ST The Sanctuary - (Dissenters Unite! - Warning on page 232)

You misunderstand my meaning. I say it's insulting in the narrative sense because the antagonists largely cheapen Palpatine as a villain in the sense that all the First Order had to do to conquer the galaxy was build a big gun and that's it. The Emperor from the original saga had to use deception, subterfuge and ingenious maneuvering to succeed. He was the kind of villain that constantly compelled an audience while Snoke is as generic as you can possibly get.

 

no I got it, but I didn't care because Snoke is pitiful compared to Sidious... So I disagree with with your subjective take on the matter.

 

I hate to distract from the reylo critique because it really resonates with me, but was thinking about the chase.

It would have been so much better to have a pitched battle and then the rebels I mean resistance jumps away. You see some of the same things with people chiding Poe for being too risky then the FO jumps in. Another pitched battle. They jump again. Now leaders argue nobody can figure out what’s going on. This time the FO appears and holdo commits them to jump. FO comes out again and they figure out the FO can track them. Now they argue in the middle of a battle and have to have the leadership debate. Maybe at this point they have no choice but to send out slow bombers that are normally used in planetary battles. To me that would have been more believable, more interesting and provided more interesting character development.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Snoke seems to be a very poor imitation, but they basically are the same. Same turns of phrase, same appearance. We may have never seen Palpatine year into Vader on film, but he certainly has in other media.

Palpatine is Coke and Snoke is like Diet Rite; he’s almost an over-the-top parody, IMO. Like Palpatine in Hugh Hefner’s robe.

 

A woman's hand is not needed to write a fantastic female character. Plenty of men have written wonderful women. Plenty of women have written terrible women. Gender doesn't factor into one's ability to be creative, and write good character arcs. She didn't need to hire a woman to write Rey's story. She needed to hire a good writer. She hired Rian based off his filmography, something which, if she actually watched his films, she'd know he needs help in that department. He has great ideas. He's a piss poor writer. Instead, KK allowed Rian to write his own film, entirely unchallenged, even when actors (Mark) expressed concerns. That is her failure.

That's an interesting POV. Rey does nothing particularly new or interesting. She's a poorly fleshed out character that at this point exists more as an ideal than as a living and breathing person. The only way I could consider her a feminist icon is if I'm so desperate for female characters, the only way to quantify them is based off genitalia and appearing in a blockbuster.

 

And what i thought more people would find insulting is that disney and lucasfilms actually really pushed rey as a step forward in how women are represented in film/action franchises

 

The only quibble I would have with that is that Kylo's mask is in fact ridiculous, much like the ST as a whole.

 

Fits considering this is a wanna-be Star Wars movie.

 

Spoiler: Are we blind? Deploy the photoship!!

 

No worse than all Lucasfilm's blatant lies about how great Phasma was going to be. My fiancé was absolutely pissed about that character's treatment in the last two films. A fantastic actress, and all these promises of having a great, evil, female villain. My fiancé spent all that money on the merchandise, expecting something actually worthwhile. Instead we got a literal joke character that did absolutely nothing, and had less screen time than Snoke, despite being on both films posters.

 

Phasma is only there to sell toys. They fooled everyone not once, but twice into thinking this character would do anything of note between the two films. Not to mention there is no explanation of why the heck she's there on the Supremacy anyway. Hux had enough time to get her out of the trash compactor AND pick up Kylo in the forest while Starkiller is exploding all around him?

 

Don't worry, I'm sure they'll make an anthology film dedicated to just that thing.

 

If anything, the way the announcements have been going lately, it seems like they're desperate to bury the ST, and move as far away from it as possible.

 

For anyone who wanted more Snoke backstory/wasn't satisfied with Luke nearly murdering Kylo, there's a pretty simple re-do we can create in our minds:

Snoke is responsible for Ben becoming heavily influenced by the dark side. Snoke was extremely powerful, living in the unknown regions, and was connecting with Ben through the Force without being detected by Luke for a long time. Eventually Luke began to see things in Ben's training that were off, and Luke caught Ben talking to Snoke through the Force. Then one night while Ben slept, Luke peered into Ben's mind to learn about who Snoke was, where he was, and what he was doing. Now comes the difficult part to think up, but I'll give it a shot. Luke decides he must go confront Snoke, the ultimate darkness. Leaving the rest of his Jedi students alone was fine, but not Ben, so Luke asks Lor San Tekka, a trusted friend of Luke and the Solos who knows the Force, to watch the Jedi Academy temporarily while Luke goes to find Snoke. So Luke travels and meets Snoke on Snoke's home planet deep in the unknown regions, leading to a confrontation that results in Snoke's crippling wounds. Luke takes his lightsaber to Snoke, causing the deep head slit, but Snoke pushes Luke away with Force power and attempts Force lightning from a far distance, which Luke is able to deflect with his saber. Luke then demonstrates incredible strength with Force-collapsing the structure of Snoke's residence onto Snoke, which Luke believes utterly crushes and kills Snoke, but it is revealed that Snoke fights back with an equally impressive Force demonstration, and he has to draw extreme power from within himself to repel the crumbling structure. It is not any impact of the structure that deforms him, but his outrageous display of power from within that literally cripples him from the inside-out. Luke flees believing Snoke to be dead and wanting to get back to Ben as soon as possible. When he arrives back, he sees the temple burning, as Snoke contacted Ben about Luke coming to confront him and that was the final straw for Ben. Lor San Tekka was not in the temple but in his own private structure nearby, and luckily escaped into the wild, not to be found by Ben, who settled for the destruction of the temple, the killing of some students and the taking of the rest.

This could be shown in a flashback, everything sped up of course but still lasting maybe 30 seconds or so. Eh, not perfect, and I only spent a few minutes on this. But many people I have spoken to like the idea of Luke going to confront Snoke instead of Luke nearly murdering Kylo. So it's a fun idea to play around with.

 

Some epic writing... "the likes of which the world has never seen before" writing to turn this disjointed mess around.

 

That works consistently with The Force Awakens. It makes sense with Rey's Force vision, and it builds on Lor San Tekka knowing Ben Solo before he turned - 'Look how old you've become' etc. Theoretically, Luke's exile could work as well, in that firstly, he retreats to recover from the temple attack and secondly, amazed at how Snoke could've survived his attack, Luke needs to deepen his knowledge of the Force to find a way of taking him out once and for all - thus going to the site of the first Jedi temple.

That would have worked well as a prologue to The Force Awakens, but it would be tricky considering Star Wars doesn't use that paradigm in-movie.

But as Disney didn't want Luke to be a major player in this trilogy, ideas like these won't have got a look in. It's all about projecting Rey and Kylo no matter what.

 

Sad but so true :-(

 

You forgot that she might have had a love affair with a Wookie. She understands Wookies, Why?

I'm sorry, but it's time again for this:

 

As it has been mentioned Germany does have an army, and Japan also has an army (yep, it has). It's a self-defense army, because you know, North Korea is just right across the sea and they have a nutjob of a leader who has a beef with Japan. Also, North Korea’s activity is incessantly monitored by the Japanese government and constantly communicated to its citizens. For instance, whenever they launch a missile, I get a message on my phone within minutes of its detection.
This is not a country ruled by a bunch of blind, navel-gazing and incompetent idealists like the New Republic who just shrug it off at the potential threat of an Empire-loving fascist military group rising just around the corner which they knew about.

Which is part of what annoys me with the ST and its worldbuilding. If anything, the ST makes it look like democracy doesn’t work at all. The thought process for the de-militarization act is based on utopic stupidity just to justify this current situation, and that only makes the people fighting for it stupid by proxy, because they are fighting for something that couldn’t last on its own for more 30 years. Their leaders are incompetent and seemingly have learned nothing from past mistakes (including master Luke of the new Jedi order). Why should I root for them?

And about WW2 comparisons – this is not. Because you see, if this was actually like WW2, you would still see a functioning democratic government (or a bunch of democratic planets joined together in the same faction) fighting evenly against a fascist-promoting faction. With new ships, new improved weapons, new democratic laws still in place (on the good side that won the first war against the Empire) and a sense of evolution. It would, arguably, be a realistic result of the ROTJ ending without invalidating past accomplishments. I would be totally on board with it.

But no, this is not like that. This is the case of a galaxy surviving a galactic dictatorship and learning virtually nothing from it, and resetting the state of the galaxy back to galactic dictatorship and no Jedi again.

It’s frustrating to watch.

 

I was trying to draw a parallel between the aftermath of WWI and WWII, and obviously I did a very poor job of making my point. What I was TRYING to say is that after WWI, Germany, though defeated and in ruin, turned itself into an industrial nation with a booming economy and a scant 15 years later was back for more trouble. I believe that some international leader/diplomat said after the formal signing of peace at the end of WWI, 'we are going to be back here in 20 years doing this again.'

That was the point I was trying to make; Alliance/Republic didn't learn anything and allowed the Empire to come back under a different name less than 3 decades later.

 

A good parallel to real life events, though the Empire reigned brutally for 19 years(?), was preceded by the Clone Wars and featured weapons of mass destruction. The GFFA would've been much more traumatised over a much longer period than WW1 Europe, so I still find the laxity in monitoring the Imperial remnants to be quite unbelievable.

 

It is very peculiar that the Republic wasn't on a stronger footing 30 years after the signing of the treaty. Not really sure what they were doing .

 

There's no true comparison for the GFFA in the ST. What seems to have happened is that after the Empire was defeated and signed the treaty, the NR allowed the Remnant military (which itself wasn't really a government?) to flee to the outer rim. In Post WW1, Germany kept their homeland. So it's conceivable that they could rebuild. The Empire isn't allowed to keep their galaxy sized territory. In fact they have to find new territory in the UR in which to rebuild everything, even more so, than what the Empire had. Seems largely impractical.

What I find largely at fault though, is that he FO does every single thing right for 25 years, while the NR does everything wrong during that time. It's one thing to make a mistake or two, or say, allow the Imperial Remnant to exist for some reason, or somehow arm itself again, it's that the NR makes every mistake it possibly can, to the point where even when they win (destruction of SKB, destruction of Supremacy and FO fleet) they still loose.

Some of the greatest hits by the NR:
The NR allowed the Imperial Remnant to flee/exist
The NR allowed the Imperials to have seats in the new senate (is this true...i keep seeing this mentioned from the books) which creates immediate further corruption within their new government.
The NR never checked up on them.
The NR never patrolled the border making sure everything was safe and that the treaty was being adhered towards. Of if they did do this, did so completely ineffectively.
The NR ignored 100,000 of children being kidnapped across the galaxy. (I'm pretty sure this kind of news would spread. If Legendary Luke news can spread, so can't kidnapped children)
The NR ignored that the FO was buying arms illegally, or legally, from the same buyers that they had.
The NR ignored all of Leia's warnings about the FO, about Snoke, about her own son working for them - especially we know that the OT Rebels believed in the Force as a real thing.
The NR places their entire fleet around its capital.
The NR allows the FO fleet to roam anywhere about the galaxy as it pleases with no repercussions or perhaps even awareness.
The NR creates a centralized government on 4 planets all within eye line of one another.
The NR is scared and hopeless despite the Resistance blowing up SKB.
The NR is scared and hopeless despite Holda destroying the Supremecy, the FO fleet, and killing Snoke in the process.
The Resistance, despite achieving all of this with a rag tag group of fighters, is still effectively destroyed.

 

It's frustrating to the extent that it tarnishes the whole ST. I used to really like TFA (and I still can if I ignore TLJ), because the First Order, while being an Empire clone, didn't appear to be as massive and powerful as they are in TLJ. In fact, if they were clearly the underdog and were visually a bit more rag-tag and less Empire-like, I'd have thought it more realistic and logical.

After TLJ, I watch TFA knowing that the whole ST is a reboot of the OT, so it loses a huge amount of its appeal.

 

I know, but I still think WW2 comparisons are faulty by nature, mostly because we’re not talking about actually evenly opposing factions, we’re talking about overthrowing a dictatorship twice by the same severely outnumbered small band of rebels. How many examples are out there of countries that turned from democracy to dictatorship to democracy to back to dictatorship again in a short period of time? That's probably the comparison that should be made.

WW2 comparisons usually come in arguments of “because history repeats itself” - and often by defenders of this set up (not you, just in general). Sure it does sometimes, but only in broad strokes, and the situations are never the same. The ST goes to the point of copying the details (same ships, same dead Jedi order by same Skwyalker turned evil, same small band or Rebels fighting same fascist dictatorship that looks the same as the previous one, also ruled by a darksider, but originality is overrated) it’s just contrived and unnatural. The only way you can justify such a contrived set up is to assume entire galaxy is run by too many incompetent leaders.

Let us remember, WW1 and WW2 weren’t the same war. For starters, Japan and Italy were an Allied power in WW1.

WW1 was also a much smaller event comparatively, and its results weren’t also completely nullified. I mean, the Ottoman empire was soundly defeated. The Austro-Hungarian empire never returned again. Germany was the country that persisted and grew stronger, but the scope of WWII was facilitated by two former Allied superpowers joining Germany. On the other hand, China joined the Allied powers, and the US grew abhorrently stronger with weapons of mass destruction.

It was in essence a different war that was played under different circumstances and had different motivations and different results. In the ST we are being served the same exact war. In which, the de-militarization act works completely against the Allied powers in this case because Mon Mothma is an idiot.