There is a genuine backlash building against The Last Jedi

This is the most perfect summary of how all of us 'bots' feel about TLJ.


Parental advisory. Bad words are used. He says the F word a lot.

 

LOL Only a few minutes in. What's up with the watermelon?

 

For everyone upset about Ep 8, here is your chance to fix Ep 9:

 

So much salt in this thread. (insert Crait reference here)

A very vocal group of fans dislike the new Star Wars film, make YT videos in which they swear a lot and use (amongst others) science to criticise STAR WARS (there's no gravity in space), a series that had them pew pew'ing with their makebelief starships flying through SPACE just minutes before they walked into the theatre showing The Last Jedi and not being bothered by that? Fair enough. Just stop implying that people who suspend their disbeliefs and accept change are morose. That's unfair and childish.

Imagine a world where everyone dislikes this one artistic thing that gave you joy. Would it stop you from enjoying that thing? Really?
The Last Jedi is a better shot, better acted, more intelligent, better written, funnier scifi pulp fiction than I ever expected. I loved it. So did the rest of my family. Hell, my two sons (nine and seven year olds) have been roleplaying adventures in a galaxy far, far away since last weekend! They didn't laugh at 'Force Leia.' They said 'look, the force! Cool.' At the force projection Luke scene at the very end my oldest leaned over and whispered in my ear; 'dad, this is the best SW film ever', his face the mirror image of mine when my dad took me to see Ep6 all those years ago.

I'm not telling him he's wrong because reasons. We had a hell of a time. In fact; we're going to see it again in just a couple of hours.

 

Luke Skywalker would never abandon his friends. He would also never even consider killing a child let alone his own nephew. He wouldn’t even kill his own mass-murdering father. RJ and the Lucasfilm toadies can make as many excuses as they want but this is a disgrace to one of the greatest characters in the history of cinema.

 

Not all fans who disliked or hated TLJ are telling you or others who enjoyed it to hate it too, or that by you liking it somehow makes you less than.

For myself, I'm jealous that you're able to suspend your disbelief and enjoy it. I can't come around to. My son watched it with me too, he's 8, and he wasn't into it. I think he liked it more than me, but my failure as a dad is that my son just isn't that much into SW haha. I'd say he's very much a casual fan. He watched TFA at theaters with me, liked it, but like me could never finish it again at home when it came on Netflix.

I think a lot of the hate comes from jealousy or sorrow. Jealous of those who like it because we can't, and sad because we're not going to get the SW we craved for decades. Call it head cannon or expectations, but whatever it is, many fans can't suspend their disbelief in this trilogy (so far). Some blame is on the fan for sure, but some has to go on the movie as well, whether it be writing, producing, or whatever. It's the movies job to capture it's audience, and we can argue all day, but this movie has failed at that for a significant portion of its fans.

 

Agreed. You, I and many others have difficulty following Rian's "character development" for Luke because in ROTJ we witnessed Luke's moral code solidified. Willing to give up his life, Luke confronted Darth Vader (the universe's most infamous villain) and succeed in saving him from the Dark Side and turned him to the Light.

Good people do not pull swords on sleeping relatives in a moment of weakness. (Maybe recovering serial killers murder in a moment of weakness.) For Rian to tell us Luke, who would not kill Vader while facing death before the Emperor, would kill his conflicted sleeping nephew in a moment of weakness is extremely inconsistent character development or extremely bad storytelling.

 

I see where you and many others are coming from and I sympathize with the fact you hated not seeing the optimistic Luke we all grew up with back.
For what it's worth, here's how I saw it. First of all I loved the Rashomon-esque (this film was filled with Kurosawa Samurai influences!) 'truth is a matter of perspective' take on THAT flashback.

The difference with the Vader scenes, again to me, are these: Luke was able to see 'good' in Vader, even though he was a mass murderer and forgave him.
(Come to think of it, forgiving the mass murdering dictator is way more perverse than anything we have witnessed in this trilogy so far!).

In Ben Solo he couldn't see it. Han and Leia had sent their child (who already had a lot of Anakin's darkness in him before he got sent to Luke's Jedi school, at least that's how I understood it) to Luke in the hope he could be saved and here comes the failure: Luke couldn't do it. No matter how hard the most optimistic character of the OT tried he saw only darkness in his nephew. Even so he only entertained the notion of killing baby hitler (classic dilemma in a film filled to the brim with classical philosophical themes) for a second or so. The movie makes it perfectly clear to me he would have never done that but the thought did cross his mind. Just as killing Vader crossed his mind when he ferociously attacked him after the 'Sister!' reveal back in episode 6. No matter how angry and aggressive young Luke became back then he doubled down on killing Vader in the end just as he did with young Ben.

Fact remains; Luke honestly believed young Solo had only darkness in him, UNLIKE Vader. So far he has proven this; the guy killed his own father, participated in the murder of his own mother, rejects Rey, becomes Supreme Leader and wants to wipe out the past. ... this guy isn't the new Vader, he's the new Palpatine. A character young Luke, nor Anakin in the end had any trouble killing.
Now he could be wrong and maybe Rey will prove this in the end, but so far Kylo Ren is the worst kind of evil we saw in the series. The son who doesn't forgive his parents (what did Han and Leia ever do wrong?) but actively kills them. Patricide instead of forgiveness, the exact opposite of Luke.

Now on the Luke abandoning his friends criticism. Again I found it believable; here 's the most optimistic guy in the galaxy coming to terms with hubris (again, greek philosophy time, classical themes, powerful stuff!) and ultimately failure. Everything he held dear, ethically and philosophically, was destroyed in his realization young Solo of the 'noble' Skywalker blood was destined to kill everything he ever fought for. I believe he thought his Jedi ways (hubris!) had become a threat to the galaxy (proven to be true time and time again in these films) and so thought the only way to save the galaxy was to become a hermit...

And now it's up to Rey to bring back hope, to understand the force and bring back light to where there's only darkness. Luke realises this, is saved by young Rey and master Yoda in what to me are the most powerful scenes of the entire series and gets a final legendary farewell.

I respect anyone not buying into any of this as it IS pretty different and ballsy stuff to what we're used to in a series like this but I loved it.

 

On the risk of being impertinent: I appreciate how many of you try to rationalize and positively break down the director's questionable decisions - but sometimes, bad writing is just what it is. There also seems - understanbly enough - a misunderstanding about what people are criticizing:

Directional decisions on the narrative ("what do we do with this character") are not so much the thing people are complaining about, as much as situational decisions ("does this really have to happen this way"). We can well rationalize those decisions, but NOONE can seriously dispute that there is a conceptual change to the established pace and tone of the series. We can also rationalize whether such a change of pace is good or bad IN PRINCIPLE. But the problem with the new movie, for most, seems to be HOW the movie applies these changes, not, that, in principle, it does.

I don't want to reopen a discussion that mostly boils down on personal taste. At the same time, though, if there's anybody here who thinks the narrative goal of a Star Wars movie should REALLY be a debate about whether Luke made that sea-cow orgasm, I invite that person to tell me why.

 

I don't like it... my title wouldn't have "The blank of the blank"... that's horrible and it's been done for two finales of SW trilogies. How unoriginal and what a re-hash.

 

First; thanks for debating calmly and graciously. There's altogether too much drama on the internet as is.

I disagree however with your claim regarding TLJ that bad writing is just what it is. One man's bad writing is another's good in my opinion. In my post I never felt I had to rationalize questionable decisions made by Rian Johnson and the team over at Lucasarts. To me it just felt like trying to explain and put into words what I had seen and how I interpreted it. By saying rationalizing you make it sound like me and others who loved the film have to put a serious effort into coming up with reasons to explain why we love what is factually bad writing or filmmaking. As if someone who goes along with the decisions of the filmmaker is in denial or something.
I'm sorry but I am most certainly not.

I am not disputing that TLJ feels like a change to the fans expectations but to me does not feel like a conceptual change? We can talk semantics all day long of course and it's not what I'm trying to do here but despite being unpredictable I did not feel like the core concept of SW was changed in this film. Sure, beloved characters (Luke) behaved different to what anyone had expected but their behaviour rang true to me. Besides, if we are talking concepts it still is a classic story involving light and dark sides, good and evil, there is a hero's journey (Rey's) involving a young pupil who has to cope with the loss of a master. It's still pure Campbell and I find it strange why so many people were surprised and outraged at Luke's death while the very concept of these kinds of stories demands the master's (Gandalf, Dumbledore, Qui gon, Obi Wan, Yoda, Han, ...) demise.

On the change of tone; go back and compare the tone of episode 4 to that of ESB. Now there's a shift in tone right there at the very beginning of the series? I was there when Empire came out and boy did that film rub people the wrong way. History has been rewritten and most fans changed their tune where ep5 is concerned but back in the early eighties it was far from the fan favourite it is now. Speaking of changes in tone; compare the entire OT (which in itself does not really have a cosistent tone) to that of the PT (which does)...

On your sea cow comment; thanks mate, that sentence almost made me ruin my keyboard as I had to laugh so loud the lemonade I was drinking found its way back out, through the nostrils and onto the laptop/

 

When in fact this movie is so similar to the Transformer hence why I don't like it.

Characters just going against there historical trend...check

New stuff just happening for some reason....check

Some uninteresting character pushed to the forefront.....check

A mixup of the continuity of the previous films......check

Ridiculous scenarios that make no sense but look cool on screen.......check

Christmas 2019 watch Star Wars Episode IX: Revenge of the Fallen

Staring Rey nobody who inherits the Matrix of Leadership from Luke and transfroms into Rodimus Prime.

Finn realizes his true calling as Sam Whitwicky

 

Yeah the Transformers/Marvelization of Star Wars has been profoundly sad to witness. It just leaves a dead on the inside feeling.

 

TLJ is way ahead of transformers. Way ahead. Go and watch a parody like epic movie or a later madea film if you want see a true bad film.

I feel more opimistic than that. More a "new generation" feeling.

 

I did last Friday.

 

Depends on what he saw in Ben's mind as he slept. If you listen to the background stuff when Luke does his mind read to him while he's sleeping, it sounds horrible.

Besides Luke saw the good in Vader only when Vader was confronting Luke himself. (If Luke was around during Vader's Jedi genocide days. Who knows what Luke would have felt then.)

It seems what Luke saw in Kylo was a massacre of epic proportions.

Also I feel a lot of opposite themes are in play. When Vader found out he had a son, a little good sparked in him. When Kylo, as an adult, found out he had Vader blood in him and is a descendant of the Force itself, it sparked a lot of bad in him.

 

Boy, you sure missed a lot of things in this movie.

 

Yes I am an unenlightened rube that cannot grasp this beautiful piece of movie magic.

 

But I'm an unenlightened rube and I loved this movie!

It touched me.

 

Sorry I am just a sad miserable bot. George Lucas killed my childhood. Rian Johnson did too.


Help me JJ Abrams. Your my only hope