A/V Episode VIII - THE LAST JEDI - Official Movie Discussion Thread

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No, sorry, I meant the new EU and the new Empire's End. I can see now that it could be confusing. On the Empire's End novel, there are some fellows trying to invoke something dark Palpatine is looking for in Jakku and one guy is kicked into the pit and dies but they don't explain it further. What I meant to express is that I think of Snoke as a character from the expanded media that showed up on film; kind of like Boba Fett, whose best stories are told elsewhere and on the OT he is just eye candy (and dies easily as well).

 

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He's probably the Porg on the Millennium Falcon.

 

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Given how he was unceremoniously offed I wish MORE THAN EVER that Snoke had been Plagueis.

Can you imagine how amazing that would have been?

No?

Let me make it clearer:

Snoke: You think you can turn him? Pathetic child! I CANNOT BE BETRAYED!

*Is betrayed*

Kylo Ren: Ironic.

 

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Honestly, I am not sure why fans are so hung up on Plagueis. He could save others from death, but not himself. He was never immortal.

Either the novelization or Making Of -- IIRC -- went further in driving home the irony of a Sith that could save others from death, because all a Sith cares about is himself, so why would he care for that power? That's why his apprentice had no use for it and didn't bother learning it.

At this point I think once 9 comes out we'll get a bunch of literary content around the trilogy including Snoke's history. It's the same as the Emperor in Return of the Jedi. Fans had to wait 16 years to get his story -- we won't have to wait that long.

FWIW, I think the biggest mystery with Snoke that's still unanswered is, "what makes him supreme?"

 

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I was partial to the notion because I thought the Plagueis story was awkward and stupid and it would have been nice for it to have been reworked into foreshadowing to justify both its own existence and TFA's bargain bin Palpatine at the same time. Not to mention alleviate the ST from feeling so crazy disconnected from everything else.

Coupled with Snoke's pedestaling of Vader and his line it was a nice fit.

Et: And now we know Rey's parents are nothing nobodies from nowhere it would have been even better, because her emergence would essentially be the Force giving Plagueis a slap in the face for thinking his engineered Skywalker-line was the be-all-and-end-all.

 

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I don't think Snoke is obsessed with Vader -- that's his carrot for Ben. I think the fact that he's Kylo Ren and not Darth Starkiller closed the door on Snoke being a Sith Lord and I prefer it that way. The obsession with the Sith as villains from 2005-2012 really made me sick of them.

RC-1991 said the same thing to me about ST seeming disconnected, but I don't see it. If anything, it feels more like a pastiche of the OT and much more connected due to that than the prequels were with their eschewing the used future aesthetic.

There's certain aspects of that which I like, namely that I think from a storytelling perspective they're deliberately trying to be evocative of this era from 1983 to 1999, where the prequel era was a huge cipher. The Knights of Ren are the new Dark Lords of the Sith. Snoke is the new Emperor. These things are deliberately mysterious to cultivate fan theories.

The difference is there won't be a prequel trilogy. But I think they plan on filling the gap with other media once the sequel trilogy is completed. And we may get new information on Snoke in the novelization. I'm not sure why that's not being released for 3 months.

I dunno, personally, I see the sequel trilogy as a hybridization of the Bantam era and its pastiches of the OT, and at the same time it's doing bold things with the characters that the closest we got in that era was Veitch was Dark Empire, i.e. looking to continue developing them. Obviously not everyone likes the story choices they've made in that regard, same as a lot of people didn't like what Veitch did with Dark Empire. They're not playing it safe, like say, Zahn, where the development was relegated to his pet characters.

I guess I'm just a fan of Dark Empire. We just need popped collars now.

 

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I see the sequel trilogy as a huge waste of time that blew up RotJ's ending for the sole purpose of letting us watch a bunch of new characters get us back to RotJ's ending so they could... what? Either blow it up again or finally tell the story they should have been telling right now.

 

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Well, that was axiomatic to a sequel trilogy. I expected it. It's Star Wars. "Happily ever after" implies no continuation as it precludes further conflict and drama.

Or we could get more saccharine storytelling like Bantam. And the Big 3 didn't fare so well in the Del Rey timeline that followed, but still had character shields.

 

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Well Snoke is pretty clear that Rey is absolutely a Force-slap in the face for Kylo.

But additionally, and perhaps most importantly, Plagueis' slap in the face occurred in Return of the Jedi.

 

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We can have a sequel that continues conflict while still keeping true to the characters of the original work. Luke becoming an angry hermit with no plan in 8 is like Gandalf deciding in LOTR to stop fighting Sauron and do nothing because his blue wizard brothers betrayed him sometime after the Hobbit. LOTR is a good example of how you can continue the conflict while still preserving the character of the old heroes (in this case Bilbo and Gandalf). 8 didn't do this for Luke.

I'm seeing a trend where some posters seem to be afraid to criticize 8 because they dislike the prequels and the EU SO much. As if any criticism of 8 will somehow automatically equate to praise of the prequels/EU which they despise. Saying the EU or prequels did something better than 8 doesn't automatically mean one is saying it's good.

As an analogy, just because someone in the Marvel Universe would prefer Magneto to rule the world instead of the Red Skull doesn't mean they automatically think Magneto is good. They are just saying Magneto is less bad. Likewise, saying 8 did things worse than the EU doesn't mean that person is saying the EU is good--far from it, they are just saying the EU is less bad.

 

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Yeah, I acknowledged that folks have issues with the story choices made in the ST. I think that would happen no matter what, unless they simply played it completely safe, and completely arrested all character development for established characters, which is what a lot of the Bantam novels did. Even in the Expanded Universe, the stories which did have character growth have proponents and detractors.

 

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What about RotJ's ending requires "happily ever after", "saccharine storytelling" or "character shields" to follow?

There's this nineteen book series I think you might like.

 

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But other people didn't like it, just like some people don't like this ST.

You're not going to please everyone with story decisions that don't play it safe.

 

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The idiocy of the New Republic could be said to be a common theme in both ST and NJO. Though, NJO did at least require 2 years of near-constant Vong advance / warfare before the NR died at Coruscant, whereas the ST was, what? 2 days?

It would have been nice to have a trilogy that doesn't require characters or governments to do dumb stuff - 'hand over your Jedi!' 'yes, yes, of course' - because the plot requires it.

Which might be one of the things that people are objecting to in the ST, no one's having to do that, instead it's appears to be 'turn up, get instant win / power' (delete as applicable)

 

guys just accept that jino left me dead inside

I'm inoculated to this

 

Very well. Hook him up, yes, hook DM up to the headphones. Fate of the Jedi? Yes, yes, that shall be on complete rotation for the next 24 hours.

What do you mean he'll be a drooling husk?

 

Saw it again because my friend wanted to. It's the same movie.

Spoiler

It's easier to overlook how awful the plotting is when you already know how awful it is, but it's still pretty awful. The space combat looks wonderful but none of it makes physical or tactical sense (I also noticed the arcing lasers this time, which are really obvious if you're looking for them) Everything about Holdo's character makes no logical sense and is just there for movie reasons. The casino is a giant waste of time that does nothing with the actual setting. Del Toro's character feels like an interesting concept that was never fully fleshed out.

The emotional moments still got me, though I also still noticed that there weren't enough of them -- the film really doesn't do anything with the connection between Luke and Chewbacca. It's part of the weird disconnected feeling the whole ST has; it's devoted to aping the OT's plot points and visuals but it never feels meaningfully connected to the OT in either plot or spirit. Absolutely nothing in the ST has anything to do with the end of ROTJ. The Resistance and First Order look like the Rebellion and Empire, but have nothing to do with them in any meaningful way. Nothing from ROTJ is built on; instead it's all just intentionally thrown away. The ST exists in a universe where Luke, Han, and Leia are great big heroes from the past, but nothing they did in the OT is actually significant and nothing they do now grows out of it; everything they do in the ST is built around being props in the story of these new kids. It's part of why the only time TLJ -- and thus the whole ST so far -- really succeeds is when it actually, finally, belatedly embraces the meaning of Luke Skywalker and lets him share a personal moment with Leia, commiserating about Han, almost as if these people have an actual past, and then sends him off in a grandiose finale built around the idea that Luke is a great figure, an icon, someone who means something on his own terms and not just within the story of Rey or Kylo. That's the only time this film achieved real emotion for me, when Luke connected with Artoo (talk about a neglected character -- both droids get completely blown off in favor of fricking BB-8) and when he connected with Leia and then went out in a scene that was all about Luke Skywalker and the audience's connection with him.

Also, the porgs are the absolute worst. The worst. We already had way too much cutesy comic relief with BB-8, who is also the worst. Now we need reaction shots of adorable critters? Like, the Falcon swoops in to the rescue and we get a shot of Chewbacca flying, and it should be a great moment where we get to go, "**** yeah, Chewie!" but instead we need to immediately go to the porg reaction shot because nothing can ever actually be about the OT and our connection with it and any actual joy, it has to be about the new thing.

 

Speaking of jino

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I think Kylo is going to have a similar problem as Jacen did in invicible. In that hes gotten completely humiliated by pretty much everyone so its going to be really tough to take him seriously as the big bad by the time the finale rolls around.

Maybe Rey will further that comparison by taking his arm off in the opening segment of IX.

 

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This has nothing to do with pleasing everyone. Or even pleasing me. It's about a very specific criticism: that TFA blew up the ending of RotJ when it didn't have to, and the Saga now feels like its playing catch up with itself.

Can I imagine disliking a sequel trilogy that WASN'T guilty of this? For sure. I've read LotF.

.

 

Spoiler

Agreed, there are ways of continuing the story without completely ruining the old one. Say LOTR continued the Hobbit by having Sauron blow up the Lonely Mountain and Erebor, have Gandalf hide on a mountain refusing to budge because he is disillusioned with the blue wizards and Saruman being traitors, and have Bilbo killed by Frodo because Frodo wants to rule Middle-Earth with Sauron. I'm not sure LOTR would have been as successful if Tolkien took this route.

The real LOTR did not play anything safe with its story, but still kept true to the characters established in the Hobbit.

 

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Okay, but if the sequel trilogy didn't blow everything up and everything was great, what are the stakes? Why does it warrant a ST? Why do I care about this story?

Is it the Thrawn trilogy, where everything is great but threatened, but the threat doesn't amount to anything?

I don't get the NJO comparisons. The New Republic was destroyed in that too. The only difference was that the Big 3 were around. Which seems to be what this is about then.

But the problem is, any conflict with any dramatic weight to it is going to imperil or destroy their accomplishments. And they're not the heroes now. So the triumph coming out of that will no longer be their accomplishment or achievement.

The EU had a silly balancing act where they tried to eat their cake and have it too and what you got is a Luke that most people aren't really happy with because he mostly sat around and delegated. And certainly didn't develop as a character in a meaningful sense, except to piggyback off of Jacen.

 

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Yeah, if I didn't read outside sources (and the opening crawl didn't barely mention the New Republic), you'd think the Rebel Alliance had lost the war and Leia's been on the run with the Rebellion for the last thirty years. Most of the "changes" over the last thirty years haven't been for the better. Han and Leia had a son? He turns out to be a bigger idiot and jerk than Anakin Skywalker ever was. Luke has no kids, no students, and he's abandoned all hope and responsibility. He's not a New Hope, he's intermediate hope while the New-er Hope is Rey, who isn't tempted, needs no lessons on meditation or lightsaber combat and has already defeated or tied with Kylo Ren twice (and the second time the lightsaber broke before either of their strength gave out), and Kylo is supposed to be fully evil now too so no more hesitation excuse.

Well, until Episode X and they come out with Newerer Hope where things start out on a desert planet and the Jedi are still dead and gone and an evil Empire with Star Destroyers oppress everyone.

And when there are so many logic holes, these things are less entertaining than the prequels, at least for me. And there's very little multimedia stories to fall back on either, so there will be little to no stories in between VIII and IX as they've always got to be cryptic and mysterious.

When did angst become the answer to everything?! Luke is angst-ridden, Kylo is emo, Leia is worn down by everything she's gone through. ESB was dark, but it started out with a valiant Rebel defense against the Empire with a fleet surviving. Here we're down to less than fifty Resistance members. The Visual Guide mentions other X-wing pilots were reassigned, but I expect when IX comes out it'll turn out they all died too off-screen, just like how Ackbar's death was barely noticed (we all noticed, but we're bigger fans than most).

What really hurts is that NJO and the Legacy comics were far better as successor/sequel stories to the OT than this disaster of a story.

 

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Does the tone of TLJ feel off to anyone else? TFA felt like it was going to set up an epic story but other than the Finn and Rose stuff at Canto Bight showing hints at stuff in the greater galaxy it just tightly followed Rey, Ben and Luke and the Resistance plot line. Did we really need to follow the Resistance while they fled the FO for a good portion of the movie? Sort of like the jump from Revelation to Invincible. Galaxy-spanning war to just Jaina against Caedus with the Second Galactic Civil War ending off screen.

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Heck, to me, the end of TLJ was just setting up E9 to be ANH/ROTJ/TFA again.

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This. And it is so hard to take the FO seriously.

 

The collapse of these boards all weekend has left me almost completely out of the conversation. Super sucks.

Spoiler

i cant say i *like* the direction they decided for Luke, but i can understand it to some degree.

Though, i daresay i could understand him giving up on the Jedi religion without him having a split second of "my nephew will become a monster! I should kill him in sleep!" I mean, just knowing the history of the Jedi Order and that the Sith seem to have always arose out of their ranks would be enough. Without Luke being at least partially responsible for what finally sent Ben over the edge, i could see him feeling responsible still for even passing on the teachings that enables him to indulge his dark impulses.

I could relate because i have a faith that's marred with people using it as justification to indulge their dark impulses. I know what it feels like to retreat into yourself and hide from the world because some asshat sharing many of the markings of your religion does something horrible. I feel that way after every terrorist attack committed by an Islamist extremist.

I think it would have been a better course, a truer course, to have Luke go to Ahch-To to find something that would help turn things around, perhaps without violence. And all he finds is that this has always been happening. That a Jedi succumbs to darkness and does terrible things every so often. And it overwhelms him. At that point, he decides the universe is better off without the Jedi. I could understand it.

I don't like that, even though Luke was actually trained to be a different sort of Jedi than those in the prequels, they decided that Luke simply hunted down as much old Jedi lore as possible and basically tried to recreate a Jedi Order that Yoda was intent to remain in the past. So, even though Luke was intended to be the reviver of a *new* Jedi Order that was cut off and now Rey is supposed to be that, i guess.

I cant say i have any clue what they are going for with this trilogy. I dont think there's a cohesive vision at play here. A narrative focus. What is that so-called Story Group any good for after all?

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

 

The collapse of these boards all weekend has left me almost completely out of the conversation. Super sucks.

Spoiler

i cant say i *like* the direction they decided for Luke, but i can understand it to some degree.

Though, i daresay i could understand him giving up on the Jedi religion without him having a split second of "my nephew will become a monster! I should kill him in sleep!" I mean, just knowing the history of the Jedi Order and that the Sith seem to have always arose out of their ranks would be enough. Without Luke being at least partially responsible for what finally sent Ben over the edge, i could see him feeling responsible still for even passing on the teachings that enables him to indulge his dark impulses.

I could relate because i have a faith that's marred with people using it as justification to indulge their dark impulses. I know what it feels like to retreat into yourself and hide from the world because some asshat sharing many of the markings of your religion does something horrible. I feel that way after every terrorist attack committed by an Islamist extremist.

I think it would have been a better course, a truer course, to have Luke go to Ahch-To to find something that would help turn things around, perhaps without violence. And all he finds is that this has always been happening. That a Jedi succumbs to darkness and does terrible things every so often. And it overwhelms him. At that point, he decides the universe is better off without the Jedi. I could understand it.

I don't like that, even though Luke was actually trained to be a different sort of Jedi than those in the prequels, they decided that Luke simply hunted down as much old Jedi lore as possible and basically tried to recreate a Jedi Order that Yoda was intent to remain in the past. So, even though Luke was intended to be the reviver of a *new* Jedi Order that was cut off and now Rey is supposed to be that, i guess.

I cant say i have any clue what they are going for with this trilogy. I dont think there's a cohesive vision at play here. A narrative focus. What is that so-called Story Group any good for after all?

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

 

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I don't get the sense Luke was necessarily trying to recreate the old order, just gather understanding.

As for having no direction with the trilogy, the firing of Trevorrrow and Abrams starting over from scratch would certainly suggest that to be the case.