Star Wars 8 shit talk

This is really good, and says much better what I was trying to say upthread about Finn's story arc: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/the-last-jedis-biggest-storytelling-innovation/548609/

When Finn wakes up in The Last Jedi, he’s similarly only interested in Rey (who has left to find Luke Skywalker), and quickly decides to abandon the Resistance fleet because of their desperate situation. He’s caught mid-escape attempt by Rose, a below-decks engineer on a Resistance freighter, who has none of his dubiousness over their shared cause. Her sister, a gunner, heroically dies in the film’s opening sequence; Rose doesn’t want her sacrifice to have been in vain. Quickly enough, she and Finn are drafted into a risky mission to combat the First Order’s tracking of Resistance ships.

Rose is a wonderfully sneaky character, in that she’s set up as a plucky sidekick but almost immediately becomes a crucial teacher, and equal partner, for Finn. Her certitude about the Resistance is not tied up in a noble idea of heroism, but in her understanding of what they’re trying to overthrow. She was born on a mining colony, she tells Finn, that was stripped of resources by the First Order and then blitzed for weapons testing. When the two journey to a casino city draped in finery named Canto Bight, Rose rolls her eyes at Finn’s delight, pointing out that it’s a haven for arms dealers that runs on slave labor.

During their travels, Finn and Rose meet DJ (Benicio Del Toro), a thief who happily sells his skills to the highest bidder and tells Finn there’s no moral absolutism in the galaxy. “It’s all a machine, partner,” he warns. “Live free, don’t join.” At the start of The Last Jedi, Finn might have believed that: He’s still a runaway from the First Order trying to get as far away from the action as possible. By the end, he’s committed to taking them down, slaying his evil former master, Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie), in a charged showdown on a First Order ship. “You were always scum,” she scoffs. “Rebel scum,” he replies proudly, embracing an identity he’d once tried to escape.

i thought "you must have a million questions" "where's Rey?" and then a quick cut to the next scene, was some kind of genius.

left: I’m just a porg boy nobody loves me

Right: HE’S JUST A PORG BOY FROM A PORG FAMILY SPARE HIM HIS LIFE FROM THIS MONSTROSITY pic.twitter.com/SSfV0QvUk3

— merry brittsmas 🎄❄️ (@supbruss) December 21, 2017

lots of posts critiquing the "suicide run" that Holdo went on as a major flaw.

This just seems like the kind of thing that SF pros can easily come up with some after-the-fact explanation of why it works in this case and not in every dreadnought-vs-hyperdrive-equipped-ship scenario. I feel like this scene and the salt-skiiing skimmers with their red plumes both offered that primal "HOLY SHIT AWESOME" which is one of the things I come to Star Wars for. And then you make up whatever explanation you have to make up in order to facilitate that feeling.

The only thing that annoyed me about that scene was that she waited so long to do it. She just stood and waited while the transporters got shot down.

made up explanation: the transporters have to be a certain distance away or the polar-ray dynasphere effect of actuating the hyperdrive matrix will scramble their navigational circuits

Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer's pet theory was that hyperdrive ramming is a verboten war crime or something

made up explanation: the transporters have to be a certain distance away or the polar-ray dynasphere effect of actuating the hyperdrive matrix will scramble their navigational circuits

right, see, i'm totally satisfied

Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer's pet theory was that hyperdrive ramming is a verboten war crime or something

uh, the Empire blew up an entire planet in the first movie. I think they'd be cool with the odd suicide bombing

The obvious answer is that they have detectors that can tell them when a ship is spinning up its hyperdrive and if it had been smaller than the Raddus and their big guns hadn't been on cooldown from shooting the transports, they would just have blasted it out of the sky. In addition, traveling through hyperspace takes time and objects move, so predictably hitting your target demands that you be in visual range. Hence why there are no kamikaze lightspeed rammer drone squadrons. They'd just get blown up before they could move.

Star Wars makes perfect sense when you remember that the spaceships are just boats

the holdo suicide thing worked for me bc of the use of silence, even though it’s a collage of two things i hated about rogue one (forest whitaker boldly deciding to stay on the rapidly vaporizing planet + idk there was some lightspeed ramming in that incoherent space battle in the third act right?)

no that was just regular ramming

regular ramming is a jackie treehorn production iirc

Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer's pet theory was that hyperdrive ramming is a verboten war crime or something

uh, the Empire blew up an entire planet in the first movie. I think they'd be cool with the odd suicide bombing

― Number None, Friday, 22 December 2017 17:47 (fourteen minutes ago) Permalink

right, yeah, not a good theory

yeah that theory struck me as unlikely, though one might argue the rebels would be more adherent to the laws of (star) war than the empire/first order

found something with zoom & enhance:
https://i.imgur.com/Ypy8d2Q.png

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, December 21, 2017 4:48 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Dammit I’m not getting this reference, and I’m online enough that I feel I should be. Can somebody clue me in?

the crimes of george lucas ('90s on)

now I'm cracking up all over again

Star Wars makes perfect sense when you remember that the spaceships are just boats

― .oO (silby), Friday, December 22, 2017 9:48 AM (forty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The best Star Trek film had the director use this approach, too

Frederik you're otm about the First Order being held back by the emotional meltdowns of Kylo Ren. I just tend to enjoy watching it happen.

It does make me wonder if he'll be the First Order's undoing because Snoke actually was a disciplined ruler (if not a vain dick) and now there's really nobody to check the power struggle between Ren and Hux.

I wager 20 bucks that Kylo domes Hux 30 minutes into Ep IX and becomes a unilateral dictator and starts executing innocent people who piss him off

weird thing is Kylo was kind of like an independent contractor and didn't really have a rank so he wasn't really next in line of succession as far as I could tell, so I think he just usurped Supreme Leader simply by choking Hux as if to say "lol u got bypassed son, c/o my amazing powers"

Can I just say I love Hux and think he is gr8

now I'm cracking up all over again

― El Tomboto, Friday, December 22, 2017

omg otm!

btw i would like to point out that mh and i were otm in this thread months ago when we agreed that luke would merk himself in this one

i mean not in terms of method, or the timing in the narrative but

otm nonetheless

tbh Vader was never really a title guy, either

also true. these Empires must issue a lot of 1099-Rs....

This was a lot of fun

Was thinking how quaint it is that in a lot of these movies people are into racing - pod racing, space horse racing - despite living in a world with pretty easy to attain light speed.

we still watch Usain Bolt sprint around a track when we all have cars

maybe this also explains the anti-droid prejudice seen in mos eisley - against the background of a highly technological society, the place was actually trying to brand itself as an authentic, old-fashioned, artisanal hive of scum and villainy. i want a movie about the john ruskin and william morris of this universe.

so even after seeing it multiple times I'm unsure, but when Hux is berating Kylo for issuing him orders and says "the Supreme Leader is dead, we have no ruler", Kylo chokes him and says "The Supreme Leader....is dead". Was this him merely correcting Hux and saying "you were right about the first part, but...we *do* have a ruler. Me, bitch."?

I mean I know Hux calls him Supreme Leader 30 mins later so

Yeah, it's an exchange -- Ren chokes Hux, says "The Supreme Leader is dead," and Hux chokes out "Long live the Supreme Leader" in response. It's a very efficient coronation.

xpost it's a "the king is dead - long live the king" succession of power bit: hux originally says the supreme leader is dead intending it to mean that the order of succession is at least up for debate (and really should fall to hux). kylo then reiterates that the supreme leader is dead, but the meaning is shifted b/c he's choking hux making clear how the succession goes as far as he's concerned. hux in the second half of the line is acknowledging kylo as the new supreme leader.

why hux doesn't have his army just gun down kylo while he's on the ground fucking with luke is probably going to keep him up at night. damn! damn! he was right there!

At this point I have to assume that Hux takes Kylo out after the latter attempts to redeem himself towards the end of episode 9 or something like that.

bit I did love: after Hux sees the carnage, and seeing a temporarily incapacitated Kylo lying on the ground, he briefly opens his coat to go for his weapon until Kylo wakes up.

yeah that was hux's best moment for sure. i still don't think the character is very interesting but the concept is fantastic, a weasely little alt-right empire fascist wannabe, forever seething with a sense of denied glory because whatever position he rises to in his imitation Empire he's still playing second fiddle to the same "imperial in name only" force wizards who screwed it all up the first time.

I wonder how hard it was for Driver to resist saying "blow that piece of junk THE FUCK OUT OF THE SKY"....he pauses before 'out of the sky' which made me think he was tempted

I do enjoy that SW universe uses our swear words but has a shit ton of their own too

i still don't think the character is very interesting but the concept is fantastic

I mean, the character is exactly what he should be. We don't need more backstory or anything on him, and Gleeson just takes it and runs with it.

the alt-right description is totally otm though

he's kind of a throwback to the OG trilogy, as he's one of the few who speaks in the stilted, over the top manner that most of the non-Vader Empire did in that series.

oh agreed. maybe i just mean he's better in TLJ than he was in TFA but is still running to overcome TFA where he had the most boring business to do, preening and shouting about starkiller base and the first order. starkiller base was the most annoying aspect of the movie generally, and the first order was the least convincing and well-explained, so that's screen time that could have gone into anything else in the movie. or just him having other kinds of interactions with the people around him that would have given a little more texture to his seething resentment, and/or made the first order/republic/resistance thing less confusing.

like maybe a scene of him in a teleconference with the Republic civilian leadership where he's mewling about restoring greatness to the galaxy or something... we'd have a clearer sense of what he's actually hoping to accomplish, and that along the way the audience could get a more natural sense of the current status quo and how endangered it actually is, the same way the very economical "we've eliminated the senate" talk does in the first film.

he's kind of a throwback to the OG trilogy, as he's one of the few who speaks in the stilted, over the top manner that most of the non-Vader Empire did in that series.

― fuck you, your hat is horrible (Neanderthal),

Piett was admirably terse.

Admiral Piett was played by Kenneth Colley in both Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi. Piett is the only Imperial officer to survive more than one film and be portrayed by the same actor.[9]

Colley recalled that when he auditioned for the role, Irvin Kershner said to him, "'I'm looking for someone that would frighten Adolf Hitler!' And he sized me up and down and continued, 'Yes, I think you’re it.

lol damn

like i'm not saying we need a flashback to his pampered Imperial childhood, all undone when vader killed the emperor, years spent in his parents' space-basement writing increasingly agitated missives back and forth with other space-fascists on the galactic hypernet. but it could be alluded to in an effective way i think. "this SO-CALLED 'republic' is riddled top to bottom with the traitorous REBEL LEADERSHIP who murdered the LEGITIMATELY ELECTED emperor and plunged a stable galaxy into CHAOS! my BROTHERS IN ARMS are far from the only proud defenders of the Empire our parents built to keep the galaxy prosperous, secure, and unified! and in their names we WILL prevail!!!"

i dunno....... might just be me that wants this angle made less subtextual but i feel it would solve a lot of the "what's the actual status of this galaxy again?" problems in TFA. and i think the first order makes enormously more sense as a faction of the old imperial army that was never entirely put down, now reinvigorated with neofascist resentment ideology to appeal to the aging officer cohort, than as an entirely new entity that managed to put together a planet-sized death machine out of nowhere while the republic did nothing. hell i'd even love it if the first order's leadership included, alongside kylo and hux, an aging imperial commander with a tarkin kind of vibe for them to play off of. he could go down with the ship in TFA, setting the stage for the more contentious and unstable leadership rivalry in TLJ. but tbf i guess we needed all that screentime for poe and some nobodies to do a stakes-free bombing run on the death planet.

also man the piett subplot cracks me up every time. what a great addition to the movie that is.

I feel like TFA was taking a weirdly downplayed approach to what happened to the Hosnian system that TLJ corrected a bit. It's played like a tide-turning victory and didn't really focus more than 2 seconds on "shit, now we have no government".