ST Admiral Ackbar in Episode VIII

except her plan worked... would have been even better had Poe not tried his plan. It was Poe's incompetence that got most of the Rebels killed

 

No, her plan didn't work. A bunch of the escape shuttles got blown up, and of the survivors, most of them got wiped out on Crait. All because she didn't have the confidence of the crew, because she couldn't tell them her plan, because it was terrible, and they would have wanted a better plan, like Poe's . . .

His plan would have been great if he could have sent some actual spies/commandos and not a janitor and a grease monkey.

 

no offense but that is the worst reading i have seen of the events that happen in TLJ.

As stated before Ackbar was exactly where an experienced admiral should be. Now you could argue he deserved a more grand death but it's hard to say he was ignored as he was where he should have been.

 

No one is arguing Ackbar shouldn't have been on the bridge, as far as I can tell. The debate is whether he should have been killed off screen. Or killed at all, at least in the sense that it was the loss of a fairly popular OT character and the story gained nothing from it.

I'm also fairly certain RJ has said that he realized after the fact that Ackbar was killed off screen. I'm pretty sure it wasn't strategically thought out. No one sat down and thought, Ackbar must be on the bridge and must be killed off screen. It was simply a mistake on RJ's part. It can't be rationalized as the right decision, IMO.

 

Lol, you can dislike it all you want but it’s exactly what happens in the film. The “plan” depends entirely on the stupid laziness of the First Order, praying that they will just let the Resistance fleet putter along for 18 hours without sending more waves of TIE Fighters (which we’ve seen can devastate the Raddus) or maneuvering to surround them.

As to Akbar, I don’t really care whether it “makes sense” for him to be on the bridge and get killed. I care about what purpose he serves in the film and whether the character is used well, and he’s not. His function is, like I said, to remind us that Holdo is the one who shouldn’t be in charge. That is the only reason for him being in the film at all.

What a pathetic end to such a beloved character.

 

Glitterstim apaternally is, also... Ackbar doesn't' die off screen. You litterly see him die

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwJ3dr_3pLU

i've never heard that. Do you have a link? Cause it would be hard for him to not know he died onscreen seeing as he filmed him die.


Ackbar's popularly has largely due to his silliness and him being a meme. It's not like he was an integral part of the OT.

 

Ackbar is the key to all this.

 

Other than Chewy and Yoda and droids there were no non-human allies of the Rebel Alliance until ROTJ, and one particular *named Mon Calamari became the face of the fact that there were other species of the coalition. There are at least two other alien species in the Home One briefing room scene, Prune Face (did get named as a Kenner action figure) and that star head species. That is a manifestation of Leia's warning to Tarkin that the more the Empire tightened its grip, the more star systems would slip through its fingers. Ackbar represents or reifies what Leia was talking about. An argument that he was not integral to the OT has to include an implication that Mon Mothma was not integral to the OT. Mon Mothma represents a moral right and Ackbar represents a capability to put that moral right to trial by combat under the scales of providence. There cannot be a complete moral resolution without both.

I have regarded the ROTJ Briefing Room scene as Leia's Opus. She was presented as a central espionage and liaison figure in SW77. She was presented as a recruiter in ESB and also presented as having discretionary powers over a general. If one is consuming solely the film works of the OT, the only way to get from the all white male military of SW77 Rebel Alliance, to the mixed sex officer corps of ESB (still all white male ground troops) to the mixed sex, mixed race, mixed species combat forces of ROTJ Briefing Room scene, using only the narrative engines provided on screen, is to freight Leia with an interfilm role of what she has already been doing - espionage, liaison and recruitment. I challenge anyone to explain, using only OT film resources, another pathway that gets from ESB Leia in her leadership + recruitment + 'last out' role to ROTJ Leia in non-leadership + 'first in' paratrooper-equivalent role.

Since the creation of Rebels and Rogue One, anyone who wishes to find an easy pathway to ROTJ Ackbar's significance while bypassing what the films say about Leia is free to perform as if there is a time machine that retroactively puts into effect in 1977 the state of play that Lucas (apparently) signed off on with respect to the Mon Calamari being involved with the Rebellion early on. I do not know of any such time machine.

Operating solely with the knowledge framework extant from 1977 to Disney sale (the framework in which Tim Rose formed his relationship with this Ackbar character), Ackbar is causally connected to Leia. Anyone who finds this statement to be a stretch, explain using only OT film resources how we go from Leia being de facto highest authority at Echo Base to being merely one of many in the officer corps in ROTJ. (No one can possibly give a flying **** but Leia's rank in ROTJ should be or 'is' Colonel {tedious derivation}, and if Lucas was not Saturday morning Flash Gordoning, both Han and Lando would have been field promoted only to Major, not General.)

Right. So the end product of this post is to get to the Ackbar Slump of Deliverance. It's an iconic moment. It's a very human moment. It is a moment performed by Tim Rose. It is the first moment in the OT where we the viewer see the heavens opened up and a light from the providence of this IP shine through. It is the first moment we see that the capability to put a moral right to trial by combat under the scales of providence has been rewarded. Providence has conferred victory. So the Ackbar character is the first living thing we get to see behold the fruits of the struggle from the first crawl of SW77.

 

I never cared for the memeification of Ackbar. There's a real weight to his role in ROTJ, and next to Yoda he's probably the most "human" of all the alien characters in the original films. I agree the slump is just stellar, a moment of OT magic that goes far beyond the basic fact of simply having a practical alien costume on set.

That "it's a wrap" thing was cheesy and I'm a bit disappointed it was on the filmmakers' minds to begin with even as a production gag. Although honestly I forgot Ackbar was even in TLJ to begin with, so whatever I guess.

 

After the terribly old meme jokes in TFA, I commented that I was surprised that JJ didn't hit that Ackbar meme. Looks like the comedic genius Rian Johnson found a way.

 

Wasn’t there the mention of Ackbar’s name and first and foremost that he and “all our leadership are gone “ . I don’t think RJ kept that line in if he was just vilifying the character as a joke.

MJ

 

Aside from the original screenwriters and directors, I think an actor's input is still a valuable resource when it comes to the continuation of legacy characters. So it is disappointing to hear Tim Rose feeling humiliated over his treatment in The Last Jedi.

Giving credit where it's due, J.J. Abrams brought back BOTH of Ackbar's actors (let alone the character himself) in what I'm sure many will agree was a serviceable appearance for the character in The Force Awakens. With renewed interest in the character, plus legions of returning fans waiting to see what was in store for the character, Tim Rose's disappointment in the character's treatment is warranted. The little joke at his dismissal seems to show that the crew didn't really share a deep appreciation for the character, basically reducing him to a two-dimensional internet meme.

From one perspective, it seems like they wanted to quickly and quietly retire the character after voice actor Erik Bauersfield's passing, but this also send the message that actor/puppeteer Tim Rose didn't matter. Overall, the loss of this character seemed rather empty and was the exact opposite of fans that wanted to see the character fleshed out more.

 

Within the internal logic of the film, the escape shuttles were destroyed because of DJ, who was brought to the First Order because of Poe, Finn and Rose’s plan, which was in defiance of Holdo’s leadership. Otherwise the FO apparently...wouldn’t have detected their descent to Crait.

It’s nonsensical, but that was the internal logic given in the film. So Poe, Finn and Rose are implicated in the deaths of hundreds or thousands of Resistance troops.

A very clumsy narrative - one that I don’t like. But the parameters of it were spelled out by the characters in the film.

 

I barely noticed Ackbar's presence in TLJ. I was never a big Ackbar fan but they should have treated his character with a little more respect.

I saw a fan edit that features him prominently even making him do the hyperspace ram. It's jarring (old OT footage) but makes a lot more sense.

 

i believe he died during shooting not sure if they shot his scenes yet or not.

 

That Tim fella whines an awful lot for a guy in a suit

 

Fair enough but he definitely comes across as over-dramatic about the whole thing. I liked Ackbar but I don't feel that he was "important" in the OT. He's known for It's A Trap and that's it. Raddus already died in the manner that folks wanted Ackbar to die, so it would just be repeating a scene 2 movies in a row.

 

For me at least, the problem isn't *how* he died, although it was very anti-climactic. The problem was that his death served no purpose for the story except to emphasize that the Resistance had no competent officers left and were stuck with Holdo. If you think about it, he didn't need to be in the film at all, so why include him? For the lulz? There wasn't anything funny or endearing about his appearance though. His whole utilization is weird, like Rian Johnson thought the film needed more credentials or something, and so he threw in another meme to show everyone how clever he was.

 

I've heard this mentioned many times before, but Ackbar could have had Holdo's role, and heroic death. Just another example of casually doing away with/disrespecting OT characters in the ST. Then they double down on OT fans for not liking it.

 

Well, you'll probably disagree with me here, but it's clear that Rian Johnson doesn't know how make interesting characters in the SW setting (Holdo, Rose, DJ) and he doesn't know how to incorporate the weirdness of alien characters either (Yoda is more like a parody than an authentic portrayal), and so in order to lend credibility to a premise that he probably realized was absurd (space chase) he included references to past situations that blended weirdness and seriousness into compelling storylines (Endor). The problem is that he couldn't think up any original material for the character, or wasn't actually interested in that, and so he's just a cameo, a little reference to prove that this is still part of the saga. Maybe "meme" is not the perfect phrase, but it seems Akbar's aesthetic function is provide weirdness.

But then you'd lose the gender politics between Holdo and Poe! The other issue is that I don't think anyone could seriously believe that Akbar would keep his plans secret from his entire staff like she did. And so you either scrap the entire space chase story line, or you end up deconstructing Akbar like Luke.

 

it's easy to fall into that "trap"