I grew up with the OT on VHS and loved them , and hated the prequels generally.
I consider myself a relative casual compared to most folks here.
I really liked it.
Pros:
The morally ambiguous nature of some characters.
characters fail and in a way that subverts the fairy tale nature of the franchise.
Great action and special effects
Music (I thought it was better than TFA, but under the OT)
Hamill’s performance
Cons:
Finn/Rose side mission dragged for me. and Benicios character annoyed me.
Snoke in the climax was a let down (I wasnt super interested in the character, but was expecting more than what was in the film)
Rey still seems too overpowered for being a relative newbie.
The actor who plays Kylo Ren can do conflicted well, but any semblance of him trying to be a genuine badass doesnt really register with me.
It feels like when a little kid is dressing up in their parents clothes.
Overall: 8.25/10
Ranking
Empire Strikes Back - 9/10
A New hope - 8.5/10
The Last Jedi - 8.25/10
Return of the Jedi - 8/10
The Force Awakens - 7.5/10
Rogue One - 7/10
Revenge of the Sith - 6.5/10
Attack of the Clones - 5/10
Phantom Menace - 4/10
[details=Spoiler]that never ends up happening. There never was a mole. The lead Super Star Destroyer just has a fancy new tech. There’s never even a subplot that state’s there is a possible traitor.
So there isn’t a reason to keep it a secret. There isn’t a reason to not just tell Poe. When the plan is later revealed to him he reacts accordingly: " yea that’ll work" lmao
Actually there is a reason. To give Finn a reason to go with Rose on a side quest that ultimately ends up getting nearly everyone killed to advance their interpersonal development that ultimately is entirely pointless and not wanted
[/details]
I can’t believe the movie isn’t happening the way I wanted it. I can’t believe they didn’t make Rey’s parents of a decorated bloodline. They should have done that because that’s how I would have done it. If they made me do the movie, I wanted more Skywalker action. Why? Because I want more of Skywalker. They should have Knights of Ren in this movie. Let’s add in more 30-45 more minutes to the current movie because well I don’t want to buy a ultimate silver platinum collector’s edition version of this movie late down the line. </s>
Watching the movie the second time was even better because the theater was more empty and there was almost no talking by the audience.
I’m actually in awe of how bad TLJ was. I went into the theater wanting to like it. Hoping that it would answer many of the massive plot holes left in TFA. But this movie basically resolved nothing.
Poor writing. Disjointed scenes. Flat characters.
The Phantom Menace was better than this, and it had Jar Jar Binks.
why didnt Disney hire Kevin Smith to direct one of these movies?
if any director knows Star Wars…its Kevin Smith. regardless of what you think of him or his movies, Kevin does know and love Star Wars.
so why?
also
[details=Spoiler] i know alot of people are nitpicking the lack of logic by certain characters. but let me remind you that you got to suspend certain amount of logic to go along with a movie.
for example
in Alien, the crew demands to open the ship door knowing damn well you cant bring a ET life form on board since all it needs to do is sneeze and everyone dies of space flu.
in Aliens, the soldiers read the report Ripley made describing the xenomorph. 7 foot tall monster with acid blood and super hard outer shell. yet the soldiers not only go down there to the planet but theyre not even worried and think its gonna be a cake walk.
in King Kong, Kong cant hop over the fence the natives built and just bangs the door in frustration yet is able to climb a skyscraper
in Star Wars, ships in outer space make sounds when theres no sound in space.
dont nitpick too much the lack of logic. or youll go insane.
The amount of suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy this movie is crazy when scene after scene is stretching it thin. With such great hits as…
[details=Spoiler]Why didn’t Holdo tell anyone the plan?
Why didn’t the First Order just send some of the Star Destroyers with them to cut off the rebels??
Why didn’t the TIE fighters just keep attacking and take out the rebels?
Why didn’t Holdo just leave a droid or something piloting the Raddus instead of sacrificing her character who I actually rather liked?
How did Finn survive going through the mini Death Star laser unscathed when it was fucking melting his speeder?
Why didn’t a single fucking AT-AT shoot at him when he was doing this dumb shit? Or when he and Rose were kissing? Or when he dragged Rose 3 fucking football fields back to the base? Was it just out of courtesy, did the fucking First Order not want to be bad sports and overkill some rebel scum?
HOW IN THE MOTHERFUCK DOES LUKE HAND LEIA THE DICE IF HE’S A GODDAMN FORCE ILLUSION THAT CAN’T ACTUALLY INTERACT WITH ANYTHING? SHE FUCKING HOLDS THE DICE WHAT THE FUCK???
Gotta love how Luke also doesn’t tell anyone about the actual plan of distracting Kylo and the First Order so the remaining rebels can escape!
What if Poe hadn’t figured it out and went back to his brass balls ways since he thinks they’ve got a sick ass Jedi master on their side. How fucking convenient that he chooses to have an epiphany about running away at that exact moment.[/details]
Im done with Star Wars as a MOVIE franchise. But I still think theres a future for it in the TV series like Rebels and Clone Wars and MAYBE the comics and books if it wasnt just marvel doing them as well as the games if EA isnt doing them. But other than that, I dont care.
The thing is Star Wars should have never had the old cast involved. should have either taken places decades before Phantom Menace or far into the future after Jedi. Get actual fucking scriptwriters together and make their own stories that take the lineage and the things that make Star Wars special (the adventure, the crazy characters, swashbuckling sci fi action, galaxy in turmoil…or not.) and make that their thing. Like many games and books and the TV series have done this and they worked out fine. Theres no need to carry the burden of the Skywalker’s story anymore considering its long been over and completely told. I and many other people were ready for the next step or ready to see what else is out there (that doesnt include galactic cenobites like the Yuuzhan Vong). But these movies aren’t the future. Theyre too stuck in the past. A past they could never hope to match.
Look what Star Trek did when The Next Generation launched
Spoiler
Gene Roddenberry didn’t show the first few episodes killing off Scotty, Kirk, McCoy L, or Spock as a way to make room for TNG cast like this series has killed Han and Luke.
Just have an imagination and write a good story. Even the video games did a better job of loosely involving heroes from the OT as background characters to whichever was the main protagonist of the game
Which brings me to something else, what kind of asshole douche screenwriter kills or makes fun of the old story’s characters in such a way as to insult the original fanbase that loved them just to bring in the new people and be like “THESE ARE THE NEW CHARACTERS! You need to be rooting for these guys! Fuck your favorite characters!”?
I havent seen this level of slapping the audience with your proverbial dick since Hideo Kojima made MGSII.
This movie had a terrible story, but the worst thing IMO was Laura Dern’s character. She acted like some bitch from Corporate and not the Admiral of a resistance. I was genuinely surprised she didn’t send Poe to HR for sensitivity training.
As much as I dislike the phantom menace and the prequels for how sterile they are, those movies had imagination. Lucas and his team built a universe where everything is fresh. Aliens, planets, ships, mechs, and on and on
In this movie…
[details=Spoiler]nothing is really different. Too much is the same and appears in similar fashion to the older movies
Super Star Destroyers appearing in the 2nd trilogy movie
Ties, x wings, A wings, storm troopers, At At walkers and At St walkers, throne room and guards
Crait is reminiscent of Hoth
The one truly new location is casino world and its involved in a boring useless side quest
The Falcon tie fighter chase looks similar to the Death Star 2 core with cavernous rocks looking like the pipes inside the base
[details=Spoiler]a lone pilot takes command of a doomed starship and in a final act of heroic sacrifice kamikazes the ship into a large vastly superior enemy ship in order to allow the surviving crew to escape
i took the “Fuck the past” message as a metaphor for how i feel about star wars. while the original trilogy is good. everything, EVERYTHING else is terrible. so it seemed to me that i need to just accept that star wars has become a superficial, shallow super hero movie at this point. i didn’t want to think this but during the movie i realized I’m clinging onto a franchise due to nostalgia.
I am more casual than most apparently in their Star Wars fandom and can say I enjoyed it.
Spoiler
Not going to lie at the ending, I personally think while it would be a dick move, had the movie just ended at the scene where Luke appears to have gone out to face the First Order alone with all the guns trained on him and folk scrambling to find a way out of it, that probably would have been a more interesting and talked about ending as a cliffhanger. But showing what remains of the resistance escape on the Falcon alone and Luke’s astral projection fool everyone makes it more of a complete stand alone film which I think was the point. While this is the second part of the new trilogy, all it really wanted to do was show the development of the new cast and the shuffling of the old. Leia is clearly grooming Poe for leadership, Finn is learning to become more of a hero that fights for other people, Kylo/Ben is becoming his own beast instead of trying to be the shadow of someone’s goal or ambition outside of his own and Rey is the great big hope that unites them all and can do jedi shit.
Yes the exact logic of multiple scenes is flawed but that is always the case in Star Wars, this just ran with the setting and tried to do its own at a quicker pace then really anything since Return of the Jedi. But no matter, the movie will make a shit ton of money and like Force Awakens, no matter what people feel about among the more hardcore fanbase, they will still keep trying the Star War a year formula until probably the last of the current anthology films since none of these movies are going to slow down this machine.
Although I wonder if Solo which seems like they should have probably delayed that shit will wind up doing as well given it is still scheduled for a different portion of the year for release.
I’d put Last Jedi on-par with Revenge of the Sith. Both movies had a lot of potentiol and hype, with some good moments in their own right but, were ultimately lame and disappointing. Storytelling about on-par too.
Speaking of which, i’m shocked at how many here are so content with such Lazy and shitty, uninspired writing. You’d think George Lucas got his hands on the script at the last minute.
Then again, if he had, George would probably have given us more satisfying payoffs to the mysteries TFA built upon. Instead of just scrapping them. He’d have made Rey a “Force-clone” of Anakin created by Snoke or something. And as lame as that sounds, it will would have still been 100.00% more interesting than how TLJ turned out.
I have to concur with the point they mentioned about where the next installment should go plot-wise as there’s not much left except for a final showdown between Kylo Ren and Rey to really wrap up their storyline.
