Chat corner 47: The Last Jedi

[annathecrow]

Welcome to this week’s chat corner!

Optional prompt

This week’s prompt is “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”, the second movie in the Sequel trilogy.

Just as with the first Sequel movie, I remind you to use The Dark Side post as necessary, so there’s some space left for people who enjoyed the film. If you did, the floor is yours ;)

 

Comments

[annathecrow]

I might cough up a longer post later, but I wanted to post something right away so it got long right away, oops. XD

I went into the cinema knowing the movie is Controversial (TM), but I still enjoyed it! It does have a lot of valid narrative problems (I might start a thread about that on the Dark Side post, there's a really great review I've read that I'd love to share), and it makes some decisions I will forever mourn (...that's definitely Dark Side material for me), but it still had a lot of parts I loved.

I was extremely pleased when they said Rey was a nobody, I thought that was a great place to go with the Sequels. (Oh, me.)

Maybe this is a hot take, but I approved of the way it made Poe's dashing recklessness and inability to respect authority into something dangerous. It wasn't handled well, I understand why so many people hated it, and maybe "sometimes following orders is good, actually" isn't the right message for Star Wars, but I still think it makes a valid point.

Rose was sweet. I did feel the Rose/Finn romance was a bit forced, but Rose was great.

The scene when Holdo sacrifices herself to destroy the First Order ship is MAGNIFICENT. I know the sound cut is a gimmick but holy shit.

Luke's goodbye to Leia was horrible and amazing and I think I cried in the cinema (something I never do.)

[annathecrow]

Off-topic: I made the inadvisable decision to start SW:TOR, and it continues to be inadvisable. The client is now trying to download ~40GB game data at 2MB/s 🙃️ I SUFFER.

[astromech1138]

I'd go straight to the dark side but honestly I don't care to think about this movie any more ;)

I did like Yoda's line, "we are what they grow beyond."

[ironymaiden]

I loved the idea that Rey had no special heritage and the idea of more force sensitive people in the galaxy. So many great scenes! It challenged my expectations, it surprised me -the throne room fight, the Holdo maneuver, Luke being a badass and the biggest troll ever!

Not to get all dark side, but anything wrong with this film was overshadowed by the next film being the worst.

I had to rewatch the throne room fight again - the lightsaber exchange and final kill is so good

[yourlibrarian]

I heard virtually nothing about the movie before seeing it because I don't like to be spoiled and I went to see it with friends, so saw it in the theater. I thought the opening section was great, with the tension of Rose's sister's sacrifice and the humor with Poe's approach. And having Leia turn that around and show what an awful decision Poe made was unexpected and intriguing!

But then I found it disappointing for a few reasons:

a) I was expecting to get more adventures of all three of our new heroes together, which did not happen
b) Since the first movie didn't do a great deal of explaining what had happened since the previous trilogy, I was amazed that the resistance was on its last legs after all that time. It made me even more baffled about what was really won at the end of RotJ.
c) I had assumed we'd get Luke training Rey which didn't really happen. I found that pretty disappointing because we never saw Luke himself get much training and I'm not keen on this idea that everyone just becomes a Jedi during summer camp.
d) I think my entire group found the whole casino section rather boring. OTOH I think that, canon-wise, it was one of the few things we see that actually addresses life in the new Republic. We sort of touch on this with Rey's introduction, but clearly Jakku is so much farther out in nowhere than Tatooine that we could be excused for thinking that her experience is more just living in what amounts to a company town of gig workers.
e) The film is back-loaded with all the exciting parts -- the throne room battle, Holdo's stand, Luke's appearance and scene with Leia, etc. It felt like a slog getting there.

So once I heard about the negative reaction to the film, I assumed it had to do with how it just seemed emotionally barren, given that we were now invested in the new characters as well as the older ones. But instead the reaction to the themes in the movie seemed to be the big sticking point and I actually liked those. It made me feel like they were trying to do something new with Star Wars which, after the copycat setup in the first film, seemed like a really good idea to me.

BUT. I think it ended up being a bad idea as part of a film trilogy. Star Wars films were always very lightly sketching out the verse in favor of action and thrills, and it seemed to me that questioning Poe's approach and Rey not turning out to be of some special bloodline were already enough of a twist in the story. I liked Rose just fine and wanted to have Finn get a significant storyline. But their quest just didn't seem to have the same overall importance and it seemed like it belonged in another movie or (and here's the key point) in a series.

Star Wars, since Clone Wars, has made its TV series do the heavy lifting in terms of world building and addressing issues in Star Wars. The closest we came to that in movies was in Rogue One (which is my favorite of the new films) which also had issues with back loading all the really high tension, exciting developments. So I felt like Rose and Finn's adventure was both too much and not enough.

Also, I'm amazed anyone was surprised at the boom in Reylo after this film, because one of the few ongoing threads that paid off was to see where this whole psychic connection was going with them.