Saying a woman is an adult female human (the definition) is not anti-queer bigotry...
because going to Boystown in Chicago for New Years and the gay pride parade with friends is what anti-queer bigots do I guess
Funny Events of the "Woke" world
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because going to Boystown in Chicago for New Years and the gay pride parade with friends is what anti-queer bigots do I guess
Point made. Accusation retracted. You still have an empathy problem.Saying a woman is an adult female human (the definition) is not anti-queer bigotry...
because going to Boystown in Chicago for New Years and the gay pride parade with friends is what anti-queer bigots do I guess
Han's character arc is that of the unscrupulous scoundrel turned war hero. It starts in a New Hope, in which he's an amoral (not immoral, amoral. More 'rebel without a cause' than 'bad'), opportunistic smuggler who is only in it for himself (and Chewie). Over the course of the movie he comes to care for Luke as well, and thus reconsiders his refusal to join in on what he explicitly refers to as the 'suicide' mission against the Death Star; risking his life for the sake of saving his friend.
In Empire Strikes Back, he's still tagging along with the Rebellion (for three years at that point) and helping them set up shop on Hoth, despite evidently still planning to leave at the earliest opportunity, when he feels he can leave with a clear conscience. Despite his pretenses to the contrary and at least claiming not to care about the cause, it's obvious in even the early scenes that he kinda wants an excuse to stay because he's sweet on Leia. Moreover, their early exchange indicates that he's damn good at it, with Leia explicitly citing the fact that he's proven himself to be both invaluable in his efforts and a natural leader, as much as he might try to deny it. He again finds himself embarking on a suicide mission to save Luke (freezing nights of Hoth), before delaying his own escape to the last minute and personally pulling Leia away from the command room to evacuate her. By the end of the movie, his last request to Chewie is that he take care of Leia in his stead, indirectly committing them to the Rebellion.
After being unfrozen in Return of the Jedi, he follows up on that by returning to the Rebellion and fully committing himself as the General leading yet another potential suicide mission, only this time for the sake of the Rebellion rather than for the sake of someone he cared about. This completes his transformation from amoral, jaded smuggler only in it for the money to hero fighting for - and willing to die for - a noble cause. It's very much an arc wherein circumstances make a scoundrel discover a new - more respectable - side of themself, and through that improves their life, something we actually see the end result of with Lando, who was deliberately crafted to seemlessly slot into Han's role in case Ford didn't come back for the third film. He gives us a glimpse to the approximate trajectory of Han's implied future, with he and Han sharing a laugh over the fact that the once scoundrelly Lando had become a responsible and respectable leader.
Cue TFA which reveals that during the time skip Han reacted to his son's turn to the Dark Side by returning to smuggling because that was "the only thing he was ever good at". It reeks of "One More Day" rationalization, wherein the character is returned to a point earlier in their development that the new author preferred.
Rey was guided to it by an odd sound (resembling a young girl crying), leading her to a locked room that proceeds to unlock itself to clarify that yes, that is the room she's being led to, and zeroes in on the box containing the lightsaber. No distractions. She knows exactly where she's being led, and opens the box. She touches the lightsaber, gets the vision, and then Maz helpfully informs us that the lightsaber had been calling to her and was now hers. Shortly after, Maz tells Finn to take the lightsaber and find Rey, and then in the climax, Kylo tries to pull the lightsaber to himself only to find that it won't come to him. Confusion evident on his face, he increases his effort...and it finally lifts off the ground...and flies straight past him to Rey (to the shock of both). Feels like a pretty evident "chosen wielder" chain of events to me.
Then why were they looking for him before meeting Rey? Presumably, their interest in him has little to do with his ability to train people in the ways of the Force as they evidently had no known Force Sensitives of their own to send his way. For that matter, why are they trusting Rey, whom nobody conscious in the Resistance has known for more than a few hours? ...Come to think of it, do they even know she's Force Sensitive? Nobody (except probably Maz, who was not there to corroborate) knew that until she repulsed Kylo's mind probe, and Finn (the person who knew her best) was not only comatose but also had never seen her using the Force. But even if they trusted her enough to tell her what the map said, why would they not send their own people along?
I thought I recalled another pair who'd deferred to him as a superior, but glancing at the script it seems I probably misremembered. Regardless, however, that Rose had already cultivated that impression of him indicates both how wide an audience the story about him had spread and the reverence conferred upon him through it. Rose worked in maintenance, and what she'd heard of Finn convinced her that he was "a Resistance hero", someone her late sister (the gunner) described to her as "a real hero", the type "who [doesn't] run away when it gets hard", leading her to be positively starstruck when she recognized him.
And yes, our impression is necessarily filtered through Rose, but consider what that implies: In the span of maybe a few days (and potentially as little as a dozen hours), Finn's story had already spread through the Resistance, from the gunners to the maintenance crew that Finn was an exemplar, a true hero, with the evident undertone that he was wholeheartedly devoted to their cause. It's there to play into TLJ's themes about idealizing legends, but the reason Johnson wanted it there doesn't change the fact that it doesn't make narrative sense.
Ah, let me clarify on that: When I said Johnson was torpedoing Abrams' plot hooks, I was speaking very generally about plot threads that Abrams left, not inconsistencies with Luke specifically. TFA implied that Luke had been looking for ancient Jedi wisdom and TLJ flat out stated that no he had cut himself off from the Force, had no intention of getting involved and had, in fact, ran away to an off the map backwater to die.
TFA deliberately set up Rey's parentage as unknown and the circumstances of her abandonment as suspicious. TLJ walked that back with "Your parents were nobodies". (And that one just pisses me off because it's so obviously shoehorned in for the hell of it. Rey had not been speculating that her parents were special, just desperately hoping that they'd come back for her. That line is there entirely because of audience speculation) Rey goes to train to be a Jedi under the last Jedi? Said Jedi contemptuously tosses away the lightsaber just to hammer home how done he is with anything Force related and how he believes that the Jedi should just die out. TFA set up Snoke to be the mysterious greater evil who corrupted Ben, the Emperor to his Vader. TLJ ignobly kills him off with about as much gravitas as Captain Needa. TFA sets up the First Order to be a dangerous insurgency that just dealt a major decapitation strike, TLJ retcons them into the dominant force mopping up the last of the Resistance. TFA sets up the Knights of Ren as a probable antagonistic force...TLJ doesn't even acknowledge their existence (or simply hoped that you'd assume they were Snoke's guard and thus dealt with in that fight). Etc.
It ended up feeling that Johnson was trying too hard to subvert the audience's expectations, like his goal was to deliver a string of "didn't see that coming" moments that they couldn't have predicted. It's an adversarial philosophy that I've seen a few times before, wherein the audience being able to anticipate the plot is treated as a mark against the story's quality, while being able to catch them completely off guard is presumed to be a mark of quality (and therefore reason in itself to change the story to something unanticipated). And I think we see this in everything from Snoke, to Rey's parentage, to his building up Holdo as an apparently ineffectual leader only to go 'gotcha, she really did have a plan all along, as much as we tried to convince you otherwise", to Luke having to be talked out of destroying Jedi texts...only to reveal after the fact that Rey had taken them, to Luke's final conflict being a fake-out just because. Hence the impression of putting too much stock in subverting expectations.
With that said, allow me to further clarify that I'm not trying to say Johnson is more at fault than Abrams, or anything to similar effect. I'm less interested in a "who's most to blame" pissing contest than I am in dissecting the what, why, and how of each film; both their internal flaws, and how they relate to the rest of the franchise and even their own trilogy. I've historically been pretty open with my criticisms of TFA, including its implications and plot hooks, and that I felt those should have been pared back, and I'll be the first to admit that Johnson inherited a lemon because of TFA's shaky foundations. I dispute, however, that Johnson did not himself contribute to the Sequel Trilogy being the hot mess that it became by going "no, instead" rather than "yes, and" (and yes, RoS is guilty of the same and more).
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Okay, just butting back in:
I'd agree half the problems of TLJ was caused by TFA nonsense
I think the exact same thing happened in the original series though, and we just forgave it. Thus does not mean you have to forgive the sequels
I understand why Luke turned far more than Han. I think he ended up in a more natural place based on that turn. I think they did Han a real disservice.... and I don't really like Han even in the originals. Or Luke really for that matter. He's a whinging brat that would be better suited in a teenage school drama. The only reason any of this happen was to match the originals
Holdo was a stand in for Leia because Fisher was sick. They thought they could just make a stand in and it would work. I didn't
The futile exercise of the casino is about as futile as the exercise of trying to escape in an asterior feel. Like Han and Luke, it was placed there as a nostalgia trip to the originals. Same with salt planet and the speeder going against impossible odds. Or the rebellion being trapped by the fleet with little hope of escape
I think I forgot some points.... anyway, I think the biggest problem is that the sequels tried to ape the originals... but the originals were already flawed
All true, but:
Really disagree here. I don't think there's anything incongruent with grief working that way on Han. Losing a child is bad enough. Losing that child to an order of Neo-Nazis is arguably even worse.
Also, there's not really much actual reversion going on. Han was never part of the Resistance. That's about 23 in-universe years where there'd been no Rebellion of any kind. The "only thing I was ever good at" line isn't meant to be taken literally, it's conveying Han's lack of confidence, grief, etc.
Is that meant to symbolize the Lightsaber's 'calling' to her, or an example of Rey's Force abilities. For instance, when Ben reaches for the weapon, and Rey catches it, isn't the implication that she's already reaching out for it? By this time in the film, she's willingly used Force powers after all.
Why would they look for Luke? Well, y'know, the reasons you'd expect them to. I mean, it's Luke - he defeated the Emperor and Vader, he was there at the fall of the Empire, he's got to do again what he did last time. You can argue that Last Jedi subverts this by asking what would actually happen if Luke joined the Resistance, but it makes sense in-universe as much as anything else why the Resistance would want Luke, if only for the boost in morale (which Last Jedi does demonstrate at the film's end).
As for sending Rey, well, she's the one who's Force-sensitive, she's the one with Luke's lightsaber, she's the one with the Millennium Falcon, she's the one who confronted Ben and lived, she's the one who doesn't have a role that would need filling if she left. And if you're asking who knows that she's Force-sensitive, well, Leia, almost certainly. She can probably put two and two together. Even if you don't factor in Rise's revelations that Leia knew Rey was descended from Palpatine (though it's unclear if she knew from the start or worked it out later), sending Rey makes sense.
I think those are fair points. I can understand why the Resistance might see Finn as a hero (same reason why some First Order stormtroopers might), but in the timeframe in question? Yeah.
Implied, yes. Never confirmed.
Star Wars has implied one thing and confirmed another before after all. Remember Yoda?
Really disagree here.
Fan speculation aside, by this point in the story, Rey would have good reason to suspect (and hope) that maybe her parents were special. I say hope, because among other things, even TFA hints that Rey is in a state of denail, from her interactions with BB-8 ("they'll be back...someday...") to Maz ("child, you know in your heart that they [your parents] aren't coming back.") Rey's denail over her parents, and her apparent need to latch onto parental figures (in TFA, Han, in Last Jedi, arguably Luke) is established. That would be reason enough for the moment to work, but I also mentioned that Rey would "suspect" that her parents were special, because by this time, she has good reason to suspect something's up. She's powerful, the mirror sequence shows her only herself when she asks to see her parents, she has this weird link with Ben, etc. We see this play out when she goes off to redeem Ben, because hey, it worked for Luke and Vader, right? So the revelation that Ben doesn't want redemption, or that she's really just a nobody...it hits on both levels.
Also, if you want the actual reason why Johnson made that the case, hypothetically it could be to refute fan speculation, but his stated reason is that he asked himself what the most devastating answer Kylo could give would be, and came up with that conclusion. You can disagree if that was effective, but there's a clear train of logic there (build the character up, break them down, allow themselves to rebuild).
Well, yeah, but most of those I don't see as plot issues. TFA sets up a bunch of cliches, Last Jedi tries to make something of them. I do agree that the 'power shift' for the First Order is an issue though.
And okay, sure, I can understand why and how some people would be super-invested in Snoke, for instance, or really wanted to see these "Knights of Ren," or wanted to see Luke hunt a McGuffin, but at least to me, these are cliches that have been done to death. It's the same old stuff that Star Wars has recycled for ages, and even if your consumption of Star Wars is limited to the movies, well, TFA has been called "New Hope 2.0" for a reason.
(I just realized that of two of the three sequel films, Abrams has a mcGuffin drive the plot to at least some extent...God fucking damn it...)
I do agree that in theory, one can be so consumed with subverting expectations that it hinders the story's quality. However, on the other hand, if the audience IS able to anticipate the plot ahead of time...well, yeah, I do think that's a mark against its quality, or at least, originality. I do agree that a simple story told well is better than a complex story told poorly, but if people can predict your plot, and especially your 'twists,' well, maybe you want to go back to the drawing board?
Also, of those examples, I really, REALLY disagree that Luke's final confrontation in Last Jedi can be called "a fakeout just because." I've seen people, including Kevin Smith opine that they would have had the scene with Luke using his lightsaber to reflect the AT-AT laser blasts to destroy them, or show that he was so powerful that he could pull a Star Destroyer from orbit. This...please don't take this personally, but to me, this is how a child thinks. This is simply a power fantasy, and if one's limits of imagination only go as far as pew-pew-pew, then, well, I kind of pity them. Even by the standards of Star Wars up to this point, this is shallow. The best lightsaber actions in the series prior to this work due to their psychological and character interactions as much as their action-actions.
But if we're looking at the final scene, what's going on beyond "hah, gotcha!" Well:
-It harkens back to Luke's words as to Rey's expectation of "facing down the entire First Order with a laser sword." Here, he does that. And it's made abundantly clear that if he was physically there, he'd have been blasted to oblivion.
-It shows how haunted Ben is by Luke. He's willing to delay an assault, and attack face-to-face, because he's still so haunted by his uncle, and for all his bluster, is still a scared child.
-It perfectly encapsulates the differences between the Dark and Light sides. The Dark has more 'power,' but the Light, even with its pacifity, can emerge triumphant. It's about as Jedi as you can get for Luke to 'win,' without ever striking a blow.
-It finalizes Luke's character arc, and the themes of the film. Luke isn't perfect, and he isn't some superhuman that can singlehandedly stop an army. But there's value in the legend of Luke Skywalker, and how it can inspire others (which we see in the film's closing scenes with the children). And if we ARE talking about the power fantasy, this is Luke at his most powerful, projecting an image across countless light-years. It's hard to get more powerful than that.
There's also the more subjective elements. There's the poetry (it rhymes!) that the first time Luke saw Leia was as a hologram, and ergo, the last time she sees him is as a vision. There's the overall cinematography (I'd say Last Jedi is a beautifully shot movie in general, but that's another matter), how, for instance, Luke doesn't leave any footprints in the salt, while Crait as a whole looks like it's 'bleeding' because of the First Order. There's the dialogue between Luke and Ben as a whole. And there's that absolutely perfect ending of Luke fading away under the twin suns (poetry!).
I know art is subjective, but to compress everything on Crait that happens down to a "hah, gotcha!" moment...I seriously don't get that. But then, this is Last Jedi, so completely different reactions to identical scenes seem to be par for the course.
Well, I can broadly agree. Despite my gushing, I do think Last Jedi is a flawed movie - ranking it, I gave it a 6/10 (which is the same ranking for TFA, Rise is either a 5 or a 6), and of the Star Wars films I've seen (all of them, pretty much), it takes the #5 spot. I can also understand the idea of "yes, and" versus "no, instead." However, my subjective distinction if that "yes, and" to TFA is just more boring cliches and rehashed plots. Rise does "no, instead," and we get...um, boring cliches and rehashed plots.
I'm weird on Abrams in that I actually quite liked his Star Trek stuff, and Mission: Impossible III is...decent, but as a self-professed fanboy of Star Wars, his works in the setting just strike me as hollow. And it's harder to 'forgive' Rise for that, because it's coming off one of the most interesting Star Wras movies made, whereas I can at least understand why TFA is the way it is, even if I still dislike it.
I dislike Abrams to a significant extent. I think he tends heavily to superficiality: a people-pleaser rather than a person with deep creative instinct. If he is the creative bottom line, what you get might be glossy, but it will be quite empty and compromised underneath.
@Hawki & @Asita, I think we can all agreed that the overall problem with the Sequel Trilogy is that Disney had no overall story plan of any kind, other than nostalgia baiting. This gets really evident with Rise of Skywalker and the over course correction. It's gotten so bad, that nearly no one was left satisfied.
I was always neutral towards the man, or had disinterest in any of his works. I know after Star Wars, I could definitely see where dislikers were coming from, and I will never go out of my way to see any of his movies. Or movies with his named attached to the producer's seat.
Star Trek: Into Darkness holds the speed record for breaking my suspension of disbelief, by freezing a volcano with a "cold fusion device" in the first segment. And then the plot was just 1000 plot holes stitched together. Visually a pretty good movie though.
Much as I enjoy a good back and forth on storytelling, it occurs to me that at this point we're kinda derailing the thread with this tangent (never mind me almost singlehandedly exploding the post length), so I'm going to try to cap this off. That said, there's one thing I feel obliged to address:
I don't take it personally, but that's admittedly partially because I'm not making that argument in the first place. I'm not saying that Luke should have taken on an AT-AT head-on, or anything so bombastic. When I say that it's a "fakeout just because", I mean the whole shebang of "Luke is pulling an Obi-Wan in distracting Kylo by letting his nephew get a free killing blow on him, down to echoing Obi-Wan's "if you strike me down" line...just to reveal that he wasn't actually there, and he therefore wasn't actually sacrificing himself because it was a Force illusion...except it turns out that he actually did sacrifice himself because the strain of the very act kills him". I call it a "fakeout just because" because Luke sacrificing himself by putting himself into a situation he can't escape from and then letting Kylo strike him down is not functionally different than Luke sacrificing himself through the strain of creating an illusion to appear that he sacrificing himself per the above. It's a fake out in that it first fakes you out with Luke's sacrifice and then his evident safety after pretending to pull an Obi-Wan.
And let me clarify, I love illusion powers. They're some of my favorite fictional abilities when used effectively. I don't have any problem with Luke tricking Kylo like that. What I take issue with here is the narrative purpose in faking us out with Luke taking a fake fatal blow only to then have him still die from the act a minute later.
I look at this scene from...I suppose a more Doylist perspective. I see that scene and I'm asking why the writer scripted it that way, and suffice it to say that I'm unimpressed by the answers. I see the very act of putting Luke in front of a line of AT-ATs in the first place to be a contrivance for the specific purpose of conferring forced perspective: it's there to create an impossible situation that he could only survive by not being there, thereby making us focus on how the illusion solved that problem rather than how the aftermath rendered the twist irrelevant.
And, mind you, the "Luke's not physical" twist could have worked. One of the more clever suggestions that I'd seen someone pitch as how they'd have written it simply went Sixth Sense on it (requiring some minor changes like Luke seeming to drop the lightsaber rather than toss it at the start, that sort of thing), with Kylo's final blow passing through Luke again, only for him to sigh and let the blue glow around him finally fade in...revealing to both Kylo and the audience that he'd actually died that night he confronted Kylo and been lingering as a Force Ghost ever since. Again, that's clever! I would have loved that because it's a twist that recontextualizes everything from his uninvolvement in the main conflict to his interactions with Rey. He wasn't getting involved because he was suffering from a major case of deadness and therefore couldn't.
But instead we got what amounts to a twist for twist's sake. It neither changes the trajectory of the plot nor does it do anything to change our understanding of the events up to that point. It's there just to let him survive a 100% lethal situation before revealing that the situation was 100% lethal anyways for slightly different reasons. It's scripted the way it is just to be a fakeout. Hence my characterization of it as a "fakeout just because".
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Wait.... more unbelievable than slingshotting around the sun in a ship they have little experience with to save some whales to stop an ecoterrorist AI?
Anyway, I thought the Peter Weller parts were good, and it lost me from there
I mean, and I'm both getting meta and acknowledging that Rise did absolutely nothing with it, think about what that scene does to any onlookers who dont have sufficiently advanced force powers. Luke Skywalker just became an unkillable, teleporting boogeyman. They don't know he was actually an illusion nor that he's actually dead. He's a Legend.
Which would've been so cool to explore in a hypothetical sequal not written by a hack
Not more unbelievable, just impressive for how early in the movie it lost me. It's like 5 minutes in and I'm already thinking "what the crap".
I think it's "a" problem, I disagree it was "the" problem. The original trilogy manages to function quite well for instance, despite the lack of an overall plan for it, whereas in contrast, the prequel trilogy had a plan, and had...issues, to say the least.
They still had some ideas of what they were doing and where they wanted to go, so I will give the OG Trilogy credit to that.
At least it was a plan, no matter if you liked the Prequel Trilogy or not. Besides, Episode I is average, II is abysmal and so boring, and III is regular good (7/10), despite some writing issues.
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My sister in christ we do have an strong party.
"Control the crazies" is not what a rival political party does nor are they your friendly budget checker and/or where you go if you just want to cheer lead CEO rather than make something on your own. SMH
Oh please, this thread was already derailed the moment Critical changed its name to something stupid, as a "counterbalance" to the anti-woke thread.
The purpose of statements like Pelosi's here is not actually to encourage any particular direction from the Republican Party. It's to create division and navel-gazing.
Infighting is one of the most self-destructive ailments a political party can suffer from.
Which is in itself hilarious because the examples of ridiculous wokeness in this thread are mostly nobodies on social media saying questionable things. Conservatives don't know what to do with themselves if they're not complaining.
I have my doubts Pelosi is that savvy. She's paid not to be.