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

Yeah, but between the Ben Swolo scene and Rey attacking Luke she goes through her whole mirror cave thing, which is a huge turning point for her arc, and again plays into that need for belonging. Considering Kylo was "right" to point her in that direction, she then confides in him, and Luke's explosive reaction thereafter just pushes her further towards Kylo.

 

I didn't see it that way. To me it seemed like Ben's revelation to Rey was the missing piece of the puzzle in her eyes. The key to solving the mystery of why Luke Skywalker was acting so strange. And to her credit, she was right. That's exactly why Luke was in hiding.

 

It's sort of interesting how the Ben/Rey story can be interpreted so many different ways. I hope whatever JJA does, he leaves the TLJ events ambiguous.

For me Rey's TLJ story reminds me of another tale, but I can't recall offhand what it is. When someone is so desperate for something they're willing to believe anything, like falling for the snakeoil salesman. She's so desperate to find her "path" that she takes Ben's "magical" apparitions as a sign the Force is guiding her on her journey. The mirror cave reinforces this: she gets no help learning about the Jedi from Luke, so she looks to the Dark Side for answers and sees something she fears, an eternity of herself alone, just like where she came from. So she chooses to go visit Ben and see what he has to offer seeing is she's getting nowhere on Ahch-to and the Ben-visions must mean something, but then finds out the Ben-visions were just Snoke all along (snoke and mirrors!). She bought the snakeoil hype. Snokeoil. God Snoke, your name is so punny.

 

Even I think this is reductive and makes its point (to which there is something) poorly, but I did enjoy this, which cuts to the core of the problem:

“I’m just a fan who grew up with Luke Skywalker as my hero, who waited eagerly to see him be the Jedi Master I’d hoped he would be thirty years later: powerful, wise, compassionate . . . .”

To which the ST said “lolnope” and killed him.

 

Crucially, Ben seems to think this, too.

 

Snoke ended up dead and the First Order crippled by it, so I'm not sure it wasn't the Force.

 

Rey taking the texts is an extremely obvious allusion to Martin Luther. Rather than relying on the inherited wisdom of an embodied false priesthood, she has embraced the notion of the priesthood of all believers, and will read and interpret scripture on her own to create a properly reformed Jedi Order. In the same way, Luke's unwillingness to fight demonstrates his commitment to justification by faith alone rather than faith and good works.

And obviously his trying to kill Young Ben shows that predestination is an accepted doctrine of Lukeranism.

 

As it was inflicted upon mine eyes elsewhere, so do I now inflict it upon thine:

 

Since this thread seems to be slowing down, I figured I'd give my actual opinion on the film, which I've been loathe to do because reaction to it (here and elsewhere) has been just so vitriolic and over the top on both the sides of its defenders and promoters.

I personally think that it is the best Star Wars movie since the OT, but that is in spite of, rather than reflective of an absence of, immense flaws throughout the movie. The prequels had major flaws too, but I think they tilt just a bit too much in the other direction - at their heart, the prequels had interesting (and controversially contrarian to the OT) takes on the universe but were enveloped in shoddy directing, acting, CGI, dialogue, etc.

TFA and Rogue One are the opposite - narratively uninteresting and completely bland storylines simmered in the moviemaking-by-corporate-committee model that Marvel pioneered for its newer stepsibling in the Marvel family. TFA and Rogue One are more technically adept than the prequels, the dialogue is generally better, and even if they might not have better actors overall, the actors are able to (for the most part) get better performances. But they lack the certain Star Warsiness of the prequels, and even of the OT - they're based as much as what the general public memory and expectation of the OT is rather than what is actually in the OT. (And I say this as someone who really likes the first half of TFA, mainly on the strength of the cast, and thinks that Rogue One is a fine enough movie overall.) Solo also seems like it's following this model, and we can guess that IX will too given the people involved.

TLJ feels different - like the prequels, despite the flaws and the contrarianness, it has the sort of Star Wars feel that TFA/R1 hasn't. I think partly that's because of all the post-Disney movies, it's the one that had the least drama to it behind the scenes; it's also the only post-Disney movie where it had one director and one screenwriter and they're the same person (which also makes Rian Johnson the only other Star Wars director besides Lucas to have also solely written his movie - and notably only two Marvel directors over three movies have had this distinction too, and one of those movies was such a bad experience it chased the director over to DC). It also seems like there was much less direct involvement from the Lucasfilm corporate side of things than there was in TFA, IX, Rogue One, or Solo. From Johnon's past experiences as a filmmaker, he's closer to the various Anthology directors than he is to Abrams or Treverrow, which makes him doing a core movie interesting too, and which combined with the fact that Johnson definitely had a very strong opinion of where to take it going in meant that it had the sort of voice that TFA didn't, IX probably won't, and to be honest ROTS and AOTC also didn't really have (no surprise given Lucas had a lot of problems writing those scripts and getting the movies out on time).

As for that kind of scope... I think part of the problem with TLJ's issues, as well as the fan reaction to it, is that it had to build off of what Abrams left him. I don't think Johnson and Abrams are at odds with each other or don't like each other or anything like that, but I do think they fundamentally have different ideas on the series and the saga in general, even beyond their filmmaking interests and approach. I've seen a lot of back and forth on whether TLJ was actually just as slavish to the original trilogy as TFA was but just with a slightly different paint job (I actually still don't know how I feel about that, though I think the ability to do something that seems new even while it's at its heart still recognizably Star Wars is better than Abrams-style overt emulation) or that Johnson was betraying fans by pretty much dumping all the mystery box stuff that Abrams set up. (More on this in a bit.) If hypothetically Johnson had started the series with TFA, I think a lot of the contradictions (intentional or perceived) would not have been there, and the theme of moving on from the past would have made a lot more sense and been more palatable coming as it does from the start of the reboot. I also think we would have gotten the Luke/Leia/Han reunion, too, but I digress.

Now, as for some of what he actually did do... I think that all the Force-related stuff, Luke and Kylo and Rey, was great. A lot of the messages were great in the movie. Visually, the movie was excellent and the cinematography and visuals some of in not the best in the series. I even liked Canto Bight, which seems to be a major sticking point. But things like the pacing of the movie, the idea of an 18 hour chase, the internal timeline making even less sense than stuff like the travel time to Bespin, the pure length of the movie, essentially every Resistance-based plotline and character interaction, the Marvel-ized quips pervading every moment of potential gravitas in order to protect audiences from even the chance of an emotional reaction, the muddled message with Rose at the end or stuff like clinging to the Rebellion and Falcon undermining the prior message of letting the past die... this is the kind of stuff that muddles it for me.

I could go on, but really, it's been debating to death. But what I'll say is, unlike TFA (or even the prequels honestly), the negatives here are at least interesting from the attempts. It's that kind of noble failure that makes TLJ as interesting and appealing to me as a result of its issues as much as what it gets right (and it does do a lot right, it has to be remembered when I'm focusing on more of the negatives here).

To use a comparison I'm sure most people here won't like, think back two years ago to Batman v Superman and Civil War, two movies that everyone talked about the similarities of. Civil War was held up as the better movie because it got the same type of reviews that Marvel always got and it made more money, and we all know that money determines whether a movie is good. Yet two years later no one cares about Civil War because there have been twenty more identical Marvel movies since, and in the end there wasn't really anything that memorable about Civil War. Meanwhile BvS is still widely remembered and debated online.

Yet after BvS, DC consciously decided to move away from its more unique if controversial take in favor of emulating the same Marvel formula. Something which resulted in Justice League, a movie that no one cares or remembers about. And I'm worried that with Star Wars after TLJ, especially for IX and whatever other 'main' movies come after it (and we all know there will be a sequel-sequel trilogy announced within ten years, once the Anthology movies start to flag) Lucasfilm is going to go the route DC took. Avoid the negative press, avoid anything that even seems outside the established genre/series box even if it's not actually outside the box, and keep doing the same movie just with different placeholder names in the script. Putting Abrams back in charge for IX seems like a pretty big indication for that. (And I know that Terrio is co-writing IX and that Johnson is doing his own thing, but this being Lucasfilm, until the movie comes out, there's always going to be the chance that they'll be given the boot if they make Kennedy too nervous.)

I guess this was a long post that probably doesn't say a whole lot, but it's a lot of my thoughts that I've had the last two months but kept to myself because, to be honest, the conversation around TLJ and its quality has just been so unpleasant that I didn't really want to take part.

 

Wrong as usual!....

...oh, wait...we actually agree on a lot of things here

Interesting, well thought out, and well written review.

Sent from my Moto X-Wing

 

So you are saying that you are both wrong?

 

Totally agreed. Despite what Yoda says about trying.

 

EPISODE IX: THE REY FORMATION

 

I remember being initially a little thrown that we got puppet Yoda instead of CGI Yoda but I've definitely grown to like it, and I don't think it's a nostalgia factor but more of an immersion with actor factor - the last time we saw Mark Hamill interact with Yoda, it was a puppet. It would be weird to see Mark Hamill acting with CGI Yoda.

I also thought for a second that it'd be great to see Luke talk with Anakin but it wasn't a conversation about family that Luke needed but about teaching, so def. need Yoda more than anyone there.

 

I remember being thrown because it looked so strange that I initially (read: for days afterwards) thought it was a CGI Yoda that they'd tried to make look like a puppet.

 

Now letts us all sit back and enjoy the Star Wars version of the reformation wars but where all the different leaders of the different reformation sroups have super powers and little in the way of control training!

 

I think, personally speaking, my brain has been formatted to CGI Yoda for about 15 years now (to the point where they took out the puppet Yoda from TPM and made it CGI. And even animation was still CGI animation Yoda) that may have taken awhile to settle into it. But I do maintain that seeing Mark Hamill with Puppet Yoda is the way to go, especially since Hamill is old and Yoda is still Yoda (if Force Ghost-y). I think it works best when both Hamill and the Yoda puppet are in the same shot, where it starts to feel very much like ESB or ROTJ. I also remember thinking there may have been some CGI trickery on the Yoda puppet but all indications are it was pure puppet Yoda there.

I think we call agree it looked loads better than the (rightfully replaced) Puppet Yoda from TPM. Yikes!

 

That being said, wasn't that practically the original purpose of Luke's arc in the OT?

 

That and Luke's daily life on Ahch-To (bless you) was the highlights of the film for me (ignoring Kylo & Luke's fight). The overall Resistance, FO, and Chewbacca-not-helping-Rey-get-Luke-his-mojo-back plot parts did not do that much for me.

 

I agree with everything Gleeson proposes here

 

...anything?

 

I think the problem is the CGI ghost effect. Their ghost effect is super dodgy, either because they’re just bad at trying to replicate the classic effect with CGI, or because it just looks weird on a puppet.

 

To be honest I always think the Ghost effects were the less impressive side of the scale for the OT. I agree though the blue shimmer was off.

As someone else said we’ve seen CGI Yoda so much over the past decade. OT puppet is even further ingrained so it probably also jarring finally getting new “Yoda scenes”.

 

Man, I know you did acknowledge that people won't like it, but this is ridiculously projective and contrary to my experience. The overwhelming majority of people I know online continue to regard Civil War favorably and if anything are too unified in not debating that BvS was rubbish. And I mean, yes, that's absolutely equally anecdotal, but I think that just underlines why the tone of certainty here is kind of bogus.

 

Exactly. The most memorable thing about Civil War were the three upcoming Marvel movies that it set up.