well... (Off-Topic)

by EffortlessFury , Monday, November 28, 2022, 11:38 (736 days ago) @ Kermit

...that the best thing to come out of it is from a guy who's not a fan of it?

Not trolling. Genuinely wondering.

From what I can tell based on interviews, Tony Gilroy adopted a learner's mind, dug into the lore, made sure he thoroughly understood the bones of universe, took his time with his section of the world building, then populated that section with believable human beings.

Contrast this with Rian Johnson, who thought he understood it going in, and was mainly interested in the artistic ways he could subvert its tropes.

Both were interested in showing something new, but one approach added to what was there, while another took away, destructively, IMHO.

I suppose you could call it destructive; I might call it deconstructive. The Last Jedi, at its core, addressed a lot of the issues I've always had with the series. It pulled up a bunch of elephants in the room from the prior films and held a mirror up to them. Perhaps people were happy to let those elephants chill for the sake of what the series did otherwise, but I personally appreciated the movies finally explicitly pointing out things like the Jedi's hypocrisy and especially the flawed "do or do not, there is no try" mentality. Yes, practically speaking, this is true, but failure is a necessary step in the process, and the Yoda of Episode 5 didn't seem to share that sentiment. (ironically, The Last Jedi fails in this regard by having Rey continue to fail at absolutely nothing lmao but that's another subject)

Much of The Last Jedi's execution could be improved, but I still liked the core ideas, and I actually think Luke's arc was mostly well done. "Recidivism" (used loosely here) is a thing; any tendency we have, even if we work to oust it, can recur. If you're trying to kick a bad habit, there's a good chance you'll fail to kick it completely. You will relapse, but that's okay, as long as you get back on the right track. Luke was tempted to kill his Father and nearly did so, but refused at the last second. The same scenario played out with Ben, but it didn't end quite so well. Just because Luke rejected the Dark Side once doesn't mean he wouldn't be tempted to do the exact same thing again at some point in the future. Unfortunately, many folks think that Luke had completed his struggle in Episode 6 and should've been an unassailable paragon from that point forward. I understand that's what people had built up the expectation for in their head, but it's incredibly unrealistic (and boring tbh).

Anyway, tl;dr, I think the movie could've been executed better but I liked the approach to the TLJ. The entire sequel trilogy is a mess, though, and I mostly ignore it anyway.

I plan to watch Andor soon, I continue to hear nothing but great things and think I'll probably like it given what I liked about TLJ, despite Andor taking a different approach to it.