star wars 9 spoilers and postmortem shit talk

I make a lot of poor decisions on a daily basis, but I can't say that a 65-minute fixed-shot video of someone talking about Star Wars to camera is going to be one of them - does no-one write rambling Medium articles anymore?

I have a very dull task to do at work today, so I've gone in. I agree with her. But yeah, could be shorter...

JJ Abrams is not a good director or characters or plot. All he can do is visuals and vague superficial 'feel'.

He's good at TV pilots. He shoulda stuck to those.

He seems like someone who's constitutionally incapable of ever pushing past 'good'.

He should start things and let other, competent people, finish them.

Abrams is competent. What he's lacking is inspiration, daring, a whiff of madness, an intern who knows how to disable the lens flare tool in After Effects, etc.

didnt suzy post some shit once about jj abrams running some kind of brideshead revisited fantasy camp out of his sarah lawrence dorm room

starts 65 minute youtube video
gets 20 seconds in
"ultimately, i just kinda want to talk about all the dumb stuff that they got wrong"
turns off youtube video

65 minute youtube video about new star wars movie = ted k was right

Any YT critique that doesn't at least match the runtime of the film being critiqued is strictly bush league.

those red letter media ones about the prequels that did just that were a really good watch! except the serial killer joke & the fact they turned out to be skeevy libertarian white dudes.

been trying to remember some things about this film i watched barely 24 hours ago - structure, story arcs, dramatic moments, visuals. surprisingly little comes to mind.

i fucking hate those videos and rlm

maybe add an 'at the time' into my post, i wouldn't go near them now for sure.

i have a q: luke used the force to pretend to be on another planet and the effort killed him. rey and kylo use the force to actually BE on different planets - and it’s nbd? i’m not complaining just curious. i expect there isn’t really an explanation.

the force got a horniness assist

Luke, against doctor's orders, had been neglecting his midichlorian injections for a while.

hitherto untapped potential of a dark/light force dyad obv, does this have to be spelled out, jeez. plus luke=old.

maybe add an 'at the time' into my post, i wouldn't go near them now for sure.

― Paperbag raita (ledge), Friday, January 3, 2020 11:02 AM (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

oh ofc, just expressing my rage. feel like it was a v short path from those prequels videos to shit like cinema sins

yeah they were ahead of their time in the worst way possible

(tbc I am also in ledge's boat)

Because every day is a good day to clown yourself, I listened to the YouTube as I cycled home. Bits of it definitely made me more defensive of the film, but I did like the rewrite where Rey's fragmentary but painful memories of her parents leaving are because she tried to stop them with her latent force powers and killed them herself.

I liked it well enough. Some minor flaws and plot holes that have all been pretty well covered here, but it was fun! I really don't get the massive hate though, it was still miles better than the prequels.

Knowing that SW fandom in general right now is a toxic mess that I never expected to be distancing myself from, but some of the criticisms are so weird. I'm still not quite sure I understand what Abrams "undid" about TLJ (which I also really liked, fwiw), he just shifted it back in his preferred direction. It's not like he brought back Luke and Snoke or erased that movie.

I also find in interesting to compare the complaints about this flick's narrative leaps against the prequels. One of the completely valid knocks against them was how they ruined the mystery and how not everything needed to be explained or tied together. But now I keep seeing folks on Twitter complain that ROS didn't explain things enough and didn't hand-hold the audience through plot points. It's supposed to be a kinda dumb space opera, it's fine. I don't need the hows and whys about how Palpy staffed each of the Star Destroyers, I just think it looked badass for him to unleash this giant armada.

it was kinda fucked up that oscar isaac sank every one of those star destroyers--there's like 50,000 sentient creatures staffing each one of those. gotta be a massive war crime

probably fascists tho, war is messy

Apropos of almost nothing but this seems like the best current thread to note that I saw a picture of a young Jack Kirby yesterday and immediately thought of a certain intergalactic general who absolutely needs to be cast in the event of a biopic.

Adam Sandler as Stan Lee

Martin Starr as Steve Ditko

> not quite sure I understand what Abrams "undid"

My understanding, is that despite the damage RJ did to past installments with Luke's character and the Holdo maneuver, at least he tried to divert it from being a saga about a dysfunctional family. JJA, by making Rey a Palpatine, and only force users particularly meaningful in the fate of the galaxy, engaged in a dispiriting genetic essentialism. One's born a hero, villain, or irrelevant. All you popcorn eaters are roadkill to the ubermenchen.

Mind, I haven't seen one of these in full since 1983. Rogue One seems intriguing.

Rogue One is great. The best of the recent films.

Also The Mandalorian!

It’s v telling that it’s The Mandalorian that’s had me spend hours fiddling with Lego and not any of the films.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B637oH1nRnC/?igshid=1f1lljli6xyre

xpost - thanks, I was genuinely curious and that's the most succinct description I've seen yet of that line of thinking.

I agree entirely with Sanpoku’s unpacking btw - TLJ was egalitarian, socialist even, with the force. Anyone could be a Jedi and save the galaxy. It also set up lots of potentially interesting avenues for further exploration. And JJ ignored them all and made it about hereditary power again. Plus dumb ass infinite fleet of star destroyers. The best Star Wars films don’t have a massed threat, like a Death Star or a massed fleet - they have the heroes being pursued. ESB and TLJ.

and all of the prequels heyyyyy

j/k attack of the clones prob fails that test

revenge of the sith being more about attending the bubble opera with your weird evil mentor and looking through windows in silence than a massed threat

Read somewhere that the prequels were a good story badly told, while the new trilogy is a bad story told well, and I kind of agree with that.

That sounds about right. Prequels would've been much more solid if Lucas didn't feel the need to dumb them down for seven-year-olds (hint: you don't have to dumb things down much for seven-year-olds). While Abrams Wars are candy floss for all ages, massively satisfying for five minutes before dissolving into a sugary slurry all over your nice new shirt.

I mean let's not elevate them too much. The Prequels were just filling in the blanks of a story we already knew the ending of, in broad strokes

I just saw this, and I have a lot the same complaints people have mentioned here, like the fact that it reversed almost all the fresh ideas TLJ brought to the story, and that it playing it safe by imitating the original trilogy, just like TFA did... And the imitation wasn't limited to just revealing the protagonist to be related to the bad guy, the finale played almost exactly like the finale of RotJ: the good guys' fleet is trying to bring down the planet-destroying superweapon(s), it seems like they have a chance, but then Palpatine pulls a suprise move and all hope seems lost... But then Palpatine's plan is defeated because the protagonist doesn't succumb to the Dark Side, and because the other main bad guy has reformed. (The only main difference here is that it's the protagonist, instead of the reformed villain, who kills Palpy.) The reformed bad guy saves the protagonist and gives up his life in the process. The heroic fleet is now able to destroy the superweapon(s), there's a big victory party, and the movie ends with a funeral ceremony for the fallen hero(es). The fact that there was even a shot of Ewoks after the climax only served to hammer in the very obvious similarity between the ending of the original trilogy and the ending of this one.

Besides those gripes, my main problem with the movie was the same thing Dr. Casino mentioned upthread:

think it's a mix of how nakedly fetch-questy and forced the adventure itself is

Like, the first two thirds of the story literally play out like a multi-part video game fetch quest: the good guys go on a dangerous mission to retrieve information on a spy. -> The information tells them Palpatine has returned and resides on a secret planet called Exegol. -> They go on another mission to find an alleged clue about the location of the secret planet. -> They find the clue inscribed on a dagger hidden on a remote planet... But wait! 3PO can't translate it! -> They go on a another planet to get the translation. -> The translation leads them to another planet where they can find the clue that actually leads them to Palpy's secret planet (this bit felt like the most fetch questy element to me, the fact that the inscription on the dagger itself wasn't the location of the planet, rather than the location of another clue that would lead them to Exegol). -> They finally get to Exegol, at which point most of the movie was over.

I get it that this Star Wars, and one of the main appeals of the franchise is to show different kinds of planets and the weird aliens who live on them, and that's cool! But it was kinda boring that all this was achieved bt putting the protagonists through a multi-part scavenger hunt, instead of coming up with some less contrived reason for having them visit different planets.

"all this was achieved by putting"

It keeps the cast together, but the inter-cast interactions of the main three are terrible: they find out that Poe used to be a spice-smuggler, which is a big deal for 3 1/2 seconds, Rey is completely Kylo-focussed, and Finn is completely Rey-focused but channels it into just shouting "Rey!" a lot, including a big hands-megaphone bit while she's in an actual sword fight (him being force-thrown 10 feet here might be his most significant character moment)

I had the same complaint with Force Awakens and the weird missing map piece that would show the way to Luke. So many maps in this new trilogy, as if it was a pirate story

if the expanse has taught us anything unexpected it's that spacemaps are potentially interesting as on-screen business (insofar as they're very *unlike* land- and sea-maps) and hence can be made plotwise needful if ppl are actually thinking abt plot (which literally no one was in this film)

Abrams has not got good ideas.

I could totally take TFA being a beat-for-beat relaunch - it was like a hi-res fairground ride version of A New Hope, and that was OK because it was re-establishing stuff, getting us in the mood, making us excited about Star Wars again after the prequels ruined it.

But - especially after TLJ - the culination needed to go somewhere different, and it didn't. And the worst thing is that I suspect Abrams thinks it did because "we've never been to Exegol before!" but that's totally not what anyone means by "go somewhere different".

And TLJ had several beats that landed the same as Empire - Crait was similar to Hoth in many ways, the heroes got beaten, bruised, chased, and separated, everything looked dark at the end - but there were so many new ideas and concepts (arms dealers, force sensitive stable kids), planets that weren't like places we'd been before (Canto Bight!), the main protagonist really not being from any significant lineage, that it lef tme thinking the last film could be awesome if it took those ideas and ran with it.

And actually it ended up just being another fairground ride. I have no questions at the end of it (other than 'why'), and no real closure either. Unlike the other two I won't go and see it a second time in the cinema.

The kid who moves the broom at the end of TLJ should have been a jumping off point for where to go next. Hope lies with the proles!

so many new ideas and concepts (arms dealers, force sensitive stable kids), planets that weren't like places we'd been before (Canto Bight!)

tbf these new things were pretty much all terrible at best

RONG

exegol: what if an entire planet based on what it looks and feels like in the gaps behind and underneath yr stove