PT RYL: PT Social Thread - The First Annual RYL Awards (name pending)(TM) Day 5!!

It is finished.


Posting this gif again because apparently I spoke too soon when I posted it in the spring.

 

Guys... while critics seem to raving about TLJ, the GP seems PISSED!! Not that Disney will worry...but I find it sad that. Probably will wait to after the holidays to it. I'm in no rush tbh.

 

It turns out that my Mum is coming with me, Moll, and my sisters to watch TLJ on Monday. This despite the last SW film she watched was Return of the Jedi. In cinemas. No idea how she's going to react to the second part of a trilogy. If there's any Prequel or Rogue One mentions she'll be lost.

How will she cope with all the Reylo?

 

Spoiler

Did I mention that the "It's time for the Jedi to end" quote is a total red herring? There is a reason why it was in the trailer.

 

darkspine10 That should be an interesting experience..let us know how it goes.

 

I can totally see why it would be divisive among fans though. Its definitely not at all what I was expecting. Though now that I've seen it once, I need to see it again, this time without any of those expectations or thoughts of what might happen and just kinda enjoy the ride.

Also can we talk about

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broom boy?? People keep saying he used the force but I did not see that. Though at that point in the movie I was in a haze of emotion lol.

 

I just came back from Last Jedi.

Here are my thoughts:

Spoiler

For the first 2/3 to 3/4 of the movie, I was really enjoying. I thought it was great, actually. And I say this as someone who was underwhelmed with TFA. For the majority of the movie, I was really pulled into TLJ.

The movie had more of the "moral dilemmas" that Lucas wanted this trilogy to be about. The cinematic direction and tone felt more fresh and Star Warsy. The world-building was back. There were some good moments with depth and uniqueness. It kept me on my toes without feeling too rushed. It had some good unexpected moments like Kylo killing Snoke. And maybe some other things, I can't process it all right now.

I enjoyed seeing Yoda back, though I felt like they were trying too hard to make him seem like a puppet. And it felt like a missed opportunity to not feature Obi-Wan and Anakin.

Some of the little minor cinematic details weren't quite right but it's no big deal. (For example, in the opening scene, the abrupt cut from the ships in space to the base on the planet's surface. In Lucas's Star Wars, we would typically follow a character's POV as it leads us into a new planet. For example, how we follow the Probe Droid's POV onto Hoth, instead of just abruptly cutting to Hoth's surface from space.)

But overall, for most of the movie, I had been thinking "This is the Star Wars movie I was hoping to see 2 years ago. This makes up for TFA."


However, there were two story decisions from the last part of the movie that I thought were bad, and will probably negatively color the movie and trilogy as a whole for me in hindsight.

The first was the decision to make Rey's parents two nobodies. Now I understand why Lucas was upset a couple of years ago, saying comments like "Star Wars is about families". Now Lucas's comment fully makes sense in context.

This was a huge blunder in the thematic integrity and cohesion of the saga. Making the lead character of the sequel trilogy a nobody instead of a Skywalker descendant was a big story mistake, in my opinion.

When this revelation came, it kind of took me out of the movie. I still mostly enjoyed the rest of it, but my pull was broken.

I know some people were crying foul about "Rey being Luke's daughter is too obvious, make her descended from two nobodies to make it different!" I think different is great and an important part of the Star Wars experience. I thought TFA didn't have enough different. But you have to do it right. You can't just throw any terrible idea at the wall just for the sake of being "different". This movie already had plenty enough "different" things for my liking. You have to keep the deeper thematic integrity of the saga intact. Some consistency is necessary.

They already set up all the clues in TFA for Rey to be Luke's daughter. She inexplicably had a strong connection to the Force (a point this movie even makes note of with regard to Kylo Ren -- his Skywalker connection gave him Force potential). She was called by Anakin/Luke's lightsaber (which is now broken and irrelevant). They cast an actress who resembled Shmi and Padme, suggesting genetic descent.

But they decided to do this unnecessary twist just for the sake of making it a twist. And in ten years, no one will care about whether the contrived "mystery" of Rey's parentage was a twist or not. What will matter in the long run, in the big picture, is whether the 9-episode saga has thematic cohesion.


The other bad decision was what they did with Luke. Making him a depressed hermit seemed like an unnatural direction for the character. I wasn't initially sure whether this was a good idea, but I was willing to give the arc the benefit of the doubt.

While watching Last Jedi, I was enjoying Luke's arc more than I thought I would. It really helped endow this movie with the "moral ambiguity, and passing on what you have learned" themes that Lucas wanted the sequel trilogy to be about.

And then Luke started to come out of his slump towards the end. I thought, "Great! Now we'll get to see the real Luke back in the next movie."

But then they just randomly killed him off at the end of the movie. He just died all of a sudden, for literally no reason. (Okay, I'm sure there's some sort of reason behind it, but I'm just making a point about the execution/presentation of it.)

I can tell now that they structured this trilogy to make each movie about one of the original cast. The Han movie, then the Luke movie, then the Leia movie.

But with Carrie Fisher's passing (), this isn't going to work. And so I think they should have just told the story naturally and taken the characters in natural directions instead of just trying to make each movie about one of the original characters for the sake of nostalgia.

I would have been fine with Luke's slump if he had had two movies, and he would have been back to his old self in the third movie. But instead this is his sole movie. This is his sole arc.

And now with Carrie's passing, we have all of the original heroes dead after two movies, only sidekicks left for the third movie.

Maybe it should be a Chewbacca-centric movie?

 

I don't think that the box office will matter now...its Carrie's last film and the Leia books seem good enough to have sparked curiosity to see the character's development; myself included. It could affect the next film though.

 

omg i'm on!

 

One more small thing

Spoiler

The opening crawl music was more similar to the prequel version this time, which I always preferred over the original version. So I was glad they chose that

 

Hated almost every second of it. Even more so than TFA, which came as a surprise.

 

Holy ****. I can't get on here at all except for rare moments like this. Goddamn

 

Yeah. I wonder if the boards'll be here when I need them most.

 

Glad to see I'm the only one having trouble loging-in - I thought it was my internet connection.

 

I think the forum crashed from the overload of people trying to get on to discuss the new movie.

 

Here are my pre-screening feelings about TLJ. It's apparent that it's going to take things in new directions, and I'm generally okay with that. I'd rather something new than a film like TFA that repeats what we've seen before.

I'm imagining that they'll do something unexpected with Luke. Some people can change a lot from their youth to old age, so I'm willing to accept them taking a lot of latitude with Luke's character arc as long as his behavior has something in keeping with the old Luke. Of course, it also has to work dramatically too. It might be in character for him to choose to meditate the whole film, but that would be pretty boring.

The one thing that I really don't want them messing with is the concept of the balance of the Force. The Original Saga makes it pretty clear. Balance equals destruction of the Sith and at least a containment of the influence of the dark side if not the elimination of it altogether. This point is made clear multiple times. Just one: "It was said you would destroy the Sith, not join them; bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness."

I'm against making this type of change not only because it would break continuity and go against GL's vision but most of all because I really don't like the idea that the Force (the power the guides the destiny of the universe) wants evil always to exist as a counterpart to good. That would mean if the universe became too light, then the Force would react by creating more evil in the universe to counteract that. That idea seems to go against everything we know about the Force in the Original Saga, and it would mean that good and evil will continue to fight it out forever, with neither ever gaining the upper hand since they must always stay in balance (an idea beneficial to Disney if it wants to pump out sequels forever rather than bring the films to definitive conclusion).

When I look at our world, life here on earth seems crappy enough to me, and the course of history seems pretty amoral. I don't want that type of idea brought into a beloved fantasy universe from my childhood, especially when it goes against the ultimate vision of how the Force was meant to work in Lucas's films. Changing the concept in the Force in this way would mean constant conflict and perpetual warfare forever. That's too dark for me when the 6 films had a perfectly wonderfully satisfying and very optimistic ending in ROTJ.

Well, I don't know if TLJ is going in this direction. Maybe it'll go in some other direction or somehow reconcile these different ideas so they don't contradict with Lucas's vision. However, if they make this change, I don't know if I'll ever find these new films satisfactory because they won't ever come to an ultimate conclusion.

Well, this post ended up being more a diary entry than a short idea I wanted to share. Oh well, editing it to make it shorter will only take more time.

So, these are my thoughts going in. Keeping my fingers crossed.

(Please don't tell me if I'll be disappointed or not because I want to go in spoiler free.)

Hi, Natalie, nice to hear from you after so long. Hope all is well. Too bad the film was a stinker for you.

Congrats, Huttese. You're gonna make it after all!

 

I feel so conflicted about TLJ that I feel a second viewing is essential.

STAR WARS Marathon (2017 Edition)
(12/08/17) - THE PHANTOM MENACE - B
(12/09/17) - ATTACK OF THE CLONES - B-
(12/10/17) - REVENGE OF THE SITH - B+
(12/11/17) - ROGUE ONE - A
(12/12/17) - A NEW HOPE - A+
(12/13/17) - THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK - A+
(12/14/17) - RETURN OF THE JEDI - B
(12/15/17) - THE FORCE AWAKENS - A-
(12/16/17) - THE LAST JEDI - ??

 

I agree. I felt pretty conflicted.

There were things I really enjoyed. But then there were things that, to borrow Mark Hamill's words, I fundamentally disagreed with.

I want to go see it again at some point so I can say for sure how I feel overall.

 

What a buncha Anakins y'all are! All this conflict within...

 

After two viewings..

Spoiler

I'm pretty sure IX will end the Skywalkers.. What you guys think?

 

I have a sneaking suspicion you might be right.

 

Must...not...click...on...SPOILERS!!!!

 

Well, that was a weird mess of a movie.

Not all bad. Certainly not all good. Better than the last one. I'll probably see it again next week before dishing too much of my thoughts.