It was... passable. That second movie was still some of the worst shit to ever happen to star wars, but this was passable. I can't wait to see them butcher what little of Rey's character there actually is in like 2-3 decades.
O Flora, of the moon, of the dream. O Little ones, O fleeting will of the ancients. Let the hunter be safe. Let them find comfort. And let this dream, their captor, Foretell a pleasant awakening
You forgot something important that was pivotal to the Twilight movies... topless male scene to show off how buff they are to the female lead! I do remember the first thought I had when I saw TLJ and that Force Skype call between Rey and Kylo after they cut to him shirtless... "Please don't say Kylo is a lycan... please don't go there..." Ironically enough, I almost thought JJ was going to treat TLJ like they treated most of the last act in the Twilight movies: almost the entire ending was just a premonition. I'm sure I'm missing parallels, but I've only seen those movies once when my wife wanted to see them when they were popular.
So I went back and rewatched the entire new trilogy just to see if I could get a different read on it when I was rewatching it, and it really comes off a high-budget fan fiction. I can understand why people would get a little irate about a high budget film feeling only like a fan fiction (not Twitter crazy, but Twitter does tend to attract younger people who get a little... emotional, to say the least). The entire trilogy feels like someone wrote themselves as the protagonist via Rey. Considering all the comments from the people (Kennedy, JJ, etc.) in charge throughout the production of these movies, it's not really a surprise that Rey came off as such with most of the other characters existing to validate her.
Say what you want about the prequels, I could at least tell what the story was and follow the narrative, and I could explain the plot for the trilogy with relative confidence. Yes, most of the dialogue got in the way and was pretty horrid, and only a few actors managed to pull off the lines in a convincing/good manner (McGregor and McDiarmid)... but if you view what you're seeing and hearing as an opera instead of just a movie, it makes a lot more sense/enjoyable. I'd argue that some of the best scenes in the Star Wars movies actually come from the prequels, especially the opera scene between Palpatine and Anakin (helps that almost the entire scene is kept to McDiarmid's dialogue, and the entire atmosphere of the scene really comes off great).
When it comes to the new trilogy, I can't make the same parallels. A lot of it has to do with (sorry to beat a dead horse here) Disney having no plan. Lucas, with all his flaws and tendencies to go off the rails, still had an overall vision and plan that is apparent in his movies. Seriously, just try to think of what happens in each of the trilogies and the themes the trilogies try to grapple with along the way. OT and prequels have a storyline and character arcs/motivations that deal with some serious themes, and I'm sure people could rattle off a general storyline/themes that a person who hadn't seen the OT/prequels could understand and relate to. The new trilogy? Here, I'll give Johnson some credit here: he tried to interject themes to some degree into his movie, and everything just came off nihilistic in the end. Otherwise, everything just becomes an muddled mess with no real message/theme in this new trilogy.
“Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.”
“It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville
Pure garbage and I'm not even disappointed. Only a miracle could redeem the previous two and this was the wrong kind of miracle
You can say anything you want about the movies, but they had fantastic actors on their hand like Driver and Isaac. Ridley will probably have a harder time moving on from this, hell Driver and Isaac had better movie then star wars to their name before and during star wars. Luckily its unlikelly these movies were enough to stop their career, if it does, it would be another shit from this movie. Id understand them coming back for the money, but id increase my cost by a shotload if i was them and disney wanted em back. They are worth more then disney star wars. Isaac was already a well loved actor with very good roles to his name, fuck star wars.
Some, others is that the story between Rey and Kylo means its "glorifiying" women abuse. The rest of the world needs to start working with my system. When ever someone starts anything with: "Objectification" and "Glorification", you need to simply not read their text, nothing smart is coming out of it.
No. You can see that from the lack of awareness of people calling others toxic while deeming others sexist or racist for not worshipping a character or the movies.
It'd be one thing if those people really did only focus on that kind of stupidity. But that isn't the case.
To us, canon matters for two things:
1) What you should expect or not in the movies or official productions. The "canon" concerns mainly the creators, who must respect it the best they can (knowing that nothing's perfect down here).
Ex.: if they ever make a movie with the Yuuzhan Vong as the main vilains, I expect that Luke and Leia will not be there, since they are now dead. And the Vongs may not be exactly as what we have seen in the old EU books.
2) Discussions about the stories of the afore mentionned movies or official productions. Discussions need to have a common ground. If we're talking about the movies and the role Thrawn may have in future productions, it is useless to talk about EU Thrawn.
Canon does not matter on what you prefer. You can still enjoy Legends, and even prefer them over the official storyline, but you cannot expect the movie makers to stick to the stories Legends told. Likewise, you can hate the new movies, but you can't brush it off as if they have never been made when you are talking about the movies. Like it or not, they are now part of the storyline, and the events and characters that we have seen in them will have an impact on future movies, tv shows and books.
"Je vous répondrai par la bouche de mes canons!"
You're talking about a franchise that has been largely influenced by old serials like Flash Gordon (so you're looking for late 1930s-1940s, not 1960), with planets having only one ecosystem (city planet, forest planet, sea planet, desert planet, etc.), spacecrafts that make noise in space, "light" sabers that can hit each other, instant interstellar communications, etc, etc, etc. If you're looking for verisimilitude, you have chosen the wrong franchise.
"Je vous répondrai par la bouche de mes canons!"
I believe Lucas said something like "it's not as canon as my stuff, and I'll ignore it if necessary to the stories I want to tell."
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Lightsabers as a device more or less follow physics, especially since - despite the name - the blade is actually plasma held in place by a magnetic field. What's unrealistic is what happens when two blades strike each other.
Cheerful lack of self-preservation
But that's not the standard actually being applied to the term. If that's how it was actually being used it would only come up in the tiny fraction of situations where crazy people actually say those things, and most people would nod and agree that it's a problem instead of rolling their eyes.
I'm 38. I was fine with TLJ, I don't think I'll like TRoS (haven't seen it yet). I'm an older Star Wars fan, and TLJ was exactly what I wanted - something grown up, something moving beyond the easy themes of black and white, dark side and light side, that had real, flawed human beings as characters as opposed to idealized tropes.
Criticizing TRoS for throwing that all away is fine. So is criticizing TLJ for throwing away the formula that everyone felt comfortable with. It's not so much about making it "for kids" or not, it's about making it "comfortable" or making it something bigger. Everyone who likes TRoS likes it because it's nostalgic, and comfortable, not because they're kids. The people who liked TLJ like it because it explored some themes not seen in the mainline SW canon to that point.