ST What do you think of TLJ 6 years later?

Personally, I still say it's my favorite entry in the saga. Where are you with it?

 

Still love it, apart from how Kylo and Rey 'regressed' back into enemies at the end. At the moment TROS has 'burned' me to the extent I no longer love the SW franchise, but hopefully one day I'll be able to watch it again.

 

I still think it plays like Johnson wrote it in self-exile on Ach-Too... It feels as disconnected to TFA and TROS as TFA feels to ROTJ (granted that's not all on Johnson's film). I think it's the best sequel overall, but it's probably the most flawed in terms of characterisation (which is incredibly poor IMO) and in terms of gaping holes within the internal logic. If Johnson told me the shooting script remained relatively unchanged from his initial draft, I'd believe him...

 

As others have said i still despise the film. It feels completely disconnected from all of the other films in the saga. Characters are completely out of character with no explanation. The film also focuses a lot on visuals and little substance in many scenes. It does not care about the lore or world building.

The film also sticks 2 thirds of its characters in useless sub plots and has them retread character arcs or invents out of character conflict to create artificial tension. Also both militaries are completely idiotic with their strategy and tactics. It’s the film that split the fan base and the one that ensured the ST would never be a cohesive story.

On a positive note it showed just how little Disney cares about the expanded Canon so it saved me a lot of money in merch that I stopped buying

 

It is the most handsome made of the sequels in terms of technical and cinema. But it is made as if to be a huge troll plan. I think that it is the film which somebody thought - let us make a Star Wars movie with all the worst possible ideas in, and it can just be for our fun to see what will happen. It ignores what happened in the previous film. It ignores what happens in all previous films! Finn is sent off on a stupid wild goose chase for nothing, to a boring town. Wasn't he supposed to be the hero in the previous? I think that was forgotten. Luke Skywalker who was the hero in the old films is now a miserable hobo who doesn't like anybody. The evil Snoke character who was supposed to be controlling everything is suddenly killed by Kylo Ren? They have a space chase which is slow and not involving. They have a fight on a snow planet which looks exactly like Empire Strikes Back but then isn't Empire Strikes Back because it is salt instead? What is this?

I think it might be a comedy-spoof like Spaceballs, and the real Episode 8 is yet be revealed to us.

 

On release, it felt odd to me. I left the theater very unsure about the movie and my own feelings on it, but with a strong, compelling sensation telling me that I had to revisit it and further explore it.

These days I absolutely love it, and it is honestly the only one of the Sequel Trilogy that I can say that about.

 

Right now I feel like I have no desire at all to rewatch it again. The bits that I didn't like have stuck with me and been magnified, like Canto Bight, the fact it follows on the day after TFA, force projection Luke, the Holdo maneouvre, Leia's space walk, the force skyping are all factors that grate on me. I also felt characters were sidelined or served little purpose in this, like Finn, Rose, Phasma and Poe.

I love Mark's performance as Luke. I liked Snoke and thought he was very well done. I like Adam Drivers performance and Rey is fine too. The film look gorgeous and I like the score too, but theres something about it that just doesn't feel right to me for some reason and overall I came away feeling like it didn't progress the story and that it was detrimental to the ST as a whole.

 

Still despise it.

 

It’s still wildly overpraised as something “new,” as progressive when it isn’t, well written when the dialogue is tineared, and praised for its cinematography when it looks like it’s shot through a mud covered lens. Any movie that uses a shot of growing plants out of a 60s educational film loses points just for that. I saw it on Netflix after reading six months of comments on it and it managed to be worse than people had told me.

Then, it was layered with “if you hate this movie, then you are bad” reaction from certain critics and clickbait sites, along with questioning of your taste if you found fault with it. It’s only gotten worse, especially after TROS and the narrative that it was a reaction to the “haters” of TLJ when there was nowhere to go from it. Plus the whole “it’s great Star Wars was burned to the ground.” Right, silly old SW with its love of heroes and underdogs. That needed to be remade by cynics.

Set aside the horrible characterization done to Finn, Poe and Rose, there’s the insanity of the whole space chase/Holdo stuff that manages to make Laura Dern look awful and the fact that Leia is the only one dressed decently until she gets turned into an interstitial Terry Gilliam bit from Monty Python. Don’t get me started on how the First Order works either.

Finally, the Rey and Kylo stuff is beyond the pale.

To this day, I think there are two versions of it because I can’t square the love of it with what I saw. Usually, I can understand even when I think a movie is terrible. TLJ, I will never understand.

 

I'll be respectful since this is your thread but I really disliked what they did with Luke and whatever the heck was going on between Rey and Kylo.

 

I don't think anything more 'horrible' could have been done to Rose other than TROS.

 

I can and it's called TLJ

 

I love it, your honor.

 

I didn't really like the movie that much personally and I think it kind of wrecked the trilogy.... but I am very amused by how much it drove some of the most toxic parts of the fanbase insane. FWIW, I actually think this could have been pretty good if it was it's own thing and not part of the ST (obviously there'd be some changes - RJ clearly didn't care about anything but the jedi stuff so all of that would probably be quite different)

GL ruined my childhood has now become RJ ruined my childhood. It always amazes me how incredibly angry people get over these very serious space wizard movies. (not referring to anyone here - nothing wrong with normal criticism.... talking more about the fact that there are entire subreddits of people raging over the movie 4 years later).

 

I absolutely HATE TLJ!!! It was the worst movie-going experience of my life! It destroyed the character of Luke Skywalker and diminished all of the other characters except Kylo. (I hate Kylo too, by the way). Rey, who is supposed to be the hero of the trilogy became far less interesting, far less endearing and likable, and far less understandable and relatable than she was in TFA.

TLJ really doesn’t tell much of a story, but it does make the OT films meaningless, and completely obliterates the wonderful, hopeful, optimistic, perfect ending of RotJ. It assured that the Skywalker family would have a miserable, unsatisfying ending, and that the family ultimately brought more evil, death, and destruction than good and positive contributions to the galaxy by making Kylo the only next-generation Skywalker character. This film really did negatively affect the original trilogy and characters, making them LESS than than they were. I have not even been able to watch any of the OT films since I saw TLJ. It ruined everything that came before it.

TLJ was neither a fun or exciting film. It was actually painful to watch. Plus, the settings were “meh” and often copied from previous films, like the setting of Crait, which was just like Hoth except for the salt, and the throne room scene where Rey watched the battle unfold, which was just like Luke on the Death Star with the Emperor and Vader, who watched the battle through the window in RotJ. Ryan Johnson’s jedi temple setting was unbelievably poor! I mean, really? A mosaic and a tree??? It should have been something amazing and unique and inspirational, but we got pretty much nothing. It’s also disappointing that Luke apparently went there to die instead of to learn something important or to train a couple of Jedi in secret.

As, I think it was @Pendragon said, the film wasn’t even beautiful to look at. Everything looked murky and muddy.

TLJ was a bad film, and it was an even worse Episode VIII in a nine film series. It negatively impacted the entire saga, and (along with TROS) changed it from the positive, thrilling, satisfying Skywalker Saga to the negative, uninteresting, profoundly unsatisfying Palpatine Saga. I haven’t watched a single SW film or TV show, or read a single SW book since I saw TLJ.

 

She went from being a major character to having one line.

 

Some of us think her one line was better than her entire story in TLJ. She did have more scenes with Leia but they were just awful after post so they cut all of it. I prefered her as a key member of the resistance than the character that was constantly preaching at Finn like he was an idiot for some reason.

 

She saved his life.

 

Why couldn't they have made the Luke Skywalker who appear at the end who has combed his hair and put on some clean Jedi clothes fighting as part of the good guys team and be training Rey and Finn to be Jedi? That was what I thought was going to happen.

 

This really isn't the thread for an entire discussion about the miniaturized Death Star tech, Finn and Rose. To make it simple Finn survived because of plot armor. His speeder was melting but he wasn't for reasons. He was going at Max Speed and Rose would have to have hit him at a similar speed. Also Somehow they walk back to the base without getting shot. The only thing that saved his life was bad writing.