star wars 9 grim resignation thread

the part where Anakin gets the "it's only a fleshwound!" treatment is v funny

guys let's just do a "the prequels are: good or bad" poll and everyone who votes for the losing option gets permabanned

polls are anonymous to protect those of us who keep voting for a certain indiana jones/crystal skull movie as the best spielberg work

The Last Jedi > The Force Awakens >> Rogue One >> root canal >>>>> the prequels

seriously tho, the three old leads aren't in *any* scenes together?

not a one in TFA

well, I guess Han Solo/Chewbacca counts, although in the last couple released films, Mayhem is no longer in the costume

petition for a spin-off starring Dean Winters as Chewbacca with the wookiee head taken off

how the fuck did I type that instead of Mayhew

Peter Mayhew. sheesh. sic, you should have caught that

oh wait, the insurance commercial character is Mr. Mayhem and I was properly clowned

never mind

... did you take a piss all the way through the Han / Leia scene?

I was doing my hair

YOU GUYS.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--EQl3mdZQ--/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/ybsmpyjtqyzixdtjhg12.jpg

http://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.a-aCdAU5cK_Jy9dSXOsaAgEsCo

https://www.starwarsnewsnet.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Billie-Lourd.png

this is where I admit that I took "the three old leads aren't in *any* scenes together?" to mean all three of them in the same scene and then appended han-chewie as an additional combo outside of the han-leia and luke-leia duos

but then decided it'd be funnier if I pretended the only two to ever appear together were han and chewie

chewie did not, in fact, do something different with his hair

ok fine i'll see the damn films

I'm the man out there pressuring individuals into believing star wars movies are genius works of art

― mh

"the last jedi" showed up on netflix. i don't have netflix but the place where i get my tms has netflix and i got tired of watching nature documentaries after five weeks (yes i understand now what polar bears look like and your narrator script is terrible) so i'm watching it again, this time in 2d. it really is a wonderfully put together movie, "genius work of art" i wouldn't say but it's fantastically subversive, kind of like moffat's doctor who except it's entertaining in addition to being clever. my drunk ass is wondering how much of the backlash is just a backlash against people being clever, which if you don't like cleverness fuck you you are sentenced to watching all of the "nick and nora" movies until you stop perceiving this as a "sentence".

seriously today i was watching the scene transition where they went from a zoom from water dripping on kylo ren's hand to a spaceship, if you'd rather see another fucking wipe fuck you you are sentenced to watching "radar men from the moon" until you _do_ perceive this as being a sentence

I was being sarcastic because they’re workmanlike family space dramas

steve yedlin pretty solid cinematographer though and when they ramp up all the practical+digital visual effects and great foley artists even scenes that drag seem like they could be real

also re: clever, I kind of hated them when I realized in the intro he is saying “holding for general HUGS” but now I kind of chuckle and mumble “general hugs”

idk, i've seen enough mediocre and bad films that i have a hard time describing any of the star wars films, even the awful ones, as "workmanlike"

and yeah, starting the movie with one of the main characters making a stupid prank phone call to a captain of a star destroyer is idiotic enough to be entertaining. there's a fine line, i've been told, between clever and stupid, and "the last jedi" for the most part straddles it expertly

buddy “workmanlike” in my book means they have a work ethic, actual normal level of skills (they’re probably union), and they’re able to hack it

I mean, if you go by strict definitions a lot of Ron Howard work is hack work — they give a director with the right skills a direction and a script and he churns out usable product. It doesn’t mean it’s bad in quality necessarily. imo JJ Abrams is very much in the hack camp — he takes the day’s norms and a given formula and comes out with something that reaches the standards of the time

I also think there are several directors/producers who are sub-hack getting work now because they’re disconnected from modern standards or think themselves auteurs and fall far short of interesting result

In repeat viewings the stupidest part about TLJ is how much time it spends on two doofuses who are always fucking up and surviving by miraculous intervention while almost all their comrades get murdered in bulk, and not making it funny enough.

I get the sense there was a difficult balancing act between treating Finn and Poe as the completely absurd, walking punchlines of masculinity that they are, and treating the near-total wipeout of the Resistance with some kind of A Bridge Too Far seriousness, and they got middled on the deal.

Like there’s a great dark comedy buried in TLJ - and i said basically right after Rian Johnson was announced that the guidepost to use was Brothers Bloom - but we’re supposed to care about all the rebel redshirts getting murked every other minute and that just makes it a little too much like those goddamn Hobbit sequels that aren’t any fun either.

I think TLJ owes a considerable debt plotwise, in terms of the rebel fleet actions and even the aesthetics and pursuit manner of the First Order, to the new Battlestar Galactica. I’m thinking of the (very excellent) second or third episode of the series (maybe it was called 33?), where they kept jumping and getting caught by the Cylon fleet because they were somehow tracking them.

yup

i don't think it gets terribly "middled", no - i think a lot of the criticism is about perceived tonal whiplash, which i don't see - having seen enough modern doctor who, and, frankly, living in 2018, i don't think there's any disconnect between slapstick comedy and apocalypse.

re-watching the movie, i don't think we as viewers are supposed to care about the rebel redshirts, but poe and finn _are_, and they're portrayed as incompetent for the simple reason that they don't. as for "miraculous intervention", one person's "miraculous intervention" is another's pure blind luck.

maybe i'm cynical about what human beings are capable of, but i find making an entertaining and watchable blockbuster movie takes an exceptional level of talent. to me, if you can shoot a three camera sitcom without sticking the boom mike in shot too often, that's my bar for competence.

the hobbit films? i could barely make it twenty minutes into them. absolutely leaden films, everything was telegraphed to excruciating extent. major characters from the books got lingering shots and ridiculous fanfares. none of the characters were at all likeable, they were all Important. they put fucking sylvester mccoy in the thing and he wasn't any more over the top than anyone else. the humor in tlj is certainly lowbrow humor, but it's brief enough that, to my chronically humor-averse sensibilities, it's actually funny instead of excruciating (see: lucas, george).

Kindly forgive any digressions/transgressions below, as I certainly won't remember them:

1) The autie fans also note that the novel Force powers and starship tactics (re: hyperspace) in TLJ invalidate much prior canon. Ie, huge swathes of the cinematic, animated, and literary canon hbecome senseless if force users can survive and fly about in vacuum, and starships can kamikaze through hyperspace.

2) We've never learned the appeal of the New Order, or for that matter its Imperial predecessor. In human history, most taxpayers are likely cattle, initially cowed by fear, but every enduring state has had an ideology providing legitimacy, and winning recruits. Whether its a claim to divine righ, fear of other nations, or of other classes. What exactly does the NO have? How can one align the economic efforts of billions, if it only seems to serve the whims of a petulant emo? Honestly, just as the best video game in the franchise (Tie Fighter (1994)) followed life in the Imperial navy (which was as beset by civil conflict as the Roman military), I think the best film in the franchise would look at what compels people to join the Empire/NO, what competing interests they serve there, how they let off steam, and how ordinary citizens view the rebels.

3) Since the debut, SW has existed primarily to sell action figure toys. Over 4 decades, I wouldn't be surprised if toy licencing outpaced box office nets. When I was young, my mum didn't buy SW figurines, like my friends had. I got the silver headed Micronauts, because mum was clueless. My friends had small-to-large scale SW dioramas in their bedrooms. I just had a handful of these peculiar yet more flexible ciphers, which my friends would pose in homoerotic tableaus.

4) So, fuck 'em all. Go crazy SW marketing and SW 9 writers. Let Chewie become the furry sex object he/she/it always threatened to become. Let Kylo realize he really wanted to express himself through paint instead of sabers all along. Let Rose Tico obtain justice from anonymous dark side hecklers, with extreme prejudice. I think SW licenced sex toys, and thumbscrews, would sell *great* among remaining die hards.

true that a tie fighter movie would be rad but one of the radder things about tlj was that it was closer than the franchise had ever seemed likely to come to a kotor2 movie

def agreed that one of the (few) inherited problems it doesn't even try to dissolve is that the first order makes even less sense than any of the other aspiring states in these movies

(oh and allowing kamikaze attacks is the least of it rly: obviously they should put hyperdrives on missiles.)

xp I mean, if “give me your fucking lunch money” is an ideology, fair enough, otherwise that might be the wrongest statement ever.

I’m sick of humorless pedants trying to make this long running multimedia series of pastiches of comic books and samurai movies be totally self-consistent in every aspect of its worldbuilding

I liked The Last Jedi, the next JJ one will probably be straight back to shooting without a script and fixing it in post but I’ll probably still find it enjoyable in the theater and it’ll probably still not withstand any kind of careful scrutiny from any angle, what is the problem if a Star Wars movie doesn’t make sense, I ask you.

yeah i do think the FO is m/l ideologically fine (parti de l'ordre) but the gap between ROTJ and TFA just isn't plausibly bridged imo. silby otm tho obv who cares. i mean i did care watching TFA. found that movie just repulsively decadent. makes scary movie 3 look like alexander nevsky.

1. one of the things that irritates me about fans who bicker about changes to canon is that the stuff they hold up as canon is stuff they would have, if it was new, denounced as heretical (and probably did, back in the day). god, how would these "just admit it's bad" people take "The Empire Strikes Back", which did just as thorough a job at fucking with fan expectations - more thorough, really, because at the time there was no precedent for it? when i hear this kind of "but CONTINUITY" bickering i just want to move on as quickly as possible to the point where we can ignore and laugh at these people, or at best treat their complaints as a wacky joke like luke snogging his sister.

there's also this assumption that characters will behave in ways that are logical to the _viewer_ rather than having their own, alien motivations. maybe there weren't kamikaze hyperspace attacks before because nobody had ever thought of one before!

2. in 2018 i don't think "why do people support the empire" is a question we need to watch a movie to answer. i really don't. in any case fandom has plenty of persuasive answers to this question - "the death star was an inside job", imperial media perpetuating the dolchstosslegende, economic essays about how building multiple death stars would wreck the galactic economy and make any post-imperial form of governance impossible.

3. the toy licensing thing is one of the biggest urban legends about star wars. after '77 when a bunch of kids got empty cardboard boxes for christmas they learned about the importance of toys to the line pretty quickly, but the notion that star wars was, from its inception, made to sell toys, or that george lucas made more from the toys than he did from the movies, has i believe been debunked.

film crit hulk tackled a lot of this issues in a recent essay, particularly this one: "there's also this assumption that characters will behave in ways that are logical to the _viewer_ rather than having their own, alien motivations. maybe there weren't kamikaze hyperspace attacks before because nobody had ever thought of one before!"

http://observer.com/2018/07/film-crit-hulk-the-beautiful-ugly-and-possessive-hearts-of-star-wars/

<3 Film Crit Hulk

yeah i actually read and enjoyed film crit hulk's essay last week (and then forgot i was repeating one of fch's points! obviously i agree). i think fch's point that people think the movie is "bad" because they don't agree with it, but it kind of goes beyond that for me, where you have people accusing characters behaving in psychologically plausible ways, not trusting their allies, etc., of being "unrealistic". the stuff backlashers are most adamant about calling "unrealistic" are things that are happening in the world right now. that's what rubs me the wrong way about the fans, it's less that they don't like the movie but they refuse to accept reality. this is why i think they are bad people.

at the same time i don't want to emphasize too hard the notion that star wars is about an alien society, because that weakens it as social/political allegory. backlashers who accuse tlj of promoting a women good/men bad agenda aren't really giving holdo proper consideration, because there's an argument to be made that she is, at the very least, a seriously flawed leader. chain of command (i can't believe these wehraboo shits don't understand basic chain of command) means that holdo didn't _have_ to explain anything to dameron, but her decision to not trust her underling, while certainly rational and well-motivated, was probably a poor one, one that revealed her inexperience. her engaging in a kamikaze attack is also not necessarily super praiseworthy. for all we know kamikaze attacks might be considered morally reprehensible in that millieu.

i am rewatching this week and i will acknowledge that it has certain flaws. particularly the casino planet sequence - while within the larger framework of the movie it's necessary, both from a pacing and from a character development point of view, it was markedly inferior to previous iterations of the sequence (any series that wishes to survive long-term has to adopt iteration). the shaggy-dog sequence really needs something like the absurd touch of the coens to work. also, the depiction of the child slaves came a couple years too soon - we would have had something better-rendered than fucking space newsies if it were done today.

there's so much else in this movie that does work, though, that it seems stupid to focus on the few substandard bits. god, at some point mark hamill actually learned how to act! that was fun to watch.

Wait, didn't this film come out just 7 months ago?

sure but it wasn't _filmed_ 7 months ago

the most underrated part of the casino scene is that little dude who thinks bb-8 is a slot machine

...who, apparently, was voiced by Mark Hamill

for all we know kamikaze attacks might be considered morally reprehensible in that millieu.

They certainly weren’t in the OT!

& certainly not so in Rogue One either!

the reasoning for not putting hyperdrives on cruise missiles seems obvious to me - they’re expensive and take time to spin up, during which sensors are able to detect their activation early in the process; the only reason Holdo’s maneuver succeeds is because she turns around the ship at the last second, after the FO officers have already decided to ignore it (“it’s empty”) and she’s piloting a massive vessel with incredibly powerful shield generators.

a launcher firing hyperspace-enabled drones would be a huge liability for any ship big enough to carry one. Flexible fighters that can dodge their way in close have a better return on investment. IRL, this is why we use carriers as flagships instead of big rafts covered in MLRS boxes (although yes, against adversaries with weak aerospace A2/AD, cruise missile destroyers play a very important role)

The slow bombers with weak-ass shields in the opening sequence make literally no sense to me though. Those things are trash, it really is a complete fuckup by the FO that they lost a ship to that run.

“Let’s buy a half dozen of something that’s worse than the Y-Wing in every possible category”

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.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Friday, December 22, 2017 12:13 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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.

― Frederik B, Friday, December 22, 2017 12:20 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― Newb Sybok (Doctor Casino), Friday, December 22, 2017 12:31 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

aren't the bombers just continuing the analogy to old-school aerial warfare? bombers are heavy and slow and need to be protected by lighter fighters while they execute a bombing run...?