But my chief problem with The Last Jedi is that literally everything involving Finn/Rose/Poe/Holdo/Leia is nothing short of a pure idiot plot. The more attention I pay to it, the worse it actually gets.daibakuha said:One of the points in the Patrick (h) Willems video is that people often don't pay close enough attention to things and then complain when they don't make any sense. That's about 90% of the problems people have with The Last Jedi.
I don't give a shit about pedantic nitpicks regarding the feasability of FTL ramming or Rey being too powerful too quickly. I do care when the entire two-thirds of the plot is facilitated by one character refusing to divulge even the slightest amount of crucial information with no estabilished reason for them not do so - other than the fact divulging said information would collapse the entire story.
Holdo doesn't owe the recently-demoted Poe a detailed explanation, but the fact Poe isn't just throwing a fit by himself but instead successfully inspires a mass mutiny amongst a sizeable portion of the officers in charge who were also willing to go against Holdo speaks volumes about her failure as a leader. Yet instead of the theme being something about two flawed people trying to do their best and accidentally going against each other due to poor communication, the film is still seemingly trying to sell it as "Poe do a bad, Holdo right and good all along" which straight up doesn't work.
It seems to me they initially came up with two key themes, a fairly comprehensive idea of where they want those characters to end up, and zero clue how to get them there:
1) Subvert the classic archetype of authority-defying bad boy rebel character who says "screw the rules" and saves the day. Instead have Poe be in the wrong and inadvertently put in motion the events that screw everything up.
2) Don't be obvious about Poe doing something genuinely wrong or shady-looking. Don't even hint at it, either. Instead bait-and-switch the audience into fully sympathising with Poe's point of view and purposely paint Holdo as a *****, before pulling a fast one on them.
Plenty of stories have done this kind of stuff before, but in order to do it succesfully you absolutely have to lay out a fair bit of narrative groundwork for the audience to buy into.
I understand what they were trying to do, the themes themselves are pretty excellent, and TLJ gets brownie points for actually trying something like that in the first place, yet at the end of the day they still completely failed narratively. Poe and his fellow mutineers are left looking like a bunch of people making the best choices based on bad information, while Holdo looks hopelessly incompetent.