MUCH better the second time. I walked out yesterday with mixed feelings. Too much going on so quickly, some bad dialogue/jokes that didn't seem to fit, etc. the second time it actually flowed well and it was indeed a really good movie. The one really cringeworthy scene is still cringeworthy and pointless though. But bothered me less today.
Minor complaint/nitpick about one scene later in the film. Spoiler So Luke projects his image to the last rebel base and has a scene with Leia where he gives her Han's dice from the Millennium Falcon. Then she, still presuming them to be real, leaves them behind. Then they disappear when Luke does. So what was the ****ing point of all that? Why in the hell would Luke bother giving Leia imaginary dice that would eventually disappear anyway? It's pointless. And hell, she got on the Millennium Falcon 20 minutes later anyway. If she really wanted the dice, she could've gotten the real ones then. And some details that I thought were kind of cool. Spoiler When Luke projects himself at the end. His hair is more brown/less grey. He looks like he did in the flashbacks when he tried to kill Ben Solo. I noticed it at the time and thought it might be a kind of continuity error. But it was really Luke projecting the version of himself that Kylo was most familiar with and it was a clue (along with him wielding the same lightsaber that Rey and Kylo had just broken) that Luke wasn't really there.
Glad to read this, Blake. I actually liked Blade Runner 2049 more the second time around, and I liked it a lot the first go round.
I actually wanted that cringeworthy scene early in the movie to happen because of those trailers. It's like those Marvel trailers leave nothing to the imagination (2 infinity stones...already!). I guess my suspension of disbelief is already crazy high from all of these CG movies. Totally agree. **** you JJ Abrams. Finish what you start. For the first point... Spoiler They needed a way to bring back phasma. Bit disappointing climax though. Def not Boba.
Brother Spoiler: Complaints Thought the CGI creatures were mostly stupid. Finn/Rose = no chemistry, threw in awkward kiss Laura Dern? Why? Snook dying was terrible, wanted to see him lay the smack down So they were riding these bikes toward the big ass cannon in the dessert, what exactly would they have done to it? Po did whatever he wanted the whole time
Wait. Adywan did prequel edits? I thought he just made ANH and recently released ESB while using elements from the special edition and prequel score like duel of fates. Had no idea he touched the PT.
Spoiler Snokes death bothered me the most. Rey's parents being nobody is fine and fits well with the final scene of that young kid(who somehow honed his force powers enough to move objects without training when even Anakin couldn't do anything at that age without training. Instincts for pod racing, sure. Anyway, Snoke was a total bad ass and was obviously extremely powerful both with mind tricks and wielding the force physically. He toyed around with them and then he just dies like that? He could make Rey and Kylo see each other and touch each other without ever knowing where Rey was, but he can't sense Kylo using the force to try and kill him? Maybe it's supposed to be like the Luke quote in ROTJ "Your over confidence is your weakness." This leads to someone's comment earlier that Kylo didn't do anything special to be the big baddie for the final film. I mean he still needed Rey to survive fighting off the red guard while Rey did fine on her own(that whole scene was amazing though). Then Luke makes a fool out of him at the end. It's all really suspect. He didn't even gain any new force powers from TFA to show off and didn't even pull the trigger on killing Leia. Perhaps this really isn't the last of Snoke and the big reveal will be that he can use the force to transfer his consciousness into another body? Perhaps it's an ancient Sith that learned how to live forever? Snoke was actually very interesting and cool looking and sounding, but it still feels like a huge waste of Andy Serkis's motion capture acting brilliance. Potential unfulfilled due to bad writing.
On one hand I get it. Spoiler This trilogy isn't about Snoke. It's about Rey and Kylo. Snoke has a ton of power but I can see them not wanting him to be the big bad guy heading into the final film. And now you have both Rey and Kylo as the most powerful Jedi/Sith in the galaxy and both are without their masters and neither have completed their training. Rey is still tempted by the dark side and Kylo is still conflicted. Both are "gray" instead of being pure light or dark. There's balance there and Snoke existing throws off that balance. Maybe if they didn't kill off Luke . . . ., but that's not the story they're telling. On the other hand, it does seem like a lot of wasted potential with what they could've done with the character.
I enjoyed it overall. Spoiler But that Leia scene was so bad, so cringe inducing. I can't believe somebody actually thought that stupid ass s**t was a good idea. The entire movie would have been elevated had Leia simply died there, It would have mad so much sense in so many ways. Her presence the rest of the way actually dragged the movie down for me because I was perpetually reminded that she only lives because of "that scene". I was more interested in Laura Dern's b**** character, and wanted to see more of her. I personally loved the Jedi elements for the most part, although some explanation for Snoke would have been appreciated.
Spoiler Yeah i agree. But, it's not just Rey's story. Rey coming from nobody and the line Kylo says "you have no part in this story" and the final scene with the kid. I think it's trying to show that you don't need to be some special offspring and i think it was a big F U to medicholrian count as well. This story is about anyone from anywhere can use the force and you don't need some ancient religion to be good or bad. Gray Jedi as you mentioned. It kind of is the end of the jedi if you consider the religion dying and "Jedi" are members of a religion. I need to watch it again because i don't quite remember what Yoda was saying when he burned down the ancient texts. I do remember him nodding that it needs to end or something or was he nodding to the books needing to burn just to get Luke to help? The Yoda we knew for 6 films was all about the religion and following it spiritually. Hard to believe he just pops up after 3 decades and says F IT...burn it down and end the Jedi religion. There's also Kylo wanting to let go of the past and he no longer wants to be Vader or have anything to do with being a Solo/Skywalker. It's probably Disneys way of saying "look nerds. Were making this last trilogy as fanfare but also to tell you were going to move on and be done with any past characters having any involvement with the Star Wars universe."
I gotta say, i hated on the visuals in an earlier post but this film did have some of the best shot scenes ever in any SW film for me. Poe landing his x-wing at fast speed before they took off to light speed. That was amazing looking even if it was a quick shot. The throne room fight sequence. The colors. The jump to lightspeed kamikaze scene. Amazing. Luke facing the new ape AT-ATs with the sun in the background with the camera looking up. Perfect wallpaper. I really need to see this film again, but need to watch TFA again first. Listening to the John Williams score right now and i think i spoke too soon. I might have been caught up in the film to really let the score settle in my mind, but this is actually really good and i'm hearing a lot of similar sounds used in the OT but also the PT...like a mix of both. Snoke's theme: Spoiler It's basically the emperor's theme..hmmm...could this lead to theories about what i mentioned in a spoiler earlier? The ability to transfer his consciousness into another body using the force?
Spoiler Not entirely. Yoda said that Rey has everything she needs to know to become a Jedi. She took the scrolls with her when she left ... somehow unbeknownst to Luke. We got a brief glimpse of them on the Falcon.
I was really disappointed with the first hour or so. It seemed like there was a cutaway every 2 minutes and it really dragged on. Once we get to the Snoke throne room scene, **** gets real and the movie takes off. Quite enjoyed it from there. Disjointed movie but the 2nd half really saves it. The Leia scene was total ****. I’m good with the humor, should have cut the brush the shoulders off bit.
This is gonna take more than one post... Spoiler 1. The tone felt more like one of the prequels. Including corny jokes that didn’t carry. The movie started with Poe making a your mom joke to Hux. Come on. And pretending to be on hold like waiting for a doctor to take the call. Silly. The Force Awakens was great because it felt like the old movies. This went away from that in my view. 2. We had an amazing finale to the force awakens. Waited 2 years for what happened next. Rey is reaching out to him with urgency in her eyes..and we wait for 2 years to see how it’s received...And Luke flips the lightsaber over his shoulder like it’s a slapstick comedy scene. The reaction in the audience in our theater was like...heh. Seriously? That’s it? All that buildup for that? That’s weak, lazy bullshit. Could have pulled Chevy Chase into that role to execute it. And he’s like that repeatedly in this movie. Where the hell did that come from? Zingers about Jakku? All of a sudden Luke is a quick, dry witted jokester in this movie. It’s like someone wrote those lines intending Han Solo to deliver them. Im fine with him being bitter and sick of it all. No problem. But character personality changes need context. The script for him sucked, except for his scene with Leia, which was particularly poignant knowing Carrie Fisher subsequently died. Hamill told Rian Johnson he hated the script after reading it but that he would execute on it because it was Johnson’s vision. I see very clearly now why Hamill said that. 3. Yoda. Holy crap, that sucked. First off..he looked awful. It was so cartoony. Something in the way he appeared, but it was poorly executed. Was not a fan of him laughing and stomping his feet. More prequel silliness...it came off ridiculous. But him literally being the one who burned the temple with the sacred texts was too much. I was literally...and I’m dead serious...ready to walk out of the theater with that. This was a 900 year old dude who devoted those years to the Jedi Order. Who sacrificed everything for it. I get they wanna be post-modern..and his poke at religion was one I’m sympathetic to...but holy crap, that whole thing lost me. Felt more the director was making a personal point about religion than moving forward the story. And Yoda literally used the word “page turner”....the sacred scripts weren’t “page turners”...seriously? Man, that is awful effing writing. So we’re gonna burn away all he stood for over 900 years because...”eh...those things weren’t really page turners anyway.” Had i been alone, there is no way I would have stayed. I was so turned off by that. Again..when you write a script, you have to understand who you’re writing for...the context the audience has to that point in time. They missed this wildly....somewhat with Luke...but overwhelmingly so with Yoda. I think this ended up being somewhat disrespectful to the character of Yoda and to every other character who cared about the Jedi Order..including Chirrut in Rogue One, who spent his life guarding a Jedi temple that had been destroyed. 4. One of the primary reasons Die Hard is so celebrated is its script. It tells a story where nothing is wasted and nothing is superfluous. So much was wasted in the Last Jedi and so much was superfluous. There’s a brief scene on Crait where one of the Rebel soldiers (by the way, they changed from Resistance to Rebels at some point in this movie...I’m fine with that.) rubs his finger on the ground and tastes it. He looks to the guy next to him and tells him it’s salt. That’s it. Who cares? Meant nothing. Was waiting for that to have some sort of significance....it never meant anything. Wasted or entirely unnecessary and without purpose. No reason for it in a film that already lasted 2.5 hours. a. Casino scenes — those literally reeked of the Prequels. The characters...loading up BB8 with coins and burping...the whole feel and look...the horse like animals. All without purpose other than to lead to a code breaker who never breaks a code and give background on a new sense of class warfare I’ve never seen in a Star Wars movie before. I’m sympathetic to it in my galaxy, now...but all of a sudden we’re unpacking a story of Rose, who I don’t care to learn more about at the expense of time that could have been spent on characters I already do care about (whose stories didn’t get told — more on that in a bit). I don’t know that we need class warfare unpacked in Star Wars in anything more than clear subtle undertones..without giving it a soliloquy from a brand new character. That whole scene in the casino planet was about 15 minutes and was about 15 minutes too long. I was waiting for the pod races to start. b. Snoke — ok...W. T. F. ??? In the years after the empire falls, this guy completely reassembles the empire..recreates it...seduces the son of Princess Leia..manipulates him from afar...creates some goofy awkward Rey/Kylo intimacy that came off awful (I’ll get to that)...shows himself to be off the charts powerful in scenes with Rey...and we have no idea who the hell he was...where he came from..what his story was...what the context for it all was. He’s larger than life in the Force Awakens..he appears larger than life at the beginning of Last Jedi facing off with Hux...and then he’s killed off like it’s nothing. We get no history..no context...no idea why Kylo becomes Kylo. This reminds me of Darth Maul, a badass character we never got to know...or Venom in Spider-Man 3 (another movie that just tried to do much all at once) a vicious character that we met but was killed off all in the span of about 15-20 minutes. By the way..this movie reminded me a ton of SpiderMan 3. Same problems for me...and I felt the same walking out. Intellectual properties I cared about that literally made me mad walking out of because of how they were handled. In my opinion, this is just terrible storytelling. 5. The shirtless Kylo scene with Rey...come on. Prequel crap. We saw Anakin that way with Padme in the prequels. Stop it. So goofy. Completely unnecessary and without purpose. Honestly..imagine the director being like...”wait..I have an idea...play this next scene without a shirt on but your pants pulled up super high, Adam Driver...that’s what we’re going far with our villain in an intellectual property that produced Palpatine and Vader...shirtless Kylo Ren....Go!!!” Ugh. 6. I don’t need to see the First Order’s dry cleaners. Seriously? Come on. Ridiculous. What are you trying to say with that shot? What point are you trying to make? I can begin to guess as I type this, but it’s completely lost in a viewing.
Spoiler 7. Knights of the Ren. Who the eff were those guys? Snoke’s dead now. There is context around Kylo and Snoke that should have been unpacked...we got none of it. Maybe Disney thinks they have 3 more movies they can make to tell us that story 15 years from now. It’s poor story telling in the here and now, though. From the Force Awakens, it’s the Knights of the Ren who destroy the Jedi temple...in Last Jedi it’s just Ben after being confronted by Luke one night. No idea. The visions that Rey had of that event are lost...wasted. All her visions seem lost on me now, honestly. 8. If you’re gonna bring in an actor like Benicio Del Toro, you’re gonna have to do better than that. Flat lines. Poor writing. Some more preaching about moral equivalence between the Resistance and the First Order, I guess....I guess that’s moderately consistent in a movie where you have Yoda come in to burn the Jedi temple and the sacred texts. But I don’t care if he’s in the next movie at all. Didn’t move the needle at all. And his introduction never led to anything that mattered. 9. Laura Dern’s character. Hey, here’s a little tip on storytelling...if you’re gonna show a scene between 2 people that’s apparently stacked in context and their history with one another..and it’s a climactic scene where one is staying behind for her own death...hey, maybe you should introduce that character some first. Scenes like that matter a lot where there’s context and background...but when you never see that, they’re empty. I could not care less that her character died. I never knew that character...if it was supposed to mean something when she sacrificed herself it fell flat and was completely overshadowed by the amazing visual effect of her ship running into Snoke’s. Visual effects without meaning are fine for comic book movies..but please don’t do that with Star Wars. 10. The finale. You’ve spent the last 2.5 hours unpacking that the Jedi should be dead..you’ve burned the temple...you’ve burned the texts...you have a confrontation where Luke makes it clear that he won’t be the very last Jedi. You have what I think would have been a fine ending when Leia answers Rey’s question. Rey asks how are they to regroup now with so little...and Leia says, “we have all we need.” Camera pans out and you see the whole group. Perfect. End it..right there. But nooooo...we flash over back to the casino planet to some kid who uses the force to move a broom and looks up at the sky holding his broom kinda sorta like it’s a lightsaber. Geez. I’m sure George Lucas loved that scene, because it had Phantom Menace written all over it. Which is why we all prefer the Lawrence Kasdan view of things in Empire Strikes Back right? Had they ended the scene with Leia’s final line it would be somewhat akin to the finale of ESB. But, as was done repeatedly through the movie, they couldn’t help themselves...and added something completely unnecessary. 11. The worst...the worst part of any Star Wars movie EVER...and I mean worse than Vader screaming “noooooooo” in Episode 3....was Princess Leia going Space Mary Poppins on us. Look..I get it..it’s science fiction....bend reality some. But time is still measured in hours...ships still run on fuel...people still die....but apparently Leia can be blown out of a ship and find a way to force will herself back into it. None of that looked like a Star Wars movie...it looked like a hybrid of Mary Poppins and Superman. Mace Windu died falling out of a building...Leia flew through space. You know there’s no oxygen in space, right? That it’s a vacuum? If they could all fly through space, why did they bother worrying about how much fuel was in their ships? They could have just jumped out and flown around. Terrible. The worst scene in any Star Wars movie ever with no close second. Holy crap. 12. Shouldn’t I feel more when Luke Skywalker dies? Man, I grew up with that character. I was hurting when Han Solo died...that was awful. When Luke died it was like, “ehhhh.” His character was so poorly handled in this movie. I hate that they robbed that. I sat on aisle next to wife..right past her was my 13 year old son and his friend...and then past them was my 17 year old son and his friend. I had no idea what they were thinking. My wife fell asleep twice. Younger boy's friend liked it. The movie ended and older son said, “what was that?” Wife said she thought it was awful but didn’t want to say anything because she was afraid I’d be mad at her for saying it since it was Star Wars. At the end of the day, I think it was just an awful way to tell a story that left little integrity to the characters that they claim make up “canon.” I have no idea why they were so concerned with “canon” when they altered so many fundamental concepts. I loved Rogue One. That’s amazing storytelling. Wasn’t superfluous. Stayed true to the story it was tied to. That movie contrasted to Last Jedi is literally night and day. When those characters...characters we were first introduced to in that very film....died...it was emotional. It hurt. There was none of that in Last Jedi. Rose dies...eh...that sucks, but it’s not a character I’m endeared to. Laura Dern’s purple hair lady? How could you begin to care? I spent most of the movie thinking she was the traitor that put the beacon on the lead Resistance ship that the First Order was tracking. She was opposed to Poe and I knew nothing of her history, because the storyteller never bothered to tell us that story. I loved Force Awakens. I defended the hell out of to people who complained about it being too much like A New Hope. And I think Rian Johnson heard that criticism and was so determined to have Last Jedi not be Empire Strikes Back that he was ready to throw the baby out with the bath water. The problem is, you can’t get the genie back in the bottle. I was totally fine with Kylo being a conflicted villain...I liked that about him, honestly...and thought it made him compelling. I will say that, of what’s left of this trilogy, the character of Kylo is the one far and away most interesting to me. He’s connected to dark and light by blood...he’s unpredictable...he’s a mess...and he’s essentially in the role of Palpatine at this point. Unlike Palpatine, who was perfectly evil, Kylo isn’t perfect anything..but he’s very powerful and interesting. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is 57% right now...it will go lower. To put that into perspective, Force Awakens has a 88% audience score...Rogue One has an 87 audience score. Disney will have to take that into account (and they just gave Rian Johnson a whole new trilogy to do all on his own.) I will not pay to see this film a second time. I will watch it when it hits STARZ....and I’m a HUGE Star Wars AND Disney fan. I’ve never been that disappointed walking out of a movie, mostly because I care so much about the intellectual property behind it. The only other close second was Spider-Man 3, and that was a god awful movie. I’m not particularly interested in Episode 9 at this point. I’m sure I’ll see it, because I have too much invested in Star Wars, generally. But please don’t screw up one of my favorite fictional characters ever in the Han Solo film. I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Very disappointing.
