). Even on the still, the bombs nearest the bottom of the frame are no closer than fifteen feet apart, and they'll continue to separate as they fall.
And that tank is well in front of the bomb impacts you're seeing. This means the bomb impacts are again significantly farther apart than you think they are.
Now go back and look at the SW video. Those bombs aren't much bigger than Paige Tico's head. Call it a foot in diameter max but deliver explosive power comparable to the modern bombs. Presuming comparable average density to said 500 pound bomb and being roughly the same diameter but 1/8th the length yields an overall weight of 60-odd pounds. This makes it far more vulnerable to being blown off-target... say by the shockwave of the equivalent of a modern 500-pound bomb going off less than ten feet away.
chaos0xomega wrote: Considering this is a topic I actually know anout from a professional standpoint, Im just going to go ahead and say that you're way overthinking this.
Well, there really isn't any other enjoyment to be derived from the movie, so...
chaos0xomega wrote: Considering this is a topic I actually know anout from a professional standpoint, Im just going to go ahead and say that you're way overthinking this.
Well, there really isn't any other enjoyment to be derived from the movie, so...
Fair. I'm pro-Episode 8 (in case you couldn't tell) but it brings me little real pleasure, none of the sequel films do.
At to TIEs vs Xwings, come on guys, we've seen x wings take hits and survive . A couple times in ANH an xwing took a hit and survived. Even Porkin's X wing didn't die the second it was hit, he was trying to keep it going. Luke's took a hit and kept on going, i think wedge's took a hit and made it back.
With the obvious exception of vader's advanced prototype, TIEs died like flies. We never really saw a damaged TIE, they got hit, the died.
Hell, i think they exploded if an enemy shot came within 3 feet of them. At times I think those big black suits and helmets TIE pilots wore were to hold gas in because a TIE might explode if the pilot let off an uncontained belch or fart in one.
Plus the xwinf cockpit made sense, the pilot could see out of it, he could see to the sides and above him.
TIE cockpits were a joke. those wing panels meant zero peripheral vision. the pilot also could not see out of the bottom half of the windows in the front because the control panel was in the way. He only had tiny slit windows in the hatch to allow extremely limited vision above him.
I think TIE cockpits were heavily influenced by the cockpit of the ME-109, one of nazi germany's most common fighters and one who most pilots agree was not very pilot friendly despite the overall 109 design being technologically advanced over most ww2 fighters.
From an article on ww2 fighters.
"In terms of ease of operation, there were advantages and shortcomings to both designs. The Spitfire’s bubble canopy and large mirrors offered excellent views and better situational awareness to the pilot. The Bf 109s angular canopy with its thick frame fell short. On the other hand, the Bf 109’s Revi gunsight was far ahead of the early Spitfire’s ring-and-bead type sight. It eliminated parallax errors and made deflection shots more accurate. The aircraft’s engine and propeller controls were also more automated, which reduced pilot workload.
On the flip side, the Bf 109’s small size made the cockpit very cramped. Not only was it uncomfortable, it also restricted the force that pilots could apply on the controls, with obvious effects on flight performance. Post-war testing by the RAF revealed that under certain conditions, the force that pilots could exert on the Bf 109’s control column was only 40% of what they could apply in the Spitfire. In an era when hydraulically boosted controls were not available, this was a serious deficiency. The Spitfire’s two-step rudder pedals also allowed the pilot to raise his feet high during high-G manoeuvring, delaying the onset of blackout. The Bf 109 had no such pedals."
Here's a pic of a 109 canopy with it's panels and frame design. Pilots called it a bad canopy but it was still better than a TIE fighters by a long shot.
Here's a close up on a detailed model of a tie made from the original movie blueprints, imagine the view you get from that with zero side views.
Of course the movie shows this view from a TIE cockpit even tho the model shows it to be mpossible.
The octogon is on its point on the model, but resting on its side when the camera looks through it. Clearly the camera can’t be looking through the same window as the pilot. The only possible explanation is that the empire makes teeny-tiny cockpit windows to be fitted over every TIE’s gun camera.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: The octogon is on its point on the model, but resting on its side when the camera looks through it. Clearly the camera can’t be looking through the same window as the pilot. The only possible explanation is that the empire makes teeny-tiny cockpit windows to be fitted over every TIE’s gun camera.
Well feth me running.
I'll be damned again if you aren't right. How the hell did i miss that all these years? No wonder you're an inquisitor.
Here;s what a view from a TIE would be like from the pilots POV.
If that isn't the most limited POV of any so called fighter I don't know what is...
Yeah, today we could say the pilots wore VR goggles that had feeds from cameras in the body that gave a full simulated view but not in 1977.
Both of them are appalling, it's hard to pick. Episode 9 is a complete mess however episode 8 was bad in a purposeful, spiteful, almost malicious way. Probably the most disappointingly awful big budget film of the last 30 years.
Cynista wrote: Both of them are appalling, it's hard to pick. Episode 9 is a complete mess however episode 8 was bad in a purposeful, spiteful, almost malicious way. Probably the most disappointingly awful big budget film of the last 30 years.
Yes.... yes. That's exactly it. TLJ feels like it was done by someone who hated Star Wars and hated Star Wars fans and who wanted to do everything he could to spite them. And in that goal, he succeeded.
Cynista wrote: Both of them are appalling, it's hard to pick. Episode 9 is a complete mess however episode 8 was bad in a purposeful, spiteful, almost malicious way. Probably the most disappointingly awful big budget film of the last 30 years.
Yes.... yes. That's exactly it. TLJ feels like it was done by someone who hated Star Wars and hated Star Wars fans and who wanted to do everything he could to spite them. And in that goal, he succeeded.
Agreed. I just watched the latest Hellboy reboot and it reminded me of Episode 9. It was an overblown and undercooked mess made by too many cooks in the kitchen of a variety that we've seen plenty of times in the past... in the end just a garden variety bad movie that while disappointing and a missed opportunity but ultimately not maliciously so. TLJ was a calculated attempt to undo what the previous movie set up as well disrupt the "expectations" of long time customers/fans of the franchise. It wasn't a bug but a feature (to use the programming meme) that it turned out how it did. Episode 8 is more cringey by far.
I'm not sure what people mean by 'more cringey'. If this is just 38 000th thread about the subject "TLJ sucks more/less than TRoS", then lets have it die a quick death. At this point, opinions are entrenched and no amount of debate can bring any resolve.
8 is a deeply flawed movie that almost did something cool. It has some pretty great visuals and touches on some interesting ideas, but ultimately fails to stick the landing.
9 is a pile of absolute crap, completely incoherent with a terrible message and themes and very little in the way of interesting visuals or ideas. It also wastes the potential of some likeable characters and is just generally dubious.
But the cringiest thing about these movies is always the fan reaction, and the fan reaction to 8 was an order of magnitude more cringey than the fan reaction to 9, so I guess that makes it the cringiest Star Wars movie.
Star Wars is pretty deeply mediocre when you look at it. 2 actually good movies out of 11 is not great. (Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, if you're asking).
Cynista wrote: Both of them are appalling, it's hard to pick. Episode 9 is a complete mess however episode 8 was bad in a purposeful, spiteful, almost malicious way. Probably the most disappointingly awful big budget film of the last 30 years.
Yes.... yes. That's exactly it. TLJ feels like it was done by someone who hated Star Wars and hated Star Wars fans and who wanted to do everything he could to spite them. And in that goal, he succeeded.
Snake Tortoise wrote: I have some sympathy with the writers of episode 9. They were dealt such a bad hand with episode 8 there wasn't a great deal they could do.
The writers of 9 (though at that point it was not known they were going to write it) reviewed the script of 8 and had no issues with it. JJ & Kasdan even changed the last scene of TFA on RJ's request.
Da Boss wrote: 8 is a deeply flawed movie that almost did something cool. It has some pretty great visuals and touches on some interesting ideas, but ultimately fails to stick the landing.
9 is a pile of absolute crap, completely incoherent with a terrible message and themes and very little in the way of interesting visuals or ideas. It also wastes the potential of some likeable characters and is just generally dubious.
But the cringiest thing about these movies is always the fan reaction, and the fan reaction to 8 was an order of magnitude more cringey than the fan reaction to 9, so I guess that makes it the cringiest Star Wars movie.
Star Wars is pretty deeply mediocre when you look at it. 2 actually good movies out of 11 is not great. (Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, if you're asking).
There's badly done movies, and then there's movies done specifically to spite the fan base. Some movies are so bad they become good - Army of Darkness is a great example of the former. TLJ is the essential expression of the later.
Complaining about the fan's reaction to a movie that was crafted to provoke EXACTLY the response they got is silly.
It's so easy to assume malice despite all the evidence to the contrary. It's also easy to point the finger at 8 despite all the bull crap mystery box foundation laid out by 7.
8 is the only movie in the new trilogy that had ANYTHING interesting to say.
I thought TLJ had some spite aimed towards the prequels, TFA, and “safe” Star Wars cash ins, but I didn’t feel any malice directed at Star Wars fans in general. (The Poe thing feels more like a take-that at by-the-numbers Star Wars...a poorly realized one, but that’s what makes it not a good Star Wars movie).
In contrast, TFA felt complacent-yet-try hard, like it took Star Wars fans for granted and tried to do nothing new or interesting, but really needed you to know that it also loves the OT, please associate it with the OT. I wish I could say it was malice that it assumed Star Wars fans are so dumb and easily manipulated, but I think that’s more just JJ Abrams’ style.
TROS oozed with contempt for the preceding movie. It wasn’t contemptuous of the audience, but it was craven. It was desperate to stay on the good side of an audience it seemed to think wasn’t as discerning for quality entertainment as it was ravenous for validation. An embarrassing film to enjoy unironically.
In contrast, TFA felt complacent-yet-try hard, like it took Star Wars fans for granted and tried to do nothing new or interesting, but really needed you to know that it also loves the OT, please associate it with the OT. I wish I could say it was malice that it assumed Star Wars fans are so dumb and easily manipulated, but I think that’s more just JJ Abrams’ style.
Yep, he did same with Star Trek movies...particularly the second.
One thing which did cringe me in TLJ was humour, it nearly always fell flat. TRoS wasn't too great in this respect either, but it had at least couple of moments which were somewhat funny. Plot and dialogue-wise, I was rolling eyes more with TRoS.
Cynista wrote: Both of them are appalling, it's hard to pick. Episode 9 is a complete mess however episode 8 was bad in a purposeful, spiteful, almost malicious way. Probably the most disappointingly awful big budget film of the last 30 years.
Yes.... yes. That's exactly it. TLJ feels like it was done by someone who hated Star Wars and hated Star Wars fans and who wanted to do everything he could to spite them. And in that goal, he succeeded.
Thats entirely contrary to my take. To me Episode 8 was made by someone that understood Star Wars better than most of its fans and spent a lot of time analyzing missed details in not just the films, but also things like The Clone Wars (as well as a lot of deep cuts from the expanded uinverse), and then lovingly built a film that attempted to deconstruct all of that... and went way too far.
Thats entirely contrary to my take. To me Episode 8 was made by someone that understood Star Wars better than most of its fans and spent a lot of time analyzing missed details in not just the films, but also things like The Clone Wars (as well as a lot of deep cuts from the expanded uinverse), and then lovingly built a film that attempted to deconstruct all of that... and went way too far.
Yeah I never got the impression that RJ hated the franchise. He seemed to have much more passion for it than writers of TFA, who clearly were there just getting bread to their tables.
It's just that those who love us sometimes hurt us the most...
To me the whole sequel trilogy wasn't just cringe inducing, it was spasm inducing.
I think the worst part was that the force will forever perpetuate an endless cycle of war that goes on forever and most most people are just blaster fodder to be killed in the background while the magic space wizards decide the outcome of this battle with their red and blue laser swords.
No one can ever win. One side wins, the force sends in a ringer to the other side. The republic falls, the jedi are like "Eh, lets go hide in a swamp and a desert and wait for the force to send us a new champion we can use."
The good guys win but palpatine becomes the bad guy champion and turns kylo ren into a ringer for the dark side. So the light side just turns rey into the good guy side ringer.
Everyone else are just background characters, all the big issues are settled by super space wizards, chosen ones, etc. No one else really matters much, just supporting characters for the elite chosen ones.
I liked rogue one because it was about characters who weren't basically superheroes with magic force powers. of course they all die to give the new chosen one, luke, a shot at blowing up the death start but hey, non main character lives don't matter.
That seemed to be the overall theme i got from the sequel trilogy.
Lance845 wrote: It's so easy to assume malice despite all the evidence to the contrary. It's also easy to point the finger at 8 despite all the bull crap mystery box foundation laid out by 7.
8 is the only movie in the new trilogy that had ANYTHING interesting to say.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. Had 8 been done as a stand-alone movie with zero connection to Star Wars, it would actually have been a pretty good generic sci-fi movie.
But it IS connected to Star Wars, and went out of it's way (call it malice, call it incompetence, call it a political agenda, call it being too clever for your own good, the result is the same) to break those connections... and therefore becomes a terrible Star Wars movie.
Cynista wrote: Both of them are appalling, it's hard to pick. Episode 9 is a complete mess however episode 8 was bad in a purposeful, spiteful, almost malicious way. Probably the most disappointingly awful big budget film of the last 30 years.
Yes.... yes. That's exactly it. TLJ feels like it was done by someone who hated Star Wars and hated Star Wars fans and who wanted to do everything he could to spite them. And in that goal, he succeeded.
Thats entirely contrary to my take. To me Episode 8 was made by someone that understood Star Wars better than most of its fans and spent a lot of time analyzing missed details in not just the films, but also things like The Clone Wars (as well as a lot of deep cuts from the expanded uinverse), and then lovingly built a film that attempted to deconstruct all of that... and went way too far.
I would argue that, as his Holdo maneuver invalidates the whole concept of having a Death Star... and therefore invalidates no less than three previous movies, including the very FIRST movie.
Hyperdrives and navigation computers and droid brains are DIRT CHEAP compared to the Death Star. Wander into a system's asteroid belt or Oort cloud, find a suitable object, install the necessary equipment, set it off and smash the planet. No muss, no fuss, and no WARNING.
And yet, hyperspace ramming has been explored in various ways within various forms of Star Wars media going back basically to the beginning. Hell, Han has a line of dialog in A New Hope that alludes to the very concept.
It isn't a new concept within the lore, that you and most audiences seem unfamiliar with it is more of a you problem than a him problem.
Lance845 wrote: It's so easy to assume malice despite all the evidence to the contrary. It's also easy to point the finger at 8 despite all the bull crap mystery box foundation laid out by 7.
8 is the only movie in the new trilogy that had ANYTHING interesting to say.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. Had 8 been done as a stand-alone movie with zero connection to Star Wars, it would actually have been a pretty good generic sci-fi movie.
But it IS connected to Star Wars, and went out of it's way (call it malice, call it incompetence, call it a political agenda, call it being too clever for your own good, the result is the same) to break those connections... and therefore becomes a terrible Star Wars movie.
It didn't BREAK those connections. It built on them to be the only movie in all 9 to have anything interesting to say about the nature of the force and force users and the cycles of conflict that permeate the galaxy. 8 is the only movie to question the doctrines of the jedi and sith. It's the only one to say that maybe the force isn't a light and dark side, maybe it just is. Maybe things are not so black and white. Maybe the rebellion or resistance and the empire or first order are not so clearly cut into good guys and bad guys. When the hacker dude on the ship talks about companies selling ships to both sides, about children and casualties on all sides, that is a thematic thing to bring to the table that SW was sorely lacking and makes the universe significantly more interesting. When the Dark side place that Rey goes to shows her visions and it's not evil and corrupting despite Luke's fear of it it has a lot to say about how the dark side ALSO has things to teach people. When Rey was nobody and her parents were no one, when that slave kid force pulled a broom into his hands and held it like a light saber silhouetted against the star field of the night sky saying that ANYONE could be the hero and magic blood lines don't matter it opened up the galaxy of SW into a bigger and broader more interesting place.
8 is NOT a perfect movie. Things could have been done better. For sure there were missteps and dumb gak. But again, it's the ONLY movie in the entire saga with anything interesting to say about the core themes the whole thing is about. 7 and 9... its just the same crap spoon fed to you with the flimsiest bs in the world. And it just shrunk the universe right back down to the same couple families and their friends running into the same dozen people on the same 5 planets again. The whole franchise is worse off because of it.
chaos0xomega wrote: And yet, hyperspace ramming has been explored in various ways within various forms of Star Wars media going back basically to the beginning. Hell, Han has a line of dialog in A New Hope that alludes to the very concept.
It isn't a new concept within the lore, that you and most audiences seem unfamiliar with it is more of a you problem than a him problem.
The vast majority of the audience for the SW movies has never engaged with anything other than the movies, and maybe some video games. It's hardly the audience's problem that hyperspace ramming invalidates the threat of the Death Stars according to the information they are given in those movies. That one scene in Ep8 makes the entirety of the climax to ANH feel completely pointless if you take even one second to think about it, while also making the Empire out to be a bunch of complete idiots for even thinking about developing the Death Star in the first place. Thankfully their idiocy is matched by the Rebellion not just firing a capital ship at the thing as soon as they get the chance. If most audiences are unfamiliar with it, as you claim, it's the job of the filmmakers to explain it sufficiently so that it makes sense rather than leaving loads of people pointing out it's ridiculous. Yes, Han has a throwaway line about jumping straight into a planet or a star but the assumption I think most people made about that line was that it would lead to the destruction of the ship, not the object they were jumping into. I think it's a huge stretch to say that line is specifically about hyperspace ramming.
chaos0xomega wrote: And yet, hyperspace ramming has been explored in various ways within various forms of Star Wars media going back basically to the beginning. Hell, Han has a line of dialog in A New Hope that alludes to the very concept.
It isn't a new concept within the lore, that you and most audiences seem unfamiliar with it is more of a you problem than a him problem.
The vast majority of the audience for the SW movies has never engaged with anything other than the movies, and maybe some video games. It's hardly the audience's problem that hyperspace ramming invalidates the threat of the Death Stars according to the information they are given in those movies. That one scene in Ep8 makes the entirety of the climax to ANH feel completely pointless if you take even one second to think about it, while also making the Empire out to be a bunch of complete idiots for even thinking about developing the Death Star in the first place. Thankfully their idiocy is matched by the Rebellion not just firing a capital ship at the thing as soon as they get the chance. If most audiences are unfamiliar with it, as you claim, it's the job of the filmmakers to explain it sufficiently so that it makes sense rather than leaving loads of people pointing out it's ridiculous. Yes, Han has a throwaway line about jumping straight into a planet or a star but the assumption I think most people made about that line was that it would lead to the destruction of the ship, not the object they were jumping into. I think it's a huge stretch to say that line is specifically about hyperspace ramming.
It's not just the death star that makes no sense. In SW if you think about anything for long enough none of it makes sense.
Droids exist. C3P0 is fluent in over 6 MILLION forms of communication. Why the feth does R2D2 beep? Why does someone need to manually input hyperspace coordinates? Why don't ships have AIs? How come the targeting computers are a 2 color screen like a hand held game and watch? Why isn't the computer handling targeting? Why do individuals have to sit in gun turrets and pull triggers on a ship so big it has living quarters and cargo holds? Or so big it can hold that ship inside of one of it's MANY docks while housing hundreds of single man fighters? Or a space station so big it looks like a moon? In episode 9 a "Droid Smith" retrieves data from C3-P0s head by using a blow torch on his circuitry, looking into the hole he made, and then telling everyone about the data he is looking at... as opposed to like... plugging him into a monitor with a USB. How come every single door in SW, including secure military installations, have no key pads or manual locks, but do have a weird little spinny lock at the exact height of every astromech droid in the galaxy. that can be opened by any astromech droid in the galaxy because that is a big part of what they have been purpose built to do?
Nothing in SW makes any sense if you " take even one second to think about it". If hyperspace ramming is the one time you stopped to take a second I am sorry that you never spent any time thinking about this thing you apparently like.
chaos0xomega wrote: And yet, hyperspace ramming has been explored in various ways within various forms of Star Wars media going back basically to the beginning. Hell, Han has a line of dialog in A New Hope that alludes to the very concept.
It isn't a new concept within the lore, that you and most audiences seem unfamiliar with it is more of a you problem than a him problem.
The vast majority of the audience for the SW movies has never engaged with anything other than the movies, and maybe some video games. It's hardly the audience's problem that hyperspace ramming invalidates the threat of the Death Stars according to the information they are given in those movies. That one scene in Ep8 makes the entirety of the climax to ANH feel completely pointless if you take even one second to think about it, while also making the Empire out to be a bunch of complete idiots for even thinking about developing the Death Star in the first place. Thankfully their idiocy is matched by the Rebellion not just firing a capital ship at the thing as soon as they get the chance. If most audiences are unfamiliar with it, as you claim, it's the job of the filmmakers to explain it sufficiently so that it makes sense rather than leaving loads of people pointing out it's ridiculous. Yes, Han has a throwaway line about jumping straight into a planet or a star but the assumption I think most people made about that line was that it would lead to the destruction of the ship, not the object they were jumping into. I think it's a huge stretch to say that line is specifically about hyperspace ramming.
It's not just the death star that makes no sense. In SW if you think about anything for long enough none of it makes sense.
Droids exist. C3P0 is fluent in over 6 MILLION forms of communication. Why the feth does R2D2 beep? Why does someone need to manually input hyperspace coordinates? Why don't ships have AIs? How come the targeting computers are a 2 color screen like a hand held game and watch? Why isn't the computer handling targeting? Why do individuals have to sit in gun turrets and pull triggers on a ship so big it has living quarters and cargo holds? Or so big it can hold that ship inside of one of it's MANY docks while housing hundreds of single man fighters? Or a space station so big it looks like a moon? In episode 9 a "Droid Smith" retrieves data from C3-P0s head by using a blow torch on his circuitry, looking into the hole he made, and then telling everyone about the data he is looking at... as opposed to like... plugging him into a monitor with a USB. How come every single door in SW, including secure military installations, have no key pads or manual locks, but do have a weird little spinny lock at the exact height of every astromech droid in the galaxy. that can be opened by any astromech droid in the galaxy because that is a big part of what they have been purpose built to do?
Nothing in SW makes any sense if you " take even one second to think about it". If hyperspace ramming is the one time you stopped to take a second I am sorry that you never spent any time thinking about this thing you apparently like.
You typed all that out but it really doesn't point out any issues at all. All that is standard to the universe as a whole, what he points out is something that breaks something of that universes rules given the knowledge presented to the viewer through the various media presented to the average viewer. So your argument really doesn't help you in the way you think it does.
chaos0xomega wrote: And yet, hyperspace ramming has been explored in various ways within various forms of Star Wars media going back basically to the beginning. Hell, Han has a line of dialog in A New Hope that alludes to the very concept.
It isn't a new concept within the lore, that you and most audiences seem unfamiliar with it is more of a you problem than a him problem.
The vast majority of the audience for the SW movies has never engaged with anything other than the movies, and maybe some video games. It's hardly the audience's problem that hyperspace ramming invalidates the threat of the Death Stars according to the information they are given in those movies. That one scene in Ep8 makes the entirety of the climax to ANH feel completely pointless if you take even one second to think about it, while also making the Empire out to be a bunch of complete idiots for even thinking about developing the Death Star in the first place. Thankfully their idiocy is matched by the Rebellion not just firing a capital ship at the thing as soon as they get the chance. If most audiences are unfamiliar with it, as you claim, it's the job of the filmmakers to explain it sufficiently so that it makes sense rather than leaving loads of people pointing out it's ridiculous. Yes, Han has a throwaway line about jumping straight into a planet or a star but the assumption I think most people made about that line was that it would lead to the destruction of the ship, not the object they were jumping into. I think it's a huge stretch to say that line is specifically about hyperspace ramming.
It's not just the death star that makes no sense. In SW if you think about anything for long enough none of it makes sense.
Droids exist. C3P0 is fluent in over 6 MILLION forms of communication. Why the feth does R2D2 beep? Why does someone need to manually input hyperspace coordinates? Why don't ships have AIs? How come the targeting computers are a 2 color screen like a hand held game and watch? Why isn't the computer handling targeting? Why do individuals have to sit in gun turrets and pull triggers on a ship so big it has living quarters and cargo holds? Or so big it can hold that ship inside of one of it's MANY docks while housing hundreds of single man fighters? Or a space station so big it looks like a moon? In episode 9 a "Droid Smith" retrieves data from C3-P0s head by using a blow torch on his circuitry, looking into the hole he made, and then telling everyone about the data he is looking at... as opposed to like... plugging him into a monitor with a USB. How come every single door in SW, including secure military installations, have no key pads or manual locks, but do have a weird little spinny lock at the exact height of every astromech droid in the galaxy. that can be opened by any astromech droid in the galaxy because that is a big part of what they have been purpose built to do?
Nothing in SW makes any sense if you " take even one second to think about it". If hyperspace ramming is the one time you stopped to take a second I am sorry that you never spent any time thinking about this thing you apparently like.
A lot of that stuff is consistent in-universe though. Much of it is due to the OT being made in the 70s and retaining that 70s-futuristic aesthetic through all the movies. Yes, it's weird that SW doesn't have voice-controlled computers or touch screens but that's the established feel of the universe. Things like no automated targeting is there because so much of the action was based on WW2 dogfighting, so having a turret and single-man fighters engaging each other at visual range is all part of that. You still need to be careful not to take it too far as I feel they did with the Resistance bombers which break immersion because the in-universe explanation for them doesn't make sense. All of this is consistent in-universe and part of what makes the SW universe what it is.
When you then introduce a new thing in the 8th film that completely invalidates important parts of the previous material that's a problem because it's internally inconsistent.
chaos0xomega wrote: And yet, hyperspace ramming has been explored in various ways within various forms of Star Wars media going back basically to the beginning. Hell, Han has a line of dialog in A New Hope that alludes to the very concept.
It isn't a new concept within the lore, that you and most audiences seem unfamiliar with it is more of a you problem than a him problem.
The vast majority of the audience for the SW movies has never engaged with anything other than the movies, and maybe some video games. It's hardly the audience's problem that hyperspace ramming invalidates the threat of the Death Stars according to the information they are given in those movies. That one scene in Ep8 makes the entirety of the climax to ANH feel completely pointless if you take even one second to think about it, while also making the Empire out to be a bunch of complete idiots for even thinking about developing the Death Star in the first place. Thankfully their idiocy is matched by the Rebellion not just firing a capital ship at the thing as soon as they get the chance. If most audiences are unfamiliar with it, as you claim, it's the job of the filmmakers to explain it sufficiently so that it makes sense rather than leaving loads of people pointing out it's ridiculous. Yes, Han has a throwaway line about jumping straight into a planet or a star but the assumption I think most people made about that line was that it would lead to the destruction of the ship, not the object they were jumping into. I think it's a huge stretch to say that line is specifically about hyperspace ramming.
Han invalidates concept of planetary shielding in Ep7, concept of hyperdrive in Ep5, hyperdrive is again invalidated in Ep1, in same scene which invalidates turbolasers...lets not even mention all the weird stuff in Ep9.
All of these movies have weird crap out of nowhere written just for the 'plot needs it' or 'it looks cool'.
Star Wars fans were all saying they wanted the films to connect to the tv shows, novels, comics, etc. Rian Johnson did that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Frankly speaking though, nothing about it breaks any of the universes rules, we are told very early on in A New Hope that hyperspace:
1. Isn't easy and requires precise calculations.
2. Its possible for an object traveling through hyperspace to collide with objects in the real world.
Its stated clearly that without precise calculations its possible to collide with an object. It seems safe to assume that this is reciprocal - purposefully colliding with an object likely also requires precise calculations itself (i.e. its not easy to do so intentionally, its a long shot with "one in a million" odds). This should be fairly obvious - if you need precise calculations to use hyperspace travel to get to a specific destination, and in this case your specific destination is, in fact, a collision with a particular object, then it stands to reason that you need precise calculations to collide with that particular object.
Its also safe to assume that if colliding with an object is damaging to the object in hyperspace, its also probably damaging to the object that the hyperspace vehicle has collided with. I don't know of any situations in the real world where a collision isn't mutually harmful to both objects in question, I don't see why it would be any different in Star Wars - if you assumed differently that seems to be *your* problem. While its true that Han didn't mention anything about causing damage to the objects being collided with, its pretty clear that hes less concerned about the destruction of something else than he is with the destruction of himself and his ship - i.e. it would be out of character for him to bring it up, and also irrelevant since he'd be dead at that point anyway. Its also safe to assume that its some level of "common knowledge" or "unspoken assumption" in-universe as well, and thus doesn't need to be stated.
So, anyway, the precedent for it existed from the very get-go, and was indeed explored on multiple occasions over the 40 years since then - just not necessarily on film. Contrary to insistence otherwise, it hardly invalidates the threat of the Death Stars or whatever - again, one in a million odds of success (probably even lower than that, lets not take that too literally), requires precise calculations, etc. etc. etc. Holdo got lucky, I don't know why thats hard for people to accept - its no different than how Luke got lucky dumping his proton torpedoes down the exhuast shaft without a targeting computer (another "one in a million" shot - Han Solo says as much, or did you forget?).
We can also reason here that proximity played a role - Holdo and the Raddus weren't all that far away from the Star Destroyer, fair to say that the proximity played a role in increasing the probability of success here. In this case, the explanation for why the Death Stars were safeguarded is pretty self-explanatory - they were built with significant armament and defensive capabilities in order to specifically fend off attacks by capital ships - the audacity of the Rebel attempt to destroy it was that they used starfighters when they instead expected to be attacked by a fleet of warships. I would go one step further here and ask, what do you reckon a fleet of rebel cruisers would have been able to accomplish against something as massive as the Death Star using conventional attacks by missiles, torpedoes, and turbolasers? Perhaps the concern of a hyperspace ramming attack was always there from the get go.
And the reason they didn't just use droids or AI to launch hyperspace ramming attacks en mass using asteroids with cheaply made hyperdrives against anything and everything in order to play the probability game? Holdo tapped into the force in much the same way Luke did in order to successfully time and aim this one-in-one million shot, something that droids or AI would not be able to pull off in a pinch, even if they weren't vaporized by defensive fire on the way in. Oh, and also its well established that the Rebellion/good guys view droids as sentients/people and it would be amoral and unethical for them to send them on suicide missions in that manner.
We hear Luke claim to 'bullseye womp rats' in the desert. And we've also seen that sandpeople like to hang out in the desert. We don't know that he hasn't been shot at while flying before. We do know he's done some shooting while flying before.
Shooting what amounts to a big rabbit and being in war are entirely different things. Yavin is Luke's first actual battle in a war. It's a military engagement the likes of which he has only ever heard stories about. Not only does he handle himself in that situation in a way no reasonable person should be able to, he is the single most important person in the entire conflict and delivers the fatal blow that turns the tide of the battle and the rebellions place in the galaxy.
Lets not pretend that ANYTHING in Luke's history prepares him in any capacity for that engagement or explains how cool he handles every aspect of it, including watching friends and comrades die in explosions as their ships smash into the side of a moon sized battle station.
The basic argument that Rey is a mary sue or that 7-9 do a bad job of setting up the skills of it's characters is terrible. SW has always had characters just learn random gak in the moment the plot demanded and the explanations for why have always been flimsy at best.
Shusssssssssssssssssh dont take away my nine year old who can drive space racecars and therefore also knows how to drive spaceships i'm here to complain about how the orphan girl who's obviously been fighting with close combat weaponry her entire life can somehow win a space swordfight against a whiny bitch boy who ran a half-mile after being shot center mass with a laser crossbow wielded by a sasquatch that instantly and spectacularly killed every other person it was aimed at the whole rest of the movie.
Lance845 wrote: It's so easy to assume malice despite all the evidence to the contrary. It's also easy to point the finger at 8 despite all the bull crap mystery box foundation laid out by 7.
8 is the only movie in the new trilogy that had ANYTHING interesting to say.
Yeah, I thought the idea that heroism and greatness can come from anyone...that it's not a matter of being born into the right family...is a wonderful, modern, relevant message. I'm not sure if JJA ever even ponders what his films are trying to say. He's generally good at action and pacing and beats and set pieces and all that stuff. But sometimes there isn't much 'there' there.
The mystery box stuff wasn't just BS because it was empty calories that screwed over the directors to come. It also spawned lots of theorizing by fans, who were bound to end up disappointed. Either the obvious answer was true, making everything...obvious. Or their fave theory wasn't true, leading to a letdown. Fans walked into TLJ with a HUGE set of expectations. And in a way, I guess RJ did almost gleefully pop those expectation balloons. But they shouldn't have been there in the first place...not like that. SW doesn't need mystery boxes to get people talking about it or coming to the next one.
Lance845 wrote: It's so easy to assume malice despite all the evidence to the contrary. It's also easy to point the finger at 8 despite all the bull crap mystery box foundation laid out by 7.
8 is the only movie in the new trilogy that had ANYTHING interesting to say.
Yeah, I thought the idea that heroism and greatness can come from anyone...that it's not a matter of being born into the right family...is a wonderful, modern, relevant message. I'm not sure if JJA ever even ponders what his films are trying to say. He's generally good at action and pacing and beats and set pieces and all that stuff. But sometimes there isn't much 'there' there.
The mystery box stuff wasn't just BS because it was empty calories that screwed over the directors to come. It also spawned lots of theorizing by fans, who were bound to end up disappointed. Either the obvious answer was true, making everything...obvious. Or their fave theory wasn't true, leading to a letdown. Fans walked into TLJ with a HUGE set of expectations. And in a way, I guess RJ did almost gleefully pop those expectation balloons. But they shouldn't have been there in the first place...not like that. SW doesn't need mystery boxes to get people talking about it or coming to the next one.
JJ's ego must be out of control.
Ironically in the lead up to the release of The Force Awakens, JJ Abrams gave an interview in which he discussed the democratization of the Force and how growing up it was understood to him and his friends (and indeed yours truly) that the Force was available to anyone and things like bloodlines and midichlorian counts, etc. were irrelevant: https://www.slashfilm.com/jj-abrams-interview-star-wars-the-force-awakens/
Peter: George Lucas based a lot of the saga on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, and we’ve seen a lot of “the chosen one” stories and the Star Wars prequels I think made the “chosen one” prophecy even more specific because Force/Jedi-potential was linked to having a high midi-chlorian count, making it seem like you had to be born into being a Jedi. Does The Force Awakens explore the possibility that anyone can have the power? Know what I mean?
J.J. Abrams: I do. I will just say this. I would never presume to question anything George Lucas says is canon in Star Wars. And our job was not to negate or undo… A lot of people who are critics, and I respect all of them, of Star Trek, the ones that we did, said we destroyed what they loved and negated everything. And we worked hard to clarify that we are not saying that our Star Trek over-rides a thing of the original Star Trek — it was a parallel timeline. I never wanted to negate canon that fans held so dear. And because I love Star Wars and have for too many years…
Peter: But I think, for me, as a kid watching Star Wars, part of the power of those stories were that I could be Luke Skywalker.
J.J. Abrams: Yes, and what I’m getting to is having said all that and meaning it — I don’t want to presume over-write or change what George says the rules are. I’m not someone who quite understands the science of the Force. To me Star Wars was never about science fiction — it was a spiritual story. And it was more of a fairytale in that regard. For me when I heard Obi-Wan say that the Force surrounds us and binds us all together, there was no judgement about who you were. This was something that we could all access. Being strong with the Force didn’t mean something scientific, it meant something spiritual. It meant someone who could believe, someone who could reach down to the depths of your feelings and follow this primal energy that was flowing through all of us. I mean, that’s what was said in that first film! And there I am sitting in the theater at almost 11 years old and that was a powerful notion. And I think this is what your point was, we would like to believe that when gak gets serious, that you could harness that Force I was told surrounds not just some of us but every living thing. And so, I really feel like the assumption that any character needs to have inherited a certain number of midi-chlorians or needs to be part of a bloodline. It’s not that I don’t believe that as part of the canon, I’m just saying that at 11 years old, that wasn’t where my heart was. And so I respect and adhere to the canon but I also say that the Force has always seemed to me to be more inclusive and stronger than that.
So either JJ didn't understand the meaning of the words coming out of his own mouth in terms of what it would mean for the story, or perhaps the "Reys parents" mystery box was really meant to be empty the entire time.
The mystery box stuff wasn't just BS because it was empty calories that screwed over the directors to come. It also spawned lots of theorizing by fans, who were bound to end up disappointed. Either the obvious answer was true, making everything...obvious. Or their fave theory wasn't true, leading to a letdown. Fans walked into TLJ with a HUGE set of expectations. And in a way, I guess RJ did almost gleefully pop those expectation balloons. But they shouldn't have been there in the first place...not like that. SW doesn't need mystery boxes to get people talking about it or coming to the next one.
JJ's ego must be out of control.
I think that even 'mystery box' might be giving too much credit for JJ. For example lets take Snoke: one of the most talked about aspect of TFA afterwards was identity of Snoke. Who was he and how he was related to rest of the timeline? Because TFA revealed very little of him. Surely there must be more to it?
But the way JJ and co. created him was simply that they picked one from a series of different models studio had created for them. 'Lets take this guy, he looks the scariest'. That's all there ever was. Not any kind of backstory or characterization was ever written for him. His role was just to be there and look evil and say evil things.
But as much as I enjoy crapping over JJ, the final responsibility must land on the producer, Kennedy. Not because of some daft 'feminist agenda' but because all the oversight she ever did was to hire 3 directors and tell them to 'make me 3 blockbusters'.
But as much as I enjoy crapping over JJ, the final responsibility must land on the producer, Kennedy. Not because of some daft 'feminist agenda' but because all the oversight she ever did was to hire 3 directors and tell them to 'make me 3 blockbusters'.
Im a staunch Kathleen Kennedy apologist, but this is 100% on the money. This is where she dropped the ball. Everything indicates that she took a "we'll do it live" approach to the sequel trilogy in an attempt to replicate some of the approach used during the making of the original trilogy, and it blew up big time.
chaos0xomega wrote: And yet, hyperspace ramming has been explored in various ways within various forms of Star Wars media going back basically to the beginning. Hell, Han has a line of dialog in A New Hope that alludes to the very concept.
It isn't a new concept within the lore, that you and most audiences seem unfamiliar with it is more of a you problem than a him problem.
The vast majority of the audience for the SW movies has never engaged with anything other than the movies, and maybe some video games. It's hardly the audience's problem that hyperspace ramming invalidates the threat of the Death Stars according to the information they are given in those movies. That one scene in Ep8 makes the entirety of the climax to ANH feel completely pointless if you take even one second to think about it, while also making the Empire out to be a bunch of complete idiots for even thinking about developing the Death Star in the first place. Thankfully their idiocy is matched by the Rebellion not just firing a capital ship at the thing as soon as they get the chance. If most audiences are unfamiliar with it, as you claim, it's the job of the filmmakers to explain it sufficiently so that it makes sense rather than leaving loads of people pointing out it's ridiculous. Yes, Han has a throwaway line about jumping straight into a planet or a star but the assumption I think most people made about that line was that it would lead to the destruction of the ship, not the object they were jumping into. I think it's a huge stretch to say that line is specifically about hyperspace ramming.
It's not just the death star that makes no sense. In SW if you think about anything for long enough none of it makes sense.
Droids exist. C3P0 is fluent in over 6 MILLION forms of communication. Why the feth does R2D2 beep? Why does someone need to manually input hyperspace coordinates? Why don't ships have AIs? How come the targeting computers are a 2 color screen like a hand held game and watch? Why isn't the computer handling targeting? Why do individuals have to sit in gun turrets and pull triggers on a ship so big it has living quarters and cargo holds? Or so big it can hold that ship inside of one of it's MANY docks while housing hundreds of single man fighters? Or a space station so big it looks like a moon? In episode 9 a "Droid Smith" retrieves data from C3-P0s head by using a blow torch on his circuitry, looking into the hole he made, and then telling everyone about the data he is looking at... as opposed to like... plugging him into a monitor with a USB. How come every single door in SW, including secure military installations, have no key pads or manual locks, but do have a weird little spinny lock at the exact height of every astromech droid in the galaxy. that can be opened by any astromech droid in the galaxy because that is a big part of what they have been purpose built to do?
Nothing in SW makes any sense if you " take even one second to think about it". If hyperspace ramming is the one time you stopped to take a second I am sorry that you never spent any time thinking about this thing you apparently like.
While true, you state the exact point while simultaneously missing it.
Star Wars up to 7 were entertaining to various degrees. 8 was not. Since I was not entertained by the movie I THOUGHT about it. And thus the flaws are revealed.
I don't watch Star Wars to think; I watch it to be entertained. If you can't do that, then I'm going to think about it... and you'd better be prepared when I do if you want me to pay for the NEXT movie in line.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Both films are awful and kinda meld into one another, so it's difficult to say which one 'wins' here.
But, on the other hand, TLJ killed Luke, my fav SW character, so feth that movie.
That was always going to happen though, each of the three films was intended to be a send-off to one of the original trilogy characters - Hans was TFA, Lukes was TLJ, and Leias was RotS.
While true, you state the exact point while simultaneously missing it.
Star Wars up to 7 were entertaining to various degrees. 8 was not. Since I was not entertained by the movie I THOUGHT about it. And thus the flaws are revealed.
I don't watch Star Wars to think; I watch it to be entertained. If you can't do that, then I'm going to think about it... and you'd better be prepared when I do if you want me to pay for the NEXT movie in line.
I was not entertained in the slightest by 7. I derived a lot of entertainment from 8, though mostly via Schadenfreude as I knew the decisions made would be divisive and stoke new levels of nerd angst. 9... 9 could have been entertaining, but I think at that point everyone was phoning it in - the cast, the director, the audience. Nobody wanted to be there anymore, we were all just going through the motions out of obligation. In a different time, with a different Episode 7 and a different Episode 8, it might have been a decent film.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Both films are awful and kinda meld into one another, so it's difficult to say which one 'wins' here.
But, on the other hand, TLJ killed Luke, my fav SW character, so feth that movie.
The Last Jedi - or, more accurately, The Character Assassination of Luke Skywalker, by the Coward Rian Johnson...
Well, in star wars there most definitely is an afterlife, so in a universe where there absolutely is an afterlife and some people in it can still interact with the living is anyone really 'killed' or just sent on to another life?
And apparently the aftertlife in the star wars universe is a lot better than the ones most people on earth believe in if even that mass murderer torturer and all around monster annikin skywalker got into a good one. His happy redeption scene was hard to buy in RotJ, after the "Let's murder children!" scene in RotS it became impossible to swallow.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Both films are awful and kinda meld into one another, so it's difficult to say which one 'wins' here.
But, on the other hand, TLJ killed Luke, my fav SW character, so feth that movie.
The Last Jedi - or, more accurately, The Character Assassination of Luke Skywalker, by the Coward Rian Johnson...
Well, in star wars there most definitely is an afterlife, so in a universe where there absolutely is an afterlife and some people in it can still interact with the living is anyone really 'killed' or just sent on to another life?
And apparently the aftertlife in the star wars universe is a lot better than the ones most people on earth believe in if even that mass murderer torturer and all around monster annikin skywalker got into a good one. His happy redeption scene was hard to buy in RotJ, after the "Let's murder children!" scene in RotS it became impossible to swallow.
Ah... he wasn't referring to the actual death of Luke Skywalker. He was talking about how Luke's nature was altered beyond recognition by someone who clearly had no idea who Luke was. Thus, a character assassination, not the assassination of a character.
Well, at the end of RotJ luke was young and optimistic, having seen palpatine defeated, his father redeemed, the empire going down, etc.
The luke in the last two movies was a lot older, he'd seen the new republic fail pathetically, be usurped by the new order and he'd royally, in his view, screwed the pooch with ben solo, not knowing good ol' palpy was likely pulling strings on him and ben to arrange that.
Luke from the last two movies was a completely different person than the optimistic kid ion RotJ and in that case i will kinda defend those movies for making him a different person.
chaos0xomega wrote: That was always going to happen though, each of the three films was intended to be a send-off to one of the original trilogy characters - Hans was TFA, Lukes was TLJ, and Leias was RotS.
If luke projected himself across light years and manifested a lightsaber, the effort may have killed him.
it was obviously a strain on yoda to lift Luke's xwing out of the swamp. Maybe excessive force use can cause weakness and even death to a user.
One early explanation for why palpy looks so horrible was that excessive force use was burning out his body and he kept using the force to put his mind into new cloned bodies.
Ah... he wasn't referring to the actual death of Luke Skywalker. He was talking about how Luke's nature was altered beyond recognition by someone who clearly had no idea who Luke was. Thus, a character assassination, not the assassination of a character.
Though, that was again a pass which TLJ picked from TFA. JJ did not have problems with RJ's interpretation, he even changed the ending scene to better fit to 'reluctant hermit' plan.
Personally I was fine with Luke as he was in TLJ. I have always seen him as somewhat a selfish character, and to me it made perfect sense that he would throw down his toys and walk away if his endeavour was to fail such a manner.
Matt Swain wrote: Well, at the end of RotJ luke was young and optimistic, having seen palpatine defeated, his father redeemed, the empire going down, etc.
The luke in the last two movies was a lot older, he'd seen the new republic fail pathetically, be usurped by the new order
He actually hadn't seen that. As it happened after he went into hiding and given up. It could easily be argued that it happened because he did nothing to try and stop it.
Very little suggests the New Republic 'failed' before the absurd decapitation strike by physics-breaking lightspeed visibility lasers.
We're told (never shown) that the not-Rebellion 'Resisty' group exists because the New Republic doesn't believe in the First Order, but not why (nor why every passing character in the film knows what the First Order is and what they're doing, which makes that an absurd stance).
TFA basically cowers from repeating the 'too much politics' problem of the prequels, never realizing that it wasn't the 'too much' aspect but more the approach and poor quality of Lucas' dumb vision of politics. The sequels happen in a basically dead galaxy where nothing happens if the heroes (or Ben) aren't there to witness it. The OT has some sins, but the galaxy marches on without the unlikely band of heroes (disbanding the Senate, new death star, various attacks and searches, spying missions, etc).
and he'd royally, in his view, screwed the pooch with ben solo, not knowing good ol' palpy was likely pulling strings on him and ben to arrange that.
Yep, trying to murder your nephew is bad.
What indicates Palpy was involved? It seemed more a generic Jedi future-flash with too little information and he decided Ben was too much like a Vader and made a horrid decision.
He actually hadn't seen that. As it happened after he went into hiding and given up. It could easily be argued that it happened because he did nothing to try and stop it.
Very little suggests the New Republic 'failed' before the absurd decapitation strike by physics-breaking lightspeed visibility lasers.
We're told (never shown) that the not-Rebellion 'Resisty' group exists because the New Republic doesn't believe in the First Order, but not why (nor why every passing character in the film knows what the First Order is and what they're doing, which makes that an absurd stance).
TFA basically cowers from repeating the 'too much politics' problem of the prequels, never realizing that it wasn't the 'too much' aspect but more the approach and poor quality of Lucas' dumb vision of politics. The sequels happen in a basically dead galaxy where nothing happens if the heroes (or Ben) aren't there to witness it. The OT has some sins, but the galaxy marches on without the unlikely band of heroes (disbanding the Senate, new death star, various attacks and searches, spying missions, etc).
Agree billion zillion times...nearly every episode of Game of Thrones is full of political dialogue and intrigue. People seemed to be ok with it.
Set-up for Sequel Trilogy is actually perfectly fine IMO. First Order rises outside of Republic's 'jurisdiction' which forces Leia to build a new organization to fight it. But you're not privy that information unless you read it elsewhere. It's only fleetingly touched upon in Episodes 7 & 8 because film-makers were so afraid of 'ruining the story with politics'.
chaos0xomega wrote: That was always going to happen though, each of the three films was intended to be a send-off to one of the original trilogy characters - Hans was TFA, Lukes was TLJ, and Leias was RotS.
It's not that he died, it's how he died.
By cranking the force up to 12 to the point that it burned him out? Pretty epic way to go.
Or are you still mad that JJ Abrams decided that Luke was a burned-out has-been and stuck him on an island in the middle of nowhere?
Though, that was again a pass which TLJ picked from TFA. JJ did not have problems with RJ's interpretation, he even changed the ending scene to better fit to 'reluctant hermit' plan.
The reluctant hermit interpretation originated with JJ Abrams, potentially even earlier than him - some of the earliest concept art for The Force Awakens, which went unused in the film itself, was of varying interpretations of hermit Luke/burnout Luke. We know that JJ decided to cut Luke out of the film completely because he felt that his presence was distracting, but that doesn't mean that the concept of Luke wasn't one of the few narrative threads that Lucasfilm was attemp instead when the wealth of evidence indicates otherwise.
As for the changes to the end of TFA, that was not about accommodating RJs "plan" to make Luke a hermit - the ending of TFA was going to involve Rey going to Ahch-To to find Luke. The change to the scene was to have the dramatic staredown between Rey and Luke on the island instead of leaving it a total mystery until TLJ launched - arguably one of the most impactful and emotional scenes in the entire film, btw. ngwasn't one of the few narrative threads that Lucasfilm was attempting to hold to hold
The way I read it, originally TFA ending had Luke sitting with some boulders floating around him when Rey arrives. Johnson and Hamill thought that showing Luke brimming with Force didn't fit well with the Luke storyline Johnson already had begun to write, and asked JJ to change it.
It didn't BREAK those connections. It built on them to be the only movie in all 9 to have anything interesting to say about the nature of the force and force users and the cycles of conflict that permeate the galaxy. 8 is the only movie to question the doctrines of the jedi and sith. It's the only one to say that maybe the force isn't a light and dark side, maybe it just is.
This was a good thing for the series of movies to explore. The Force is, it is the people who use it who shape it, and people are inherently flawed agents.
Maybe things are not so black and white. Maybe the rebellion or resistance and the empire or first order are not so clearly cut into good guys and bad guys. When the hacker dude on the ship talks about companies selling ships to both sides, about children and casualties on all sides, that is a thematic thing to bring to the table that SW was sorely lacking and makes the universe significantly more interesting.
This was bad, as it was a nihilistic approach where nothing mattered. So why even bother watching anymore Star Wars. It went against the key themes of the original trilogy, that your actions matter; and can lead to redemption and good triumphing over evil.
Lance845 wrote: When the Dark side place that Rey goes to shows her visions and it's not evil and corrupting despite Luke's fear of it it has a lot to say about how the dark side ALSO has things to teach people. When Rey was nobody and her parents were no one, when that slave kid force pulled a broom into his hands and held it like a light saber silhouetted against the star field of the night sky saying that ANYONE could be the hero and magic blood lines don't matter it opened up the galaxy of SW into a bigger and broader more interesting place.
This was also good, and returned Star Wars to its roots. Luke was no one special, he learned the Force like his Father before him from Obi-wan. Theoretically, everyone could have the "Force be with them". Only a few learned how to channel it through effort and willpower. It was spiritual in nature and available to everyone willing to learn it.
The Prequels literally killed Star Wars in The Phantom Menace with a ham handed line about Midichloridians. It made the mystical mundane and biological. Star Wars was now nothing but genetics and no longer a spiritual meritocracy. It was luck of the genetic birth.
I literally have not bothered with anything Star Wars since I watched Episode 8. I almost gave up after Phantom Menace, but sheer stbborn tenacity got me to 8, and then I realized my rapidly shrinking love for Star Wars was gone completely.......
This was also good, and returned Star Wars to its roots. Luke was no one special, he learned the Force like his Father before him from Obi-wan. Theoretically, everyone could have the "Force be with them". Only a few learned how to channel it through effort and willpower. It was spiritual in nature and available to everyone willing to learn it.
The Prequels literally killed Star Wars in The Phantom Menace with a ham handed line about Midichloridians. It made the mystical mundane and biological. Star Wars was now nothing but genetics and no longer a spiritual meritocracy. It was luck of the genetic birth.
To be fair thats more the result of fan interpretation than anything else. Lucas own take on midichlorians is pretty wildly different and out there compared to what fans took it to mean, and IMO actually even more mystical and weird than most people understood the Force to be prior to TPM. In terms of how the Jedi Order utilized midichlorians as a "blood quanta" measure of ability/membership, it seems that Lucas initial intent was to use the concept of midichlorians through the prequel trilogy to illustrate that the Jedi Order had become a soulless and sterile bureaucracy rather than a mystical order of spiritual peacekeepers, though he seems to have abandoned that due to fan backlash and only later explored it through The Clone Wars series.
Ultimately, the gamification of the Force is just a problem. Even before the time of TPM, the idea of Light/Dark Side Points was so embedded in the fanbase that you would see arguments over whether Luke could earn enough to unlock Force Choke by RotJ. Midichlorians feed into that problem of forcing structure on something that really shouldn't have it.
Their use in TPM is pretty emblematic of the prequel's overall abundance of good ideas and inability to get them across. In the film, they're used to justify Qui Gon's faith in Anakin rather than letting Anakin do things that make him worth having faith in. Honestly, if that was Lucas's intent, the Midichlorian test should have been what disqualified Anakin from being found and trained by the Jedi, with Anakin's abilities giving Qui Gon reason to push to train him regardless.
Good analysis there, LunarSol. As used, midichlorians are iconic of the lazy — or perhaps just genuinely incompetent — writing in E1.
Nonetheless, it is hard to say that E1 is cringey in that regard; cringey isn’t just bad. The main cringe factor for E1 is making Anakin an eight year old slave.
And even that is as nothing compared to the relentless cringefest of E8 (which even returned to child slavery, even more lazily/casually).
Manchu wrote: E9 is probably the worst film I have ever seen. I’m not even sure if calling it a “movie“ is technically correct.
But E8 is hands down the definition of cringe.
I really like this short and simple encapsulation. I can't really bring myself to care which movie was worse, but 9 was bad, 8 was bad, 8 was probably a lot more cringey for what it was. This works for me. Anything else feels like quibbling over something that isn't worth quibbling over in the first place these days.
Manchu wrote: And even that is as nothing compared to the relentless cringefest of E8 (which even returned to child slavery, even more lazily/casually).
Personally, its one of the two missed opportunities in 9 that really break my heart. The first and foremost is missing out on Ghost Luke trolling Kylo. That just... that should have been. The other though was the idea that relying on those in power to come save the day isn't going to change anything. The Resistance dies at the end of 8 realizing that those with power will abandon freedom the instant doing so serves their own interests. The only thing left at the end of 8 is the people taking a stand for themselves and fighting back. It's the single best idea in 8 and the fact that 9 just completely failed to do anything with it is just infuriating.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Both films are awful and kinda meld into one another, so it's difficult to say which one 'wins' here.
But, on the other hand, TLJ killed Luke, my fav SW character, so feth that movie.
The Last Jedi - or, more accurately, The Character Assassination of Luke Skywalker, by the Coward Rian Johnson...
Well, in star wars there most definitely is an afterlife, so in a universe where there absolutely is an afterlife and some people in it can still interact with the living is anyone really 'killed' or just sent on to another life?
And apparently the aftertlife in the star wars universe is a lot better than the ones most people on earth believe in if even that mass murderer torturer and all around monster annikin skywalker got into a good one. His happy redeption scene was hard to buy in RotJ, after the "Let's murder children!" scene in RotS it became impossible to swallow.
Ah... he wasn't referring to the actual death of Luke Skywalker. He was talking about how Luke's nature was altered beyond recognition by someone who clearly had no idea who Luke was. Thus, a character assassination, not the assassination of a character.
Which means he had no idea who the character Luke Skywalker was according to the movies. Yoda called him on his bs in 8 just like everyone does in all the other movies. Luke is always looking somewhere else. Always thinking of something else. And it trips him up. Except all his friends and mentors were gone either because HE left them or they died and there was nobody there to pull him out of the funks he gets himself into. Luke would ABSOLUTELY be terrified of raising a new Vader. Luke would 100% make the mistake of dwelling on the possibility as though it was an inevitability. Luke strength, his biggest and best strength, is that he can start to falter and pull himself back from the brink. He ALMOST goes darkside and kills Vader, and then tells the emperor to feth off. Then he ALMOST decides to put down Ben, and then pulled himself back.
Hes not a fantastic warrior. Hes not super intelligent. He is full of doubt and fear (Yoda always said as much). But he never tips over the edge. And he didn't.
Anyone who thinks 8 was a character assassination of Luke has been reading way to many Luke spank fest, might as well be fan fiction, expanded universe novels where he is the greatest being in the universe that is capable of only the correct choices and the greatest goods and they completely forgot what Luke was like in 4-6.
As I said, I have never seen Luke as some sort of paragon of virtue. I think he is in many ways just as, if not more, selfish than Han. I've been thinking about writing a small article about it, because it makes him much more interesting.
Personally, only issue which I had with his characterization in Ep8 was that I find it hard to believe and very much off-character he would contemplate killing his student, however briefly. They could have achieved same effect with something more sophisticated.
Backfire wrote: As I said, I have never seen Luke as some sort of paragon of virtue. I think he is in many ways just as, if not more, selfish than Han. I've been thinking about writing a small article about it, because it makes him much more interesting.
Personally, only issue which I had with his characterization in Ep8 was that I find it hard to believe and very much off-character he would contemplate killing his student, however briefly. They could have achieved same effect with something more sophisticated.
You have to remember the sheer volume of death and destruction caused by Palpatine and Vader over the entirety of Luke's life. For him to have a vision from the force that Ben would be that again and cause all that destruction, seemingly undoing all the works of his lifes greatest achievements... Yeah... Luke would ABSOLUTELY contemplate the lives of the many over the one. Remember, Luke is full of fear and doubt.
Totally agree Lance. Old man Luke isn't the master we expected, he isn't the master we imagined, but if you go back and look at what Luke really did.... it's exactly the sort of master Luke would become.
This is the guy who dreamed of getting off his farm, until he actually could.
The one who abandoned his friends to train as a Jedi, up until he felt them in trouble in an obvious trap- and then puts his friends over the fate of the universe.
The same guy who's plan to free one friend, ended up with a sister captured, a friend captured, and selling 2 other friends into slavery, when really- couldn't they have just pulled some strings and got a Rebel strike group to go after Jabba? We're talking about not 1, but 2 Rebel Generals by the end of the film involved in this unnecessarily complex heist scheme. Or..., you know, he talks his way in, and lightsaber fights in the throne room, rather than getting captured for the lulz.
Luke has always meant well, and has always had terrible, longshot plans when much better alternatives are readily apparent. That dude totally bought into his own legend.
I had a single vision- if I train this guy wrong I might destroy the galaxy- that makes sense, these sorts of things always happen to me. I'll have to kill him now, it's the only way. I certainly couldn't have a talk to him, and refuse to train him, or attempt to correct whatever errors I've made in training him. Or consult the sacred texts, or Yoda, or Obiwan.
No more training do you require.
Then I am a Jedi.
NO!
More than anything else, a successful teacher needs patience. Lack of patience is Luke's fatal flaw. He rushes into every challenge, and never adequately prepares for it.
Manchu wrote: Good analysis there, LunarSol. As used, midichlorians are iconic of the lazy — or perhaps just genuinely incompetent — writing in E1.
Nonetheless, it is hard to say that E1 is cringey in that regard; cringey isn’t just bad. The main cringe factor for E1 is making Anakin an eight year old slave.
And even that is as nothing compared to the relentless cringefest of E8 (which even returned to child slavery, even more lazily/casually).
I mean, aside from the discomfort that portrayals and discussions of slavery elicit in large swathes of the population, whats cringey about it? Its not portrayed in a positive manner by any means, although it is portrayed so casually as to be wholly unimpactful by way of its failure to actually show slavery in a negative light (i.e. depict it as the horrifying and disgusting institution that it is/was).
The movie, and Ep 8, both invoked 'slavery' to tell the audience how bad they should feel for someone's situation. It always struck me as amusing that Watto can be accused of being racist Jewish stereotype, cause Watto doesn't really have any negative character traits.
What? He's bad because he has slaves and wants money? Well it's a good thing he's super nice to his slaves and runs a business! Why, I dare say he even keeps his word and doesn't try to renege on his agreements at all! He's a honest businessman and in context, hardly the worst person in the galaxy. Sure is a good thing the show made him big nosed and greedy and told us he has slaves, otherwise we might think he was remarkably unremarkable!
I'd go beyond calling Ep1 writing lazy. The entire film is lazy. It used numerous visual and rhetorical short cuts to try an tell the audience how they should feel and the end result is a big nothing burger of a movie with some so-so set pieces and nothing to say or do with them.
And thinking of it that way I guess Ep8 is pretty similar.
Matt Swain wrote: Well, at the end of RotJ luke was young and optimistic, having seen palpatine defeated, his father redeemed, the empire going down, etc.
The luke in the last two movies was a lot older, he'd seen the new republic fail pathetically, be usurped by the new order and he'd royally, in his view, screwed the pooch with ben solo, not knowing good ol' palpy was likely pulling strings on him and ben to arrange that.
Luke from the last two movies was a completely different person than the optimistic kid ion RotJ and in that case i will kinda defend those movies for making him a different person.
Here's the real problem.
Young Luke refuses to kill his mass-murdering, child killing, Dark Lord of the Sith and right-hand man to Emperor Palpatine father.
How does that person become willing to himself even CONSIDER murdering his nephew, who he is apprenticing, in the kid's sleep, before he'd even done anything wrong?
Yeah, the Luke we see could be a bitter old man. But the explanation of HOW he became that bitter old man was pretty darn limp. It needed to be set up way better than it was, if they wanted us to buy in.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Both films are awful and kinda meld into one another, so it's difficult to say which one 'wins' here.
But, on the other hand, TLJ killed Luke, my fav SW character, so feth that movie.
The Last Jedi - or, more accurately, The Character Assassination of Luke Skywalker, by the Coward Rian Johnson...
Well, in star wars there most definitely is an afterlife, so in a universe where there absolutely is an afterlife and some people in it can still interact with the living is anyone really 'killed' or just sent on to another life?
And apparently the aftertlife in the star wars universe is a lot better than the ones most people on earth believe in if even that mass murderer torturer and all around monster annikin skywalker got into a good one. His happy redeption scene was hard to buy in RotJ, after the "Let's murder children!" scene in RotS it became impossible to swallow.
Ah... he wasn't referring to the actual death of Luke Skywalker. He was talking about how Luke's nature was altered beyond recognition by someone who clearly had no idea who Luke was. Thus, a character assassination, not the assassination of a character.
Which means he had no idea who the character Luke Skywalker was according to the movies. Yoda called him on his bs in 8 just like everyone does in all the other movies. Luke is always looking somewhere else. Always thinking of something else. And it trips him up. Except all his friends and mentors were gone either because HE left them or they died and there was nobody there to pull him out of the funks he gets himself into. Luke would ABSOLUTELY be terrified of raising a new Vader. Luke would 100% make the mistake of dwelling on the possibility as though it was an inevitability. Luke strength, his biggest and best strength, is that he can start to falter and pull himself back from the brink. He ALMOST goes darkside and kills Vader, and then tells the emperor to feth off. Then he ALMOST decides to put down Ben, and then pulled himself back.
Hes not a fantastic warrior. Hes not super intelligent. He is full of doubt and fear (Yoda always said as much). But he never tips over the edge. And he didn't.
Anyone who thinks 8 was a character assassination of Luke has been reading way to many Luke spank fest, might as well be fan fiction, expanded universe novels where he is the greatest being in the universe that is capable of only the correct choices and the greatest goods and they completely forgot what Luke was like in 4-6.
This might be true, but if this is the story you want to tell, SHOW IT. Show us that in the events of the movie, not in a couple five-second flashbacks.
Show, don't tell. Especially when you're radically changing the basic nature of an existing character.
As LoH already explained, the use of slavery in E1 and especially E8 is really lazy, as shorthand for the enslaved character “having it rough.” But, to me, it is cringey, beyond just being lazy, because of the lack of proportion between depicting the character in this extreme situation, being enslaved, and the casual non-impact this has on the enslaved characters, which thoughtlessly implies that slavery, while not good, isn’t necessarily all that bad. That’s squarely cringe, in my book.
Thinking about it, E7 and E8 really rise or fall on whether someone has a taste for their particular cringe factors. Take away the stuff that makes them cringey, there really is not much left. Big example: the main antagonist, Kylo Ren, is the personification of cringe as a pathetic fanboy. For some, this is actually interesting. For others, it’s unbearable. But it’s cringe, either way.
Young Luke refuses to kill his mass-murdering, child killing, Dark Lord of the Sith and right-hand man to Emperor Palpatine father.
How does that person become willing to himself even CONSIDER murdering his nephew, who he is apprenticing, in the kid's sleep, before he'd even done anything wrong?
Yeah, the Luke we see could be a bitter old man. But the explanation of HOW he became that bitter old man was pretty darn limp. It needed to be set up way better than it was, if they wanted us to buy in.
Exactly this - the Luke we see in the OT cares deeply for his family, even his father, despite knowing what Anakin turned into.
Despite his father being one of the most evil people alive at the time (or, at least, that we see on screen), he believes it is possible to redeem him - and this is after he lost a hand in their first lightsaber duel on Bespin. He makes a sacrifice play at Endor to try to do so, and to help protect his sister at the same time. OK, he was close to Leia anyway, but he only finds out she's his sister in RotJ.
His sacrifice play works. OK, he should be in worse physical shape than we see him in at the end of the film, but he manages to convince his father to return to the Light Side in time to (as far we know at the time) kill Palpatine and save his son. We know this redemption appears to work by his appearance alongside Yoda and Obiwan at the end of the film as a force ghost - I doubt they'd accept his presence were he still seen by them as a Sith.
Luke is likely to have a skewed perception of the Dark Side at this point - but it is likely to be skewed in favour of redemption, rather than murder. If the Force were to show the vision of Ben to the Luke at the end of RotJ, he's more likely to monitor Ben more closely, and work to head off any Dark Side influence - not cut the head from the serpent. And that's before you take into account the fact that Ben is his nephew - as we know how important family ties are to him.
Cranky Old Man Luke isn't inherently a problem. You could tell a decent story around Cranky Old Man Luke. At the end of 7, we have no idea why he is like this - another JJ mystery box at that point in time - but we assume there is a story to tell. The story that we're told doesn't line up with what we know of the character from the OT in any way, shape or form. In fact, from memory, I'd say he's pretty much the only OT character whose ST characterisation doesn't really fit with how we see them in the OT.
Oh, and Lance? You may not like the EU material that's now in Legends, but it was developed in a much better manner than the ST ended up being. There are elements and sub-series I'm not a fan of, for sure, but there were also some damn fine reads in there. As for "might as well be fan fiction", as far as I recall there was quite a bit of Lucas (or LucasFilm, at least) oversight, at least for the first few series. The corrupted Jacen Solo we saw in the EU was a far more interesting character than evil Ben Solo from the films, for example.
Darth Mickey made a big error in shunting it all into being a parallel timeline, rather than picking and choosing the books that they wanted to use to form the base of their new timeline. Hier to the Empire trilogy, Jedi Academy trilogy, the Rogue Squadron and Wraith Squadron books, just off the top of my head.
Matt Swain wrote: Just curious, does anyone on this board have anything good to say about star wars?
Rogue 1 is the best thing ever put to celluloid (or digital equivalent).
Lightsabre fights are awesome spectacles in all 9 of the films, even when the fight mechanics don't necessarily make sense when considering a blade with zero mass and momentum and infinite cutting power.
The ship designs are gorgeously realised (even when I dislike some of the concepts... looking at you starfortress!).
The star wars galaxy has been realised to a level of consistent detail that it lends itself to fans getting truly caught up as if it is a real place, hence disappointment when things jar or seem a bit lazy.
It has pew pew lasers and zoomy space ships. It is a lovely place to visit.
Matt Swain wrote: Just curious, does anyone on this board have anything good to say about star wars?
Yeah, it was pretty ground breaking and got us away from late 70's Nihilism in cinema. Sadly, we have turned the corner and returned back to everything having to be grim and gritty all the time.
I wonder what the "New" Star Wars will be that will allow us to turn the corner back in popular culture?
Matt Swain wrote: Just curious, does anyone on this board have anything good to say about star wars?
Yeah, it was pretty ground breaking and got us away from late 70's Nihilism in cinema. Sadly, we have turned the corner and returned back to everything having to be grim and gritty all the time.
I wonder what the "New" Star Wars will be that will allow us to turn the corner back in popular culture?
Yeah, you're right there. So many 70's movies were dark, depressing, hopeless, etc. SW broke that streak. And it was something no other SW movie could ever be: it was NEW. it was lie nothing on the big screen before. That was it's real secret, it was new.
I think one thing that plagued a lot of movies, especially the sw sequels, after SW was what i call 'Epic Movie Syndrome". When people make star wars they just made the best movie they could, they weren't trying to make an 'epic movie".
But SW exploded the box office and its sequels just had to be epic movies, they were trying to make an epic movie. And when people decide to make an epic movie instead of just the best one they can, it often falls under thw weight is trying to be an epic.
I think STTMP suffered from this a little, and the Dune movie definitely did. In fact when i saw Dune the sound track even seemed to beshouting 'THIS IS AN EPIC-MOVIE! EPIC MO-VIE! EPIC MO-VIE!" I literally imagines hearing those words as the soundtrack blared at me.
Now the LotR movies managed to succeed despite having an epic legend to bear, i almost wish i could have watched them but i'm not a LotR fan. There's nothing wrong with LotR, i am just not into it. (I know one had stephen colbert ina bit part and i watched that cuz i like that guy.)
Matt Swain wrote: Just curious, does anyone on this board have anything good to say about star wars?
Star Wars? Yes. There's a lot of good in it. Rogue One was by far and away the best Disney SW film to date.
Anything good to say about 8 or 9? Did you read the title of the thread?
I don't participate in the Disney/Star Wars promotion thread because 8 killed all interest I have in Disney Star Wars... and because that's a thread for people who are looking forward to future Disney Star Wars releases. I don't go over there and trash-talk Disney Star Wars out of courtesy for people who have a different opinion than I do.
So coming here and trash-talking people who think 8 and 9 are bad is quite DIScourteous, don't you think?
Go to the other thread and discuss what you enjoy. Let us discuss what we didn't enjoy in peace.
Their use in TPM is pretty emblematic of the prequel's overall abundance of good ideas and inability to get them across. In the film, they're used to justify Qui Gon's faith in Anakin rather than letting Anakin do things that make him worth having faith in. Honestly, if that was Lucas's intent, the Midichlorian test should have been what disqualified Anakin from being found and trained by the Jedi, with Anakin's abilities giving Qui Gon reason to push to train him regardless.
Whoa, I have hated the midichlorian idea since 1999... but that would have been awesome.
Oh, and Lance? You may not like the EU material that's now in Legends, but it was developed in a much better manner than the ST ended up being. There are elements and sub-series I'm not a fan of, for sure, but there were also some damn fine reads in there. As for "might as well be fan fiction", as far as I recall there was quite a bit of Lucas (or LucasFilm, at least) oversight, at least for the first few series. The corrupted Jacen Solo we saw in the EU was a far more interesting character than evil Ben Solo from the films, for example.
Darth Mickey made a big error in shunting it all into being a parallel timeline, rather than picking and choosing the books that they wanted to use to form the base of their new timeline. Hier to the Empire trilogy, Jedi Academy trilogy, the Rogue Squadron and Wraith Squadron books, just off the top of my head.
Wether I like something or not has nothing to do with the point I was making. Most of the EU around Luke turns him into a paragon of force virtue. Which is counter to everything about the character seen in the movies. If your idea of Jedi Master Luke is based on the EU then you forgot what Luke was actually like in the movies.
I mean, I think the Legends EU take on Luke was that, barring early post RotJ entanglements with the dark side, he had completed most of his character development within the span of the film series and overcome his faults and demons - which is a valid interpretation.... but at the point at which a character stops developing they cease to be worth continuing to tell stories about. I.E. they continued writing stories about Luke well past the oint that they should have stopped, and there wasn't much else to do with him other than make him Force-Jesus the Mary Sue.
Their use in TPM is pretty emblematic of the prequel's overall abundance of good ideas and inability to get them across. In the film, they're used to justify Qui Gon's faith in Anakin rather than letting Anakin do things that make him worth having faith in. Honestly, if that was Lucas's intent, the Midichlorian test should have been what disqualified Anakin from being found and trained by the Jedi, with Anakin's abilities giving Qui Gon reason to push to train him regardless.
Whoa, I have hated the midichlorian idea since 1999... but that would have been awesome.
Lots of things that went wrong in Star Wars could have been made awesome.
Ewoks were supposed to be wookies. That would have made RotJ make SO much more sense. Ewoks wiping out an Imperial Legion is weird. Wookies doing it would have been awesome.
Applying that to 8...
"Grumpy old man Luke" is a front he's putting on, much like "Crazy green midget Yoda" in ESB. It's a test to see if Rey is worthy of training. Luke blames himself for Ben's fall, but he didn't try to murder Ben in his sleep. Instead Ben turned on him during a lesson, caught Luke by surprise with a force push, and went on to wipe out the rest of the Academy. Luke exiled himself immediately afterwards, but his meditations since have shown him that he can't run from his responsibilities and he still has to train the next generation of Jedi.
Cut Poe's prank call on Hux. That served zero purpose.
The First Order only brings the Dreadnaught and a couple escort carriers to deal with the Resistance. The rest of their fleet is running around accepting surrenders. The bombing raid is done with Y-Wings and B-Wings, possibly even using the B-Wing prototype with the composite laser to deal the killing blow. Casualties remain heavy
Leia remembers that during the battle of Yavin, two full squadrons of fighters left and only three fighters came back, two significantly damage, and doesn't attack Poe for suffering slightly LESS casualties.
Admiral Holdo is in charge of fleet counterintelligence. She refuses to discuss plans with Poe because she's convinced there's a spy in the fleet, and probably thinks it's Finn. So instead of guarding the escape pods, Rose is guarding Finn in the detention area and Poe has to convince her to let him out.
Supremacy shows up to chase the Resistance alone. Again, most of the fleet is still running around accepting surrenders.
Rose and Finn go to Casino planet to get a hacker to hack the First Order computers on the Supremacy so they can find out who the spy is. They find out just a little too late... it's Holdp.
Holdo had bargained with the First Order to get the Resistance in a position where they could be captured with minimal loss of life. That's why they're out of fuel, Holdo arranged it. She gets all the Resistance personnel out in the open in 'stealth' transports so they can be captured, not killed. Hux tells her (in a throwback to Grand Moff Tarkin) "You're far too trusting, my dear," and stars blowing transports up. Holdo turns and rams the Raddus into the Supremacy in normal space, crippling it. Thus, she earns her redemption arc.
Battle on not-Hoth has Luke and Rey arriving together, Rey helps evacuate the Resistance while Luke stalls the First Order attack. He is killed in battle, probably by Kylo Ren in a manner reminiscent of Obi-Wan's death, after cutting a swath through the First Order's troops.
Same basic plot points but VASTLY more interesting, yes?
chaos0xomega wrote: Considering this is a topic I actually know anout from a professional standpoint, Im just going to go ahead and say that you're way overthinking this.
Well, there really isn't any other enjoyment to be derived from the movie, so...
Expect they are great movies. And much better than the prequels?
Same basic plot points but VASTLY more interesting, yes?
No.
Ewoks are a Vietnam nod. Superior enemy technologically getting their ass handed to them by people thought of as backward, bucktoothed, dumb savages with sticks. All of the OT film battles are based in real life parallels. Hoth= Dunkirk, the Original Death Star trench run is the entire plot of the Dam Busters.
Nothing is wrong with Luke's character and is very much in line with Jedi hubris biting them in the ass and going on to be hermits.
The prank was fun bit of levity and Star Wars is chock full of it.
While I would have loved to have seen the Ys and Bs, they were REPUBLIC property. Leia was using decommissioned, black market, and scraps for her Resistance. The bombers were obsolete, but there was still nothing wrong with the scene and their usage. Poe is a hot head, who thinks every problem can be solved with starfighters. He needed a humbling event.
Everything you said about Holdo? Just... no. She's a badass as is. The hyperspace ram was sweet. She doesn't need a redemption arc.
Again the First Order is a modern allegory for alt-rights following in their jack booted reverence of their old glory aka Empire/Nazi. So it makes sense they are egotists, and so cocksure, they will win it's why that even with better tech than anyone else they are absolute blundering idiots for the most part in tactics and critical thinking. and can be taken down completely by regular folk and little homebrew violence in TRS.
Canto Bight and DJ as a red herring is nice. Everyone got so pissy that TFA was walking in the same shoes as the original so then they got pissy that instead of the next Lando, they got that curveball.
The fight on Crait is again taking advantage of the First Order being blind fanatics chasing their daddy's ideals. I would have liked Luke to physically be there, but getting killed serves no purpose. The force projection across vast distances of space was a great show of his power.
Matt Swain wrote: Just curious, does anyone on this board have anything good to say about star wars?
I have. I like everything Star Wars except Episode 2 and the 2d Clone Wars shows, but even then different strokes for different folks. The idea of 7,8, or 9 being cringe in any way is childish toxic fanboys crying crocodile tears.
Expect they are great movies. And much better than the prequels?
They are absolutely not great movies. I wouldn't say they're much better than the prequels either. Equally bad, but in very different ways.
Ewoks are a Vietnam nod. Superior enemy technologically getting their ass handed to them by people thought of as backward, bucktoothed, dumb savages with sticks.
Still would have been better with Wookies.
All of the OT film battles are based in real life parallels. Hoth= Dunkirk
I'm sorry, but... how? Seriously, how? No civilian fleet showed up to rescue the Rebels so I'm so curious how this connection was made.
Everything you said about Holdo? Just... no. She's a badass as is. The hyperspace ram was sweet.
No, it really wasn't. Causes so many continuity issues.
Their use in TPM is pretty emblematic of the prequel's overall abundance of good ideas and inability to get them across. In the film, they're used to justify Qui Gon's faith in Anakin rather than letting Anakin do things that make him worth having faith in. Honestly, if that was Lucas's intent, the Midichlorian test should have been what disqualified Anakin from being found and trained by the Jedi, with Anakin's abilities giving Qui Gon reason to push to train him regardless.
Whoa, I have hated the midichlorian idea since 1999... but that would have been awesome.
Lots of things that went wrong in Star Wars could have been made awesome.
Ewoks were supposed to be wookies. That would have made RotJ make SO much more sense. Ewoks wiping out an Imperial Legion is weird. Wookies doing it would have been awesome.
Applying that to 8...
"Grumpy old man Luke" is a front he's putting on, much like "Crazy green midget Yoda" in ESB. It's a test to see if Rey is worthy of training. Luke blames himself for Ben's fall, but he didn't try to murder Ben in his sleep. Instead Ben turned on him during a lesson, caught Luke by surprise with a force push, and went on to wipe out the rest of the Academy. Luke exiled himself immediately afterwards, but his meditations since have shown him that he can't run from his responsibilities and he still has to train the next generation of Jedi.
Cut Poe's prank call on Hux. That served zero purpose.
The First Order only brings the Dreadnaught and a couple escort carriers to deal with the Resistance. The rest of their fleet is running around accepting surrenders. The bombing raid is done with Y-Wings and B-Wings, possibly even using the B-Wing prototype with the composite laser to deal the killing blow. Casualties remain heavy
Leia remembers that during the battle of Yavin, two full squadrons of fighters left and only three fighters came back, two significantly damage, and doesn't attack Poe for suffering slightly LESS casualties.
Admiral Holdo is in charge of fleet counterintelligence. She refuses to discuss plans with Poe because she's convinced there's a spy in the fleet, and probably thinks it's Finn. So instead of guarding the escape pods, Rose is guarding Finn in the detention area and Poe has to convince her to let him out.
Supremacy shows up to chase the Resistance alone. Again, most of the fleet is still running around accepting surrenders.
Rose and Finn go to Casino planet to get a hacker to hack the First Order computers on the Supremacy so they can find out who the spy is. They find out just a little too late... it's Holdp.
Holdo had bargained with the First Order to get the Resistance in a position where they could be captured with minimal loss of life. That's why they're out of fuel, Holdo arranged it. She gets all the Resistance personnel out in the open in 'stealth' transports so they can be captured, not killed. Hux tells her (in a throwback to Grand Moff Tarkin) "You're far too trusting, my dear," and stars blowing transports up. Holdo turns and rams the Raddus into the Supremacy in normal space, crippling it. Thus, she earns her redemption arc.
Battle on not-Hoth has Luke and Rey arriving together, Rey helps evacuate the Resistance while Luke stalls the First Order attack. He is killed in battle, probably by Kylo Ren in a manner reminiscent of Obi-Wan's death, after cutting a swath through the First Order's troops.
Same basic plot points but VASTLY more interesting, yes?
Theres nothing wrong with Ewoks. Wookiees would have been better, but the Ewoks work for what they are needed for.
Nothing was wrong with Lukes character or portrayal, just stop it. I'm not sure why we're even hung up on the idea that Luke tried to kill Ben - Luke was reacting to a force vision of Ben slaughtering his students, a more reasonable interpretation of events was that he drew his lightsaber in defense against events that weren't really occuring. Luke never says he tried to kill Ben - he says "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." While I understand why its being interpreted the way everyone has, theres another interpretation there too - "for the briefest moment of pure instinct, I thought I could stop these events that I was witnessing but were not actually occuring. The idea that I could stop these visions 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 to teach him and protect him against the dangers of the dark side.
Poes call was awful, agreed on that. I like my Tony Stark/Peter Parker style humor in my Marvel movies just fine, but I don't like it in my Star Wars movies.
The Resistance Bombers are fine, although admittedly far too painfully slow in their portrayal. They looked like they were moving slower than I could run - just speed them up a bit and they are fine. No reason why we have to keep recycling the same fighters over and over and over again just because a couple fans seem to have fetishized them, and as already established - you don't send a Stuka to do the job of a B-52.
Your bit about Leia and Yavin shows that you've entirely missed the point of the events that transpired in Ep 8. Yavin was a battle for survival, the Rebels did not have the ability to escape Yavin, they were trapped there and destined to be destroyed by the Death Star if their last ditch attack failed. Why they are trapped there is never really made clear in A New Hope to begin with, we only know the answer to that now thanks to Rogue One establishing the destruction and scattering of the Rebel Fleet at the Battle of Scarif meant that there was insufficient time and transport capacity immediately available for the Rebels to evacuate Yavin before the Death Star arrived, the most essential personnel and material had already been ferried away (Mon Mothma included, who planned to surrender to the Emperor in the event that Yavin was destroyed), and whatever and whoever was left was trapped their until shortly after the Death Star was destroyed. In the case of Episode 8, the destruction of the Fulminatrix was wholly and completely unnecessary - the Resistance had completed its evacuation of D'kar and the Resistance fleet was assembled and ready to jump away, only waiting on Poe and his starfighters and bombers to return to their hangar bays in order to jump away. Poe's attack was an unnecessary waste of lives and resources that could have been used elsewhere to greater effect instead of being sent on a suicide mission against an enemy that did not need to be destroyed, and in the process he put the Resistance Fleet at greater risk as the Fulminatrix was readying to destroy the Resistance vessels while they waited for the fighters/bombers to jump.
Your change to Holdo works well and would have made a lot more sense than the direction they ended up going in in the film. I suggested something similar when I walked out of the theater. Making her counterintel is unnecessary though, the storyline works fine with her simply being an admiral concerned about a spy in the ranks and thus withholding info on that basis. Would have probably gone a lot farther to making Holdos character more likeable for audiences vs the attitude for the sake of attitude approach that she took in the movie. In general though, it doesn't entirely make sense that one of the few remaining pilots left alive wouldn't have been briefed in on the evacuation plan, or wouldnt have noticed that the hangar and flight crews were buzzing around prepping for something.
The Supremacy's escort is irrelevant, with or without it doesn't really change anything at all. Personally the escort makes more sense given the importance of the vessel (be real y'all would be complaining about how unrealistic it is that this vessel didn't have an escort otherwise), and I like my Star Wars "big" in terms of the scale of the military forces involved. The idea that the First Order successfully occupied and took control of the galaxy with just a handful of star destroyers which needed to zip around collecting surrender documents is just silly.
Everything else about Holdo being the hacker/spy is just dumb. The idea that Luke dies by Kylos blade in battle is also dumb and even more disrespectful to Lukes character than the gak you've been complaining about. As it stands he died on his own terms doing something meaningful and symbolic that was far more impactful than what would have occurred if he just strode out there like some immortal Achilles and died in a scrap with a wannabe. This is a movie where one of the central themes is an interrogation of the myth of heroic self-sacrifice and martyrdom, your approach is completely anathematic to its message and just honestly awful.
If they had sped up the bombers to Star Wars speeds, there probably wouldn’t have been many complaints, even about the “falling” bombs, because they would have felt more Star Wars.
If TIE bombers puttered like golf carts, people would hate them too.
The hyperspace ram in 8 was really just an example of a director wanting a big dramatic moment without considering it changes the whole universe and makes the older movies kind of invalid at that point.
The empire builds a deathstar? Ehh, just have a good sized ship hyperspace ram it in the main weapon dish. Why not load the ship up with explosives first? Apparently hyperspace rams ignore shields, or the FOs huge battleship didn't have any.
It's a case of a director with no sense of continuity and not understanding real fans of the series are into continuity ignoring it to make a dramatic moment that kind of just kills the whole series.
of course JJA did this movie, and he whizzed all over trek continuity in his generic scifi action movies with star trek names plastered over them.
Apparently abrams attitude was basically "The damn fans will take what i decide to make and like it!"
Their use in TPM is pretty emblematic of the prequel's overall abundance of good ideas and inability to get them across. In the film, they're used to justify Qui Gon's faith in Anakin rather than letting Anakin do things that make him worth having faith in. Honestly, if that was Lucas's intent, the Midichlorian test should have been what disqualified Anakin from being found and trained by the Jedi, with Anakin's abilities giving Qui Gon reason to push to train him regardless.
Whoa, I have hated the midichlorian idea since 1999... but that would have been awesome.
Lots of things that went wrong in Star Wars could have been made awesome.
Ewoks were supposed to be wookies. That would have made RotJ make SO much more sense. Ewoks wiping out an Imperial Legion is weird. Wookies doing it would have been awesome.
There is a rumor that the battle of endor was a reference to vietnam. It was about what was perceived as an ignorant, backwards, primitive jungle dwelling people being attacked by a much more advanced imperial military, and the advanced military getting it's collective ass handed to it by these 'primitive" people in jungle guerilla warfare.
Lucas has never confirmed this, and it may be he doesn't want the heat he'd get from people by basically making a battle in which the side presenting the viet cong were the good guys and the advanced invading army representing the americans were the bad guys who got whomped.
So this is a rumor, but it's not an impossible of even ridiculous one. These is one possible hint it's true: The ewoks were short and had buck teeth in general, which was a popular stereotype of the viet cong in the vietnam era. make of that what you will.
Matt Swain wrote: The hyperspace ram in 8 was really just an example of a director wanting a big dramatic moment without considering it changes the whole universe and makes the older movies kind of invalid at that point.
The empire builds a deathstar? Ehh, just have a good sized ship hyperspace ram it in the main weapon dish. Why not load the ship up with explosives first? Apparently hyperspace rams ignore shields, or the FOs huge battleship didn't have any.
It's a case of a director with no sense of continuity and not understanding real fans of the series are into continuity ignoring it to make a dramatic moment that kind of just kills the whole series.
of course JJA did this movie, and he whizzed all over trek continuity in his generic scifi action movies with star trek names plastered over them.
Apparently abrams attitude was basically "The damn fans will take what i decide to make and like it!"
Go back a few pages and you'll find detailed explanation about how wrong your take is.
Also the director you're looking for is Rian Johnson, not JJ Abrams.
creeping-deth87 wrote:They are absolutely not great movies. I wouldn't say they're much better than the prequels either. Equally bad, but in very different ways.
Just you're opinion, but they are vastly superior to the prequels, and some of the best sci-fi movies out there.
creeping-deth87 wrote:I'm sorry, but... how? Seriously, how? No civilian fleet showed up to rescue the Rebels so I'm so curious how this connection was made.
GR-75s are unarmed civilian transports, the Rebels commandeered them. And civilians helped the evac in Dunkirk it was still a military operation with the military still doing most of the heavy lifting. And the inspiration of a valiant rear guard holding up a vastly superior, mechanized force till the major backbone of the rebel/allied troops and equipment could flee is still there. As is the fact that if the evac didn't succeed the war would have been pretty much over at that point. As Churchill put it: The whole root and core and brain of the British Army, on which and around which we were to build, and are to build, the great British armies in the later years of the war, seemed about to perish upon the field or to be led into an ignominious and starving captivity. It was the EXACT same situation the Rebels had on Hoth. Their top leaders, and core of their fighting force was on Hoth.
creeping-deth87 wrote:No, it really wasn't. Causes so many continuity issues.
No it doesn't. There's no continuity issues at all.
Matt Swain wrote:.
of course JJA did this movie, and he whizzed all over trek continuity in his generic scifi action movies with star trek names plastered over them.
Apparently abrams attitude was basically "The damn fans will take what i decide to make and like it!"
You mean he saved Trek by making the 3 best films in the entire filmography of the Trek series? Since that's what he did. Because Shatner movies were absolute trash except for Undiscovered Country (which is actually one of my favorite films) and the Patrick Stewart ones were overly long extended tv episodes.
Also one of the most wicked cool uses of a Beastie Boys song in film
creeping-deth87 wrote:They are absolutely not great movies. I wouldn't say they're much better than the prequels either. Equally bad, but in very different ways.
Just you're opinion,
This part is true.
but they are vastly superior to the prequels,
This part is arguably true.
and some of the best sci-fi movies out there.
This part is one of the most crazy things I have seen someone say on this forum. Besides the fact that Star Wars is not Sci Fi (It's Fantasy. Science Fiction has Science in it. Putting Fantasy in Space doesn't suddenly give it science. It's also a story about wizards with swords fighting a evil emperor who had his black knight kidnap a princess.). There are insanely good scifi movies out there. 7,8,and 9 don't even exist in the same league let alone win the awards.
You mean kinda like strolling in here and saying the ST are great movies? Yeah, you're right. I guess that is just an opinion. And?
but they are vastly superior to the prequels, and some of the best sci-fi movies out there.
I honestly don't even know how to respond to this. There are way, way better sci fi films than the ST.
GR-75s are unarmed civilian transports, the Rebels commandeered them. And civilians helped the evac in Dunkirk it was still a military operation with the military still doing most of the heavy lifting. And the inspiration of a valiant rear guard holding up a vastly superior, mechanized force till the major backbone of the rebel/allied troops and equipment could flee is still there. As is the fact that if the evac didn't succeed the war would have been pretty much over at that point. As Churchill put it: The whole root and core and brain of the British Army, on which and around which we were to build, and are to build, the great British armies in the later years of the war, seemed about to perish upon the field or to be led into an ignominious and starving captivity. It was the EXACT same situation the Rebels had on Hoth. Their top leaders, and core of their fighting force was on Hoth.
The Rebel transports in the film were owned by the Alliance, they weren't commandeered from anyone. There was no call to the civilian populace for help evacuating Hoth, the Alliance does it all with what it has. There are no local ship captains on Hoth or anywhere nearby that valiantly offer their ships to assist.
The Battle of Hoth is nothing like Dunkirk.
No it doesn't. There's no continuity issues at all.
I think the fact people are still having these arguments years after the film dropped is ample proof that yes, it does cause continuity issues.
creeping-deth87 wrote:They are absolutely not great movies. I wouldn't say they're much better than the prequels either. Equally bad, but in very different ways.
Just you're opinion, but they are vastly superior to the prequels, and some of the best sci-fi movies out there.
Then may I point you to the 'we love the sequels' thread, so you're not being disrespectful to the opinions of others in this thread?
creeping-deth87 wrote:I honestly don't even know how to respond to this. There are way, way better sci fi films than the ST.
There's a few, but they certainly belong in the top tier of the best sci fi films ever made. And certainly belong along the side of the OT.
creeping-deth87 wrote:The Rebel transports in the film were owned by the Alliance, they weren't commandeered from anyone. There was no call to the civilian populace for help evacuating Hoth, the Alliance does it all with what it has. There are no local ship captains on Hoth or anywhere nearby that valiantly offer their ships to assist.
The Battle of Hoth is nothing like Dunkirk.
Again the civilian help in Dunkirk was minor. The majority of the evac was done by allied forces. The Battle for Hoth is Dunkirk in space. Both in stakes and actions. And I've explained this clearly already.
Vulcan wrote:Then may I point you to the 'we love the sequels' thread, so you're not being disrespectful to the opinions of others in this thread?
Already posted there. And I've given as much respect as I've received.
Matt Swain wrote: Just curious, does anyone on this board have anything good to say about star wars?
The battle of Geonosis is the highlight of my childhood moviegoing experience. Backflipping Yoda was the most badass thing my 9-year-old mind had ever seen. He's old and he's AGILE?! WOAH.
There's a few, but they certainly belong in the top tier of the best sci fi films ever made. And certainly belong along the side of the OT.
They are absolutely not among the best sci fi films ever made. They're creatively bankrupt, designed by committee films.
Again the civilian help in Dunkirk was minor. The majority of the evac was done by allied forces. The Battle for Hoth is Dunkirk in space. Both in stakes and actions. And I've explained this clearly already.
The civilian help was minor? Jesus. You clearly have no idea what the hell you're talking about here. Only the most amateur armchair historian would make a serious comparison between Hoth and Dunkirk.
So I’m either a fan or a ‘toxic neckbeard whiner’ because I don’t like the new trilogy?
That’s weird, because I was a fan of Star Wars until the prequel trilogy ruined it. The new Disney movies just ruined it further.
Rogue 1 was the best Star Wars movie made to date. The Mandalorian is an acceptable Star Wars show.
I’ve watched the franchise slowly coast downhill for 44 years when I saw ep 4 for the first time in the theatre.
Ep 1,2,3,7 and 8 were not good movies I n any genre. Especially Star Wars movies. They were good for eye candy and little else. The writing, directing, acting and story were very poorly executed in all of them.
Ep 7 and 8 were bad enough that I have no desire to even watch ep 9. And have given up almost entirely on Disney doing something really good with the IP.
When my kids at age 8 and 10 can’t get through anything newer than the OT, it says a lot about how appealing and well made all the rest of those movies are. If my kids can’t stand a movie and can’t even sit through it for the spectacle?
I think that says more about rabid Star Wars fans than the toxic whining neckbeards.
We've had eight pages of passionate and reasonable discussion comparing the relative badness of two movies (though the OP asked about which was more cringy, not which was the worst so we have occasionally strayed).
Let's not let our tempers flare or lose control of our civilites just because one person comes in and tries to troll everyone by slinging insults and breaking rule #1. We're better than that, even if that person isn't.
Back on topic: to cringe is to recoil in either embarasement or in fear of harm. Given that definition, which would you say is more cringe worthy?
For me 8 is the still the more cringy as I was embarrassed at how close it came to doing something fascinating and then completely failing to do the basics of movie making. I feel no embarrassment for 9, only scorn.
I can't really judge episode 9 because I never saw it. I thought 8 was a dumpster fire and it'd never be fixed with 9 and seems like I was right.
As I said 8 was bad but I just stopped giving a crap. I heard mandalorian was good at least or at least halfway decent but i never saw it. I enjoyed rogue one, episode 7 seemed ok but told a similar story to the first series so was forgettable.
For what it's all worth trying to revive a film property with a trilogy decades after the fact usually fails except with James bond for some reason.
Henry wrote: Back on topic: to cringe is to recoil in either embarasement or in fear of harm. Given that definition, which would you say is more cringe worthy?
By that definition I didn't find either movie crngeworthy at all. I was somewhat bored throughout Episode 8 because everything was drawn out too long and it didn't show anything worthwhile. I wanted Episode 9 to get to the point a third way through, and was half asleep by the time they got to the Deathstar. I dimly remember something about Palpi being ALL THE SITH and Rey being ALL THE JEDI (no idea what that nonsense is about), but otherwise I have precious little recollection of the movie's finale. I know there's the Charge of the Light Brigade on the hull of a Star Destroyer, but I know that because it was in the trailer. If you asked me now, I'd swear that wasn't in the movie.
Hardly enough emotion in my response to find it in me to cringe.
flamingkillamajig wrote: I heard mandalorian was good at least or at least halfway decent but i never saw it.
If you enjoyed Rogue One you should probably watch it. It's good in its production values and I find it similarly respectful in slotting in with the established narrative of the original trilogy (and surrounding material as far as I have seen).
In my opinion Mandalorian does a much better job of world building than Episode 7 (with the comparison being they are both set post Endor). The story is smaller scale and closer to the end of the Empire, so nothing that you know of the setting is entirely thrown out and replaced with something new that, as was the case in Episode 7, the movie refuses to depict. Mandalorian isn't concerned with wider galactic politics and only hints at things in a similar fashion as the dissolution of the senate in Episode 4, but unlike Episode 7 Mandalorian doesn't deal with big fate of the galaxy stuff where an explanation of the political landscape and the motivation of large factions is kind of necessary as a backdrop to the conflict. It's self-contained enough to not need much of a larger galactic background, while adding glimpses of the New Republic and a view of an Imperial remnant that continues the story after Episode 6 a lot more naturally than the 30 year jump with an effectively new setting Episode 7 presented.
You'll get more out the show if you saw Clone Wars and Rebels, though, as the show also picks up the odd thread from those shows. They also both depict Mandalorians of the recent past and give you some context to the titular character and how he fits in.
flamingkillamajig wrote: I heard mandalorian was good at least or at least halfway decent but i never saw it.
If you enjoyed Rogue One you should probably watch it. It's good in its production values and I find it similarly respectful in slotting in with the established narrative of the original trilogy (and surrounding material as far as I have seen).
In my opinion Mandalorian does a much better job of world building than Episode 7 (with the comparison being they are both set post Endor). The story is smaller scale and closer to the end of the Empire, so nothing that you know of the setting is entirely thrown out and replaced with something new that, as was the case in Episode 7, the movie refuses to depict.
It was great... until... you realised there was zero peril. Honestly I don't understand how any world was subjugated by the Empire as their elite troops are objectively awful.
Rogue One? It demonstrated what happens when a guerrilla force decides to fight a pitched battle. That is, they all die (in space and on the ground). Mandalorian? There is literally never enough Empire soldiers to worry the heroes (apart from when half a dozen are hiding badly at the end of tunnel, despite ten times their number just dying they were apparently scary).
Yes, the disrespect for Stormtroopers is real. But it's been like that since 1983 and Mandalorian is hardly any more egregious than other media.
As much as I like Rogue One, Storm Troopers don't actually fare any better there. Stormtroopers are allowed to take down enemy troopers, as they occasionally are in other movies and shows, but even the pinpoint accuracy of Death Troopers fails the instant a protagonist strolls across the open without a care in the world. They just stop hitting.
If that's not something you can look past, I don't know how you'll ever enjoy Star Wars.
Geifer wrote: Yes, the disrespect for Stormtroopers is real. But it's been like that since 1983 and Mandalorian is hardly any more egregious than other media.
As much as I like Rogue One, Storm Troopers don't actually fare any better there. Stormtroopers are allowed to take down enemy troopers, as they occasionally are in other movies and shows, but even the pinpoint accuracy of Death Troopers fails the instant a protagonist strolls across the open without a care in the world. They just stop hitting.
If that's not something you can look past, I don't know how you'll ever enjoy Star Wars.
On the other hand, maybe this thing from the 70s should get better 50 years later?
Geifer wrote: Yes, the disrespect for Stormtroopers is real. But it's been like that since 1983 and Mandalorian is hardly any more egregious than other media.
As much as I like Rogue One, Storm Troopers don't actually fare any better there. Stormtroopers are allowed to take down enemy troopers, as they occasionally are in other movies and shows, but even the pinpoint accuracy of Death Troopers fails the instant a protagonist strolls across the open without a care in the world. They just stop hitting.
If that's not something you can look past, I don't know how you'll ever enjoy Star Wars.
They still managed to hit them a few times. Up yours force!
Plus the rebel fighters blew up in pleasing numbers in space and din;t last long planet side...
Geifer wrote: Yes, the disrespect for Stormtroopers is real. But it's been like that since 1983 and Mandalorian is hardly any more egregious than other media.
As much as I like Rogue One, Storm Troopers don't actually fare any better there. Stormtroopers are allowed to take down enemy troopers, as they occasionally are in other movies and shows, but even the pinpoint accuracy of Death Troopers fails the instant a protagonist strolls across the open without a care in the world. They just stop hitting.
If that's not something you can look past, I don't know how you'll ever enjoy Star Wars.
On the other hand, maybe this thing from the 70s should get better 50 years later?
But can it?
Consider the A-Team, a show from the Eighties that had a team of ex-special forces guys who couldn't hit for gak. They didn't shoot up their opponents quickly and efficiently even in situations where it would have saved them from getting in a tight spot, which as I seem to remember would have been relevant a couple of times. How believable is that? Exactly. Yet that's how it was portrayed, for reasons I'm sure had nothing to do with in setting plausibility. Then a couple of years ago we got an A-Team movie remake where the team of ex-special forces guys actually was very good at shooting up their opponents and certainly didn't hold back. Presumably because the producers, very wisely so, assumed they couldn't sell special forces that can't shoot for gak to an audience anymore.
What's that got to do with Star Wars? The A-Team existed and worked in the Eighties as a TV show that was followed by jack all for a quarter of a century before someone dug it out for a movie. I remember there were people that noted that specific departure from the original and disapproved, but there was no notable buzz about it. Because there was no notable A-Team fan presence. With Star Wars being as big as it is, with near continuous media presence and new content built on the fateful decisions from (nearly) fifty years ago, and several generations of fans that have grown up with those specific depictions, some things are so cemented that I doubt any producer would have the balls to look at them and question the validity of the basic principle.
I'd love to see Stormtroopers redeemed, but in practical terms I think it's too late for that. I guess there's always games where basic game design and balance dictate that Stormtroopers cannot universally suck, but movies and shows? I don't think I'll see that change in my lifetime.
Geifer wrote: Yes, the disrespect for Stormtroopers is real. But it's been like that since 1983 and Mandalorian is hardly any more egregious than other media.
As much as I like Rogue One, Storm Troopers don't actually fare any better there. Stormtroopers are allowed to take down enemy troopers, as they occasionally are in other movies and shows, but even the pinpoint accuracy of Death Troopers fails the instant a protagonist strolls across the open without a care in the world. They just stop hitting.
If that's not something you can look past, I don't know how you'll ever enjoy Star Wars.
They still managed to hit them a few times. Up yours force!
Plus the rebel fighters blew up in pleasing numbers in space and din;t last long planet side...
Navy pilots never had the same Ewok trauma as Stormtroopers.
The sad part is the first time we see Storm Troopers they clean house. They quickly and professionally sweep through a corvette. This meshes well with Obi-wan telling us that they're crack shots, leaving precise and professional blaster marks.
Once the heroes get involved we see that accuracy disappear, but that's largely justified by the fact that they were ordered to let them escape.
It's seems more like people forgot that reality and the memes replaced the reality.
You know what bugged me about star wars? In Empire strikes back Han told a rebel dude "I'll see you in hell!" I guess hell exists in this galaxy alongside force ghosts.
Could just be a figure of speech, I'm an atheist and I still say stuff like that.
When it comes to Star Wars canon that's not what bothers me much!
How come everyone can just communicate seamlessly with each other? There's aliens and droids which speak in nothing but simple beeps or guttural noises yet they appear to be able to convey and be understood by everyone just fine. Even someone that seems to have lived a very sheltered life on a farm in the sandy arse end of nowhere can understand these things fine.
8 was more cringe-inducing than 9, but that also had to do with the level of expectation at that point in time. 7 was a rehash but at least it set up some interesting story beats and characters. When all that lead to nothing in 8, and was replaced by nonsense, it was a far greater shock than watching 9, where expectations were very low to begin with.
In a vacuum, 8 takes the cake, too. The casino planet, Rose's spectacular statement after saving Finn, the whole plot around Holdo and her justification for what she did and did not do, Leia surviving space, Luke trying to murder his nephew and turning into a defeatist, Snoke being a complete moron – there is just too much to ignore.
kirotheavenger wrote: Could just be a figure of speech, I'm an atheist and I still say stuff like that.
When it comes to Star Wars canon that's not what bothers me much!
How come everyone can just communicate seamlessly with each other? There's aliens and droids which speak in nothing but simple beeps or guttural noises yet they appear to be able to convey and be understood by everyone just fine. Even someone that seems to have lived a very sheltered life on a farm in the sandy arse end of nowhere can understand these things fine.
I meant more the lack of universe consistency. I'm an atheist too but that God stuff doesn't bother me anymore. There are far bigger annoying things to me now.
Fiction has some weird things in it. For instance what do robots need to do bounty hunting for? Do they have a family to feed somehow? I suppose sentience would matter here. Assassin droids make more sense if robots lack sentience. You tell em to kill somebody and they do it and report back in.
That's a good point on the beeps and growls thing. Perhaps it was like dogs somehow being able to communicate via barks in tv like lassie or Timmy falling down a well or something. Who knows? Star wars is kind of an old series at this point.
To be fair, the vast majority of the time when Luke is talking to and understands R2 he is in his x wing. Its not like he can hear R2 from the cockpit. There must be a HUD in the x wing console that reads out messages from the astromech and a mic that the astromuch is plugged into so it can hear the pilot.
That doesn't explain why an astromech needs to speak in beeps to begin with. If c3po can speak 6 million forms of communication and have most of its body be made up of mechanics for moving then why shouldn't an astromech have enough harddrive for something other than morse code.
For that matter, why have translator robots at all. The other droids clearly have such advanced programing that they should have plenty of room for plenty of languages including by default galactic common.
Lance845 wrote: To be fair, the vast majority of the time when Luke is talking to and understands R2 he is in his x wing. Its not like he can hear R2 from the cockpit. There must be a HUD in the x wing console that reads out messages from the astromech and a mic that the astromuch is plugged into so it can hear the pilot.
That doesn't explain why an astromech needs to speak in beeps to begin with. If c3po can speak 6 million forms of communication and have most of its body be made up of mechanics for moving then why shouldn't an astromech have enough harddrive for something other than morse code.
For that matter, why have translator robots at all. The other droids clearly have such advanced programing that they should have plenty of room for plenty of languages including by default galactic common.
I assume the reason is not technological but sociological. Out of universe, why are little droids all beepy? To seem cute, quirky, non-threatening? Perhaps that is also the reason in-universe. The more expendable droids sound more like machines or pets and less like people. There are classes of droids who are treated more like people than the laborers and machine-interfacers, and they have humanoid speech. Perhaps this is all baggage from the way droids are treated by the galaxy, as sapient yet disposable slaves.
We’ve seen an Astromech droid capable of humanoid speech—the same astromech droid who upgraded herself to have limbs and a gender role, the only droid who fought for droid rights.
I suspect the thing with the droids is a product of the time (70s) and Lucas' limited imagination when it came to scientific stuff.
Monotask robots (translators, ship repair/accessories, etc) probably fit with the limits of what he thought machines could do.
The 'computers' in the early movies (nearly 100% physical switches or droid screwdriver ports) certainly leave a lot of gaps with even a couple decades worth of computer tech.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: I assume the reason is not technological but sociological. Out of universe, why are little droids all beepy? To seem cute, quirky, non-threatening? Perhaps that is also the reason in-universe. The more expendable droids sound more like machines or pets and less like people.
It's reasoning after the fact but that's not half bad. It fits with the astromech droids getting picked off one by one in TPM and R2 beginning to stand out by the humanisation projected by Padme. I wonder if there would be more in the series that would fit this.
On the subject of languages, am I remembering right in Solo that Chewbacca is surprised to learn that Han speaks Wookie?
Lance845 wrote: To be fair, the vast majority of the time when Luke is talking to and understands R2 he is in his x wing. Its not like he can hear R2 from the cockpit. There must be a HUD in the x wing console that reads out messages from the astromech and a mic that the astromuch is plugged into so it can hear the pilot.
That doesn't explain why an astromech needs to speak in beeps to begin with. If c3po can speak 6 million forms of communication and have most of its body be made up of mechanics for moving then why shouldn't an astromech have enough harddrive for something other than morse code.
For that matter, why have translator robots at all. The other droids clearly have such advanced programing that they should have plenty of room for plenty of languages including by default galactic common.
In ESB at least, there is a screen that fills with text as R2 is speaking to him, so there's at least some machine translation happening (the X-wing does have computers running ship stuff - it even has a hyperdrive, just no space for a navicomputer - because the astromech socket allows them to plug one of them in to take that role. They are astrogators as well as mechanics, hence "astro-mech" ).
That said, certain beeping "phrases" were understood in much the same way that certain IT nerds of an age can understand what the myriad beeping noises made by old Pcs mean.
kirotheavenger wrote: Could just be a figure of speech, I'm an atheist and I still say stuff like that.
When it comes to Star Wars canon that's not what bothers me much!
How come everyone can just communicate seamlessly with each other? There's aliens and droids which speak in nothing but simple beeps or guttural noises yet they appear to be able to convey and be understood by everyone just fine. Even someone that seems to have lived a very sheltered life on a farm in the sandy arse end of nowhere can understand these things fine.
Babel fish are an endemic parasite. They get everywhere exposed to the wider galaxy. Hence none on the ewoks as they would have started to catch them after the rebels showed up.
