Kind sir, you are doing me a boggle. (Off-Topic)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Tuesday, January 23, 2018, 16:54 (2580 days ago) @ Harmanimus
edited by Kermit, Tuesday, January 23, 2018, 16:57

I’ve seen TLJ three times and I really haven’t been able to parse complaints about narrative outside of pacing, related to length. It is really interesting to me how many different takes folks have gotten.

Think of it as a series of setups (large and small) without payoffs and the criticism begins to make sense--at least it did for me. Inconsistency within the universe is also a problem (not just from 40 years ago but from two years ago). A good narrative has a sense of inevitability to it, even if it surprises you. Because the movie treats audience expectations as toys to play with and offers little except surprise, by the end it's hard to care what happens. So much of the action leads to nothing because so much of the action was contrived strictly as a way to toy with expectations. There's a reason so many critics who praised it said explicitly that what they liked about it was it was an FU to its audience or to JJ Abrams or George Lucas or whomever. It's the UN-Star Wars. It's the most intellectual, the most postmodern, it's the most whatever is flattering to me because I "get it" and the rubes don't. Most of the elements they praise don't serve a good story. It serves how they feel about Star Wars itself and its traditional mythos. I find that people who have not really cared about Star Wars before LOVE this movie, and I think that's telling.