Gaaa! We're still talking about this! Noooo!!! (Off-Topic)

by INSANEdrive, ಥ_ಥ | f(ಠ‿↼)z | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ| ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, Wednesday, July 04, 2018, 02:01 (2332 days ago) @ EffortlessFury
edited by INSANEdrive, Wednesday, July 04, 2018, 02:09

I was just starting to forget this movie and move on. DANG IT!

There is no mistaking that The Last Jedi has become the bellwether for how you approach the larger goals of your Star Wars fandom. Truthfully, I don’t really care to debate whether the film is bad or good. The question I am much more interested in is, “why exactly did this film make a subsection of the fandom so damn upset?”

Because it's a shitty story that forgets it's in the middle of an arc! It kills the flow of the arc, because *mocking* ...OOoOO... look how clever I am! Haha I fooled your expectations!*/mocking*

Riddle me this! If this was the beginning of an arc by Rian Johnson, would the reaction be the same? Keep everything the same in this thought experiment, just change where it stands in the story line up, does that change how the story is interpreted at all? We just start - BOOM - right there on that hill top.

My answer to this, is that it changes the feel of everything. Why? Well, same reason as Destiny at launch. As I recall I talk about this in that OG Megapost of mine about Destiny 1 Year 1. Expectation. Things are already established, you take what you get and grow it to make it better. DON'T FREEK'n EXPERIMENT WITH FORMAT IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ARC!!! ESPECIALLY! ESPECIALLY!! In an ARC using THE BIGGEST GRAND-OL' CHARACTERS in WESTERN CINEMA! THIS is STAR WARS! With LUKE-flippen-SKYWALKER! These things bring with them weight in... I don't know what word to use. I guess what I mean to say it, when a movie changes how movies are made, that brings a degree or...eh.. royalty with it. For action movies right now, it's John Wick. For VFX, it's Star Wars. Plus - the classic heroes journey. I think it's fair to say for a large amount of media we consume, be it a book or movie, watching a character learn and change is fun, and perhaps even reflective.

Yet, for the Last Jedi, if it wasn't for the deaths, there is basically NO CHANGE! The movie is basically a waste of time to watch. The first half is about "killing the past", then then 2nd half REFUTES THE FIRST HALF! GAAAA! Phasma is still a joke, Ray is still powerful because whatever, Finn is still awkward and out of place & Kylo is still conflicted.

*ho ho! but what about Poe Dameron*

YEAH WHAT ABOUT 'IM! One lone minor arc of change does not a whole movie make. Nice try. Thanks for playing. Don't even get me started on that arcs presentation... holy scheiße. I know, lets put in a super obnoxious character who we movie goers have never met nor care about, unless we've read other forms of media, in our MAIN MOVIE. Don't flesh out WHY we should respect this person jugement, who they are, just THROW 'EM in there and give 'em a big rank! That's interesting! /s I have NO time to explain why I have no time to explain! What could POSSIBLY!... go wrong with that idea. People love being in the dark, nothing is more satisfying. /s

The Last Jedi is an Anti-Story. It is literally story Anti-Matter. But the WORST THING OF IT ALL!!!! ... is that this piece of shit was said by some to best film in the franchise since The Empire Strikes Back.

*OOooOoo* Oh boy. OOhhhhh boy. Happy place. Happy place.

That's like... telling Cody that the shipped vanilla story of Destiny is comparable to the story of Dues Ex. No. Just... No. I don't even want to get into that... so...

The dress is blue, and it's both yanny & laurel...

THAT'S WHY!

*Deep Breath*

There are an unfortunate amount of man-children in the fandom who don't know how to articulate feelings short of the base instincts. What happened with the actor who played Rose, for example, is simply disgraceful.

Worst of all, the story and motivations Rian Johnson seemed to be trying to tell has already been done, and like... with an actual degree of competence. Plus - IT's incomplete! Ironically, it's in the past, with Knights of the Old Republic 2. So, yeah. It's just... sad. If only they had Lucas former wife edit it.

Cus 'yall... I didn't even mention anything about that edit. MMMMm mmmmm. There are things in those deleted scenes that shouldn't have been.

... but I guess I should read the rest of this article now. :P

This is part of the problem of how any public disagreement can make it seem like there are “two equal sides,” when really it’s just two sides of an argument. But I also say all this like the percentages actually matter. They don’t, I’m just trying to explain what’s happening. But I don’t care about winning some hypothetical popularity contest. I’m much more interested in the aforementioned deeper diagnosis of “what is everyone really reacting to within this film?”

Why? Love. Inspiration. If you thought, for whatever reason, someone throw a ball of rancid shit at someone you loved, or inspired you, how would you react? That's why. It's not just a movie, and Lucas never really understood that. To him, it was just a medium for HIS experiments in movie making. I'm noticing pattern here, but maybe it's just me.

I have come to argue is that the storytelling of The Last Jedi played like a damn song, going from beat to beat with total clarity and acumen. No, I do not think it is full of bad writing. I think it is exemplary of very, very good writing.

I remember I walked out of The Last Jedi, and we were all smiling, but there was one guy in the group who was just so bitterly angry about this plot detail. The rest of us were taken aback, not by the comment itself, but by the depths of the anger behind it (it turns out he would not be alone, as it is the one comment that has been thrown around online ad nauseam). “It didn’t make any sense!” he shouted. It didn’t matter how much we threw back the fact that she outlined her reasons for not trusting him in their first scene together, nor did it matter how much we pointed out the real-life logic of how military brass is under no impetus to tell officers below them their plan (often this is due to potential capture, let alone, in the film, their paranoia of being tracked).

Oh my goodness. So... the issue with this here is that this person is using the experiences or knowledge they have to justify something in the movie that is not fleshed out. Unless the story makes those points clear throughout the movie, not just a bullet point, the argument is invalid. If someone isn't a military person, you can't expect that person to understand. IT HAS TO BE PART OF THE STORY! THIS IS THE JOB OF THE STORY! I'm not disagreeing with anything else here for the moment, just this qubble here. Don't interject reason if the story gives none. Rule #1 of story telling; The audience is stupid.

Because there is literally no point to approach the “bad logic” of a given story choice like you think you are fixing flaws of a film. Instead, you are literally erasing conflict from the movie. The obvious problem there is that the entire damn point of a movie is to create conflict. We want stories that get at the heart of strife between two people, and through the dramatization of that conflict, will say something about the human condition.

Not all conflict is created equal. Can you make the conflict endearing and believable? This is where haveing fleshed out charicters comes in, if only we had some. For more information; Game of Thrones.

(GoT Spoilers Ya'll)

(GoT Spoilers Ya'll)

I can’t tell you how many people came out of The Last Jedi angry because we didn’t get “answers” to the “questions” that were “posed” in the last film and literally called them plot holes. Now, to be fair, I’ll actually give them a little emotional leeway on this one because J.J. Abrams can’t seem to tell a single story detail without it lingering in “the air of mysteriousness” with a given scene, so perhaps it’s fair for that storytelling approach to foster some curiosity. But it is equally fair for me to argue that does not make them dramatically posed questions, either.

You mean... character development? Bro, you serious right now?

What happens to the Knights of Ren? I have no idea and I don’t care. There were just a few shots of them in The Force Awakens, and I’m pretty sure they were barely referenced in the actual text. I get being vaguely curious, but there is literally no presented dramatized reason to care beyond their mere extended universe existence within the lore.

Alright, I'll give ya that. As it stands right now, they wouldn't add to the story, not that we have much choice at that conclusion. Then again, mama always said be careful of the friends you make as they can make you. I admit, that's some Episode 9 speculation I through in there. Whatever, doesn't matter in 8. Moving on.

But what about Lord Snoke? Who is he? How did he rise to power? Well, does it matter? Don’t forget the original trilogy never really bothered answering those questions with the Emperor and it didn’t matter. (And didn’t the prequels tell us we didn’t really want that kind of answer, anyway?)

Fuuuck. I swear, between both sides of the fandom are fucking echos. It's a freeking broken record to the max. The mystery of Palpatine WAS THE POINT! It ADDED to the story of the original trilogy.

Yet here in 8, we're picking up -in a way- from where we left off in... Return of the Jedi. Luke (well... Vader) killed the Big bad. Now we have a new big bad. How did this happen? Is that REALLY such a stretch? A leap of imagination as to why that question exists? It's CONTINUATION! It's an establishing question. How did the world become as it is now, as it is these things that push our characters along their paths. What are the rules of this new yet old world?

The Last Jedi has a different modus operandi, in that it’s going to point a conflict in one direction, before twisting it and turning it another. This is common of a lot of traditional storytelling, particularly in noir or mystery, but it’s all about fostering moments of surprise.

The thing about being an audience member is you need to be willing to let it do this. You have to be willing to let yourself be tricked about a given direction.

Bullshit. I mean, look, if it's a mystery then OK. Figuring out the red herrings and all before the main character does is part of the fun. Yet what The Last Jedi does is so egregious, that it beats you over the head with this pattern again and again and again. The movie takes this tactic, and beats you over the head with it so much, it could probably legally be considered assault and battery. I can't say I've read EVERY story out there, but when a story does "trick", it's done so by earning it. The Last Jedi takes this, and turns it into a cheap parlor trick, that some sadly confuse for cleverness.

Shane Black often talks about “quality of edge,” which is the belief that a film has to have a proper balance of dramatic clarity, surprise, violence, non-violence, etc. Basically, the audience can quickly tire of something if you overplay your hand. And while it works for most of the big reveals, the feeling of constantly have to augment your sense of dramatic direction can have a lasting effect. So it’s not that the dramatic decisions of the film don’t add up, nor that they’re non-functional. It’s that a traditional audience can tire of having to always play that particular game. Which can make it feel slower, especially set against the grain of the go! go! go! style of The Force Awakens.

Oh... so, what I just said. Cool.

male character made to feel foolish or less than against a female character and HOO BOY does that open another can of worms (which we’ll get to later). Again, it’s all about learning to speak the language of what’s really happening with our reactions, especially when people keep insisting it’s about “logic.”

Ugh. Freeking man-babys.

...there are plenty of things I find objectionable in a given film and could apply a logic argument to, but I don’t. Because that’s not the point of storytelling, nor why I’d really find the given issue to be objectionable. It’s all about how characters grow, change and are in conflict in one another. Particularly in the way that all creates “arcs,” which is something that those same hardcore fans argued were “bad” in the movie. So what is really bothering people who watch this film? What is didn’t they get? Well in order to get to that, let’s dig into those…

I’m going to jump right into this, but remember: the heart of any character arc rests in the dramatization of the character psychology. We want to understand what they’re thinking, why, and how the film shows us this through an action in the text, then track the way it influences their behavior, or how it changes is or how they show resolve. Cool? Cool.

Agreed...er... Cool.

So, people are accusing Finn of having the weakest arc in the film. But let’s start with an important thing to talk about: yes, I too wish this new trilogy had better explored Finn’s stormtrooper trauma. I too wish it spent more time exploring how he’s deprogrammed and comes back into the world. I wish these things because it is important messaging that I feel is prescient to our own world. However, I do not take that wish so far as to make it a criticism of his characterization in these films, because they are out of text fan-fiction-y concerns. And it matters even less, because The Last Jedi not only grounds Finn in a way that The Force Awakens never did (his behavior was always haphazard, contradictory and weird in that one), but I actually think Finn actually has THE STRONGEST arc in film, and one that speaks to the entire movie.

So... yes, there are weak story points with Finn, but that doesn't matter anyway? Am I reading that right? I mean, shoot, it's in the same paragraph.

A bunch of words go here

SO I just read/skimmed this fellows narration of Finn (I skipped Poe), Rose, Kylo, & Rey. All I have to say it the power of editing. I know it's a bit of a cheap shot, and yeah I can totally out line a bunch of... retorts, but this post is already long enough. Maybe I'll do it later.

"It’s about saving what we love." ... I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

...and my goodness there is more. I'm going to skim the rest.

If you read any of the extended universe books, you’ll know that the empowerment fantasy went so deep that Luke Skywalker basically became god. Coupled with the deep revere for the Vader lore, there were so many disgusting notions about the power of the Skywalker bloodline and the toxic thinking that goes with it. Fellow nerds would look at me dead in the eye and exclaim, “FORCE POWER CAN ONLY BE INHERITED THROUGH REALLY GOOD GENES.” Yikes.

Yikes indeed. I blame midichlorians. :P

And now that has all exploded. To wit, a person I dare not link to, who has basically been operating a full-scale harassment campaign at everyone involved in the movie, wrote the following about what happened to Luke: “There are children now dealing with bereavement, mourning their hero, and they don’t understand. Their parents have to explain it to them, and they can’t. There are sick children (and adults) who needed an escape, and hope. But @RianJohnson mocks them. #TheLastJedi. #StarWars.”

Ugh. ◔__◔ Everyone dies. Get used to it kid.

So, yes, let’s talk about Old Man Luke.

I have no real issue with Old Man Luke, other than... the edit, and some of the content. Again, just as it is with Snoke; How did it get to this point? (Though admittedly there is at least SOMETHING to go off of with Luke.)

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I could add more from my skim, but I'm stopping this here for the moment. Thanks for reading, and have a nice day! July the 4th be with you! :P