SPOILER THREAD: The Last Jedi

[ThElonMusketeer]

As a dude who reluctantly walked away from Star Wars years ago and came back when Disney bought Star Wars and rebooted Canon, I loved The Last Jedi. I have ZERO gripes, which was to be expected given I find all the Star Wars movies works of perfect art. Yes, even the prequels... and the Ewok movies. *shrugs* Sue me. I love all things Star Wars. Might be cause I make sure to have zero expectations when it comes to Star Wars... just so I always have a good time.

 

[Insalius]

My boyfriend now only sleeps with our Brandon plushie that we got from Build-a-Bear the night of the premier. He cuddles with him more than me now. X3

 

[Brandon Rhea]

My boyfriend now only sleeps with our Brandon plushie that we got from Build-a-Bear the night of the premier. He cuddles with him more than me now. X3

This went to a weird place.

 

[Nor'baal]

This went to a weird place.

I wish I had a pet Brandon.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

I wish I was dead.

 

[MattBloggs]

Sorry to post again, but I have just found out something MAJOR that I didn't see at the end of the film, and wondering if there was anyone else who missed this??

REY TOOK THE JEDI TEXTS!!
YODA DIDN'T DESTROY THEM!

Just google 'rey stole Jedi texts' , that way I don't have to link to other sites.

I feel like a total idiot for missing this.. Must have blinked at the wrong time. Lol.

Gives a whole new meaning to Yoda's words when he basically said: " don't worry, rey has everything she needs to know ".

Please tell me I wasn't the only one who didn't notice this.. :(

 

[AutoFox]

I caught that at the very end and grinned wide enough to disturb the people sitting next to me. I don't think any of them caught it.

 

[Calixis]

It was better than The Force Awakens but that bar wasn't exactly high to reach for. With that being said, it's still in the lower tier of Star Wars films for me.

The First Order are still pathetic villains and this film only made them worse. Hux is a colossal moron in whatever he does, which makes it baffling Snoke didn't get rid of them long ago. There's 'useful idiot' and then there's screwing up just about everything that you do. I actually wish he'd been replaced by the Dreadnought captain; he was older, showed assertive authority, presented as knowing his stuff, even got a few snarky lines in. Hux mostly just screamed a lot... I mean, having a few incompetent officers because they played the game well is one thing, but not the guy in-charge. Whatever.

Phasma was about as worthless as ever. At least Gwendoline got to cash a check I guess. It really feels like they have no idea what to do with her and considering her Disney Villain 'Death' maybe third time will be the charm (but probably not). Really, the only reason the First Order seem like a 'threat' is because they subscribe to Warcraft Logistics. That is to say, they have an infinite respawn of men and machines (when they really shouldn't) to drown the protagonists in.

Whilst I'm all for the 'being SPESHUL isn't necessarily hereditary' being played, Rey was the one character who they really needed to do it for. She's still such an absurd Mary Sue that she really needed to be related to somebody, or have SOME kind of explanation as to how she's so amazing. I usually hate parentage theories, but in her case I was willing to roll with it... annnd nope, she was a Literally Who, she really is just a Jesus Christ Superstar because she's THAT good. Ugh.

Luke... just- Luke. God, no wonder Mark kept making a point of disliking the script. Yeah, it's Luke Skywalker, the guy who honestly believed that DARTH FRICKIN' VADER could be redeemed and would fight and possibly die just to see that spark of good rise to the surface, and succeeded! Oh and here's this kid who is on his way to falling to the Dark Side (but hasn't yet)... I'D BETTER KILL HIM LMAO!11! And yeah, yeah, he said himself he only considered it for a second, but that's still an absurd character assassination all for the sake of a plot device.

I'm also not exactly sure what the point of Yoda and Luke talking about the Jedi texts and how 'yeah w/e let them burn' when it turned out Rey kept them regardless.

Oh right, then there's his stupid death. "DUDE I WAS JUST A HOLOGRAM LMAO" is like... children playing and coming up with excuses as to why the other kid hitting them with a stick doesn't count. Sure, it would've meant convoluting an excuse as to how he got to Not!Hoth, but if Chewie can grab Rey off Snoke's ship off-screen, Luke can hitch a ride and use the Force to reach his sister. Having him 'die' and then actually die because of projecting a damned hologram just robbed the last ten-fifteen minutes of any emotional depth what so ever.

Holdo should've been replaced by Admiral Ackbar, been competant and not look like she was attending a gala rather than fighting a war. Sure, unfortunate implications of having a guy called 'Ackbar' ram his ship into something, but I'm sure they could think of another way for him to go (or even survive, gasp). It's difficult to really think of her as anything but an idiot considering her not telling ANYBODY her plan led to 95% of the Resistance getting killed, especially when she spent about fifteen minutes staring out at the transports getting destroyed before "Oh right, I'm in a big ship and going to die anyway."

Leia... the less said about her Supergirl scene the better.

Finn should honestly have succeeded in his suicide run. It feels like, not unlike Phasma, the writers don't really know what to do with him beyond 'somewhat whacky, cowardly lion'. Poe makes a better non-FS/military focused character anyway and short of being an exposition dump/plot device on how they can access First Order tech... there's not much there for him. It would also have worked better as an emotional note since Luke's 'DUDE HOLOGRAM LMAO' robbed the ending of that.

Rose was... okay, I guess? Inoffensive is one word for it. Her saving Finn was stupid, but this rant is long enough.

So what did I like about it? Well, it wasn't completely The Empire Strikes Back 2.0 like I'd anticipated. The Resistance bomber CREW looked good. I love the WW2 aesthetic. I'm not even going to talk about the Not!B-17's and their horrendous design though. I guess I enjoyed Leia's scenes, Poe was alright, Space!Montenegro was well-designed and a pleasant break from other planets we've scene. I'm reserving judgement on Kylo for now because he wasn't... intolerable. I'm not as peeved on the Snoke stuff on some other people, but I don't believe for one second his lack of backstory was anything more than a symptom of the First Order (and indeed, the sequel trilogy as a whole) having close to zero world building.

All in all, 3/10. I'd have given it a 4-5 if it wasn't for Luke.

 

[Dakota]

Simply put, I liked it. There were a lot of iffy moments, but overall I'm really intrigued to see where the final film in this trilogy is going to go. I could really care less if it was blatant nostalgia pandering, but I grinned like an idiot for the totality of Yoda's screentime (puppet Yoda AND they got Frank Oz? come on). The direction they went with Luke kind of made more sense to me considering where he was left at the end of Return of the Jedi; would he have known about what all went down between the Jedi and Sidious during Revenge of the Sith after the rebellion ended? Maybe not, which might explain how paranoid he would be about another student being raised up only to cause more damage than good. I really enjoyed the themes that Luke brought up, though, specifically about how the Force doesn't belong to the Jedi alone. Especially Yoda coming back to lay the mental smackdown on him for the same thing he did during Empire, looking to the horizon when he should be looking right in front of him (speaking of, the twin suns coming up as he became one with the Force? I may have teared up a bit).

I felt like Finn was done a massive disservice here. I was really looking forward to him, like Rey, learning and then earning his place in the Resistance after recovering from his injuries. The whole casino thing, while it brought up an interesting point about war profiteering, seemed like it really only existed just to give Finn and Rose something to do. Same with Rey; she really needed more of an arc in this film. If she's going to be the titular Last Jedi then what is she going to take from what Luke taught her? Also, what a weird waste of Benicio del Toro. Then there were just the outright goofy scenes (if I ever have to watch Leia force pull herself through space ever again I might gag), but all in all the film introduced a lot of new things that I'm curious to see play out. Force projection? Literally manipulating the weather to call a bolt of lightning out of the sky? A really cool direction for the Force in general.

I'm actually kind of glad that Snoke got killed. I don't know about anyone else but I could've really cared less about him, even in TFA. He wasn't frightening, he wasn't an imposing presence on the story, he wasn't really intriguing to me, and I didn't have a deep urge to know more about his character. Kylo Ren taking his place assures that the actual "main" villain of the trilogy becomes the main villain. Snoke just came across as a two-bit version of Palpatine and, lets face it, there was really no way anyone was going to top Ian McDiarmid as "shadowy, power-hungry figure of ultimate evil." It really felt better to drop the pretention and let it be Kylo and Rey's story.

Also, while I find the idea of Rey literally coming from nothing to become this important figure in galactic history really interesting, if this is the explanation we're staying with, it feels like a massive anticlimax. If this is the revelation we were leading up to, all of the hints and questions about Rey's parentage in TFA seem pointless. Like, she had to have at least some connection to her parents if she even for a moment thought about going back to Jakku instead of joining Han when he offered to bring her on as a crew member. If they were two random scavanging drunkards who sold her off for alcohol (or whatever it is these people drink) money, that makes absolutely no sense.

Final notes: Movie was p good. Cool direction for the Force. John Williams kills it as per usual.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

The interesting thing about Rey's parentage is that if you take an objective look at The Force Awakens, there really aren't any questions raised about her parentage. On a very basic level we see the story of a girl who is deluding herself into believing that her parents will come back for her. She didn't really remember much of her parents, and she didn't need a connection to them, it just came down to she desperately was looking for belonging. That's really it. And that's what Ben tempted her with when he said she means something to him and he asked her to join him. That was her arc. That's why she came into contact with a Luke Skywalker who believed that the Jedi Order had to end and a Ben Solo who believed that the past had to die. She had to grapple with her past and rise above it. She let go of that and went in the right direction. Luke took inspiration from that. Ben failed to take inspiration from that.

In The Force Awakens, there's no implication that she's a Skywalker or a Kenobi or a Snoke or all of the other theories that people came up with. The theories about her sprung not from anything necessarily in the film, but in the minds of the fans who were so used to this being the story of the Skywalkers or other important people. So fans assumed that she was someone with an important last name, came from somewhere important, or was connected to someone important.

Rian Johnson rightfully recognized that the worst thing for her to hear was that she comes from nowhere, just like the worst thing for Luke to hear was that he was Darth Vader's son. Whether that becomes the truth in Episode IX is up to J.J. Abrams, but it was theoretically very fitting for Rey's arc.

It's also important to note that Rian Johnson made all of these decisions prior to the release of The Force Awakens. All he had to go on was how he saw the story of The Force Awakens and how it fit into the six films that came before it. Fan reactions and fan theories were not a factor, because they came after he had already made these decisions.

The point about Finn being wasted is also interesting to me. I disagree that he didn't have an arc, and I disagree that the Canto Bight subplot was pointless. While I grant that it could have been executed better, and more efficiently in a 2.5 hour movie, Finn went on a journey of finding his place in the conflict. Throughout The Force Awakens and up until his story with Rose, he had two goals: 1) not get dead from the First Order, and 2) help Rey in whatever way he can. But insofar as the war between the First Order and the Resistance, he was totally indifferent. He didn't care about being part of that struggle. He wanted to play the hero, but his actions were selfish. Through his interactions with Rose, a character full of conviction about the difference between right and wrong, he not only learns how to not be indifferent and to join the side of the Resistance, but also what the right way to fight the First Order is.

Is it true that, if Rose had let Finn destroy the miniature Death Star cannon thing, the blast wouldn't have destroyed the door? Yes. On the other hand, it was so weakened at that point that the First Order still could have gotten through. So Finn was essentially just trying to play the hero, as he did throughout all of The Force Awakens ("Stop taking my hand!" and the fight with Ben, etc). Which is a very similar arc to his boyfriend Poe Dameron. Both of them had to learn that trying to be a hero is not always the best course of action.

As Obi-Wan Kenobi said, there are alternatives to fighting. That's what Luke embodied in the final battle. It's all tied together.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

By the way, I should mention that I am one of the many people who have written think pieces about Rey's parentage and Snoke's true identity for a major media outlet, so I'm implicating myself in all of this as well. XD

 

[Dakota]

I don't disagree that Finn had an arc. What interested me about his character though, especially considering his actions during TFA, was how the transition from "we need to get away from the First Order" to "I'm a rebel now" would go. That, I think, is why the bredth of his arc in this film didn't really do it for me. Finn's character is unique in the squel trilogy; his very existence brings up a lot of troubling moral conundrums that make the division between the Resistance and the First Order murky (if all the new First Order Stormtroopers are, like Finn, just children who got kidnapped and brainwashed into serving Snoke, that certainly makes killing a bunch of them really dubious). If Phasma had a more substantial role in the film to serve as Finn's foil (her routinely calling him by his Stormtrooper callsign is great) I feel like his full transition into his new role would've been a lot more satisfying. As it is, while he got where he needed to go, the journey there didn't really pan out like I hoped it would.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

I don't disagree that Finn had an arc. What interested me about his character though, especially considering his actions during TFA, was how the transition from "we need to get away from the First Order" to "I'm a rebel now" would go. That, I think, is why the bredth of his arc in this film didn't really do it for me. Finn's character is unique in the squel trilogy; his very existence brings up a lot of troubling moral conundrums that make the division between the Resistance and the First Order murky (if all the new First Order Stormtroopers are, like Finn, just children who got kidnapped and brainwashed into serving Snoke, that certainly makes killing a bunch of them really dubious). If Phasma had a more substantial role in the film to serve as Finn's foil (her routinely calling him by his Stormtrooper callsign is great) I feel like his full transition into his new role would've been a lot more satisfying. As it is, while he got where he needed to go, the journey there didn't really pan out like I hoped it would.

Ah, so it's more about execution. That's fair!

 

[Phil]

As Obi-Wan Kenobi said, there are alternatives to fighting. That's what Luke embodied in the final battle. It's all tied together.

I for one was glad for that. I was very satisfied with seeing Luke how he was in this rather then some badass, saber twirling Jedi Master killing Stormtroopers left and right and kicking Kylo's ass.

I said it to some of my friends, who were dissapointed with how Luke was, these are not the same Luke, Han and Leia we knew 30 years ago. They became heroes, horrible mistakes were made, and the Dark Side rose again.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

I just never understood the appeal of Grand Master Luke Skywalker from the EU. That feels so boring and sterile. There are fewer cinematic storytelling opportunities at that point. I much prefer the idea of a Luke who tried to do that, and then failed and had to learn from his failures.

 

[Phil]

To me, him in "Return of the Jedi" was his Jedi moments, even if he wasn't technically a "Jedi Knight" until the end. From Jabba's Palace, The Sail Barge, the Evok Village, and the Death Star Throne Room. That looked like a Luke who had learned his mistakes from "Empire Strikes Back" and polished up and took his lessons to heart.

 

[Green Ranger]

Weirdly, I was right about something for once vis a vis Rey being a nobody. Which is in itself kind of a disturbing thought.

Honestly, I was more or less astounded with this film. The cinematography was an absolute delight - the red of Snoke's chamber burning away all around Rey and Ben after Snoke's death on his flagship, or the exposed crystal surface on Crait following the assault on the blast door, shining in the sunlight and looking like slick blood, or the silent still of the First Order fleet, bissected by the damage from the hyperspace jump. It's a stonkingly pretty film.

I loved that Luke's expected characterization was the opposite of what was expected. I loved that he was flawed. I loved that he was scared. I loved that, for a brief but pivotal moment, he thought of killing Ben. And I loved that he completely deconstructed the hero worship around his character, while still managing to show us a bit of just why he's so great as well. It was good seeing him become the crotchety old hermit as well - sort of a full circle kind of thing.

Leia surviving space wasn't all that weird for me - in a previous interview, I think J.J. Abrams had stated that Leia's strength in the Force manifested in her spirit of character and strength of will, so for her to survive like that - and to see her finally use the Force - was honestly quite rewarding. And I mean, besides which, I have a huge soft spot for Carrie Fisher anyway, but she was wonderful to see in this regardless, and will be sorely, sorely missed.

Generally speaking, this was a great story for the new generation to come into their own as well - Poe dealing with the realities of command and to look beyond glory and think about real leadership, Finn struggling with hero worship and finally adressing whether or not he was ready to actually commit to the resistance, and Rey tackling the Force, her own past and all three more or less answering, ofr themselves, the question of who they were.

I also loved Canto Bight, in all honesty. I think what was great about it was seeing that despite the First Order and the Resistance and this huge galaxy-defining war, much of the galaxy was still conducting business as usual - particularly the wealthiest of society, whoed remain indifferent to the suffering of those beneath them. And it was hugely relevant as well, in that the smallest deeds and the smallest people in the Resistance were capable of effecting change and inspiring others, which was an important message of the film.




So yeah. All in all, big fan.

also HEY GAIZ

 

[MattBloggs]

If this is the revelation we were leading up to, all of the hints and questions about Rey's parentage in TFA seem pointless. Like, she had to have at least some connection to her parents if she even for a moment thought about going back to Jakku instead of joining Han when he offered to bring her on as a crew member. If they were two random scavanging drunkards who sold her off for alcohol (or whatever it is these people drink) money, that makes absolutely no sense.

Two points I feel the need to make here:

1) Daisy Ridley stated in an interview after Force Awakens that she couldn't understand all of the speculation and discussion about who her parents were. She said that the information anyone needed was right there in the film. She just saw it as it was. A girl abandoned by her parents. Their names were irrelevant.

It was the overactive imaginations of many fans (myself included) that tried to read into every line of dialogue more than was actually said.

2) Of course Rey wanted to go back to Jakku. Everyone has naturally strong feelings for their parents (more than she'd have for some stranger she just met anyway), and if you read the Force Awakens novel, in Rey's vision of the past she recalled a man saying to her: "I'll come back for you, sweetheart".

With our cynical perspectives, we can see that this was a lie, her dad had no intention of coming back.. But Rey clung to that hope for all those lonely years. She is, in my view, an innocent. Her childish sense of wonder and idealism indicate this.

Plus, a person can't let go of their feelings or the past easily.
(Even Kylo Ren has been having difficulty letting go of his natural feelings for his parents, they were his only 'weakness'.. as Snoke well knew, and Kylo's a hate-fueled DarkSider).

So in conclusion, it does make sense that Rey didn't want to let go of the past, or her hope of seeing her family again. That's why she wanted to return to Jakku.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

Weirdly, I was right about something for once vis a vis Rey being a nobody. Which is in itself kind of a disturbing thought.

Ew.

I also loved Canto Bight, in all honesty. I think what was great about it was seeing that despite the First Order and the Resistance and this huge galaxy-defining war, much of the galaxy was still conducting business as usual - particularly the wealthiest of society, whoed remain indifferent to the suffering of those beneath them. And it was hugely relevant as well, in that the smallest deeds and the smallest people in the Resistance were capable of effecting change and inspiring others, which was an important message of the film.

It sorted of reminded me of the Coruscant opera. Like the Clone Wars have been burning the galaxy to the ground and we're on the cusp of the Empire but the rich people are watching a fish play.

 

[Green Ranger]

It sorted of reminded me of the Coruscant opera. Like the Clone Wars have been burning the galaxy to the ground and we're on the cusp of the Empire but the rich people are watching a fish play.

In a deleted scebe, Rose actually starts monologuing about the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise.