Gethsemani said:
Silentpony said:
I disagree entirely. The Force Awakens was the laziest star wars movie done, and Last Jedi was the worst.
For all the bullshit in the prequels, they were at least trying to do something. I haven't felt one scene in the new movies had any effort put into it. The whole thing feels like a very lazy cash-grab, not like the writers/producers had an interesting story they wanted to tell.
You can disagree and there's some merit to the argument that TFA is lazy (though I disagree personally). However, the prequels are not just lazy, their storytelling is actively bad. From the fact that the finale of TPM has the jedis fight an adversary we know nothing about and treats it as this incredibly poignant moment, while the space fight comes down to "boy who never touched flight controls before scores a gazillion lucky coincidences to win all on his own" to the incredibly poorly thought out idea of letting the unspecified but somewhere in her late teens Queen Amidala build a romantic rapport with a 10 year old. How about the disastrously handled arc for Anakin in AotC? How Sidious right hand is once again not properly introduced (I even forget his name) but once again played up as if he's this important rival we ought to care about? The nonsensical plot about Camino and the Clone troopers (so Sidious orders the clones, then tries to hide the fact for some reason, but his plan hinges on the clones to help prosecute the war so he can become Emperor. Alternatively, he started a losing war against the trade federation without any way to win it, lucks out on the clone troopers being ready so that he isn't murderdeathkilled by the TF when they win the war so that he can assume emergency powers).
Dislike the new movies all you like, but at least they are consistent narratively, they don't screw up important characterization or introduce weird sidekick characters for comic relief that end up universally despised. The prequels are terrible stories, the worst you can say about TFA and TLJ is that they are lazy and too eager to deconstruct the franchise respectively.
Eh...I'd actually debate that. There are a lot of execution issues, don't get me wrong (ranging from a fighter somehow piloting the same as a racecar to the "I haven't seen her in ten years" romance), but for all their flaws, the prequels had - thus far - tighter overall storytelling, while the sequels have been more meandering. Summing up the prequel trilogy, they're about the rise of the Galactic Empire and Anakin's fall to the Dark Side. And we get steady progression in that regard. We see Palpatine become Supreme Chancellor of the Senate, exploiting a civil war to get emergency powers a la Julius Caesar and becoming a functional dictator, and finally dropping all pretense of being willing to step down by dissolving the Republic and declaring himself the ruler of the new Galactic Empire. Similarly, for Anakin we see him change from a sweet kid to an angry and entitled Padawan and finally going over the deep end and becoming a Sith Lord.
Sequels? The first one was a variation on A New Hope, and the second was a giant chase scene which starts and ends with the Resistance just barely escaping the First Order and with the characters ultimately ending up in the same point in their development that they were at the end of the previous movie. It's a lot of fluff that didn't actually serve a purpose outside of giving us something else to look at other than Rey trying to convince Luke to train her, and even that subplot ended up going almost nowhere as Luke stops training her within minutes of starting. This is actually a bit of a persistent problem within the film, it sets up and twists things to absolutely no effect.
Take, for instance, the big fight between Luke and Ben. Set up to be an Obi-Wan moment where Luke sacrifices himself to distract the biggest threat. Except we then learn that he was never in any danger at all because it was a projection, opening up the door for him to be a better teacher in the next installment...except he dies anyways as soon as he stops projecting himself, so there is no reason to do the twist on the sacrificial act in the first place. Alternatively, take Kylo Ren killing Snoke. It's something that was potentially interesting and is cast as a pivotal moment, but it's ultimately little more than shock value to the audience. Snoke was as enigmatic when he died as he was when he was introduced and unlike Vader killing Palpatine it didn't represent a change in Kylo's character. His goals, methods, and authority within the First Order were already not appreciably different than Snoke's, so nothing really changes outside of Ben's official title. He kills Snoke and then it's business as usual for Kylo Ren, Rey, the Resistance, and the First Order.
We can also look at the assault run where it looks like Kylo's about to kill his mother. He hesitates...and it looks like an important character moment evidencing that good's still in him...which is completely undermined by someone else taking the shot and him basically shrugging it off. And let's talk about that for a moment. Leia got spaced. She's floating lifeless outside the breached ship, her corpse slowly icing over. Holy hell, that's a poignant moment that we didn't see coming...oh wait, she wakes up and just flies back into the ship with the Force. So what was the point of spacing her like that? As I said, this is a bit of a recurring issue in the film.
There are so many moments that could have been powerful, but they're all rendered pointless because they're there purely for a "just kidding" revocation. Really, I'd go as far as to say that the Last Jedi was more about killing plotlines than it was about developing them.