Board 8 > The only Star Wars poll that matters

(+) Yeah! (+)

azuarc posted...

the last guy decided to make a Star Wars movie that isn't Star Wars

I really struggle to understand this point and I've seen it a few times now. Could you explain it?
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jcgamer107 posted...

Rise of Skywalker was just a gigantic band-aid on the whole thing, and the fact that any of it worked at all (imo) is kind of a miracle.

I mean it didn't.

Leonhart4 posted...

Phantom Menace

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XIII_rocks posted...

I really struggle to understand this point and I've seen it a few times now. Could you explain it?

Yeah I swear if I had seen TLJ when it came out I would have just thought it was another Star Wars movie. I wouldn't have even known what was supposed to be "subversive" about it. I'll just chalk that up to my lack of much interest in SW until 2018.

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The problem with most of the Star Wars movies is that they don't exist for a movie's own sake, but to explain some sort of shared universe. That's not how you make a good movie. This is true of a lot of franchise films these days, but the prequel trilogy especially feels like a filmed Wookipedia article.

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That so much. Also while I do think TLJ messed up the trilogy's structure, Rise of Skywalker could have still turned out better had more time and effort been put into its script.

Honestly TLJ was largely fine aside from its messy structure, regarding just the movie itself in addition to within the trilogy.

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ctesjbuvf posted...

I fully believe Force Awakens is the actual worst one.

Lmao

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It is.

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XIII_rocks posted...

I really struggle to understand this point and I've seen it a few times now. Could you explain it?

Well, let's start with the scope. The entire universe has basically been funneled into three ships traveling through space, pursued by the not-imperials. It works as a TV episode, or maybe some other sci-fi franchise, but for Star Wars it just isn't that interesting or compelling. It begins with Poe clowing around and insulting General Hux, and when that's the highlight of this storyline, you know you're in trouble.

There's a sidelight where Rose and Finn run off (somehow) to another planet, where they do a bunch of stuff that was clearly just thrown in so we could have some CGI stuff with colors that aren't the interior of the ship, but it seems completely unrelated. And also implausible, given what's going on in the main story, that they could leave and come back.

You have Rey exploring her skills as a Jedi, except Rey after one movie was waaaayyyyyy more capable than Luke ever was and arguably doesn't even need training. She spends more time dealing with a shirtless Kylo or wandering through a spooky hall of mirrors that looks like it was lifted from Neverending Story. Oh, and trying to persuade a grumpy Luke who has become a shade of his former self in far more ways than the story alone can account for. Sure, he's a badass at the end, but it kills him in the process.

Then everyone escapes to the planet, and although the sequence there does at least finally start to feel like Star Wars, you have inane things like Rose shoving Finn's speeder out of the way because love. The sequence where Snoke gets killed is pretty awesome, but it also literally upends everything else the entire trilogy is trying to achieve. Kylo was never going to be serviceable as a villain unless the entire trilogy bought into it, and considering I thought he was the worst, sillest, most terribly-acted part of Episode 7 (which is saying a lot when we have the Nazi propaganda scene and Rey running away terrified from Luke's lightsaber,) there was never going to be a moment where I thought, "Gee, Kylo as the big bad sure is a compelling twist I didn't see coming."

So I feel like it's bad on its own, but it's also bad because it compounds the flaws that episode 7 had. We still have no sense of The First Order or why they seem to be a bunch of incompetent buffoons. (If General Hux is at the top of their chain of command, how can you ever take them seriously?) The characters are all written as ghosts of who they were one movie ago. Potential is wasted at every single turn -- ask Gwendoline Christie -- and the thing I remember most is trying to calculate the length of Laura Dern's neck.

So if you want, you can argue that it feels like Star Wars. Sure, it has some of the components of the universe. There's stuff in space, aliens, and jedis. But the epicness is limited to a few select moments that feel either shoehorned or like setpieces the movie was designed to create regardless of how they got there. The sense of good and evil that is typically so clear in Lucas-directed movies is gone. And storywise, it's an unqualified, unmitigated disaster the likes of which even Episode II couldn't aspire toward. Ep 9 was ridiculous in many ways of its own, but mostly because it was trying to pull out of the nose dive that 8 took, and couldn't quite find a way to salvage everything without a serviceable villain, without a real plot, without a clear objective, without any usable sense of worldbuilding (in freaking Star Wars!) or really without much of anything at all to build from.

And that can all be laid at the feet of episode 8, and how it was both awful and too far removed from what fans expect of Star Wars.

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azuarc posted...

The entire universe has basically been funneled into three ships traveling through space, pursued by the not-imperials. It works as a TV episode, or maybe some other sci-fi franchise,

It was definitely way better when it was the pilot of Battlestar Galactica.

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I could post a lengthy rebuttal, but frankly the whole conversation is exhausting, so Ill just say this. The Last Jedi is a great film and one of the best Star Wars films. The only bad thing about it is that they didnt follow through in IX. And honestly with polishing Trevorrows script would have worked.

Also, most of Star Wars is good! And every single film has received mostly positive reviews, all but two are fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, all but the first two prequels and TROS have good ratings on IMDB, all the episodes were very financially successful and did well in audience metrics. Its always been a well received series. The reason that it sometimes seems like most films are hated is nothing to do with the actual quality of the films and everything to do with the fact that Star Wars fans hate Star Wars.

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Lightning Strikes posted...

The only bad thing about it is that they didnt follow through in IX.

really

I couldn't even say this about any of my favourite media

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I guess it would be more accurate to say the only thing bad enough to hamper my enjoyment in a meaningful way however it just lacks the same ring. :p

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Damn that's a really bad take lol.

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Lightning Strikes posted...

Also, most of Star Wars is good! And every single film has received mostly positive reviews, all but two are fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, all but the first two prequels and TROS have good ratings on IMDB, all the episodes were very financially successful and did well in audience metrics. Its always been a well received series. The reason that it sometimes seems like most films are hated is nothing to do with the actual quality of the films and everything to do with the fact that Star Wars fans hate Star Wars.

Honestly it reminds me a little of some MGS arguments I've seen down the years

Like MGS1-4 are excellent (to me) but at the same time all 4 have really clear flaws, and your mileage varies on how big a deal they are. Like for me the shape memory alloy elevator fest near the end is kind of a deal-breaker enough for MGS1 is problematic enough for me to have it as my least favourite of the 4. But then somebody will argue back and say the, like, characterization of Raiden+Rose is SO MUCH WORSE and how can I POSSIBLY THINK "heat the key" is worse than that

Anyone looking at that kind of argument from the outside, where those clear flaws become crucial parts of the discussion, might come to the conclusion that all the games are bad - when actually the reverse is true.

Same is true of Star Wars. I didn't dislike TROS. It was very messy and I'll point out its gaping flaws to anyone who argues it was better than like TLJ. Only SW movie I actively disliked was AotC.
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azuarc posted...

Ep 9 was ridiculous in many ways of its own, but mostly because it was trying to pull out of the nose dive that 8 took, and couldn't quite find a way to salvage everything without a serviceable villain, without a real plot, without a clear objective, without any usable sense of worldbuilding (in freaking Star Wars!) or really without much of anything at all to build from.

This is bonkers to me as I feel it left things with Ren as a completely serviceable villain, and Rey's attempt to turn him rather than just end him would add a bit of tension. Him failing to turn is way more compelling to me than what happened.

You just need to build Ren in the opening act of IX, ie, have him beat the fuck out of Rey to show that in a vacuum he actually is stronger (their TFA duel had all those mitigating factors that have been discussed ad nauseum).

I don't buy that adding a thin layer of complexity to what is still a pretty simple good/evil story makes it not Star Wars either.

Thanks for the explanation anyway because I at least understand what you're going for a little better than before, even though I totally disagree.
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Yeah I thought TLJ left the door clearly open for Kylo Ren to take the villain spot. The issue then however is that you essentially have two films of set-up, and then the next one has to conclude the trilogy, as opposed to Episode VIII following on from Episode VII in any kind of logical way.

That said, I still have no darn clue how the hate for TLJ gets so vicious. Honestly I feel like there's more truth to the idea that hating TLJ makes you a bigot than there is to liking TLJ making you an SJW.

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Also I don't get why people act like Star Wars is "dead" or that Kathleen Kennedy should be fired completely for her handling of the franchise. To me the franchise seems at worst to be in a similar position to Nintendo during the Wii U era.

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Whoever greenlit Palps coming back definitely deserves to be fired.

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TLJ tried to do something different and had mixed success.

But it shouldn't have tried to do something different in the first place, because a series of films needs a single plot and this one clearly didn't have one, but as an attempt to butcher its own series, I've seen worse than TLJ.

But then IX tried to come back to the tone of VII, and that was even worse, because it created yet another discontinuity, when sticking to VIII's plot might have been better. Also IX is pretty bad by itself. It's souless, takes zero risks and uses every possible holywood cliche it can. And VII was already kind of like that, but it had a nostalgia factor and some novelty to make it fun. IX needed to wrap up the plot well and it just didn't.

So I'd say TLJ isn't the worst movie of new trilogy, it's maybe even as good as VII. But it's the movie that ruined it. And IX is the movie that made a very shitty attempt at fixing it. This trilogy was always doomed to fail because the producers were not interested in it having a single plot under the control of one person.

Just like the DC Extended Universe.

Also, I don't get what makes Star Wars fans lose it concerning a trilogy that averages out to around 80% on Rotten Tomatoes when Sonic and Resident Evil fans take a million bad games. And it's not like MGS fans declared critics as shills for liking 4, or ditto Civ fans and V. What's different here?

And even if the Disney's handling of Star Wars has been less than stellar, at least some of the criticism of it does boil down to hostility towards women and POC in their Star Wars movies.

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