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You know what movie I'm kind of coming around to? The Last Jedi.
I know, I know, it's a terrible Star Wars movie, for all the reasons laid out eloquently by acoup.It's jokey when it should have been serious, it completely screws up both Stars Wars lore and actual military stuff, and it's a weird convoluted mess of a plot. None of the new characters are likeable, and it makes us retroactively dislike the old characters too.
But.... maybe that was the point. Maybe the movie did exactly what it said it would do in the title... it killed the jedis. Permanently. It's the last of them.
Imagine that you're Rian Johnson. You're not someone like Michael Bay or JJ Abrams who can endlessly churn out fun blockbusters. You're an "autor" director, who takes himself very seriously and writes all your own movies. Also, you're relatively young in your career, having made a grand total of 3 movies (all rather low budget) before being suddenly handed the reins to Star Wars. You've obviously heard of Star Wars, but you were never a big fan, and you've spent your entire filmmaking career under its shadow. Your personal inspiration for getting into filmmaking was Annie Hall, a weird surreal comedy movie that came out the same year as original Star Wars but is about as different as it's possible to get.
What do you do with this thing? The eyes of the entire world were suddenly focused on you. You know basically what they expect, of course- a fun blockbuster movie that's basically a soft reboot of Empire. You could do that. But that's boring- it's been done before.
I think what he did was to take it in a very "meta" direction. It's not really a Star Wars movie at all, it's a movie about the relationship that Star Wars has with its fans. Specifically the most obsessed, hardcore fanboys who have been rewatching the same few movies over and over for almost 50 years now while mindlessly consuming all the new products. I think he wanted to scream "get a life" at them like William Shatner. I also think he wanted to sabotage it a bit, to stop the Disney Empire from endlessly remaking this one silly movie from the 70s for all time. (part of the reason the original is so good is that it's a remarkably short and self-contained story- it was hard even for them to stretch it into a trilogy, and it really shows the cracks when you try to stretch it any further than that)
This movie is almost a parody of Star Wars, a much darker and more brutal parody than Space Balls. It starts by completely throwing logic out the window by showing a space battle with gravity to drop bombs from the world's slowest bombers. Then it portrays Leia as some sort of coward who tries to cancel the mission at the last minute when it's obviously correct for them to go for it. I believe this is intentional, to make us realize that Star Wars was always silly Space Opera and really should not be taken seriously by anyone. There's certainly no reason to think that "Princess" Leia was any sort of great military leader. She was originally just a damsel in distress, waiting to be rescued. Why should anyone be taking orders from her?
In a similar vein, I think Holdo was supposed to be incompetent. Why are all the rebel leaders in Star Wars so good at their jobs? Real militaries are full of idiots who get their jobs through political connections, and rebel forces even more so. Her strange appearance ("admiral purple hair") also suggests this. The movie is just being realistic here- an incompetent person is placed in high rank for political reasons ("the force is female!") and disaster ensues. That's actually a realistic and interesting story, it's just not the one we expected from Star Wars. It's essentially a comedy of errors.
Then there's all the Jedi stuff with Luke, Ray, and Kylo Ren. Here's where I think the movie really finds its mark. I remember a time not too long ago when "Jediism" was being taken semi-seriously by some people as a philosophy. The original movies made the Jedi look so cool and wise. But this movie just savages them. Luke is this weird, disgusting old man who has completely given up on everything. Ray is a silly, naive little girl who's constantly falling for everyone's tricks. Kylo Ren murders his own leader for basically no reason at all. Yoda makes a brief cameo just to use force lightning (!?) to burn down all the sacred Jedi texts, before literally telling us "time it is for you to look past a pile of old books." All of them completely fail at actually doing anything to affect the larger war going on- the resistance is mostly wiped out by regular guns.
I think this was done very artfully and intentionally to kill the Jedi. It's not easy to kill off a fictional character- as the next movie showed, you can always write in some excuse to bring them back to life. Even actors can now be brought back from beyond the grave by digital technology. But when you make both the Jedi and the Sith look, not just incompetent, but disgustingly, stupidly incompetent- it really turns the fans against them. It makes the producers not want to bring the dead characters back, which is what really matters.
A lot of people have criticized it for leaving nowhere for the next movie to go. All the plot beats from The Force Awakened were tossed aside, a lot of the main characters were dead, and the ones left alive no longer looked like heroes. I think that was the point. This is not a story that should be turned into an endless series of blockbuster movies. There's no where good for it to go, and it's unhealthy to just wallow in nostalgia. I feel like people have largely forgotten about The Rise of Skywalker by this point (what a bland, forgettable movie), but they definitely will remember The Last Jedi. The https://old.reddit.com/r/saltierthankrayt/ subreddit to hate on it is still, to this day, surprisingly active! People really hate this movie! (edit- I meant https://old.reddit.com/r/saltierthancrait/ but it's kind of funny that there's another active subreddit just to hate on that one, and at first glance I couldn't even tell the difference)
If I'm right, I think Rian Johnson pulled off one of the all-time greatest troll jobs in history. He got Disney to pay him to make a movie that didn't just parody its biggest brand, but made even its biggest fanboys realize some of it is. I feel like it used to be somewhat cool for everyone to like Star Wars. Or you could use it in an ironic way like the unipiper. I don't see any of that anymore. As Mr Plinkett tells us, Disney is cranking out Star Wars content for TV now, going in all sorts of crazy directions, but no one is paying attention. It just doesn't have the cultural relevance it once did. Harrison Ford might have spent much of his life grumbling about how he dislikes obsessive fans, but he still kept it going. Rian Johnson was the one man who could actually kill this franchise and save us from an eternity of shitty corporate nostalgia and soft reboots.
This is hilarious. Otherwise I'm not sure if I agree, although I like this flavor of Star Wars cope. @hanikrummihundursvin put it perfectly.
I'm half-convinced of a theory by Adam Roberts - Holdo has to be incompetent because the narrative logic of the film demands it. We want to see the heroes pull out victories against impossible odds, the more impossible the odds the more dramatic the victory, and at some point that requires incompetence from the commanding officers who got the heroes into that terrible situation in the first place.
On the other hand - in the original trilogy, nothing like this happens. The Rebel commanding officers in ANH, ESB, and RotJ are consistently professional, authoritative, and well-reasoned in their decision-making. If they make a bad call (and probably the only one is falling for the Emperor's trap in RotJ), it is nonetheless a bad decision that we can imagine a sensible person making, given what they knew at the time. If we look at how the background Rebels behave at Yavin, Hoth, or Endor, they are generally calm, reliable, and seem to know what they're doing. They seem like people you would trust to have at your back. So clearly it's possible to tell a dramatic story in this genre, where the heroes win a desperate victory against overwhelming odds, without incompetent commanders.
On the other other hand, though... that works in the OT, at least in part, because the villains of the OT are credible and intimidating. The OT has Tarkin, Vader, and Emperor Palpatine to work with, all of whom are convincingly threatening. The films never undermine their villains. The Rebels might be capable professionals, but so are the Imperials. That is not the case in the ST. The sequels have devoted significant screen time to establishing that their villains are a clown show. Kylo Ren is an immature brat who establishes screen presence through mere physical violence - he's a thug, with none of Vader's presence. Hux is a resentful boob, seen quivering with impotent rage more than he is genuinely threatening people. The heroes do not take these villains seriously. In the opening scene of TLJ, the heroes ring up and sass the villains. This undermines them as threats. (Comparison: in the OT, the heroes never mock the villains. I think the closest it comes is Han referring to the Imperials as slugs. But Tarkin, Vader, or the Emperor are always treated with deathly seriousness.) So the sequel films cannot rely on the villains to establish a sense of threat. The villains are too weak, in narrative terms, to do that.
Now the obvious response here is, "Well, then they shouldn't have had awful villains." I tend to agree. But I think there's a case you can make that the ST has lame villains for a valid storytelling purpose - Kylo Ren isn't supposed to be the second coming of Darth Vader, but rather him being an insecure Vader fanboy is part of the point. Where the Empire in the OT was generally composed of mature adult men with confidence and a degree of professionalism, the First Order in the ST are insecure twenty-something alt-right imitators. Maybe the films are trying to make a point about neo-Nazis or something. Okay, sure. But if you go with that, if the films are meant as some kind of deconstruction of youths imitating the patterns of evil regimes of bygone eras, then all of the films need to support that, and they can't just re-run the plot beats of the OT.
And unfortunately they do. Even TLJ, honestly, is a pretty by-the-numbers re-run of ESB; I don't know why people think it's subversive or deconstructive. But you can't just re-run those plot beats while changing the things that made them work in the first place. Re-running the OT can work and produce a genuinely beloved Star Wars story - the original Knights of the Old Republic is just a straight OT re-run and everybody loves it - but it has to be done with more skill than went into the ST.
I found the "ring up and sass the villains" part broke the illusion for me just a couple of minutes into the movie, and it was downhill from there (dropping bombs like a B-17, really?). The idea that prank calls were relevant (or that secure authenticated comms wouldn't be expected) a long time ago in a galaxy far away was way too far, IMO.
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No. Leia sassed Tarkin in the original film:
In ESB Luke sasses Vader at the beginning of their fight (though, of course, this is specifically him being a headstrong idiot):
And in RotJ Han sasses Jabba on a couple of occasions (though, of course, Jabba is not an Imperial):
There's not a lot of it, not remotely to the degree seen in your clip, and RotJ goes very hard on having Luke be courteous even to his foes. But there is a little.
She sassed him but then he blew her homeworld up. I don't think she won that exchange.
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Case in point, LotR. The good guys are fairly competent, just up against a juggernaut of an empire ruled by Satan's lieutenant himself.
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That was a choice made mostly in TLJ, they didn't have to set them up this way.
This scene is in TFA. As is this one.
Ren was a figure of mockery from the first film.
That's not mockery on the "can't take this guy seriously level". Compare it to officer what's-his-name getting thrown around the room by Snoke, in front of his subordinates.
How could Snoke possibly become a threatening bad guy in the absence of, lol, having Palpatine somehow return earlier? Having a half-bit Palpatine was a huge mistake; the First Order should have been some combination of a) overwhelming military resources and b) stupid Dark Witches bullshit trying to regain the Force as an advantage. Snoke is a horribly bad villain from the bottom up.
Another big problem with TLJ is that most of the non-Jedi stuff (Rose, etc) is just incredibly cringe.
I do agree that this is somewhat interesting as meta commentary in TLJ: everyone is stuck trying to rehash the original trilogy, characters and fans alike. But the movie doesn't do enough with it, and, worst of all, RoS fatally ignores the critique made by TLJ instead of transcending it, which dooms both movies' critical value.
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Its a funny take with some support in reality, but not on the military front. The real weird part about TLJ and the sequels is, the part where the Rebels allegedly won, but in universe the Empire guys are actually stronger now. A good story is the explanation why the rebels failed to establish a new, successful, government because very few people are George Washington and competent at governance during both rebellion and while founding a new nation. Most such scenarios do fail. Washington was an extraordinary figure.
The sequels being about bad governance and failure of new leadership is probably a much better set of movies, but also really hard to write.
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I admit, I'm headcanoning that part pretty hard. But it really does help me enjoy the film if I imagine that Holdo really is just some incompetent buffoon who got the job by political shenanigans, and now everyone is just stuck dealing with her. Sort of like character Umbridge in Harry Potter 5 I guess.
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