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

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Wednesday, January 24, 2018, 08:21 (2283 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Kermit, Wednesday, January 24, 2018, 08:41

Rey needs training. No, she doesn't.

That's because Rey taught Luke.

And how did she learn what she taught him?

Luke is here, No, he isn't.

Not sure I understand this one.

Force ghost or whatever it's called.

Snopes is super powerful. No, he isn't.

He was… He was just outsmarted.

We need to go to the gambling planet. No, we don't.

We do. The entire theme of the movie, that the future rebellion will be made up not of chosen ones, but of the downtrodden and oppressed of the galaxy. What do you think the boy force pulling the broom was all about?

Yeah, which is why the critics who want Star Wars to be a Marxist critique are wetting their knickers. I've said here before. Star Wars doesn't do politics well. That's not a critique of Star Wars. There are more important things than politics, and Star Wars was about those things--something Joseph Campbell recognized about the first film. The hero's journey is obscured now by other concerns. Case in point: I know less about Rey two movies in than I knew about Luke ten minutes after I'd met him in the first film. Her character is praised because of what she is not who she is (as is the case with several other cast members). Princess Leia was a better feminist role model in 1977 than Rey is. Again, this movie is about messages, not narrative. It's a commentary about Star Wars more than a Star Wars movie.

I'll all for getting away from the chosen one crap--the embrace of which was one of the cardinal sins of the prequels. The Force as I see it is the force as first presented--a power available to anyone who has the discipline to dedicate themselves to it. Now it just seems to be a super power some have. They haven't mentioned midi-chlorians explicitly (thank God), but I'm not convinced that they're gone. We'll see how Rey's stolen books figure in going forward. As far as I'm concerned, though, the Force as an idea has been compromised in perhaps a worse way in that it's used as narrative silly putty in The Last Jedi. It's stretched into things it has never been in the service of surprising the audience. And when there aren't clear-cut rules about how an imaginary world operates, we stop believing it and worse stop caring. Tolkien understood this in his bones. I don't expect Rian Johnson to understand the fantasy genre as well, but he really doesn't seem to care about any rules of the genre, much less understand why they're there.

Self-sacrifice is heroic. No, it isn't.

Except when Luke did it?

Which might have had an impact on me had I cared at that point. The problem is I never believed it was Luke. And it's not that I couldn't believe that Luke could've become who he was in this movie, but such a substantial progression from who he was in the earlier films would've had to have been presented carefully, and as is, it was sloppy and unbelievable, starting from a premise I couldn't believe. Nor could Hamill, apparently, but I didn't find that out until later.

Leia just died. No, she didn't.

And then she did again. Too soon?

Yoda is here to uphold tradition. No, he isn't.

Yoda was never there to uphold tradition.

The Yoda I know would have been.

Kylo is turning. No, he isn't.

This is just misdirection, not a setup that doesn't pay off. He clearly hid his motives.

Call it misdirection then. A storyteller is allowed a few, but a story made up of a bunch of them strung together ceases to be believable.

Guys are dumb jocks. Um, yeah, can't argue with you there.

Some are nerds!