The Last Jedi is (Still) Indefensible - Part One: Luke Skywalker & Nostalgia
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- Опубликовано: 28 май 2024
- Star Wars: The Last Jedi has been trending on Twitter, and it seems people still want to try and defend this cultural catastrophe. Though five years have passed, their arguments have got no better. It's as though their character progression was penned by Rian Johnson himself.
This video goes through one of the more formal defences of the film, recently published on MovieWeb. The review attempts to argue that what TLJ did to Luke Skywalker was a good and necessary thing, that Rian Johnson should be praised for being "provocative", and that TLJ as a whole was the best of the sequels - and that, further, it actually improves on some of the tropes and ideas of the original trilogy.
It's all wrong.
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The thing i love most about the sequel trilogy is that it made the prequel trilogy a masterpiece for the ages by comparison.
At least the prequels had a set story to tell. Like Dutch Van Der Linde, the prequels had a GODAMN PLAAAAN
The prequels have always been a masterpiece for the ages, just as episodes 4-6 are.
@@fundhund62 I agree! I loved the prequels before it was cool to love the prequels. Honestly ROTS might be my favorite Star Wars movie!
@@agentstevehaines9164 My favorites are Attack of the Clones and The Empire Strikes Back.
There is something magical about the way George Lucas handles the middle chapters of his trilogies.
@@fundhund62 love both of those as well! Empire is probably my 2nd favorite and Rogue One was surprisingly excellent considering eposodes 7-9 were TRASH! I think i like ROTS so much because its very dark and gritty, and seeing Vader come into being really compliments the more fun and light hearted parts of Star Wars. It brings balance 😉
After years of contemplation over the Sequel Trilogy, I have concluded that for the irreparable harm TLJ did to the franchise, TFA did more to destroy Star Wars. Yes it was loaded with nostalgia and made people feel good, but it was basically a shot for shot reboot of A New Hope. That in itself was the tragedy. It undid everything the OT accomplished.
It reset our OT heroes to their original states. The Empire is back. Leia is leading a rebellion, putting duty above all else. Luke is alone on a distant planet. Han & Chewie are scoundrels working with the worst factions of the galaxy to turn a quick buck. Worse yet, we learn that all 4 of our heroes who learned the value of friendship, family, and love allowed Han & Leia’s own son to be turned to the Dark Side. All 4 are worse off than they began so many decades ago. They are not just reset, but also utter failures in every way imaginable. On top of that great injustice, JJ also gave us new characters. But rather than developing those characters, he just created questions about them. TFA, although entertaining to watch, undid everything that came before it, resolved it’s conflict, and left us with no answers, no understanding, and nowhere to go.
I do not say this to defend TLJ, because as you have said, it is indefensible. However I think more blame needs to be laid at the feet of JJ Abrams
The last time I loved star wars was just before watching TFA.
People gloss over the loss of hope and excitement for SW, after seeing just as you said, a wish version of A New Hope. No character arcs. No one to give a damn.
Seeing Luke at the end made people talk about seeing him, not the movie. I am still not over that episode VII.
A shitshow.
I watched TFA and immediately forgot that I watched it. I still remember experiencing A New Hope in the theater in 1977. It changed filmmaking, the opening scene was incredible. It was a once in a lifetime theater experience.
As someone who dropped a scathing review of TFA the day it came out, I wholeheartedly agree. I think Rian was a strange and incompetent director, but Abrams deeply gutted the franchise - and the third film in that trilogy does SO much damage to the overall story and lore that it's surprising people even talk about TLJ anymore.
The one thing TLJ has going for it is that it is experimental, which... if nothing else... is at least an attempt at copying Lucas in some way.
Even Lucas came out and said that the biggest trouble with the people taking over was that they lacked creativity and simply wanted to copy and paste successful ideas. Even Finn (who Abrams dumped about two minutes after he introduced him) was derived from the sympathetic idea of brainwashed clones.
People forget that it was Abrams who put Luke in isolation with a breadcrumb trail of treasure maps leading to him (a tactic that proves just as dangerous for his desperate friends as it is open to exploitation by resourceful foes). It was Abrams who borrowed Jurassic Park lines with the raptors (ahem, rathtars) on the ship that conveniently only insta-murdered enemies of the protagonists. It was Abrams who obliterated Han Solo's entire redemption arc from the original trilogy and made him a grumpy deadbeat divorcee. It also Abrams who decided that the Millenium Falcon was parked long enough at a remote outpost on Rey's planet until it could conveniently be called a "piece of junk" (even though there was nothing else around) and then expertly piloted by a scavenger. It was Abrams who decided that the First Order (who kidnapped children across the entire galaxy and built thousands of ships and a whole planetary weapon) was possible or even plausible in a post-Empire-collapse galaxy. It was Abrams who decided what was needed was a bigger, better Death Star rather than something creative or viable. It was Abrams who eliminated several planets and pretended that the beams were visible from the surfaces of hundreds of other planets. It was even Abrams who screwed up hyperspace travel by allowing the Falcon to jump through the planet's shields (which negates half the sacrifices of Return of the Jedi).
Yup, I've said that too. TFA superficially seems okay to people because it's not terrible as a standalone film for someone who has never seen Star Wars, and is acceptable to someone who only vaguely remembers it or who never really thinks about it. It looks and sounds like Star Wars, it has the kind of story beats Star Wars has, it's overall not an incompetent film, just a shallow knock-off, almost like if Asylum Films made a version of Star Wars but somehow with a bigger budget. But as soon as you ask questions, as soon as you try to connect it to the OT, as soon as you start analyzing anything, you realize it's paper-thin and has nothing to offer. Which is pretty much a description of Abrams' Star Trek movies too, so it really seems to be all he knows how to do.
Yep. I thought the new Star Wars was in trouble the minute I heard that the old actors would be back, and that Abrams was directing. And bringing back the Empire as bigger and badder than ever just made no sense at all. Lazy, cheap cash grab.
"The order 66 of the franchise."
Best description ever!
On a fundamental level I think it was the decision to make TFA a soft reboot that doomed the sequel trilogy. It's insane to think that the entirety of Episode VII was designed to undo all the story progression that happened in Episode VI.
Destroy the Jedi
Luke knew all about how to deal with the dark side through his trials in the first three movies including helping his father back to the light...he should have been best set to help Ben Solo...always thought that was story breaking for anyone who even slightly knows about the originals...
But… but… but he had a bad dream, so obviously he had to try to murder his nephew in his sleep.
@@TheLittlePlatoon LOL! Indeed! The only option is to end the possibility of having to teach someone properly... that's not mt Luke! 😉
The general idea of them actively going into the "Luke wants to rot dying on an island" plot point like this. Instead of somewhat recontextualizing it in a way of, "oh no his ship crashed while he was visiting for council to these force ghosts. So he got stuck and he left a backup map in case of this happening!", they just double down on it in the worst most character ruining way possible.
I’ve honestly grown to like the Luke vs Kylo scene. Everything else about Luke was Garbo
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense - the only way to protect Leia was to murder her son, so she could be safe, and the only way to save his academy was to murder his own padawan, the same lessons he learned in the OT, murder first, ask questions later. I'm sure Leia and his other Jedi would understand that sometimes a little murdering is just so tempting it can't be helped when you want to protect everything you love from the Dark Side. Pretty sure Yoda said a little murdering is OK, if they're asking for it.
The Last Jedi did shatter the fanbase, and Rian Johnson does deserve the blame, in addition to whatever committee checked the boxes during production of that horrid production. However, what I find is often overlooked is that the first film in the sequel trilogy more or less set up the second film to be a failure. I remember going to see TFA with my non-Star Wars fan girlfriend back in 2015 and even she felt something was off. Her: "So Luke abandoned everyone after Kylo killed all the Jedi?" Me: "It looks that way". Her: "but what about his responsibility?". Me: "I guess we will get a satisfying answer to that in the next film." But we never got an satisfying answer to that question, did we? What other choice did we have but to face Luke as a failure? All of this in is in addition, of course, to the handwaving about the rise of the First Order, the inexplicably tragic separation of Han and Leia, the building of third(!) Death Star under the watchful eyes of the Republic. You almost begin to wonder if they just wanted to get that first film out as quick as possible from a "hotshot" director with a penchant for "mystery" boxes that he had little inclination to resolve.
Then you go back to 2013 and read stories about JJ Abrams begging Disney and Kathleen Kennedy for more time to make TFA and how the Disney board refused his request and said it had to be in theatres in two years, whether he had finished it or not. You begin to wonder if it was even a single director's fault, but instead just the weight of the massive anti-cultural machine that is Disney. You might even come full circle and believe that Rian, as bumbling as his attempt was, might have been an actual legitimate attempt to resolve the contradictions of the franchise and modern genre filmmaking as demonstrated in the first film of the sequel trilogy. A film that set up a half dozen mysteries and missed opportunities, and began the undercooked deconstruction of our hero's journey which Rian Johnson simply continued in the only way he saw fit given the material and obligations he was given.
In any case, very much enjoying the film critique portion of your channel, ,especially those Star Trek videos. Keep up the interesting work.
Not to sound like a broken record, but Disney really in retrospect seems to have this very strange idea of bulldozing anything previously related to a property they've attained. Something which alot of Expanded Universe fans unfortunately have experienced since 2011.
Forget the sequels. Kill em if ya have to.
@@alexgillis9446 Wait kill what exactly? Star Wars only has prequels and they aren't THAT bad.
It was Bob Iger. He felt like he overpaid for the franchise, and was determined to get that sweet, sweet, Return on Investment rolling in ASAP. He fired the original scriptwriter he inherited from Lucas (Michael Arndt) because he was taking too long, but Iger had already greenlit all of pre-production based on Arndt's unfinished script treatments. This meant that studios were leased, locations scouted, actors signed on multi-year contracts, costumes were made, props created, sets constructed, etc... all based on an incomplete script and all set to that quick turn around. JJ was ordered to finish the script in a few weeks while also keeping everything from the early half of Arndt's treatments that had already been locked into production. This was too much so he brought Kasdan on board to help him crap out a finished script.
Purportedly, SKB was JJ's idea. This is why the movie feels so disjointed when the second half begins and all the characters act like they've always known about SKB despite it never having been set up or foreshadowed before this. That was the point where JJ stopped using Arndt's material and began writing new stuff. Not to say the first half of the movie was 100% Arndt... but more of a remix of his characters, settings, and ideas as these had all been locked in via pre-production and contracts. The script was so rushed there were even major revisions while filming: see Poe mysteriously surviving.
Iger even wanted JJ to direct all three movies with the two-year gap between releases meaning they had overlapping production schedules... He was just cracking the whip and rushing production at ludicrous speeds. It's STAR WARS, baby! Just shit something out and the sheep will lap it up! The worst part of this attitude? He wasn't wrong: TFA made $2 BILLION.
Iger was also the one that threw out Luca's ST scripts and gave the "no prequels" mandate. He learned all the wrong lessons from the PT backlash and micromanaged TFA. When that was a success, he backed off and let KK handle hte rest of the franchise... only to immediately enter panic mode after she let Roundhead smear feces on the wall and call in "entertainment." This caused another knee-jerk reaction of executive meddling that brought us "Somehow, Creamy Sheev returned!"
Thus the ST is a curious case of both too much and too little executive oversight. Too much pressure from above at first, too little in the middle, and too much at the end when they desperately tried to salvage this train wreck of a franchise.
I've been a casual movie only SW watcher, whose major push to follow the franchise were my brothers. After losing them in 2014, I keep on watching the movies in their memory, but never got into forums, cared about reviews or critics, nor media about it because my relationship was entirely superficial. I thought that I was only watching it for my brothers. When I watched TFA, I was indifferent. It felt like the characters wasted their lives for nothing but it may be my own lack of interest (even though I did like Rogue One). But when I had the 'pleasure' of watching TLJ, I suffered a terrible breakdown. WHAT have they done to my brothers hero? WHERE was my brothers hero? I haven't been a follower until that moment, when I realized how invested I was with Luke's life. Where was MY hero? Worse, where was the HOPE he had always been? There was this shell with Luke's face but nothing of his essence, nothing of what made him Luke, and they expected me to believe he was the same?
Yeah, right.
It wasn't until his appearance in TM and TBoBF that I came to realize how much I wanted our Hero (my brothers and mine) back.
And no, I wasn't influenced by the media nor by the EU(I heard that one too). I was only a person who can follow a character progress and enjoys stories that make sense, whose characters success and growth is not dependant in legacy characters failure and destruction.
Good story writing, y'know.
Very sorry to hear that, buddy. I know a few people with similar attachments. An awful lot of people, including those responsible for this mess, simply have no idea what these characters and these stories mean to people - in all kinds of different ways.
@@TheLittlePlatoon yeah, we generate attachments in very unusual ways. With my brothers around I may have been indifferent to it all, but being one of the things both liked and that I can still 'share', its decadence is painful to watch.
Yes, most SW fans see to have felt more enraged when watching The Last Jedi than when watching the other two movies. Tbh, you can't really feel anything watchin TFA or RoS, whereas with TLJ you feel *a lot* .
Maybe that's not what you would like to feel... but you are feeling something. The author is giving you something you hate, but that's still something.
You can't really get enraged at what JJ Abrams did with the characters because... he did *nothing* with the characters. You can't argue that his interpretation of Luke's character was wrong, because he gave *no* interpretation. This is why, as bad as it may sound, artistically speaking TLJ is *by far* the superior movie of the three: because it is something and it makes you feel something, whereas the other two don't. It's the only one that has a hint of a soul.
I do understand that often one would rather feel nothing than feeling something they don't like, that soulless may seem better than with a bad soul; still an artist that makes you feel bad has accomplished more than one who makes you feel, ipse dixit, "indifferent". And a bad soul can still be converted to good, something with no soul cannot.
I despise Abrams's work infinitely more than Johnson's, and that may be partly due to the fact that I am never been that invested in Star Wars in the first place, but try to think of this in this way: Johnson tried to sell you something bad; Abrams tried to sell you nothing. Who is the bigger fraud, here?
It's touching to hear how you kept up with the franchise after your brothers passed on as a way to stay connected to them.
@@BiggieTrismegistus my brothers were way older than me and very different from each other. SW was the only thing they really had in common.
😞
What bothers me so much about people who use the sunset as 'closure' for Luke is that they seem to ignore that he was alone, having admitted he can't save Ben, and he had absolutely zero bond with Rey. The twin suns was his yearning for the future & purpose, and that was bookended by seeing Anakin's funeral pyre and joining his friends or 'family' having found his place. Just tossing in a sunset and Rey claiming he's looking forward with 'peace and purpose' (absolutely no bond or trust) to Leia (barely knows her or Luke) is insulting. People even try to compare this with Obi-Wan in ANH, despite the fact Luke and Obi-Wan are fundamentally different people, where Obi-Wan sacrificed himself to save Luke (whom he did have a bond with) knowing that it would show Luke who to be and how not to fall to the dark side.
OT Luke wasn't overpowered, it was his compassion and courage that fans loved. TLJ Luke is a coward and cynic, who can power himself across the galaxy to say, 'see you around'. No thanks. Every time I see some idiot claim, 'you just wanted a super powered Luke pulling down Star Destroyers' I roll my eyes.
Luke powered himself across the galaxy to apologize to Ben and because if he had been there in person, his furious nephew would have killed him and he didn't want him to have that on his conscience, too. He came to push his nephew to redemption and to end the battle of Crait without spilling one drop of blood. Say what you want but I loved that.
@@Pomoscorzo You can love it, but it doesn't stop it from being hollow.
If you watch that scene, he apologises but with no attempt to convince Kylo of anything. And he leaves with a snarky comment.
It's hollow because he has no bond with Rey, they didn't show a bond with Ben, he was suspicious enough to want to read his mind, and too much of a coward to face his sister.
Striking down Ben would have destroyed his sister, his academy and himself anyway, so that was not logical.
Needing Yoda to explain that he spent his life having learned the wrong thing from ROTJ, despite having a METAL HAND because of failure is ridiculous. The most redundant movie - because Luke was repeating the same pacifist conclusion, which we already saw done better with someone he actually had screen time with.
So I will say what I want, and you are free to read it or not, and have an opinion or not, but don't act like there is anything you can tell me about this scene that makes it make sense in the saga. It doesn't.
"if he had been there in person, his furious nephew would have killed him and he didn't want him to have that on his conscience"
More like Rian wanted him to die alone in front of a sunset is his contrived plot.
@@Ruylopez778 The scene between Luke and his nephew wasn't about pacifism, it was about facing one's failures. He had met Vader calmly in his time because he was guiltless, while this time around he had done wrong. And he did apologize to his sister.
Well, I see your points but I don't agree. To each his own. The nice thing about social media is that people can exchange points of view.
@@Pomoscorzo IMO, the people who claim the character motivations and beats make sense, are people prepared to ignore what happened in Lucas' saga and the narrative.
For example, the reason Lucas made Yoda CG was so that he could have more expression and move more dynamically i.e. do something different. Yoda appears in TLJ just like the ESB puppet - a clone of the ESB puppet, to deliver the same kind of message, by being mostly static and nostalgic. It has nothing to do with Star Wars, just as there was nothing in the sequels that was bold or imaginative. And that's why it immediately got overshadowed by the idea of a bounty hunter and a Force baby - something we hadn't already seen before, in a setting we hadn't seen before, instead of reheated leftovers and failed mentors. Myth is about passing down knowledge from one generation to the next, but the sequels are only interested in the new generation defying the old, to figure out their own solutions.
It also nuked the trilogy, because as dull as TFA was, what it setup was Luke v Kylo v Snoke. And when TLJ killed off two of them, and still left Kylo finishing second best to Rey, it removed any sense of threat or stakes to be resolved. TLJ was a better ending to the trilogy than IX, because it basically wrapped up everything.
Ultimately, the sequels tried to undo the ending of ROTJ, regress the characters to their ESB selves, while also making them jaded and passive. It did nothing to build on or expand the saga. All it did was comment on it and mimic it, which is not what I think anyone actually wanted.
@@Pomoscorzo "The scene between Luke and his nephew wasn't about pacifism, it was about facing one's failures."
And yet it was a pacifist act nonetheless. Though I agree it was Rey who saved the day (again) because of whatever reason...
Luke also faced his failures when he saw Vader's robotic arm, and his own failure in ESB, thinking he was ready when he wasn't.
As I said, TLJ doesn't deal with anything thematically that the saga hasn't already.
"He had met Vader calmly in his time because he was guiltless"
I mean, he let R2 get away, which led him to Kenobi, which lead to his family being slaughtered. And then he was left to feel he failed in rescuing Han, and let down both his mentors.
"while this time around he had done wrong"
It never bothered to explain that though. It just told us in dialogue.
"And he did apologize to his sister."
But won't make any effort to fix anything.
Ouch. That clip of Peter Capaldi made me recall his poor treatment as the 12th Doctor Who and took me out this excellent presentation. I can only attend the funeral of one beloved franchise at a time.
“He disappears in a puff of depression…”
You are, by far, one of the most quotable people I’ve ever come across. 😄👌🏻
You should watch rageaholic unendingly quoteable and hilarious
The worst thing about how they treated Luke is how easy it would have been to do better. The "heirs to the empire" trilogy for example does so by exploring his growth as a Jedi in a time of relative peace. How he grows into the role of a revered peacekeeper who is expected to solve problems and help people in need wherever he goes. And he also has the force sensitive Leia as a kind of apprentice and at the end of the story gains another force sensitive friend whom he can also train.
Meanwhile, his old flaws aren't solved, he still recklessly charges into difficult situations alone, but at least he takes a few more precautions than he used to do and has gained a certain experience of dealing with problems.
Obviously those books play only a few years after the OT and would have been probably difficult to adapt to tv, considering that the main characters are still the one from the OT but way younger than their actors were at the time. But if they hadn't been so quick to toss out all the extended universe stuff from canon, they might have been able to build upon those stories and maybe instead of Luke isolating himself on some random planet, after failing to train Ben Solo, maybe having him travel around alone and going to places with the intent of helping the people there.
Then you could also have the challenge to finding Luke be following the intelligence gathered by resistance spies or maybe even the heroes having to manually search for the places he's been to and questioning the people there.
This would have been so much more in character for Luke, would have left him as a good and virtuous character and have his growth from the OT and the following years still be apparent. And it wouldn't even change the story of finding Luke all that much, or at least not necessarily. It could very well be improved to be better.
And the worst thing about this is that I came up with this idea in frigging 10 minutes right now, after not having read the Thrawn trilogy in 6 years, not watched the OT in 8 years, not cared about the sequels since their respective release date (okay, I haven't cared about them even before tfa, but I haven't wasted much thought on them after watching them) and I am just some random guy on the internet who has no clue how to write a movie. Have these people spend even a single though on what they were doing when clumsily slapping their keyboards writing this shit?
Expanded Universe had so many great stories and it all got thrown out for half-finished tripe written by tumblr fan fiction writers with no love for the IP.
I could also have seen Ben secretly locking Luke away in isolation (not able to kill him perhaps as his old mentor - different to Vader), even if the previous decades weren't going to be filled in with Lukes adventures.
Disney would have had to pay "licensing fees", or similar, to Timothy Zahn, as the author of the "Heir to the Empire" series... and they don't like doing that. They have to OWN their IP's outright. 😔🥲
TLJ is truly special in how many things are wrong with it.
I started writing down everything thing I had issues with or questions about (broken plot, bad choices, bad dialogue, etc.)
I only got through the Title crawl & opening “escape scene”, I had 7 pages, over 2,800 words, with over 40 major problems, issues, & questions that remain unanswered in this film.
It’s staggering!
It feels like it breaks the “space/time continuum”, because more things are wrong in this film, than there is legitimate time available to have that much wrong, I’ve never seen anything like it!
And then, Vaders entire arc and sacrifice is made completely pointless by The Rise of Skywalker
That article was making claims about Luke… a version of Luke that lived only on the author’s mind and maybe Ryan…. She didn’t watched the original trilogy that’s obvious….
It is a crime you don’t have more views, so glad to have found your channel. I found you via your popular Star Trek vids, and look forward to more, but hope you don’t abandon your political commentary as you grow.
We agree! Unfortunately we’re slaves to RUclips’s algorithm at the moment, and can only be as popular as it lets us be. But we press on.
And no fear, we’ll not be ditching the political stuff!
Just post the link in the twitters
He will have to learn that feminists haven't been left wing for decades, and that sjws have never been left wing. That would be a good start, mastering basic political definitions prior to doing commentary.
He's only been around 10 months, give it time
This aged poorly 😉
"He's been asked to stay undefeated. .......Uh. kh-Okay. *plays all the defeats*" that had me rolling lol
I agree completely with exactly everything you have to say here. I was a Star Wars fan before TLJ, but the movie so completely destroyed my love of the series that I've maintained a boycott of Disney since seeing TLJ in theater in 2017. I still vividly remember walking out of the theater stunned and flabbergasted, unable to process just how bad the movie was. Looking back at it, TLJ is like a fractal of problematic writing. At every scale, in every scene, from the title crawl to the credits, there are huge problems with the movie. Just recently, I watched Shadiversity's fight scene autopsy of the fight in the throne room after Snoke is killed, and I see new problems now that I hadn't seen then. The more you look for problems, the more problems you find. It is an infinite pile of plotholes and other issues.
I felt the same mate. I had seen bad movies before, even in the theater, and I know the feeling of losing15$ (or 12€ in my case) and 2h of our life for some Hollywood bullshit. However this went beyond that. I had been bought back in by Rogue One after the disaster of TFA, and actually done my best to avoid trailers. I put in an off day at my work, and drove 200km back to watch the movie with my borthers, this is how much Star Wars meant to me. And then, this...
Coming out of it I at first did not even have feelings AT ALL. It all felt like some bad joke, and took me weeks to process it, almost like a traumatic event. Then months trying to explain online to aggressive defenders how this movie failed what Star Wars was and should be. I would say now with hindsight, the reason i was willing to forgive TFA was because i knew its failures came from greed and lazyness. TLJ actively tried to hurt people, it is the difference between incompetance and sadism.
Just think 5 years later and it is still a major discussion of media, news, fanbase for just how problematic it is
I honestly forgot the film existed
I've never seen TLJ or the other sequel films but I'm all about watching long RUclips videos of people tearing the films apart.
@Biggie Trismegistus i have watched the movies and many many reviews. The negative reviews are very accurate. The positive ones tend to grasp at straws and ignore massive issues all together
There is a reason people have lost faith in movie critics. The problem The Last Jedi wasn't that it was a different Star Wars movie, it was how they did it.
I cant help wondering if the writer of that article also wrote one in praise of the last season of Game of Thrones?
or just maybe she was unhappy with the handling of the Khaleesi.
Not that I’ve found. Which is probably for the best. Defending both would be pretty irredeemable.
@@TheLittlePlatoon IRREDEEMABLE?!? I certainly don't think Platoon would be this silly now.
The weird thing is that after I first watched TLJ I thought it was fine. I thought I liked it. But every time I watched it I liked it less. Whenever I thought about it I liked it less. It's like a jug of milk in that it only gets worse, and only CAN get worse as time passes.
By the time Rise of Skywalker came out I hated TLJ so much that I have, to date, never watched Rise. Not one time.
The Last Ruin Johnson and the Rise of Palpatine are the only two star wars movie that i'watched once and vowed to not have a second viewing. I'd rather do laundry or mow the lawn.
Btw, I used to have Mauler's videos playing as ambient sound while I work. Now I have yours too. You're both relaxing, humourus and fun to listen to.........much, much more then the movies you review. 😂
Thank you for your videos!
If you like listening to this guy and mauler you should give krimson rouge a listen he hasn’t done a ten hour review of the last Jedi but he did do a nearly 3 hour review of the Star Wars book aftermath that is highly amusing
Personally, I enjoy Platoon's commentary much more than Mauler's, and I'm surprised I feel that way. I think its because Platoon's voice tone remains even-tempered throughout. Mauler's tone is way too serious and self-important, and almost has a snarky, sing-songy cadence to it. Not for me.
Your opening monologues are nothing short of genius. The metaphors, sentence structure, vocabulary, and delivery are without equal.
I love the savageness “I thought I’d combat it with a dose of highly pressurised ear piss” … lol I’m with you already at the 3 min mark
The main problem that Disney has currently is their writers seem to be creating content for a viewership that does not exist. Then they are surprised when people say what they've made is crap or refused to see it.
The worst part is we can never have what we should have. Even if they wanted to it's impossible.
The writer sure knows how to use a thesaurus, I'll give her that.
You really got to love when these publications have journalists who clearly know nothing about the thing their talking writing articles for them. Obviously the writer has never seen the original triology and it just makes them look stupid for trying to make it sound like they know the franchise and fan base.
I particularly like the bit where she writes about how heart warming it was to see Luke die on Tatooine, suggesting she hasn’t actually seen the film she’s defending.
But there are some cracking lines in the rest of the essay. Saving them for part 2.
Luke actually was portrayed in a way that was a big insult to the Luke from the original trilogy in The Last Jedi.
@@benjaminfrazier1039 yes that's what I was getting at. Aside from betraying who he was in confronting Vader and Palpatine, he dies never directly confronting Kylo. He gives up on the jedi way. Doesn't help his old friends and family. Doesn't help new people in need of his guidance. It's such a bad take on who the character was and a single mistake with Ben Solo doesn't justify such a butchering of his character. Johnson claimed to be a fan but couldn't get a single element of who Luke was aside from Yoda's dialog of always looking to the future.
@AmazingKevinWClark Man, a number of people at Disney like Kathleen Kennedy, JJ Abrams, and Rian Johnson don't know nothing about Star Wars.
It's frustrating to try to argue logically against an argument that makes no sense, or is in fact simply a misdirect. But there has never been a time when logical debate was more needed.
You know it's bad when it got people to completely forget about the prequels. Now THAT'S legendary!
You know it's bad when someone like me, who isn't a big Star Wars fan and has never seen the sequels, can't get enough long RUclips videos of the films being torn apart.
I remember in 2015 walking out of the Force Awakens and laughing how horrible it was. I had really been duped by all the hype. So, I didn't bother to watch The Last Jedi and I am so glad I did not once the plot was revealed. It's a slap in the face to all fans. It's well-made garbage for people who think McDonalds has healthy food, Crocs are excellent footwear and mostly for people who don't want to think too much. It's a shame too since they had really great actors and effects and so much was put into this mess... I never paid to see a Disney movie again. Why bother? They hate the fans and simply want to cram an agenda down out throats - not exactly an invitation to fun and wonder.
Kylo could have been a truly interesting villain if he had remained as formidable as his intro scene in TFA teased. He instead turned in to Wile E. Coyote, with all his plans blowing up in his face in the most humiliating way possible and thus impossible to take seriously as a threat.
As bad as the Last Jedi is I do think it's a better movie than Rise of Skywalker. Say what you will about TLJ but at least it had some basic integrity. Rian Johnson was trying to do something unique and intriguing. He failed but he was trying not to make a by the number's sequel. By contrast Rise of Skywalker felt like a soulless product written by committee. It should also be noted that TFA (what a dumb title BTW) completely undid all of the story progress made by Return of the Jedi. It essentially reset the universe to a pre-Episode VI era. A small number of rebels fighting against a galaxy ruling empire while the Jedi consist of a young learner and an aging master.
On a fundamental level, it was the decision to make Episode VII a soft reboot rather than a direct sequel that doomed the Sequel Trilogy to repetitious story beats, rendering the Original Trilogy pointless, and devastating the IP despite the box office success of TFA.
I’d agree that TLJ was *marginally* more competent as a film. TROS is one of the most laughably inept things in the history of cinema. But TLJ wasn’t all that much better on a technical level, and it was significantly more malignant in its intent.
@@cactusmalone Sort of... TLJ was in part also so bad because TFA was one of the worst collections of character assassinations across a board of familiar characters... in a galaxy context that had been set up with a brief smatter of non sequiturs.
@@cactusmalone Agree with you 100%. What was left after Snoke died, Rey didn't have important parents, and Hux was a laughingstock? Of course JJ had to bring back Palpatine and do entirely stupid stuff. The whole trilogy, though, is a lesson in wasted potential - wasted for political, social, and really stupid reasons. It's a disaster.
@@cactusmalone Right. TLJ smashed the cut-glass crystal vase. TROS gathered all the pieces into a heap, along with dust and grit and various clarts, and tried to stick it all back together with chewing gum.
So I enjoyed your take but I felt I wanted to share not quite a defense of the article defending Last Jedi but maybe an explanation for why many are inclined to defend it upon first viewing (and often with less thinking).
Take as a starting point the end of The Force Awakens. From this point, I fully understood why Luke threw away the lightsaber. TFA, trying to ‘correct’ the prequels, felt to many to turn Star Wars into a, I guess the best word here is episodic, movie franchise. By that I mean something like James Bond or the Die Hard movies. Every movie is a bit different, but every movie is the same story. Defeat some bad supervillain. Like a sitcom, the plot more or less resets with each movie cycle. Star Wars fans do not want a recurring cycle of hell where every movie is the Empire is back again and plucky rebels have to fight and the latest version of the Death Star blows up at the end.
The initial act of Luke tossing his lightsaber felt amazingly realistic. If I had fought thru the entire arc of the original trilogy only to see less than 20 years later not only was the Empire more or less back again, but literally everything was set all the way back to A New Hope with people not even remembering Jedis were real (which is a really odd thing given so many species in the Star Wars universe live much longer than human lifespans), I would very much say rather than play the same script again but acting as the old Obi-wan Kenobi character, I would ‘break the wheel’ and reject the idea of training some new young person to fall into the role of going off the defeat the latest Sith lord.
And this can be done. You don’t get it much in the movies but in Lord of the Rings, the destruction of the One Ring comes with a steep price. The Elven rings that were used to preserve the world in its semi-magical state of unchanging immediately lost their power. The end of the Ring also ended the elven attempts to keep Middle Earth Middle Earth. There was a real desire to find a way to stop Sauron but not see his Ring destroyed, but ultimately that could not be done.
A very potent potential plot could have done this in Star Wars. Luke, realizing trying to remake the Jedi as they were in the prequels, despite Yoda’s instruction to pass on what he learned, was a grave error. What was needed was a rejection of near supernatural people blessed with Force powers that no one else could use and something more organic with the galaxy itself rising up instead of being at the mercy of whatever force lord has the upper hand. This rejection of redoing the whole “let’s challenge the new Emperor” routine could have been a really interesting take…especially combined with Ren’s “let the past die”.
But the movie did not do this. It toyed with it, but that was it and without good writing and consistent plot it hinted at what it could have been but couldn’t deliver at even being a marginal addition. Perhaps it would have been better to let Ryan Johnson have done the last movie. At the end of the day, JJ Abrams saying “never mind, it wasn’t just a new Emperor but the old one and we’ll do a big battle once again, blow up the big evil and even have a dancing Ewok” didn’t really repair anything.
Right now Star Wars doesn’t really have anyway forward. We have very good series like Andor but they have to live inside the narrow box of the timelines created by mainline movies. One option would be to reboot the whole thing, even retelling the stories from the beginning (hey it’s done with mythology all the time) or a partial reboot retconning out the NT entirely. Or, perhaps, jumping far into the future to get to a blank canvas again where a good story can be told.
Agreed, its funny i was listening to a stream yesterday, not a science fiction one but the last jedi came up , a lady said 5 years later she is still hurt and upset by this movie.
This is one of the baffling things about the “it’s different so it’s good” crowd. Part two covers the argument in more detail, but at one point the reviewer says something along the lines of “the OT’s themes are outdated.”
Self-evidently untrue. Self-evidently unnecessary. They seem to think TLJ *had* to destroy the past in order to make progress. But look at the state of the franchise now. Do they really think we’re better off for this subversion?
@@TheLittlePlatoon yes its ridiculous the reason the ot is relevant ( and always will be ) is because they themes are timeless and have deep or ancient roots, it has echoes of history, and history repeats , so war isn't a thing today ? Or dictatorship, ? Family, friendship love , betrayal, redemption, good and evil, its ridiculous , and its a common lazy argument or thinking, new and shiny is good , old is bad , except they dont make them like they used to was an old saying before star wars ( and its never been more true) even the production d esign and effects aren't as good , they made the universe smaller and as you said nihilistic, and just stupid. They wanted the creative freedom to make a stupid story thats insulting. To a long time fan or a book reader. ( made worse by ros ) the amount of stupid in that is unbelievable. But the damage was already done ( i was empty of feeling watching that last one ) except a headache from eye rolling.
@@TheLittlePlatoon yes its ridiculous the reason the ot is relevant ( and always will be ) is because they themes are timeless and have deep or ancient roots, it has echoes of history, and history repeats , so war isn't a thing today ? Or dictatorship, ? Family, friendship love , betrayal, redemption, good and evil, its ridiculous , and its a common lazy argument or thinking, new and shiny is good , old is bad , except they dont make them like they used to was an old saying before star wars ( and its never been more true) even the production d esign and effects aren't as good , they made the universe smaller and as you said nihilistic, and just stupid. They wanted the creative freedom to make a stupid story thats insulting. To a long time fan or a book reader. ( made worse by ros ) the amount of stupid in that is unbelievable. But the damage was already done ( i was empty of feeling watching that last one ) except a headache from eye rolling.
@@TheLittlePlatoon yes its ridiculous the reason the ot is relevant ( and always will be ) is because they themes are timeless and have deep or ancient roots, it has echoes of history, and history repeats , so war isn't a thing today ? Or dictatorship, ? Family, friendship love , betrayal, redemption, good and evil, its ridiculous , and its a common lazy argument or thinking, new and shiny is good , old is bad , except they dont make them like they used to was an old saying before star wars ( and its never been more true) even the production d esign and effects aren't as good , they made the universe smaller and as you said nihilistic, and just stupid. They wanted the creative freedom to make a stupid story thats insulting. To a long time fan or a book reader. ( made worse by ros ) the amount of stupid in that is unbelievable. But the damage was already done ( i was empty of feeling watching that last one ) except a headache from eye rolling.
I disagree with the idea that "TFA at least understood something of the potency of nostalgia". It's not that the film was any kind of clever attempt at tugging at nostalgia - it was a combination of Abrams' lack of creativity, a corporate religion of "if it worked, just copy it", and Abrams' own track record of just copy/pasting scenes and characters for every series he reboots (because is a rebooter, not a new-content-creator).
...right, so he obviously understood something of the potency of nostalgia. That's...that's what that means. The video never claimed he was "clever", just that TFA used nostalgia as a hook.
Love the Thatcher clip. That's my reaction to the hoary cliche that TLJ is hated because it's "different."
The most insane thing to me about Luke in this film is that if you completely take time out of the story, literally nothing changes. Aside from the fact that the only reason Rey was gone was cause she was with him. She doesn’t learn anything from him, he doesn’t do anything significant, he doesn’t kill Kylo. He does NOTHING and then he just dies. People always say Raiders of the Lost Ark would be completely the same if Indiana Jones wasn’t in it even though most of the story wouldn’t happen if he didn’t do certain things. Last Jedi though? Nothing would change if Luke was taken out of it and that’s some seriously shitty writing.
There's desecration and then there's ruthlessly murdering your favorite franchise, burying it, letting it rot, dig it back up and then have your way with what's left of the corpse
That's TLJ
To play devil's advocate for a minute here... when the author of the article talks about the backlash being the fault of the internet, she's obviously trying to point out (without explaining herself well) that it's a mob mentality where people can also go distastefully unfiltered and like to cause drama. I have to agree with that to a certain degree but it doesn't mean the sequel trilogy was good. In comparison with the originals it doesn't measure up partly due to the change in modern Hollywood's mentality of filmmaking. I'm not talking about the agenda pushing although that is an issue on it's own, I'm talking about how they now write movies. The way they now write a story is detrimental to a Star Wars film. In recent years they want to cut out practically all of the development aspects and just jump into the action. While the action is important to a Star Wars movie, so is the development and it's the reason why Rey is such a bad character. Development to the characters, plot and settings are what connects the audience to the world. The more interesting details you write into them the more people can get invested. Barely anyone what's to watch a hollow character that has nothing interesting written into them. The most Rey had was her mysterious background that Rian Johnson thought it would be a great idea to have a completely unsatisfying payoff for just because nobody expected it. There's a reason why no one expected it, because it makes for a terrible writing device and answer to the question. Although Johnson shouldn't have put JJ in that position of filling in the villian role, it is Abrams' lack of writing skill that he came up with the story of the Rise of Skywalker. FYI the Sith dagger was his idea. There's behind the scenes footage where he told the production team to change the macguffin from ancient scrolls to the Sith dagger which would take the form of the downed Death Star. He wanted it to be more visual than to make sense which is the number one problem I have with Abrams as a filmmaker. However all that being said some people make TLJ out to be a bigger disaster than it really was. While I don't think Johnson gave us a good Luke or satisfying payoffs to the story it also wasn't the worst movie ever. It did have some good elements and beautiful camera work. He also tried to put more development into the characters than Abrams did. It's just that the errors he did make were giant ones. I liked that he tried to take more time with the story going from point A to B. The problem is that he committed a lot of writing taboos that weighed the story down like having Luke overly persistent not to do anything. This element drags the story down and prevents it from going anywhere for a good half of the story. An experienced writer would know better. They would know that the plot needs to go somewhere so they write in an element that would give Luke the kick in the butt he needs in the first act of the story to get the adventure rolling. It's not the first time Johnson makes this mistake either. Forming the story around a slow chase through space limits his locations and actions to the point where he has to break it in order to give the movie more dynamics. If you were going to have this chase scene it shouldn't have made up most of the movie's run time. Star Wars is an adventure war movie and needs to have a back and forth between the good guys and villians. It shouldn't have the Heroes on the defensive the entire movie. You can say that Canto Bight was the offensive but it doesn't really feel that way because how out of place it comes about. It fills like filler. I've watched enough of Naruto to understand the problem. Lol. It's disjointed from the main story because of the sudden change in setting despite the situation they are currently in. It's like they picked everything up and put it in a new location because they couldn't decide what more to do in the current setting. The writers kept writing themselves into corners they couldn't figure how to get out of because they refused to have the story move forward. Essentially they were stuck in their own writing gimmicks. There was so many things they could have done to push the story out of the stalemate it found itself in like sending a team on an espionage mission aboard the Star Destroyer while having a space battle. Anyways there's a lot of things wrong with the writing and while it's not great, it's also no where near the worst movie I've seen.
Rian should not have written the script. He's a decent scene maker, but it's best to leave him with that responsibility alone. Kasdan and JJ needed to think this shit through and not given the indie film nerd from orange county the keys to the franchise.
Josef Fritzl reference regarding what Rian Johnson did to Star Wars?
Damn, that's dark, distrubing and far too true.
The last time we saw Luke, he was at peace, he was with friends in a galaxy no longer oppressed by the empire. The only path he ever could take from there was to restart the jedi order, and become wiser, more patient, he would be the one preaching like Qui Gon and Yoda and Obi Wan to his students to slow down.
That was his natural arch.
Ok, fine, JarJar Abrams and Darthleen Kennedy don't want to tell that story, that's fine.
What story did the instead tell us?
They told us nothing, they expanded nothing, they did nothing.
No Luke first movie? Fine, don't give too much too early, make it all the more epic when he returns.
Rey shows up in TLJ, and within five seconds of Luke being on screen, he tosses the lightsaber, along with the entire fcking Star Wars universe, off a cliff.
Even if he was all "antijedi" now, even if he was this depressed dejected old man...to just toss the saber he hadn't seen since the day he lost his hand without a single question about it, without even asking Rey who she was..it was bad tv humor so bad, so universe destroying and character destroying that to me it will always be the symbol for Disney Starwars. They told us right then and then and there. The perfect metaphor for what was to come.
And to think that wasn't even the most egregious universe/character destroying scene in the trilogy, let alone in TLJ, is a testament to just how much garbage they manage to cram into those films
I wanna point out that the name of the planet that had the hidden storage depot they fled to is named crate.
Crate, the storage planet
How about Snoke?
S - Sith
N - No
O - One
K - Knows
E - Exists
This article is a crime against articles. It is a war of words and this article is the baddie.
Thank you for your thorough review, there was not one part that I would have improved on.
I thought something similar. There's no way she can be this stupid. She's evil to the core. The Dark Side itself.
Your channel is a gem in the rough.
"The existence of the sequel trilogy destroyed his legacy, because it proved it was all utterly pointless."
EXACTLY
I just find it funny that the OT, which was only ever meant to be one film with the other two being added on after the success of the first, tells a far more coherent story than the sequel trilogy does when the sequels were planned as a trilogy from the get go.
My head canon is that the movie is a retelling, that Kylo Ren showed up as a force ghost and gave a very skewed version of events. "And then I kissed the girl and died"
😄
the sequel trilogy has however achieved something, it has made the prequel trilogy look reasonable enough
That Gislane Maxwell of Star Wars line was 🔥. After all, Kathleen Kennedy didn't destroy Star Wars, she just hired and supposedly oversaw the people who did. (And yeah, that includes you, JJ!)
I will forever be salty about all of these films. They had potential from the start, they even had potential as they got going. The Force Awakens was a soft reboot, I personally think it sucked but fine- you can still work with that. You could have Kylo Ren wonder why he was beat in a fight by some nobody- he could go off and look for answers. Luke could have crashed on Ach To when looking for some secret Jedi McGuffin because he had sensed the Emperor (or hopefully, someone else like some Dark Side entity or even an evil army from the Outer Rim), and then when Rey gets there to ask for help he was obviously stuck before- and now he isn't. They could leave and train together. Make it hard for Rey- she wants to go back and help the resistance, but Luke has now told her about this threat, realised she's really strong in the force (and make him wonder why) and they can go off together to try and find a way to beat this mystery threat. Have Kylo find it, realise it's bigger than the First Order, team up with the resistance... Gods there was SO MUCH they could have done. So many cool routes and ideas they could have taken.
And we got these three messes. I am going to be angry forever.
He speaks for 2 minutes and already I am on the floor laughing, captivated by what he may say next.
You have one subscription for me, wish I could give you more.
Every now and then I think, I oughta watch this thing for myself because I should judge for myself what I think about it. However, every time I can't bring myself to because the whole ordeal, especially the fallout - regardless of the quality of the movie itself - has left an especially bad taste in my mouth. The Last Jedi was how I first observed the degradation of our stories in media and is the representation for me of how different factions - fans of the new, fans of the old, the actors, the company overhead, the media, the trolls, the shills, etc. - all move to critique or praise this movie and what it's done for Star Wars and our culture. It was also how I first got into the politics of my country, and I suppose I have TLJ to thank for that.
I think the biggest food for thought I took away from TLJ when I first heard about it, though, was how much do you change vs. how much do you keep in a franchise. For example, I know many people who enjoyed TLJ because it "was the first they'd enjoyed in SW" because they never really enjoyed the older movies. It did something different. Others enjoyed TLJ because it didn't go and repeat the old events again like the Pokemon games do, using the same frameworks again and again. However, as always, balance is needed and it was very interesting to me to look into what transgressions TLJ made that were "too much." My biggest takeaway from the whole movie is that subversion, while being "different from the original," requires the existence of an original to be impactful. The subversion cannot kill the original because then it itself becomes without identity. This is why if subversion occurs, it is only effectively used as an exploration tactic or for humor without lasting consequences, in my opinion, and not as an actual story telling device.
Your videos are much more pleasant to watch than TLJ. Every time I think of TLJ I just remember the creator's disdain for the series while saying he loved it and I remember the death of SW as a whole.
Kathleen Kennedy, "the Ghislaine Maxwell of Star Wars."
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Watching the Last Jedi was like being betrayed by a Skywalker, blasted by Force lightning then falling out of a window. Luke deciding to end the Jedi after 25 thousand years as guardians of peace, with only a mere 20+ members leaving the Order is ludicrous (called the lost 20 statues in Episode 2 AOTC). Darth Vader and Kylo Ren were both seduced by Palpatine (one by snoke who is revealed to be under Palpatine). This is only one of hundreds of decisions made by the writers that demonstrate a tone deaf approach to material that I don't have space here to go into. Don't get me started. Then again I don't have to with in-depth aware reviews like this one :)
Yep, the primary hero goes off to learn from ancient master who has secluded themselves. Then the other heroes go off on a side trip to a wonderful place where they meet someone who is supposed to help them that betrays them.
Literally they moved the rebel base defending itself from the beginning of the movie to the end of the movie and then made the setting so similar that someone had to literally reach down and taste to the ground to say it was salt.
A movie fan and noir scholar, indifferent to SW except as it's part of the culture wars. TFA was interesting for some of its first act, then it collapsed into nothing. TLJ was shtt from start to finish, or I assume it was, having abandoned it at the halfway point.
2023 is already a glorious year because I got to hear “pineapple shoved up your urethra” in the most posh of accents and prose. Brilliant!
I think a good metaphor is that TLJ is a shot to the head of Star Wars. It killed it permanently. TROS then took a machine gun to the corpse.
Since the moment I walked out of the theater, I have thought TFA was a disaster. The excuse that it's supposed to be a remake is indefensible in that it really isn't. In the original Star Wars, the three characters meet and by the end of the movie are working together. Luke meets Han, they save Leia and then they all work together to blow up the death star. Obiwan's death was to HELP Luke, NOT Vader. This progression was non-existant in TFA. The three new characters don't meet (they aren't even on screen together until the THIRD MOVIE); Han's death does nothing to save the heroes and his character is an old, dumb failure; and the super weapon they destroy is just....dumb. The Cantina scene is in the wrong place, doesn't make any sense, and doesn't serve any narrative purpose. The ending has the same flaws. And none of the character acts in a way that makes sense (Han is an idiot, Finn isn't traumatized, Rei is a Mary Sue, and Poe just vanishes for most of the film)
If they wanted to copy it then it would have gone like this: Start with the raid as it was, but instead of looking for a map to Luke, they are looking for a map to the Jedi home planet. This introduces Finn, Not-Vader, Poe, and Old Man. Poe still gets captured, BUT Instead of going back up to the ship, Finn escapes the first order during the battle, and instead of the old man dying in the desert, Finn rescues him. Old Man says that he needs to get to the resistance, and he needs Poe to get him there. Finn is terrified, but agrees to help if the resistance can protect him from the First Order. The Old Man also wants to keep him around because Finn escaping his brainwashing shows some strength with the force, something the Jedi are in desperate need of. While walking, The Old Man does some training exercises. They get to the local town where scrap finders have some sort of local fair (instead of a Cantina) and bump into Rei, a local mechanic/dealer, who helps them find a ship to escape not-Tatooine. They want to go rescue Poe, so they fly up to the first order. Rei pretends to be a scrap dealer looking to make a sale (since the First Order doesn't know her) and this distraction allows Finn and Old Man to sneak away and rescue Poe (This works because Finn can use his insider knowledge of the ship to save him). However, Finn has some PTSD moments when he sees not-Vader, and Old Man dies to save him and gives him the map. All three of the key characters meet, and work TOGETHER to escape. Rei now has to help Finn with his PTSD, while Poe flies them to the resistance. They return to the resistance base, but they are followed. The resistance gets ready for battle, and Poe has to fly to help. Rei finally gets Finn to snap out of his PTSD, and Finn knows the weakness of the ship, but he needs Rei to help him stay calm and fly. (Maybe he also uses his emerging Jedi powers to do a thing to blow up the ship). The three heroes meet up in space and TOGETHER, with Resistance backup, blow up the First Order ship keeping the resistance location safe. Not-Vader escapes in a little pod or something. Once done, they land back at the base, are introduced to Chewy, Luke, Han, Leia (and the droids if you want) TOGETHER leading the resistance, and the three new leads can get a "thank you" medal. If you want family connections and more women, POE can be Leia and Han's son, and Captain Phasma can be the Not-Vader of the movie (and maybe Leia and Han's or Luke and Someone's daughter). Rei doesn't have to be a boring Mary Sue with Mystery Box background, she can be a business woman who wanted to go back to Not-Tatooine because her BUSINESS is there. She stays maybe because she thinks to use the Resistance to make money, but begins to believe in their cause (also she has a thing for Finn or Poe or something). THERE! FIXED IT. No mystery boxes, no plot holes, no character assassinations, I already like it better.
to be fair to JJ he.d taken the impossible job when deciding to direct ep9 ,TLJ had done that much damage to the story . as in i'll never understand why they killed snoke off in the 2nd part of a 3 part story , what the hell were they thinking ?
To be completely fair, Rogue One's level of deviation from the rest of Star Wars probably WAS one of the main reasons why almost everyone else disliked it, and why I did. It genuinely is true that SW's fandom is pathologically resistant to change, which means that there are isolated situations in which claiming that something being different is the reason why fans don't like it, is a valid argument.
I don't think any of the sequel trilogy meet at least my own criteria for that argument, however. The Last Jedi is not disliked because it is different, but because it is sacreligious, disrespectful, and destructive. Vandalism and innovation are not the same things.
Selective use of arguments which are very situationally true, but which are false in the current case, is a favourite argumentative tactic of the two most recent generations in my experience; and although dishonest, it is effective precisely because it makes use of arguments which are true sometimes, but are not true this time.
Indeed. Though I’m not sure that’s quite true of Rogue One. Consensus amongst pretty much everyone I know is that it’s the best (if not the only) half-decent Star Wars film Disney has produced.
Part two of this response will go into more detail on the “it’s different so it’s good” argument. It’s all written and recorded, just needs putting together. Hoping to have that out in the next few days, along with a Boba Fett Review, and part two of Picard at the weekend.
22:42
😂😂😂
What you just asked about the "reviewer" instantly reminded me of Owen Wilson's line in Armageddon:
"I'm Chewie? Man, have you even seen Star Wars?!"
Jake Skywalker (I shall never call him Luke) is by all accounts a Grey Jedi, and I mean A true grey Jedi, not the one that doesn’t exist. You know the one: the Jedi that uses both the light And the dark side without falling to the latter (even though both legends and Canon and George Lucas himself has stated that that is impossible due to the nature of the Darkside) Jake represents a true Gray Jedi; A tired, Bitter, apathetic man who cuts himself off from the force so that he doesn’t have to deal with the problems that are in the galaxy.
"Jake Skywalker, Lukes deadbeat alcoholic brother" Hammer meets nail...ping!
The problem with defying expectations is that more and more this trope, this approach to making a story and the acting on screen interesting, is drifting into this not just nihilistic approach, but also a decidedly stupid approach.
I.e. what "defies expectations" does so by going against basic logic or even basic established fact. Sure, nobody expects that because you would have to be out of your mind for that. In select cases it can work. The Joker would be just the right character to pull this with, because for a comedic setting with a crazy and illogical character it works.
But the good way to subvert expectation is to stay within the bounds of logic, within the realm of actions that achieve the characters goal, but be unorthodox about it. Give a character a gun and a villain to shoot, but make the character shoot the leg of a shelf and bury the villain under said shelf and its contents. The villain is still defeated, but it still subverted expectations.
Instead we get things like all warp cores in the galaxy exploding all at once being due to a traumatized child crying too loud that one time. I mean, FFS, there is a reason why parody edits incorporating scenes about the Attero device from Stargate Atlantis have more logical coherence than the actual earnest plot that horribly overpaid writers came up with.
I see that _Star Trek: Discovery_ reference. That show is such a disappointment. I've got some time off so I signed up for Paramount Plus because I feel compelled to watch each episode at once. I'm struggling.
My favorite thing (ONLY thing I like) about TLJ are the video essays on how terrible it is 😂
I feel ya. I'm not a Star Wars fan and have never seen the sequels but I've spent hours and hours of my life watching videos about how much those movies (TLJ in particular) suck.
I think the entire point of Luke Skywalker was missed. Luke Skywalker isn't like other heroes. Yes he follows many of the tropes and traits of many heroes and has basic formatted story but he wasn't the one to save the day in Return of the Jedi. It was his father that saved the galaxy by killing palpatine cause Luke life was ultimately threatened; Anakin realized that Luke was the last good connection he ever was going to have. How and Why vader came to this conclusion? Because Luke loved him unconditionally and purposely defied the fate put in place by Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Sheev himself. He put down his weapon after realizing the road rage and anger could lead you down if you let it control you.
Ultimately Luke Skywalker is a character about love and hope. He was never meant to be a character who gets consumed in grief and regret because ultimately he become like his father on that path. Maybe for a small character arc I can see Luke letting doubt overtake him briefly but for bloody whole movie? No. Whatever bloke said that unwavering love, compassion, and hopeful view is nativity and you must fall into nihilism was simply wrong. Niceness isn't a trait that needs to be change into something more stale and hard. Luke didn't need to be turned into harden character because simply he would never be that.
Skywalker core belief is "to choose to be better". It's what drives his character. They stolen that away from him to move along Kylo's plot which I could find million different reasons on how to temporarily remove Luke from the plot till it was time to bring him back that didn't involve shooting him in the god damn head.
That line about naivety pissed me off too. Sure, some people in real life aren't redeemable but Star Wars is a movie. We don't watch things like Star Wars for their moral realism and nihilistic theme. It's okay to give the fans a happy ending.
Please do this to the kotor remake if they mess up the story somehow
Oh, I most certainly will. But here’s hoping it won’t be necessary!
After TLJ I never watched any new Star wars. I am content to re-watch old Star Wars. As I am content to watch old Star Trek. This garbage can burn in hell.
You mean content.
@@FordHoard damn autocorect... Edited. Thanks for the heads up.
"Poorly animated testicle..." Sir, I'm afraid you've stolen my heart. Please keep going.
As a Kotor 2 fan I don't think trying to deconstruct Star Wars is a bad thing, it's how we got the best writing in the franchise. Trying to use Luke Skywalker as the focal point of a deconstruction was a questionable enough decision, having Luke Skywalker of all people contemplate murdering his nephew in his sleep was just pure stupidity that goes completely against who the character was. Sure people change but you don't go from a guy who was determined to redeem Vader despite having no real connection (beyond biology) or reason to believe Vader could be redeemed, to a guy so scared of the dark side he's contemplating murdering a child in his sleep. OT Luke was optimistic to a fault, or would have been if he wasn't right.
That was why Luke was the greatest Jedi in George's eyes. He moved past ths narrow minded ways of his predecessors, unclouded by fear and dogma. Never mind Legends Luke, George's Luke would never stop trying to save Ben.
Sad part is, Luke being conflicted over Ben going down a dark path could make for some excellent material if properly explored. To see Luke struggling with his own beliefs and having to face the reality of corruption when he doesn't have the father son connection to work with. Luke being broken by Ben's fall isn't a bad idea, the way Rian Johnson went about working with that idea very much was.
Star Wars, the OT and the expanded universe (not the ones Doucheney claim) were never "long dormant" by ANY stretch of the imagination. That is a talking point of those defending the theft of the OT by the "sequels". Love your content sir.
You know, I was in Bosnia while we were looking for Slobidan Milosevic. You used the analogy really well in this review 😂
I've never heard anyone who is a fan of Star Wars call Luke or Anakin by their last name "Skywalker".
Yup.
The internet was responsible for me beginning to hate TLJ as soon as Poe made a prank phone call to Hux.
The internet was why I immediately found the portrayal of Luke Skywalker as depressing and insulting to the character.
The internet is why I sat in the theater , scratching my head at the movie breaking the lore of how force users advance in power and ability.
The internet was why I hated nearly every scene of this movie on my first viewing.
Sure.
The internet.
I want to trace blame.
First, Lucas sold his baby. Understandable that getting up there, he would want s caretaker, but why not keep it in the family instead of being a property for MegaBehemoth Disney? Someone should have been his successor if he didn't want to think up stories anymore.
And apparently K. Kennedy was the wrong choice.
Johnson and Abrams should have understood the importance of a 33 year final reunion. I was ok with the story going ways I don't expect, but they had two jobs: 1) unite and create satisfying end for original cast.FAIL.
2) create compelling new characters people believe. ALMOST got this,
Lastly, no one has more clout than Hamill or Ford as to how their characters are handled. They very simply could have said, '4I don't like this. Rewrite it or I'm not in it."
I saw someone saying TLJ was the best movie in the franchise and that it was the best portrayal of Luke ever shown on screen. I think that person was thrown at a brick wall as a child
Unfortunately I'm in the camp with those who have abandoned star wars
"I invite you to taste squirrel poop, because that also would be different, and by your definition therefore good"
You know what, buddy? All this statement tells me is that you've never been a bacterium or fungi and it shows.
Yea he's marginalizing entire species, clearly a biggot. Must cancel.
Luke in Last Jedi = Yoda in the OT. All copied, including the “subverting of expectations” (it just felt different for Yoda, because he’s introduced as a swamp-soup-cooking hermit, and his ridiculous light-saber mastery and leading of armies is shown later, maybe it works better because he’s shown as frail and old (that’s all a bit wonky, even if you can come up with ad hoc reasons, dark side cave draining him?)
All of these Sequel films are just a mashup / soft reboot. Last Jedi suffered extra, because Disney at the time shoehoned in CCP-friendly themes, and Rose Tico for the Chinese market they wanted to break into (also see attempts with Mulan etc). That’s why they made Rogue One (RO), and set it 5 minutes before the OT, and with a chinese cast. The strategy was obviously to funnel Chinese viewers through RO into the Original Trilogy, and then they would be drawn by the upcoming tentpole with a Chinese main character. To get that past the censors, they added Rose as dilligent worker-hero and the theme of the film is to obey orders and listen to your superiors (the plot shows what happens when you don’t, you get imprisoned, almost killed, jeopardise the cause etc)…
That’s why all of this gab about Rian Johnson as the “auteur” is just silly. The bloke got paid to take the hit, same for Kennedy. Upper management at Disney certainly determined this strategy and that dictated the film. Johnson did certainly not mysteriously had the spontaneous idea to copy and invert Empire Strikes Back and suddenly add a Chinese gal. It’s too similar a blueprint as TFA, and to a degree ROS. The lower people below Disney are just pawns.
If you want to do yourself a favour: reject the nonsense conspiracy theory about Kennedy/Johnson, reject shill talking points of “auteurs” making their films as they wanted to. Nonsense. Disney doesn’t want you to see that this is a cynical cash grab of a reboot, mainly made also for a chinese market. Their shareholders wanted films pronto, and they wanted to crack the Chinese jackpot. And they relied that western fans will see it anyway. The rest is marketing misdirection.
Yes. thanks.
7:38
I never did understand why Ren was talking to Vador the way he was. Luke redeemed and saved Vador from the dark side at the end of Return. WTf?
I will always have fond memories of this movie, it saved me so much money as I have not watched or purchased anything star wars related since.
I have no idea why The Last Jedi got a higher Rotten Tomatoes score than Return of the Jedi.
As someone said here, deconstructing some aspects isn't a bad thing per se. KOTOR games did it brilliantly and Clone Wars did it too. But KOTOR and CW did keep a cohesive narrative. Kreia is a powerful character either you pay attention to the deconstruction or not. TLJ was mocking what people liked, not questioning certain points of view. Martin questions the idealized version of the Middle Ages in Tolkien, he doesn't laugh at those enjoying Tolkien. Johnson looked as if he was laughing at the fans.
I think his mocking of the fans becomes most apparent during the infamous milking scene. Johnson is basically saying: "Here's your hero drinking his milk from a bottle like a baby-man! He's a baby-man hero for baby-man fans!"
On the moral ambiguity, does the writer mean desiring to kill a nephew in his sleep is morally ambiguous? How about abandoning a twin sister whom you shared a galaxy spanning war with on the onset of another galaxy spanning war?
I literally watched it 3 times. The first time I was in shock the second time I was pissed. The third time I went to show someone else how shit the movie was.
I'm always amazed with the amount of gaslighting and ad hominems articles like the one praising TLJ try to get away with... in an awoken, enlightened modern culture we're supposedly living in.
Honestly, you'd think on the evidence of TLJ fans, that some people would go out to a French restaurant, order the pâté de foie gras, and when served instead a neatly-pressed, stinking turd in a merkin, exclaim, "How delightful! My expectations have been totally subverted! Best French Restaurant EVAH!" 🙃
For me it was actually TFA that killed Star Wars. While Luke's story was a key part of the fun of the originals, it wasn't (as RLM erroneously keep insisting) the only thing of interest. The other thing about Star Wars was the character of the "galaxy far, far away," and what fans wanted to see was _more stuff happening in that place,_ in that mythic dreamtime. That's attested to by the enormous pile of EU material, a large part of which was all about new characters, new stories in that setting.
And as you rightly said in your passing defense of the prequels in another review, that was also what made the prequels genuine Star Wars: they were attempts to _develop_ that mythic dreamtime.
That's why TFA was the initial abomination: it leaned too heavily on a robotic (Bad Reboot lol) kind of nostalgia and it showed contempt for the fans by serving them exactly the same story all over again, instead of offering them what they actually want: new stuff in that setting, that _builds_ on the nostalgia, and doesn't just rehash it. Slyly taking advantage of the fact that a new Star Wars film would make tons of money no matter what it was, it cemented the idea that "fans don't want anything new," which is what feeds into this defense of TLJ and more generally every defense of every mangling of every nerdy franchise against its fans.
Perhaps I'm too easily influenced by culture and zeitgeist, but I'm not ashamed to say that I had a period of mourning (anger, denial, etc.) for a day or two after watching TFA. At that point, as someone who'd watched the original trilogy in the cinema first time round, and loved it as a student, Star Wars was dead to me - I could dimly see something like TLJ coming, I could see where it was all going. That minor awakening also partly triggered and partly coincided with some quite heavy political awakening, and led me down the rabbit hole to where I am today.
I remember after watching TFA (gosh I HATE that movie) telling people what was coming, and no one believed me. Turns out I was right...
The author of the article does not, in fact, appear to have actually seen THE LAST JEDI. She sounds for all the world like someone who was given the remit to write a timely article defending the film by an editor, then skimmed a handful of discussion threads about it and built her argument on the "The internet fans hate it because it's different!" premise which has become the rallying cry for all its zealous apologists.
I would add here, in response to some of the other comments, that no matter how disappointed you were with THE FORCE AWAKENS for its carbon copy approach, it at least felt like STAR WARS, and an entertaining (if shamelessly derivative) trilogy could have been built on the foundation it laid. By contrast, there was no way to redeem the sequel trilogy after TLJ. None. Nothing Abrams or anyone else did could have undone the damage done by Johnson. So while you may loathe TFA for its lack of originality, it's silly to argue that it did more damage to SW than TLJ. Film franchises can survive dumb, derivative popcorn nonsense. They can't survive a plotless, meandering bout of cynical self-mockery which intentionally flips off the audiences they rely on to make a profit.
It is so gratifying, to know that other people are finally starting to this the way I always have
Defending the sequel trilogy is like claiming the Titanic didn't sink.
Rian Johnson thinks unexpectedly destroying everything makes for a good story.
Maybe when Rian Johnson saw RETURN OF THE JEDI he misheard Yoda as having told Luke to 'PISS on what you have learned!'-? It might explain a lot about Episode 8.
I had completely forgot this film even existed I watched it once in cinema and then never again
Have you thought of transcribing your review into a little book with a picture of you smoking and drinking and looking pissed off. You could call it a review five years on or something strange like that. I would buy it.
The one time I ever saw Luke even defer a fight to someone else, was when he found out that Jacen was the one who murdered his wife Mara and why he did it (same exact reason kylo Ren killed his father in TFA) he wanted to straight up unalive Jacen.. but instead of facing him directly he convinced Jaina to be the one to do it.. because he knew out of the two of them she would be the only one who could kill him without hating him for all the shit he did. And it was also so gangsta the fact that the one who taught her how to overtake him was mandalore himself, boba fett. Getting back at Jacen for killing his daughter. Now you see how much better Legends books were than this crap that we got instead..
Listening to this article is amazing, I've never seen anyone try to rim a mouse before. I'd be impressed if I wasn't so disturbed.
Your videos are entertaining enough to almost make me want to "review" movies too just so I can also get a dedicated video:)
Say, do you review game stories as well?
Thank you for pointing out that just because it is a different Star Wars movie, doesn't it means it was good.