[paulddraper]

Okay, let's give that a whirl

---

The Last Jedi

Tomatometer 91% Audience 41%: Artsy Fartsy

[Really?]

---

The Greatest Showman

Tomatometer 56% Audience 86%: Fun, not oscar worthy

[Won Oscar for Best Original Song]

---

EDIT: Truthfully, it was the release of these two films (both Dec 2017) that caused the Tomatormeter and I to part ways. Simply indefensible, IMO.

[eindiran]

I can't comment on "The Greatest Showman" since I haven't seen it, but on a certain level "The Last Jedi" was kind of artsy fartsy; Rian Johnson spent so much time on cinematography and color grading[0] that he ended up with a movie that was visually very striking, without any plot fundamentals that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.

[0] Think space-walrus cliffs, or red-salt Hoth, or lightspeed kamikazee, or the Snoke throne room battle

[the_af]

> but on a certain level "The Last Jedi" was kind of artsy fartsy

While I agree with your criticisms of The Last Jedi, I don't think you can under any circumstances consider this movie "artsy fartsy".

The Last Jedi is the anti-artsy fartsy movie, otherwise the term loses all meaning. It doesn't mean "bad", and an artsy-fartsy movie can be good. Focusing on just the technical or glossy aspects doesn't make a movie artsy, it just makes it bad.

[yyyk]

TLJ is super-ultra (about 99%) artsy fartsy, just the Euroartrash type which most non-critics aren't familiar with. This type is utterly obsessed with controlling, subverting and deconstructing expectations, so everything needs to be the opposite of what the movie-goer is supposed to expect. Except that too is a kind of convention, so a Euroartrash movie going long enough will eventually subvert itself. It's basically a 'sophisticated' type of trolling.

Critics love these movies, because first they see lots of movies, and something doing different, even if the different doesn't really have anything behind it, is refreshing. Also, since there isn't really any plan, you can read everything behind it, which allows you to write whatever you want very easily.

Especially for the SW universe which is getting stale, and the sequel trilogy was stale from the beginning. Euroartrash allows the illusion of a new path. An illusion, since if the movie went the way some critics imagined it, a certain character had to make the other choice at the end. But you wouldn't subvert the viewer if they had.

Viewers don't like them anywhere as much - turns out trying to confuse the viewer for the sake of it doesn't make for a good experience - and it's a bad fit for a movie universe. They really picked the wrong directors for that trilogy.

[the_af]

> TLJ is super-ultra (about 99%) artsy fartsy, just the Euroartrash type which most non-critics aren't familiar with

Hard disagree. First, I'm familiar with many kinds of European cinema, and second, by no means is anything Star Wars artsy-fartsy, or "Euroartrash" or whatever silly made up category.

It can be bad cinema, but that's unrelated. Star Wars is, and will always be, about entertainment first; not a single Star Wars movie or TV show escapes this fact. Not a lot artsy about it.

Subverting (some) expectations has nothing to do with being artsy. And it's not like the new trilogy was particularly gutsy either; it just wasn't very good.

We agree on one essential thing though: my main criticism of Star Wars is that it's mostly played out, with very little left to say (with some honorable exceptions). Time to give this corpse of a movie universe a rest, instead of keep milking the cash cow.

[yyyk]

I guess you have a different criteria for 'arsty'. For me, the sensibility matters more than the experimentalism some of these movies have. Some other guy below mentions a Ryan Johnson interview where he says 'subverting expectations' was a main focus (I wasn't aware of this, it just was my first impression). That's typical for post-Deconstruction European filmmaking. It was bringing this sensibility (a poor fit for Star Wars) which makes it 'artsy' here.

In fairness, I knew the moment JJ Abrams got the role that the sequel trilogy was doomed. It's a lot more his fault than Johnson's, and a lot of the criticisms TLJ got were a consequence of the previous movie. If SW was to modernize, it needed to find new grounds, and JJ could never do it.

I was never a big fan, but I still regret to inform everyone that Disney is going to Zombify the franchise and milk the Zombie cow forever. This video is the future of Star Wars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zY9z7IP-1Q

(Yes, it's about the Simpsons, but all Zombie TV looks the same at the limit)

[bbor]

“Artsy fartsy” ~= “more concerned with art than entertainment” ~= “more concerned with making a movie pretty than fitting fans expectations”

So IMO we should cut the person some slack :). I don’t agree that it’s that way because ultimately that’s a movie by Disney not a movie by Rian Johnson, but it’s weird to say that technical aspects are somehow not related to art

[the_af]

Nothing Star Wars or Disney, good or bad, is more concerned with art than entertainment. It might be bad, it might be a miss, but they surely aim for entertaining.

It's of course a continuum -- few movies exist squarely in either the "artsy" or "entertaining" ends of the spectrum -- but it's a safe bet Star Wars is closer to the entertaining/spectacle end.

The problem with calling a Star Wars movie "arty fartsy" is that it twists the meaning of this term to mean "a movie I don't like", which I'd rather people did not do.

[adammarples]

You're missing a 4th rule, if the audience score is far, far below the critics score, near zero, it means the movie is "woke"

[hotnfresh]

FWIW I was a Star Wars nerd and read all the books and played the games (even the obscure ones—Yoda Stories rocked) and my Windows cursor was a lightsaber and 70% of my Christmas toys were Star Wars (the rest were Lego, and those two things didn’t yet have any overlap) and all that, until the prequels put me off it (and thank god, as really I’d had quite enough of that in my life)

So far as betrayal goes, from the perspective of someone with that background, TLJ and Rogue One are the only two Disney Star Wars films I’d save from a fire, and I’d give it a hard think before I bothered with Rogue One. Nothing about TLJ struck me as “a deep betrayal”, and on the contrary, it felt like a return to the franchise’s roots in a lot of ways, but with enough of a twist that it wasn’t just a mediocre lazily-plotted remake (cough).

[rob74]

I'm not a Star Wars nerd (but I watched Episode 7-9 nevertheless). I think the main weakness of the "Disney trilogy" is that the plot is basically the same as the "original trilogy": powerful evil forces with a death star/planet, commanded by a truly despicable bad guy with a slightly more nuanced henchman, valiant heroes fighting them and winning against all odds - been there, seen that. And the plot twist at the end (let's not reveal it, although everyone probably knows what I mean) makes it even more similar.

[paulddraper]

Episode 7 was the re-remastered Episode 4.

[saiya-jin]

Interesting, everybody I ever talked to about this, Rogue one is considered to be by far the best movie of them all. Mature, dark stuff, no cheesy stupid stuff for small children, dicey characters, and of course epic hopeless battles.

I don't have some nostalgia emotions of going to cinemas in 80s, waiting in endless lines for tickets, watching it 30x in a row... its a nice scifi soap opera but not much more by today's standards. But its true I don't care about things like canon and entire SW universe, and neither do folks around me.

[hotnfresh]

Rogue One has immense promise, but only partly delivers.

It’d have been better if they leaned harder into ripping off other heist movies (ripping things off and slapping a Star Wars coat of paint on them is when Star Wars is at its best—weirdly few people who get to make Star Wars media understand that, but the people behind The Mandalorian clearly did)

We didn’t build quite enough rapport with our characters to make their deaths hit as hard as they should have. I think it was a combo writing and directing issue. Ripping off better heist films a bit more might have helped with this, too.

Sequencing and editing of some action sequences felt a bit flat. I think it’s easy for these everything’s-CG films to run into that, but its being a common problem doesn’t make it not a problem.

A couple scenes were just awful. Vader in a couple of his scenes, LOL. Could have been one of those pre- and early-YouTube Star Wars fan parodies. WTF. And I don’t even mean the one where he rages at the end.

It is one of just two that gave me any amount of some mysterious quality I think of as Star Wars Feels, and it did the best at that, even, but was dragged down too much in other areas. Coulda been excellent, ended up OK.

[fastball]

Would you say you care about consistency and coherence when it comes to the things you fanboy/girl?

Not everyone cares and that's fine, but for the people that do care about how the pieces all fit together, TLJ was a travesty.

[hotnfresh]

I do a bit, but when something breaks that enough I don’t have trouble pretending it’s something else and still enjoying it, if it’s good.

I didn’t find I needed to with TLJ, and complaints of that sort about it don’t resonate with me at all.

[fastball]

Fair enough. There were a number of things that didn't jive with me about the film as I watched it: the fight choreography was meh, Luke's behavior given his previous characterization, Rey's almost complete lack of actual character development, and of course Admiral Holdo being portrayed as a wise leader by the filmmakers, but when you look at her actual actions and the consequences of them, it's unclear if a leader could be less competent.

The Luke thing was the only one of those that really bugged me though.

However, the moment I walked out of the cinema and the spectacle faded and I thought about the implications of certain other things in the film, the less happy I was.

For example, a ship going lightspeed was used as a weapon in TLJ. The implications of this are pretty huge. Shooting lasers around in a universe where you can apparently have kinetic lightspeed weapons is dumb. If treated as canon, TLJ makes every other space battle in Star Wars nonsense.

Similarly, I would say in Star Wars up until TLJ, it was somewhat clear (to me at least) that space in Star Wars is not a vacuum, but more of an "ether". People get out of their spaceships on small asteroids without any sort of vac-suit and breathe fine. Sound propagates during space battles. Spaceships (their engines, their ability to open/close, etc) seem to operate in approximately the same way on a planet as they do in space. So when they used Leia's first onscreen usage of the Force (which is actually a whole 'nother thing) to totally break that system and treat outer space in Star Wars as if it's what we experience in our universe, it kinda sucked. And all for the sake of a "she's dead, actually she's not" gotcha thing.

In summary, Rian Johnson explicitly said one of his goals when making the film was to "subvert expectations". But I think there is a huge difference between "subverting expectations" and "indiscriminately shitting on existing canon", and he was definitely just doing more of the latter. Yes, it is very easy to "surprise" people when you make characters do things that they have no reason to do from previous character development and when you ignore the laws of physics (or lack thereof) that had previously been established.

In summary: Rogue One is the only Disney Star Wars film I would save from a fire. Though I also greatly enjoyed "Andor".

[hyperhopper]

> without any plot fundamentals that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.

1. Luke went from the most optimistic and positive Jedi in the world, who found the good in Darth Vader, to a dude who tried to kill his own nephew without any explanation on how he got to that point aside from "I had a bad dream". Pathetic even if you ignore he also had dreams about becoming Darth Vader himself, and overcame those.

2. They completely destroyed any sense of time or speed with their "this turtle is so slow but too fast" race as the main plot point

3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???

4. They kept the elderly Leia around, instead of having her do a hero's sendoff at the end. Instead, they killed the only good character that was set up perfectly to be the new cutthroat cunning but likable leader of the rebellion.

5. They ruined every other fight in star wars with the hyperspace joust. Why was any other fight a big deal when they could have just rammed a few ships with jump drives into the star destroyers, or hell, the death star.

6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.

And this is just what I can remember on my phone while sitting at this bar. If you think this movie wasn't a deep betrayal to the universe, you didn't pay any attention to it.

[knodi123]

"Lightspeed skipping" was just offensively absurd. They're teleporting around at random, but wherever they wind up, they're dodging between things on a planet's surface? Flickering through the galaxy like a slideshow? I don't even know why spaceships have chairs. You're never going to travel long enough to need to sit down. It was a fun visual spectacle that made no sense and flew in the face of all the worldbuilding and scene setting they'd been doing over the last 40 years of star wars movies.

[BLKNSLVR]

I'm picturing someone else at the bar, watching you as you furiously, dejectedly type away on your phone whilst your facial demeanour slowly degrades...

"Say, man, what's up?"

"Someone just made me think about the myriad ways in which The Last Jedi not just sucked, but sucked the rest of the life from the 40-year history of Star Wars"

"oooof! Here, I'll shout you a bottle of Jack's, but I know it's not enough by far".

[anigbrowl]

...he ended up with a movie that was visually very striking, without any plot fundamentals that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.

...he ended up with a movie that was visually very striking without any plot fundamentals, that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.

Behold the terrible power of a misplaced comma, and the warped reality it inflicts upon the careless reader.

[darkerside]

Careless writer

[makapuf]

the sexy saxophone is heard in the background...

[monksy]

Dear hyperhopper .. please get out of my head and where did you get that recording of ranting about this movie to my friend drunk at a bar in 2018ish?. :)

Don't forget about the pointless plot of the animal racing with John Boyega's character that went no where.

Also, don't forget the whole dressing down of Poe Dameron by Leia and Vice-Admiral Holdo as lol guy dumb. But the action gets ignored because she decides lol ship danger ram into bad guy.

I found that I hated the movie more and more as I explained the plot to a friend. I went from this is a solid dud to I really hated this when I went and described the action in the film.

[thedrbrian]

0. they're running away in space and the imperials can't catch up. unless the two ships are exactly the same then at some point there will be a power to weight difference and one will catch up or get away. fuel was never an issue in any other SW story. also why didn't the imperials just hyperspace jump in front?

7. why bomb the base they're escaping from and not the ship they're flying to? 8. they only launch about 5 tie fighters against poe at the beginning and the ship only has about 6 self defence lasers. Rogue One showed us just how many Tie fighters could be launched to defend an important base. 9. the rebel bombers. nuf said.

there's so much wrong with that film.

[meroes]

1. Luke had a knack for hitting things right where it matters most, a product of his ability to focus. Forget the long winded rituals and attack the target dead on. That’s Luke above everything. In spite of the weight of the galaxy, he doesn’t loose focus. Him thinking about killing his nephew was almost his failure in keeping target. He knows something else is more important to focus on which this won’t solve. He has a focus no one else in the story does. It’s again seen in his last moments of force projecting. No other user sustains that amount to focus in the movies, look at his face and for how long he did it. I’m tired of this innocent always positive Luke trope. That’s not his main quality. He was a crack shot and that’s his method of the force. Him reconciling with Vader is mainly about a one on one, how to topple the Empire with a single interaction, he just has to get close enough. Not goodness, which of course he does have. Only Sidius has comparable focus. Luke’s time in seclusion is rest and preparation for past and future unsustainable effort.

[willghatch]

I think the parent poster agrees with you, but wrote somewhat ambiguously. I think he meant something like “a movie that was visually very striking, [but] without any plot fundamentals[,] that [therefore] felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.”

For what it's worth, I agree with him. When I saw the movie and even just the promotional materials I thought it was visually striking and had very strong color themes. But wow, it was a train wreck in terms of plot, characters, faithfulness to the series, etc. I could go on for hours.

But to be fair, I also think The Force Awakens was terrible and painted the story into a dumb direction. Instead of “what if the Nazis came back to power in Argentina”, they should have moved the story into a direction more like “the alliance against a common enemy is fractured”, like what actually happened after World War 2, or “there are now many factions of ambitious warlords rising among the widely deployed and still incredibly powerful imperial military”, or some of both. The Mandalorian did the setting much better in that sense.

[krapp]

They should have picked a direction at all, and TFA should have been anything other than a pandering remake of ANH (except this time the Death Star is even bigger.) There was no plan for the trilogy, so it wound up being Rian Johnson sabotaging JJ Abrams, then Abrams desparately trying to salvage things, and Palpatine thrown in at the last second in hopes people would show up.

[anigbrowl]

(except this time the Death Star is even bigger.)

Look on the bright side, it could have been 2 Death Stars and a whole bunch of bad space boobs jokes.

[FiatLuxDave]

Or a proper sequel to Spaceballs

[gota]

Solving 4. with 5. - Would make a lot more sense if it was Leia who rammed the ship and if took a huge amount of "Force" to do so

(explaining why Leia _Skywalker_ could do it, but not any ordinary Joe)

[dnh44]

You misread the comment you responded to; OP agrees with you.

> without any plot fundamentals that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.

There should be a comma between “fundamentals” and “that”

[Jagerbizzle]

I believe it should have actually been a semicolon.

[dnh44]

It would have read a lot nicer with the semicolon and also if “that” were changed to “this”

[slg]

>3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???

>4. They kept the elderly Leia around, instead of having her do a hero's sendoff at the end.

I don't want to get into a long drown out fight about Star Wars on HN so I'll ignore most of your points, but this complaint has always really bothered me because it shows such a huge lack of human empathy. A real person died, a person that was one of the 4 or 5 most important people to the success of Star Wars. And it has become the standard opinion of her "fans" that her last performance should have been largely thrown away to slightly improve the overall narrative arc of the movies. It really puts into perspective what fans care about. It is all about the product on the screen. Anyone involved in making the product is meaningless. Their only significance is in their role of servicing the product.

I'm glad they didn't re-edit the movie after Carrie Fisher's death even if it created new challenges for the next movie.

[phist_mcgee]

They gave her a bad arc. Her performance was good, but her role was bad.

It's not dehumanising a person to critique the art she last appeared in.

[darkerside]

Want to respect Carrie Fisher? Shut down production, and give her family time to mourn, then reconsider the second half of the trilogy. Having her come back to life in a silly way after she fucking died in real life is offensive.

[justincredible]

I agree that they shouldn't have re-edited the movie based on Carrie Fisher's death IRL, but that scene is a masterclass in bad writing.

Rian's intention was to demonstrate some semblance of humanity remained within Kylo. But the optics are that he is truly weak and in the end isn't even bothered much by the (for all he knows at the moment) imminent death of his mother. Had Kylo fired the shot he at least would have surpassed Vader in evilness, whether or not Leia saved herself.

I agree with the "fans" that she should have died in that scene, but since Rian was too scared to snuff Leia before Luke the scene shouldn't have been written in the first place.

[goto11]

The general audience does not care about any of that though. Star Wars is beyond ridiculous in the first place - I mean how does "light-sabers" make any sense? What matters to the general audience is there are relatable characters doing cool stuff which feels plausible in the moment. The space ramming was cool and emotionally satisfying, so it works.

For most of the audience, if they know Luke at all, it is as the whiny kid with the bad haircut from the old movies. So its fun to see him as old and grumpy. They do not care if he is some kind of space-Jesus in the expanded universe or whatever.

A "deep betrayal to the universe" of Slave Leia, Jar-Jar Binks, C3PO?

[hyperhopper]

Jar jar was also a low point, and the biggest crime is that the big bad villain of the sequel trilogy wasn't Darth Darth binks

[khazhoux]

> 3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???

I didn't think she was fully unconscious. Also, "magically"? She used the Force. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together. In this case, given she was in a vacuum, just a slight pull on the ship is all she needed to fly back to it.

> Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training

Well, that is the premise, though. Luke himself grew immensely powerful with much less training than Anakin. Some people are just born with stronger Force. Something something midichlorians

[paulddraper]

Anakin was a literal cripple

[NiloCK]

re: 6.

Isn't Luke the same story? He went from zero to Darth Vader rival in a couple of years maybe? Yoda thought that kid Anakin was already too old for training, but Luke was a young adult.

Rey's rise was sillier still, but both heroes are the story of an "even more special individual" superseding the efforts of prior generations by virtue of their intrinsic personal connection with the force - pure genetic destiny.

[paulddraper]

> isn't luke the same story

Dude lost his entire hand for his arrogance

[hyperhopper]

Luke went to dagobah for training with Yoda for a long time, then spent years more training after that. And then then he was no match for Vader and palpatine, they were still toying with him just trying to turn him to the dark side. What he really did was make Anakin look inward and redeem himself by killing the emperor. He became a competent Jedi but never became stronger than everybody else before him like Rey did.

[the_af]

I think the commenter you are replying to is saying it was a deep betrayal, though maybe their wording is not the best.

[krapp]

>1. Luke went from the most optimistic and positive Jedi in the world, who found the good in Darth Vader, to a dude who tried to kill his own nephew without any explanation on how he got to that point aside from "I had a bad dream". Pathetic even if you ignore he also had dreams about becoming Darth Vader himself, and overcame those.

Luke was always fragile. He barely trained with Yoda, then he basically failed up to celebrity status. His weakness has always been his impatience, and his preference for the quick and easy out.

He became an icon, he got old and disillusioned, he realized his naive view of the world and the Force didn't apply to reality, as he saw the Jedi being just as corrupt as the Sith, and just as the Jedi did he fell back into a rigid orthodoxy that led him to repeat the cycle of generational darkness that he never took the proper effort to address because he was never properly trained. And in the end, he regained a truer and more grounded faith in the force than he had before. What Yoda literally said would happen, happened.

That isn't pathetic, it's an actual character arc. Unfortunately, people like yourself only wanted Luke Skywalker to remain a cardboard cutout.

>3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???

Leia is the sister of one of the most powerful Jedi in history. She has the Force, too.

It's weird how many people completely missed that.

5. They ruined every other fight in star wars with the hyperspace joust. Why was any other fight a big deal when they could have just rammed a few ships with jump drives into the star destroyers, or hell, the death star.

I've never understood this argument. Why don't we simply kamikaze aircraft and submarines into our enemies now? Why bother with guns and missiles?

I mean, it's a risky (potentially deadly) maneuver that a rebellion lacking in personnel and equipment can scarcely afford to lose through normalizing. It's not something you do all the time even when it is effective. Japan only resorted to kamikaze missions out of desperation.

And I'm curious what exactly you think the effect of ramming into one ship with another ship transitioning into hyperspace should be, and why it shouldn't be an effective weapon at all?

No, this is just finding shit to nitpick about.

>6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.

It was established that the Force is a constant, distributed amongst all Jedi. The fewer Jedi there are, the more powerful each becomes because they have access to a greater portion of the whole. Rey was as powerful as she was because, as one of the few Force users left, she had potential access to nearly all of it.

>If you think this movie wasn't a deep betrayal to the universe, you didn't pay any attention to it.

I don't know, it seems like you're the one who didn't pay attention. Did you even see any of the new trilogy or just jump on the hate train when it was popular? Because I've seen all of your criticisms, verbatim, repeated ad nauseum, by people who just seem to be repeating memes.

[iainmerrick]

It was established that the Force is a constant, distributed amongst all Jedi. The fewer Jedi there are, the more powerful each becomes because they have access to a greater portion of the whole.

What?? When was that established?

[lawgimenez]

I believe what the parent comment meant was that, when someone dies he/she will become "one with the force" (cosmic force) and will bring additional power to the force (living force). I forgot what comic or series I read or watched that from but that's how it worked if you watched all Star Wars, including the stupid animated ones.

[krapp]

No, I meant what I said, it was one of the things they changed about the way the force worked in the new movies, but I'll be damned if I can actually find a source to prove it. So there's a chance I Mandela Effected myself but I'd swear it was a thing.

Even then, assuming I'm full of shit... she's a Palpatine. Secret legendary bloodline. I hate it but it still works in universe.

[Karrot_Kream]

They established this in Episode 1, when Qui-Gon talks about becoming "one with the force". It was implied to tie in with the Originals when the holograms of Obi-Wan and Anakin show up in the ending of ROTJ.

I'm not sure what changed with the fewer Force users thing in the new series shrug.

[darkerside]

I disagree with much of your post, but the first point bothers me the most. If the trilogy were about Luke's disillusionment and fall, I would have been much more interested. You are filling in a ton of back story that I can see making sense, but you can't just handwave it in, especially with a character as important a Luke Skywalker. I can see a creative and emotionally compelling series about how he deals with impostor syndrome and I could even see it ending very badly for him. Treating that character arc as a sidebar misses the point of the entire saga.

[krapp]

The intent was there, even if it was poorly executed on. That lack of coherence is one of the most frustrating elements of the new trilogy for me. It had a lot of good ideas but no sense of direction.

[darkerside]

It wasn't executed on at all. The story was not about Luke, it was about the new class. Which could have been fine as well, but they ruined Luke's character with no explanation. Some people care about that.

[losvedir]

> And I'm curious what exactly you think the effect of ramming into one ship with another ship transitioning into hyperspace should be

It has to be nothing, or else none of the other movies make sense at all. Kinetic energy attacks (accelerate a mass to a great velocity) are the most obvious attack there is, from the dawn of time with throwing rocks to bows and arrows to muskets to cannons on up. And in a universe where you can accelerate a mass immediately to light speed, nothing else will really compare.

So yes, at some level it makes obvious sense that a kamikaze of one starship to another "should" work. But in the Star Wars universe we had had to suspend that disbelief (in some ways justified because light speed jumping isn't real, so maybe it just doesn't work that way) because otherwise X-wings could take out Star Destroyers and the Death Star is unnecessary because you can just strap the hyperspace drives to large hunk of rock.

[krapp]

You have to take into account that Star Wars is not an attempt to simulate realistic space battle strategy and tactics, it's pew-pew space battles and laser swords and pulp adventure. It was never realistic. The Death Star is a patently ridiculous, extremely inefficient weapon, since there's no need to entirely explode a planet to destroy it, as is it needing to wait until the moon of Yavin is out of the way when it could easily destroy Yavin from any axis, as is the trench run, which only exists at all because George Lucas ripped off a World War 2 movie, scene for scene, as is the plot twist of the exhaust port. Yes, it's been retconned (like the parsecs thing) but it's still goofy as hell that two torpedos could cause a chain reaction big enough to blow up an entire moon-sized ship even if it hit the reactor dead on. People accept it because it's the OT and they have nostalgia glasses on but it really is kind of bullshit.

The Empire was just that arrogant and self-confident that they never noticed such an obvious flaw until it was too late? Still bullshit.

Sabotage? Better, and it got us Rogue One, which was a great movie. But even then it stretches credibility.

The walkers in Empire Strikes Back are ridiculous, no one would actually build those, with their obvious (and easily exploited) weakness. And in a universe with blasters, no one would ever be using lightsabers. Hell, if you can force choke someone, which even Luke did with that Gammorean guard, why not just force pinch an artery in your enemy's brain or heart? Why bother with all the spinny flips and shit? Just force heart attack from a concealed location, done.

Realistically, you wouldn't even have dogfights in space at all, much less with plane-shaped ships that bank through turns, you would have fully automated, spherical droids attacking from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away or just, as you mentioned, toss a big FU asteroid through hyperspace into the orbit of a planet. And yes, the elephant in the room is that any FTL drive is by definition a weapon of mass destruction.

None of it makes much sense. It never has, because it has always been more important that things look cool than make sense. But the point is, ramming a ship with another ship while going into hyperspace makes no less sense than anything else. The transition to hyperspace isn't instantaneous, you can see the ships zooming in and out of hyperspace and see the starfield warp. So logically there must be a point at which it works. Maybe the margin of error for that is so razor thin that it's not worth trying most of the time. Maybe the particular shape of the ships involved made it an optimal strategy that one time. I don't know, but one can come up with excuses a lot less goofy and contrived that the "maze of black holes" that justifies the parsec line about the Millennium Falcon to justify it.

People are just being particularly nitpicky about this one element while they're willing to forgive the decades of patent ridiculousness that came before.

[the_af]

Fully agreed with the gist of your point...

...with the addendum that it's still possible to dislike the silliness of the prequels and the new trilogy, while embracing the silliness of the OT. Rose-tinted glasses? You betcha! The OT meant the world to me when I was young.

I like Rey though. I think the accusations of her being a Mary Sue are mysogynistic -- isn't Luke's journey in the OT essentially the same? -- as is some of the backlash against the new trilogy. Which I also find boring, but not because the main characters are women or whatever.

What undid the new trilogy, in my opinion, was a couple of things:

- As a reaction against the worst excesses of the prequels, they instead stayed too close to the OT, especially during the serviceable but uninspired The Force Awakens, basically a remake of A New Hope.

- Then, it's clear JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson didn't see eye to eye (or their creative teams didn't, same thing), and so the rest of the new trilogy is essentially a flamewar between the two, with each saying "what happened before didn't matter, THIS is what matters now!" and undoing what the other did. Which was... embarrassing. Again, the OT was also full of retcons -- e.g. it's obvious Leia wasn't Luke's sister in Episode IV -- but at least it wasn't a glorified flamewar of writers actively undoing what others before had done.

[saiya-jin]

Can't agree more. SW is just popcorn fun, brain better left elsewhere. I think people are being too harsh and pedantic, Lucas never bothered to make every single aspect of the universe and story infallible and scientifically correct.

I mean if I start taking apart every single aspect, logical issues are there. Why use useless troopers who can't hit barn when robots are so much better? Space bombers that drop bombs in WWII style doesn't make any sense at all. Empire of first 3 movies is bunch of incompetent idiots who couldn't run a local 7/11, not a galactic empire. Literally pick any aspect, it doesn't make much sense in real world.

I had blast watching new trilogy in cinema, simply because I expected same level of brainless fun as original movies, and it delivered. And that's enough, making SW into some infallible religion is as stupid as other religions.

[lawgimenez]

> 6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.

In Star Wars, there are "force sensitive" Jedis and not sensitive. I believe Rey was force sensitive just like the Skywalkers. Rey comes from a bloodline of Palpatine too. Thus, this explains how other Jedis' are "quick" to learn, etc.

[thatnerdyguy]

In reference to Luke not really knowing what the heck he is doing, see also The Mandalorian season 2.5 (BoBF) - (summarized) "Hey little green guy, you can either join my weird cult and never see your friends again, or you can go ahead and f*ck off"

[notJim]

Ehh, I feel like if you broaden the system slightly, it still works.

TLJ: cultural elites liked the whole burning the sacred texts thing, normies hated it. (NB: I only vaguely remember this movie and don't have strong opinions about it, don't crucify me.)

The Greatest Showman: I assume "not oscar worthy" meant specifically not "Best Picture" worthy. It's a specific type of movie that wins that award.

In any case, just like you append " reddit" to most searches, I recommend appending " letterboxd" to any movie searches. You do kind of have to read the reviews instead of just going by the rating though.

[krapp]

>TLJ: cultural elites liked the whole burning the sacred texts thing, normies hated it.

Wouldn't the "cultural elites" in this context be the hardcore Star Wars fans who hated everything about the new trilogy, and Luke's disillusionment arc in particular, and the "normies" be the mainstream fans who really didn't care?

[notJim]

I think the interesting thing about this comment and the other reply to it is that there are actually several different subgroups of people who all will have different takes on this. I meant cultural elites the way bluefirebrand described it (I'd put it a little differently, but still), but as you say, there is another group that you could call cultural elites as well (though this isn't usually how the term is used)

The nice thing about letterboxd is that many different subgroups are represented, so you can find the reviews you vibe with and get a better idea of whether the movie will appeal to subgroup you're a part of.

There's probably a pretty decent youtube essay on like the balkanization of culture and also the construction of identity through consumption, and how social media has turbo-charged all this here.

[bluefirebrand]

Cultural elites is within the context of the broader culture, not the narrow niche of Star Wars.

They tend to hate Star Wars because it's wildly successful and popular, but it doesn't have any of the cultural crap that they want.

Cultural Elites are the ones who decide what wins Oscars, for example.

[nvm0n2]

Hardcore Star Wars fans are very much not what "cultural elite" means. Quite the opposite.

TLJ got great critic reviews and poor audience reviews because it was propaganda designed to please movie executives and their friends who don't care about Star Wars but do care about social engineering (the badly named "cultural elites"). It wasn't intended to please the people who paid to go watch it.

[jonathankoren]

"Hardcore fans" is doing a lot of lifting here. There's definitely a giant toxic group in the fandom, but in my experience of absorbing Star Wars for over 40 years, those folks have very simplistic opinions that aren't informed by anything in the material except their edge lord fantasies.

[romusha]

It's funny in this case it's the elites who burn the books instead of peasants

[Ekaros]

Isn't it generally so? The peasants are too busy trying to make living.

[dale_glass]

It sorta fits for TLJ. It's a movie with interesting ideas that break the mold vs the previous movie. I can see how critics might find it more interesting. Compared to TFA it's interesting to think about.

But it sucks from the point of view of watching something enjoyable, and especially so if you were looking for a straight follow-up of TFA.

[Pxtl]

I'll always take an interesting failure over a boring success. I thought that TLJ was incredibly uneven, but I wanted a sequel to that far more than a sequel to TFA.

[darkerside]

I think it depends how much you care about the source material. If you genuinely love and cherish it, it's hard to want to take risks, even those that might result in a better movie. There was probably some of that going on with the prequels.

If you care less about it, then you'll surely want to try new things, and if it doesn't work out, no big deal.

[Pxtl]

Wow. "You obviously don't love Star Wars as much as me if you like The Last Jedi" is a heck of a take.

[darkerside]

Most people who live the works of Beethoven aren't opining that they wish he took more risks in his work. They respect his canon for what it is. Some people are very glad we've moved on to new and different music and that's OK. Some people think it's trash and noise and classical music is real music. And that's ok, too. I don't mean to offend you. I think this is a universal dynamic in a field as subjective as art and entertainment.

[ShamelessC]

Welcome to the internet!

[bmelton]

For me, it was after they invited a new batch of reviewers who ended up bumping Citizen Kane from RT's "best movie all time" down a bunch of slots to such an extent that it was outranked by Paddington 2

I still use the ratings (because they're built into Plex) but mostly as a novelty, and sometimes as a puzzlement. Increasingly, you see scores like 5% tomato, 95% audience (or vice versa!) that I'm sure mean _something_ but rarely anything to me.

[enragedcacti]

I think this is mostly just a misunderstanding of what the RT score means. The scoring falls apart at the edges because its a measure of recommendability*, not a precision measure of quality.

Exceptionally good movies (which Paddington 2 is btw) will trend heavily toward 100% and any drop from 100% are from outlier reviewers. Citizen Kane has 1/131 negative reviews and Paddington 2 has 2/253 negative reviews.

If you want a rating of quality you can always just click on the score and see that paddington 2 has an 8.7 aggregate compared to Citizen Kane's 9.9.

* what percent of viewers will not regret watching the movie. That makes this a combination metric of quality and variance. A low variance 7/10 will beat a high variance 8/10 in RT score

[Andrew_nenakhov]

"Paddington 2" is one of the best movies ever made, it is up there with the "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari".

[Blackthorn]

Paddington 2 is legitimately great though.

[JambalayaJim]

Both those movies have excellent scores. Does their relative ranking really matter?

[0x457]

TLJ was review bombed (movie sucked tho). Critics gave a good score out of fear imo. It's just an outlier for that rule.

Oscar worthy - best picture, best actor, etc. Best original song isn't a top tier category. That year also had weak competition.

The Greatest Showman was nominated in a single category, and it lost to Coco. I don't know where you got that it won. Coco got nominated in two categories, one of which was important, and won both. Coco also within 3% difference on rotten tomatoes.

[paulddraper]

I'm sorry, you are correct. Nominated not won

[daveguy]

I don't think "Best Original Song" negates the heuristic. Generally when someone talks about "Oscar Worthy" they are generally considering the original categories or even just best picture, director, actress, actor, etc. Maybe best original screen play added in 1940. Not to diminish the performers or writers of the Best Original Song, it's still an awesome achievement. Just more personal than something like Best Picture.

[jdminhbg]

Yes, I agree. Put another way: It's hard for a movie with the best director or best screenplay to be a bad movie, but it's very easy for a movie with a great original song to otherwise be terrible.

[daveguy]

Much better said. Thank you.

[alonsonic]

TLJ: from a technical film POV this movie was actually great. Strong cinematography, interesting twists in the script and overall good acting and pacing. The issue is that it was a very bad "star wars" movie. A lot of fans felt it didn't do the traditional Star Wars characters and story justice. I agree with both critics and fans.

TGS: It didn't win an oscar for best song, it was nominated. Regardless of that, best song is not usually considered a top category in the Oscar's from a film critic POV. That would be best movie, director, script, actor/actress.

[goto11]

The Last Jedi was incredibly successful. According to Wikipedia is "the highest-grossing film of 2017 and the ninth-highest-grossing film of all time." I have a hard time believing an audience score of 41% accurately reflects the opinions of the actual audience.

[sph]

Being a blockbuster movie is not an indicator of quality nor success. One thing is certain about them: they sell like hotcakes because they have millions poured in their marketing.

So highest-grossing doesn't mean absolutely anything about how good a movie is, or whether people actually liked it. There is a huge contingent of people that follow religiously a franchise and will pay to watch the new one even if they've been told it is not very good. You don't skip the latest Star Wars movie if you call yourself a Star Wars fan, and it is marketing's job to create the Star Wars fan in the first place.

As a cynic, I'd argue the opposite to what you said: you have to spend more on marketing if the material is not very good in the first place. The result is a terrible movie that becomes a meme and still makes bank.

[paulmooreparks]

Eh... I'm a huge fan of the original trilogy, and found the prequels somewhat enjoyable, if not as magical, but I checked out of Star Wars entirely after TFA. I haven't seen any of the others.

Otherwise, yes, I generally agree that sales are not necessarily an indication of quality.

[saiya-jin]

You are stating numerous incorrect things. Just one - marketing can be somewhat successful, but it won't make a turd into highest grossing movie of the year.

The thing is, the last trilogy was tremendously enjoyable by general audience, and this is what generates sales after initial weekend. Few butthurt starwars nerds writing endlessly on internet (just like here with consistently flawed arguments) or review bombing out of pure hate don't change anything, luckily.

I had great fun, considered it as brainless popcorn fun just as original trilogy and prequels, exactly just like everybody else I know. Sometimes, that's enough.

[goto11]

Quality is of course subjective, but I'm questioning whether the audience scores on RT represent what the audience actually thought. Given how easy it is to game scores on such sites by review bombing, I'd take box office as a more reliable indicator or how real-world audiences actually liked the film.

Marketing can boost ticket sales, but there are plenty of examples of movies which flopped despite heavy marketing, just because the audiences didn't like the movie that much.

The ratings on RT and IMDB does not represent the average audience member.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

It was part of a huge franchise, which it severely damaged. Of course people went in to see it. Most didn't like it, but they still paid for a ticket. However, many of them didn't bother watching the next one.

[mcmoor]

Interestingly it may be more accurate to measure performance of a movie by the initial sale of its sequel. I haven't gathered any data but I guess it'll be interesting.

[goto11]

Box office across all three of the sequel trilogy moves. The same is the case for the three movies in the original trilogy btw, so I guess we should conclude that "Return of the Jedi" was the only Star Wars was movie people actually liked, since The Force Awakens is one of the most successful movies of all time?

In reality, sequels tend to be less successful than the original, but can expect a certain audience. Since only very successful movies get sequels, sequels are still safer investments than original movies.

[kevinventullo]

Indeed, the trilogy were my favorite movies growing up, and I went to see TLJ on the opening week. Haven’t watched a Star War since.

[goto11]

> many of them didn't bother watching the next one.

The third movie was still one of the most successful movies of all time.

[mauvia]

The next movie was Solo, the first Star Wars Movie in a run of 10 to fail.

[goto11]

Solo probably failed because the average cinema-goer does not want to see a Han Solo spin-off with Harrison Ford replaced by an unknown B-list actor.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

The actor was ok, btw, he was also very good in "Hail, Caesar".

[Andrew_nenakhov]

It takes more than one bad movie to kill a franchise of such magnitude. But I think Disney execs are going to persist in achieving this goal.

[nomel]

> I have a hard time believing an audience score of 41% accurately reflects the opinions of the actual audience.

Attendance is expectations, and rating is reality, after the necessary act of paying to watch the film. A film that someone is excited to see can still stink.

It did make 30% less than TFA.

[mpweiher]

I watched it not expecting too much -> box office.

I was astounded by just how bad it was -> rating.

I did see the next one (the last of the Skywalker series), mostly out of morbid curiosity. That one was just...random. After that I stopped. The halo of the franchise only carries so far.

[darkerside]

I would have paid money to have the money I paid for that movie to be subtracted from the box office take

[paulddraper]

You don't rate it until after you've spent your money

[colordrops]

It's more than two dimensions. For instance, The Last Jedi measure doesn't take into account Disney extorting and/or paying off critics to boost the movie.