Star Wars 8 shit talk

I just realized there was no "I have a bad feeling about this."

Sweet.

“I have a bad feeling about this” could have been spoken by the protagonists during almost every scene, tbf

Spoilery take on how this is finally the common people’s Star Wars

http://www.vulture.com/2017/12/rey-parents-star-wars-last-jedi-populism.html

BB-8 spitting coins and slot machine tokens at dandy arms dealers was not the subtlest class-warfare flourish

boy this is kind of a mess huh

nice to see eddie hitler getting work tho

my kids literally had to pee three times during this movie so i missed a lot of it (rey in a hall of mirrors??) but it was p good

the action didn't feel as lean and directed as TFA. there were even bits that were kind of.. boring? too much snoke. that was a cool red room though. and i loved the way it all burned and fell apart.

once everybody's safe i noticed rey just chilling with her characteristic bandages wrapped all up her arm EXCEPT on the actual place where she's been slashed lol

there was a LOT of innocent deaths going on in this one, like entire ships full of people, again and again and again :(

the escape on the beasts was magnificent

agreed with the pointlessness of the poe/finn/rose gambit, and how quickly poe's forgiven

when rose and finn are in that cell, realising they're fucked, and they get an offer of help from an admittedly shady character, why aren't they immediately on the case? i know the script wants us to understand they don't trust him or believe him but what's the alternative?? they literally are like "nah we're good" when he promises he can break the code. uh? lost of lot of momentum and motivation for me there and i suspend disbelief for a whole lot less, believe me

and it felt like rey was on that goddamn island forever

hux has really taken snivelling to a new level tho, it is quite an accomplishment

Another layer to this is how it seems like Johnson just decided to throw away everything from TFA he didn’t like. Snoke. Phasma. Kylo’s mask. By the end of this he’s boiled it down to the one big conflict that matters, taken the meaningless mysteries off the board, and raised the stakes by an order of magnitude

Johnson had said that the plan was for this to be the more Luke-centric movie and the next one more focused on Leia (for reasons now clearer) iirc

i liked how tangibly glad poe was to see finn. probably the best thing for me about the OG trilogy was how much hand/luke/leia's friendships mattered.

on that tip, near the end, when poe introduced himself to rey i was like..... they haven't met?? that's crazy

anyone else wonder if rose’s sister was originally written as her romantic partner?

huh?

i did!!

my man

tell you 1 thing for sure.. i've no idea where they go from here.

if anyone can write them out of the corner they’ve painted themselves into it’s... jj abrams?

oh

next film will have only droids and chewy as holdovers from the original.

I do hope Finn has more to do in the next film, I feel like he was kind of misused here. I just saw the movie for the second time, and I still don't really like that whole casino scene. bah.

the attempt at social/class commentary shit was weird and lame

but yet not weird enough

there's good weird and bad weird ffs

hall of reys + teat monster + jodorowsky room were good weird

Mark Hamill was very good in this btw

Really dug Salty Luke

yeah, hammill, driver and kelly marie tran were the standout performances for me

i could watch domnhall gleeson get smacked around all day

I was sad to see all the women pilots get such short shrift tbf.

Completely concur, bg.

Hux standing awkwardly over the murder scene as Snoke’s bottom half flops out of the throne was great too.

Simon I would like to read a more detailed take from you on the lameness of the social/class commentary if you’re up for it

the best, most surprising scene in this (yoda's tough-love destruction of the tree and dismissal of the jedi order) also kinda ends up poisoning the rest of it, i think

it creates the expectation that there might be further shocking twists, which makes it extra disappointing when kylo asks rey to join him and she doesn't - how much more interesting might it have been if she had taken his hand, or she had managed to persuade him to give up on the dark side? instead we're back to a big climactic battle scene, in which both sides line up and slowly advance towards one another across a flat white plain, which seems like an unintentional visual metaphor for how the film feels after the goodies and baddies are firmly established once more

the destruction of the tree is also completely undercut in the penultimate scene when the jedi books show up in the drawer on the falcon - so in the end all yoda really did was create a big bonfire for luke and tell him that failures are important like he's a cheap motivational speaker

BG extremely otm, I will write more on the class stuff later but these points are related

lol was i the only one who interpreted those books as an allegory for the prequels

i was unclear on where Rey and/or the Falcon were supposed to be much of the time

The Last Jedi currently rocking a 56% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, compared to 88% for TFA and 87% for Rogue One

"anti-SJW" reactionaries' influence at work there I assume

all bollocks that though innit, TFA is *237* on the IMDB 250! i can bet you this goes higher or GETS there come 2019's episode. i'll bet money.

Luke thought his final task needed to be destroying the Jedi legacy so Dead Yoda did it for him and reminded him it was never supposed to be dogma and artifacts, so that Luke could get over himself and do his real job, saving the last of the rebels.

Dead Yoda also would have known that Rey had already swiped the texts. These old masters and their obfuscatory vague statements!!!

The piece I linked above mentioned that the stable boy was Force sensitive, btw - did I miss something?

I also really liked, post mortem, realizing why Luke always dodged and didn’t parry at any point during his duel with Kylo.

yeah, I get that’s what yoda was actually up to- it’s just that the narrative that his misdirection points to is much more interesting than what actually happens

which is unfortunate imo

I feel like that narrative can help fill out the next 150 minutes. After all the suffering inflicted on the rebels I feel like an old man and his dead prof burning down a tree was kind of “yup”

xxxp the stable boy very subtly Force-pulls his broom into his hand

how much more interesting might it have been if she had taken his hand, or she had managed to persuade him to give up on the dark side?

maybe it's just a part of living in this current world, but one of the best parts of this movie was that it briefly convinced me that Kylo had the right idea, like yeah! it's all shit, burn it all down and start over!

Kylo and Rey have insane chemistry - parts of this felt a bit like watching Reylo fanfic writ large. did they really need a gratuitous shot of shirtless Adam Driver?

re: Tombot's request for more on the attempts at social commentary

I guess I have two angles here, one of which I think is fair and the other is transparently unfair. The fair one is that the Star Wars universe is by design too simplistic for any insightful political allegory or commentary on a world that resembles our own. Good, evil. Dark, light. Rebellion, Empire. First Order, Resistance. For me and most viewers (though not all), the original trilogy works because there's lots of cool shit to look at and the plot beats are linked to big, obvious-but-effective emotional cues. By the same token, again for most viewers, the attempts to map out political intrigue in the prequel trilogy were misbegotten. (I'm sure people have written eloquently about the politics of the prequels but tbh I don't remember them well and fuck rewatching them.) The attempts here to introduce shades of grey - the both-sides-do-it arms deals, the class disparity on the casino planet, even to an extent Kylo Ren's hatred of the universe's own simplistic mythology - hint at a more interesting universe that these movies, by design, can't deliver on. By the end of the next one, Benicio's character (the mouthpiece for the movie's most ambiguous sentiments) will either redeem himself in service of the Resistance (in Han-ish style) or (less likely) be righteously killed. When the Resistance inevitably triumphs and takes control, they'll tack on some phony fix for the working underclass. Kylo's rejection of the universe's monolithic forces...just ends with him doubling down on Being Evil. So ultimately these nods at real-world issues feel like nothing more than a sop to contemporary audiences that expect "timely" digs at the 1%.

My unfair angle is that coming so soon after the Disney-Fox deal, the notion of this unspeakably immense conglomerate trying to sell class warfare back to us via one of their most simplistic properties left a foul taste in my mouth.

"the destruction of the tree is also completely undercut in the penultimate scene when the jedi books show up in the drawer on the falcon "

fuck I saw this movie TWICE and didn't notice that.

Something I will give Johnson credit for is that he knows people are going to watch this over and over so he lets things like that and the force-reach at the end go by in a split second, unremarked upon.

Things I liked. Almost all the non-Benecio Del Toro and Laura Dern characters are likeable and well done. Creatures. Almost all of it looked great. It had different beats than the other films and they mostly worked. Some good fights.

Things I didn’t like. Soooo long. Casino Royale subplot. Three annoying kids.

Overall though I have a distinct sense that Driver is basically carrying the entire plot for this trilogy. I’m not sure there is much else here which sticks.

This was great.

Some of my friends are butthurt about all the dead end side missions as if that wasn't the intent.

They were all impulsively rolling the dice with Hail Marys when retreat was the only answer that made sense all along. The film redefined what heroism in the Rebel universe means. The most heroic moment being simple cunning sleight of hand.

Everybody wanted the mysteries of TFA to pay off with Empire-esque plot twists and...we've done that before. Why shrink the universe more?

Enjoyed this. Uncollected thoughts:

There was a graphic starkness to the b&w shot post-suicide run that struck me as straight anime.

BSG connections were stark in this, with echoes from both the old and the new series. The casino planet was straight out of the pilot of old BSG, wasn’t it?

Lots of calling back to old bits that were then subverted. C3P0’s line, the lightsaber grab from the throne arm, even the entire last third of the movie. Nice that they felt the need to have a nameless character point out that it was actually “salt.”

Leia uses the same pistol she wields in New Hope.

Interesting how Benicio has played an untrustworthy space character in two different Disney franchises.

More outright comedy in this than I expected. The iron joke was great. Some of Poe’s lines were a little too cute; the repeated “yeah I’ll hold” and actually saying “big-ass” at one point.

Apparently JGL voiced a character.

All in all, I wish Rian Johnson was doing Ep9 instead of JJ, but I dig the fact that he has his own trilogy to go play in.

There was a graphic starkness to the b&w shot post-suicide run that struck me as straight anime.

yeah, this was easily the most striking shot in the whole movie (the sudden silence on the soundtrack is a really great choice too) - there was an audible gasp from the audience i saw it with

one thing that also really stuck out to me is rey's narration in the mirror sequence - is this the first time in the whole of star wars that we hear an inner monologue?

or at least what is presented as an inner monologue before we see cut to rey speaking those lines?