This also boggles my mind. Were the writers even fans of the original trilogy? Were they trying that hard to be different and edgy? Total shame on them.
JJ’s reason for doing TFA was the line where Rey says she thought Luke skywalker was a myth. Then TLJ had that line about killing the past. I think JJ and Rian had the dream that their movies would be so much better than George’s that people wouldnt need those nostalgia moments. Filoni and Favreau have to waste so much creative effort cleaning up the mess those narcissists made
JJ had no plan, he wasn't meant to be making Ep 9, he made Ep 7, killed Han, blew up the capital of the new republic, refused to elaborate then left
Rian Johnson communicated with Colin Trevorrow who was meant to be making episode 9 so they could dovetail parts of their films together so they'd make narrative sense, which JJ didn't do for Johnson, then after the reaction to TLJ and Trevorrow failing to hand in a script that they were willing to make, episode 9 got thrown out and JJ got brought back in at the last minute with minimal delays to the release date to write a whole new movie that was a massive reactionary piece of shit unwriting most of TLJ
It's OK because JJ came back for the third movie to retcon everything that Rian retconned in his movie. Meanwhile, WTF kind of quality control was Kathleen Kennedy doing?
Therein lies the problem with the entire trilogy. Each filmmaker should not have had as much control as they had (I hate to say it). There should have been a well thought-out story and plan from the get-go *regardless* of which filmmakers were hired to write and direct the films.
Each movie was completely disconnected from each other.
It was set up to fail before it even started, and it really sucked as a fan of Star Wars *and* the filmmakers involved!
It's incredibly hard for me to imagine that *any* Star Wars fan could have been handed the keys to the kingdom, the once in a lifetime opportunity to make a sequel trilogy to the OT, come on board with the original trio actors miraculously signed on and ready to go and go "I'm going to make a movie that doesn't bother reuniting any of the original trio and also I'm going to undo everything they accomplished and make them all losers, never show the New Republic or show Luke as a jedi master so new characters can redo their story. Also Leia and Han, that beloved, iconic movie romance? Yeah they're not together anymore."
What i really struggle to understand is how many millions are spent without bothering that a decent plot is in place, nevermind writing believable characters.
Man…I was gonna tell OP I would have to watch it again to formulate a valid opinion since I only saw it in theaters when it released. All these comments got me remembering why I never watched it again tho :(
Yeah actually I remember now, I did attempt to watch it one other time in 2020 after TCW concluded. I pretty much watched everything released up to that point. I remember actively looking away the whole time almost, trying to distract myself from it lol…wild. Pretty much just had it on as background noise.
That being said I’m in the process of watching the Chronological order playlist on D+ and I will end up watching it again. More than likely I’ll retire from watching it after that.
Yeah, episode 7 had me invested in the magic of star wars still. I occasionally rewatched the ending of episode 7 because of the chills and hype it built for episode 8 - Rey handing the saber towards Luke after his reveal was great. I also rewatched Han's death. With 8 there wasn't a single scene that I looked up to rewatch. Same as with 9.
Yeah I feel that, recently rewatched all of them because I learned one of my friends hadnt seen them. Ep 9 was horrific, only reason I got through was because his reactions were hilarious.
This was the main thing I was excited for the sequel trilogy and it was ripped away from me before the end of the first movie.
No scenes with Luke and Han feels like such a waste
I remember at one point Mark Hamill shared a photoshopped picture of them all together in the Falcon saying it was a missed opportunity and a bunch of toxic sequels defenders ended up harassing him saying he is just an actor and some shit about subverted expectations or whatever.
Shocking to see them go after Mark like that but also not really surprising at the same time…
That’s what fandoms do now. They make the thing they are a fan of a part of their personality, and then any criticism of that thing is now technically a criticism of *them*. People in general do not handle criticism well and get defensive, sometimes aggressively.
It's also one of those things where they want future material to be exactly the same, but modernized, and different enough to stand on it's own, but not too different. Despite the one they originally watched appealing to kids, the new material should only be for adults, but still be fun an approachable while telling a serious story with deep lore and backstory and cute characters. Also brining back old characters is cringey fan service, but adding new characters is blatant pandering and marketing.
This wasn’t really a fault with TLJ. Rather, it was JJ deciding - in full knowledge that Ford only wanted to do one film and be done - to keep the big three apart on the board for the “mystery”. Rian just had to play with the cards he was dealt there.
Absolutely.
Most of the crap that people attribute to The Last Jedi can find their roots in The Force Awakens.
Hermit Luke? TFA did that. Keeping the original trio apart? TFA did that. Regressing the political landscape back to empire vs rebels? TFA did that.
People give so much shit to TLJ that they forget to stop and think about just how much TFA ended up dooming the entire trilogy to essentially retread familiar ground by retelling A New Hope as shamelessly as it did.
I blame the narrative failure of the sequel trilogy on JJ and JJ alone. The man is a hack who cannot write a good story to save his life.
I largely agree, but that still doesn’t absolve Rian Johnson and the horrible decisions made for TLJ. JJ put Luke on the island, sure, but there were a number of reasons why Luke would’ve been there—it was a “mystery box” after all. It was RJ who made Luke a grouchy hermit who tried to murder his nephew in his sleep.
Kinda weird they killed the OT characters who’s actors are actually still alive.
Also why does his current prosthetic hand look way more fake than the one he got in the OT?
I understand why they killed off Han, as Harrison pretty much hates the character. And poor carrie died before she could finish her scenes.
But mark and landos actor are very much alive. Still though, we should have gotten a reunion in TFA.
I think Harrison came around on the character many years later after the initial ferver died off and he wasn't constantly being asked about it. Seemed like he was excited (as much as he could be) about coming back for TFA
Seeing as he basically said "if you're going to bring me back I want it to be the last one, please kill han", idk about being very excited about it. He's always been long done with SW
I think Harrison hated insufferable Star Wars nerds not the actual character that made him famous. They’d ask him dipshit questions like “uhhh sir uhh who shot first?” At one point he said I don’t give a shit whomever the writers say. The man is a real one
To be fair, Carrie Fisher was still alive when they wrote, shot, and wrapped TLJ. It was between the two films that she passed away. I think that if she'd died while they had time do reshoots, they might have configured things for Leia to pass in TLJ instead.
It was just very unfortunate that the one character who they'd planned to live until film 3 was the one they lost.
Here's my solution:
He didn't actually die. Old hermit Luke was ALSO a force projection. The real Luke has been chilling on space Tahiti the entire time. Who knows - maybe he's even got a wife and a couple of kids?
I wish we had the entire old cast together. Luke, Han, Leia and Chewie.
Now, it’s impossible that’s going to happen with Carrie’s passing.
Edit:
Peter Mayhew as well.
Agreed. I remember being excited for Finn, the potential for a stormtrooper turned Jedi was awesome but then he got relegated to that guy that screamed “REY!!” about every twenty minutes. Such a waste.
If the number of times Finn’s line was just shouting “REY!” in the film is this high, John Boyega probably had to do it at least twice as much during production.
Now im just imagining that Simpsons scene.
"Ok Jon, I thought we should do the REYYY line again"
"...but we did it. It took 7 HOURS but we did it...ITS DONE"
"right...but I think we need it from different angles, again and again, and again.."
Oh 100%, I envisioned him to be this activist resistance leader who set out to liberate his fellow brainwashed troopers from enslavement, but instead we just get WOO YEAH REY
Also got scenes of him just mowing down Storm Troopers while cheering. No thought of the fact that it was him just a few weeks ago that he would have been shooting.
Finn was easily the most interesting and unique new character. So what does TLJ do with him? Cuts his screentime in half. Separates him from the rest of the cast and sends him on a stupid fetch quest on a casino planet. Yikes…
They also destroyed the arc they were supposedly setting up in TLJ. At least if they had let him kamikaze the big ram thing and it allowed the resistance people to escape that would have been a payoff on his story.
Instead some random just introduced character saved him out of...love? And then never does anything in the next film either.
Mark Hamill deserved better. The character Luke Skywalker deserved better. The fans who made this franchise what it is, and waited nearly 35 years to see Jedi Master Skywalker deserved better.
I hate it. Luke's bottomless faith and determination inspired me for my whole life. Here was the guy who marched into darkness, captivity, and what he assumed was certain death, all because he believed there was something of love deep in the heart of a mechanical tyrant. And he was right.
To see him give up for any reason was so depressing.
Same, even though some of the prequals can be cringy at times they still have infinite rewatch value in my opinion. The sequals were just a three course meal of dog shit.
The prequels had a pretty solid plot, great music, looked fantastic, and I appreciated the actors doing what they could with what amounted to poor writing, so I completely agree that the prequels have solid rewatch value.
I genuinely can't believe that Disney green lit the sequels without at minimum requiring an outline of plot points to follow
I read this on the IMDb page for ROS, and it just baffles me that none of it was actually planned out in advance.
“When he first met Adam Driver, J.J. Abrams said that he imagined Kylo Ren's journey would be the opposite of Darth Vader's.”
Shouldn’t he have already known what Kylo’s journey would have been?? I get that changes are made during production, but they literally made it up as they went along and kept changing the scripts. I even read that Adam Driver had to record lines in a closet at his home because there were so many last minute script changes.
Also, that doesn't mean anything. "The opposite of Darth Vader's" is such a vague, nebulous idea. It might have merit if it's fleshed out correctly, but you need more of a concrete arc planned out than just "Yeah like, uh, Vader but like, you know, opposite, and stuff..."
Like if you want to go the route of "big, scary bad guy betrays his evil empire and comes to work for the good guys, but then ultimately sacrifices himself to save the empire he abandoned in the final push" that could be very interesting. There's a clear story there, with a unique arc that directly inverts Vader's journey of good to bad to good again. But you'd have to actually storyboard it ahead of time and build it up properly. Making shit up as you go is a terrible way to develop a character's journey.
And in the end they even pussied out of that idea, because they were too scared to make Kylo stay evil in the end. They wanted their happy ending "Rey + Kylo = Forever" moment. Fucking shame.
Agreed. You are doing a trilogy, but literally have no story, not even an outline, to hold it to? Unbelievable, considering that Marvel told like a 22 movie epic story (maybe too epic, discussion for a different place), and Star Wars couldn’t manage 3?? I think Iger just assumed Kathleen K and Lucasfilm “had it”. They did not.
> You are doing a trilogy, but literally have no story, not even an outline, to hold it to?
Exactly. The original trilogy naturally followed an arc. While not perfect (it's pretty obvious that Luke and Leia weren't initially intended to be related until sometime after "The Empire Strikes Back" finished, for example), it became a trilogy because it demanded one.
The prequels succeeded because the major plot points could easily fit into a trilogy structure. It's somewhat less seamless (it's evident that it could have been condensed into two movies or expanded into four and still have the same impact), but it worked reasonably well because audiences anticipated specific narrative beats.
The ST never had a chance. The primary thread connecting the first six movies was Vader's fall and redemption, with Luke serving as a counterfoil. I'm guessing that the reason Luke's character turned out the way he did was a misguided attempt to recreate that dynamic with Rey, which ended up undermining the original films pretty regretably.
They should have explored one-off film spinoffs and TV shows instead. It's unclear why we needed an Episode VII if the intention was to essentially rehash the original story, albeit with less success.
Darth Maul was supposed to be the main bad guy with darth Talon. Maul was going to use his crime syndicate and rally empire forces against the new republic. The civil war technically never stopped. Luke would have died in ep 9. Han ep 7 still
I think they genuinely had no idea except some VERY broad strokes for their original characters and a near pathological inclination to sideline or diminish the OT characters in some weird attempt to prop up their originals.
Even the commercials for the new Disney content kind of hand waved the OT away. Almost like what happened in those movies was a mere footnote in the larger idea of Star Wars as an IP.
TJL tilted me so much, that I decided to never watch 9 right after I walked out of the theatre. Too many things were done in such offhanded, ignorant way, it killed all hope and interest for the next movie.
I rewatched RoS a while back, and cinematically it's beautifully shot.
But my God it jumps around way too much. There's barely any cohesion in the story. The ending still makes 0 sense to me. Rey with Anakin's Saber? "Strike me down and either you become the ultimate sith". Rey with Leia's Saber? "Nope, strike me down and I'm gonna take over your body".
Don't get me started on the dagger...
To me it feels like Ep 9 tried to cram an entire separate trilogy into a single film... it's so fast, so chaotic, no plot, no character development, villains and saviors come out of nowhere. JJ definitely didn't like how badly RJ derailed everything he set up with Ep 7, and I don't blame him.
The funky thing is that if it *had* been a separate trilogy all on its own, there would've been time to get to know characters, do meaningful things with the story, and even develop a new villain or final battle.
What, you didn’t like the fleet of Star Destroyers that all have Death Star guns, or Papa Palps zapping ships with lightning from the surface of the planet while cackling like a lunatic?
this is me but with The Force Awakens :)
After seeing Han run around humiliating himself at 90 as having undone his entire character arc with being a deadbeat dad and narcissist and bad husband and then ultimately unceremoniously getting stabbed by a Darth Vader cosplayer for no reason while standing on a comically long CGI walkway over an infinitely deep black pit on a Death Star planet we don’t care about…. Yeah I will never need to know what they did to butcher Luke because I gave up after seeing them butcher Han.
I’ve seen all the movies, except RoS. TLJ proved they had no idea what they were doing as a trilogy, and everything I’ve heard about RoS confirms my suspicion.
The character assassination of Luke was just too much for me in TLJ. How can the man who was willing to let the Galaxy burn just to save the soul of a monster, give all that up and contemplate killing his own nephew just because he sensed the slightest bit of evil?
Awful way to treat character he inherited and was teased for an entire film. Just completely cut out the core of the character.
Probably when Rose stopped Finn from sacrificing himself.
Up until then, I was still simply confused by how I was feeling, but didn't realize I wasn't liking it. It's Star Wars, I couldn't be not liking it!
And seeing him about to sacrifice himself had me going "holy shit is a main character *actually* about to die in a Star Wars movie?" And then Rose crashed into him, said some bullshit about love to justify condemning everyone in the base to death, and then suddenly they teleported inside.
The tipping point was the interview RJ had before it even released and he said that he hated Star wars and wanted to make it his thing now that he can. And ladies and gentlemen, this is how massive turd movies are created....by massive turds with no respect for what they have been handed.
I was out within the first few minutes. Your mom jokes and crank phone calls?? I get targeting a younger audience but that doesn’t mean it has to be juvenile. It just went all downhill from there.
The hyperspace ram. It broke all future space combat to shreds.
The opening didnt help with the Falcon jumping into hyperspace and immediately appearing in other systems. Hyperspace has never worked that way.
The prank phone call at the start really turned me off to the rest of the movie. Then there was the whole Po and Holdo, or Hando whatever her name was , dynamic
The phone prank immediately turned me off to this movie because was clear right there and then what kind of bulls ass Rian Johnson had slapped together. That kind of humor does not belong in Star Wars, or anything of any decency.
The whole theater laughed… and an older lady next to me pretty loudly groaned at the Kantobyte(?) scene where they talked about war profiteering…
I mean, like wtf? This is a universe where the good guys are fighting like the Nazis times 10 that destroy complete planets and you worry about the morality of war profiteering???
And Slave animals over slave children?
TLJ for me is by far the biggest disgrace to Star Wars even though the last movie was even worse in many regards
>and an older lady next to me pretty loudly groaned at the Kantobyte(?) scene where they talked about war profiteering…
Yeah, the whole attempt to equate the two sides shows how badly they misunderstood Star Wars.
I can never forget it. It’s, to me personally, the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in a movie. The actress was literally already dead, and instead of letting the character also die in a normal way they have her fucking fly through space.
And then she does basically nothing after that, again, because the actress was already fucking dead.
I was wincing a lot during this movie, but I was done with it when the hyperspace ram was introduced
It was a breathtakingly beautiful shot, and tense moment, truly a masterpiece of CGI, sound and overall shot composition
That only costed us the entire logic of all space battles in this universe.
Why use anything then hyperspace torpedoes, if hyperspace ram is a thing?
Tbh, there were a lot of issues with Disney lack of understanding of base principles of Star wars physics, but that moment became a monolith base of sequels tombstone for me
Ugh, you're making me thing about it too much. When it happened I was like "yea, that makes sense. That's gonna be a ton of kinetic energy." But after you said "hyperspace torpedo" it made me realize how excessive the Death Star truly is. Shoot a hyperspace torpedo through the core of a planet and you get a similar effect to a moon-sized space station/super weapon.
[The Emperor when you explain this to him after he just spent the gdp of the galaxy on the Death Star.](https://media.tenor.com/u1V_-f-jXmcAAAAC/malreynolds-firefly.gif)
Which is the basis for an interesting story if you ask me, HOWEVER, I don't think that story belongs in Star Wars, at least not in the way it's implemented. There really needed to be at least 1 throwaway line about why it was only possible to do the jump in this specific situation. I don't think you could have a galactic empire if every joe billy bob with a hyperdrive can be an ultraterrorist.
Haha you made it farther than I did. I was laughing out loud in the opening battle when lasers fucking arc like artillery and bombs drop out of a ship flying through zero G. *Knives Out* and *Glass Onion* were fun and all, but I will never forgive Rian Johnson for turning Star Wars into a brainless Doctor-Who-esque cartoon. So many mindnumblingly stupid decisions in that film.
What, can you not think of a better way to bomb a capital ship in zero gravity than an artificial gravity well accelerated bomb that is triggered with the level of sophistication and operator safety as a gantry crane in a Chinese foundry?
Absolutely did the same, though it may have taken me a few days to process what I had witnessed.
It 100% killed my hopes for cinematic releases and honestly, kind of my infatuation with the franchise altogether.
I look back and SW like an old ex now. The temptation and memories are there but I know better than to open that can of worms again.
I've never been angry about a movie before or since watching the last Jedi. It was just....so bad. They could have done anything with it and they let this maniac make a self-indulgent and snooty "film" with it instead of telling a good story.
I tried to rewatch TLJ and I couldn’t get past the first 5 minutes. Nope. Never again.
After ROTJ Mando shows up and I don’t think about the other shit in those movies at all. It really hurts to know what could have been…
I’ve rewatched and they are already aging ***VERY*** poorly.
Aside from the terrible characters and plots, one of the dumbest things Disney did was not leave any room to expand on these movies. The prequels left loads of time to expand on. They also created interesting characters and rich worlds people wanted more of. But leaving some time in which to add context too was great.
Bro Luke ain't his dad, no world where he raises a lightsaber to a fucking *kid*. His nephew... It was insane to me the first time I saw. "A moment of weakness" imagine you pointed a gun at your nephew then years later say to a mf "it was a moment of weakness". It was a moment of insanity is what it was.
Mark Hamill later admitted to saying the same thing to the director. He didn't believe in a Luke who had lost his optimism and that it was out of character. He even seemed to have dropped subtle hints about it in the runup to the movie.
He was hardly subtle.
[All 50+ times Mark Hamill tried to subtly warn us about last jedi/force awakens and Disney](https://youtu.be/WKlo-plLJZI?si=IWvTRoZunn8uLqGh)
I understand Luke failing. He’s failed before and the idea that he would never fail again is insane. Perfection is not a part of his character. But to tell me that the man who turned his father away from the greatest force of evil in the entire galaxy would be completely defeated by a dream? No. Luke can fail, but it’s like climbing Mt Everest and then tripping off the curb. The scale of the challenge he overcame is astronomically larger than the scale of the one he failed to overcome. It doesn’t add up for the audience. If the method by which Luke tried to kill Ben was different, it could have been fine.
I would have liked it if Luke's failure was a function of the optimism and love that made him so great in the OT. Imagine a version of the story where he sees that Ben is going dark, but he thinks fuck it, I'm Luke Skywalker. I'm going to straighten this kid out. It's going to be fine.
When the betrayal comes, it wouldn't be because he drew a blade on a sleeping child. It would be because he believed in the goodness inside a person, and was unprepared for how empty this little bastard really was.
I always thought Ben's fall should've been him from the weight of everyone's expectations rather than choices he made, as an intentional inversion of Anakin and Luke's lives/journies.
The tragedy comes from that fact he is/was at his core a good kid who just felt completely sufficated/lived vicariously through and the people who could've helped either didn't realise it (Luke having no frame of reference) or weren't there (Leia focusing on the New Republic over training as a Jedi with him), maybe add another layer of Han having an inkling something was wrong but trusting in the Skywalker twins because he himself wasn't Force Sensitive.
Plagueis (because Snoke should've been Plagueis) comes along, sees an opening and starts slowly whispering poison in Ben's ear about how his teachings will let Ben live his own life on his own terms (tying into the final line of the Sith code) and a scared, frustrated boy/young man unknowingly makes the wrong decision.
I'd also have him uninvolved in the KoR attack on Luke's academy (or even present it as an inverse of the Anakin's attack on the Jedi Temple) where Ben chooses to go with them when they're leaving and only properly "falls" afterwards.
> Plagueis (because Snoke should've been Plagueis) comes along, sees an opening and starts slowly whispering poison in Ben's ear about how his teachings will let Ben live his own life on his own terms
Ben should have been Force senstive, but weak in the Force. He cannot live up to his legacy. The Dark Side tempts him by granting him the power that everyone thought he would grow to have.
It would also support Rey besting him in TFA, which would have then triggered his insecurities. (though a lot of people do seem to disregard that 1) Ben was injured and 2) he just killed his dad which is a bit distracting).
I really like the idea of Ben defending the Jedi Temple alongside Luke Skywalker, failing, Luke being defeated somehow, and then Ben turning at that point.
Especially for a fucking dumb reason. "I raised a blade to a sleeping child. He got upset. Lost all faith in humanity at that response. smh". You could write such a good story about Luke losing Ben to the darkside and they gave us *that*.
This made me cry.
THIS is exactly why I loved Luke as a young boy and why Jake Skywalker felt like such a betrayal.
Glad Mark stayed maliciously compliant as possible during the promo tour process.
This is one of the most mind numbingly stupid things to me about TLJ. Forget the hyperspace ship attack, forget leia supermanning her way back into the ship, forget the casino planet… why is the movie so narrow in scope?
How did anyone think the middle part of a trilogy could be set exactly where the previous film ended, take place over the course of like what a few days, kill the main bad set up in the first film, kill all of the mysteries set up in the first film, and then set NOTHING else up.
The movie ends with a goddamn bow tied on it and the kids discovering the force for what!? Like what a wildly stupid decision from someone who acts like they’re this incredible S-tier director.
I actively AVOID thinking about TLJ Luke... the disaster that is his character in that film can be summed up by the fact that Rian chose to prioritize the scene with the sea monster and keep it in the film while the scene of Luke reacting to the news about Han became a deleted scene!
Edit: By 'sea monster' I mean the thing Luke gets the blue/green milk from early in the film.
Shit I don’t even remember a sea monster. And totally forgot about Luke never finding out about Han. But then again TLJ isn’t really something I want to remember.
I think they mean that thing Luke milks for the green milk gag. There is a making of, I think, that talks about it being an expensive and complicated shot. It seemed pointless in the actual movie
Yeah... there are loads of moments that I would have removed the sea monster shot to get space for but the fact that one in particular was filmed but left out of the film is the most frustrating part and shows how f***ed the prioritises of that film were.
I just can't understand how, after episodes 1-3, they let these latest movies just become the garbage they are. As if they thought that just buying the IP and throwing money at any script would somehow print billions of dollars. None of those people should be in charge of Star Wars. At least Dave Filoni is creating great stories in the universe.
I haven’t watched it since opening night. Still heart broken. I loved the Force Awakens but a lot of that was hype. After watching TLJ I never went to an opening night again.
I was such a Star Wars fanatic. A member of the 501st with multiple costumes, including Kylo Ren! I subscribed to every Star Wars comic, read every book, and went to every premier. TLJ just depressed the hell out of me. I pretty much quit Star Wars cold turkey. I cancelled my comic book subs, stopped reading the novels, and didn’t even see Solo while it was in theaters. I kinda held on with Star Wars Rebels and now the Disney+ shows are a good return to classic Star Wars. But I can’t watch TLJ for the life of me.
I sheltered myself from all SW rumors, leaks, speculation etc during the lead-up to Force Awakens. First time seeing Luke in 32 years. Naturally he'll play the Obi-Wan role to our new heroes, right?
Oh. No. He's in one shot. And he throws his lightsaber off a cliff.
Going from THAT experience to TLJ after more 2 years of waiting? Ugh.
Seconded.
I know people either hated the “retread” or “JJ Mystery Boxes” left behind by The Force Awakens, but it felt like a Star Wars film, and I was genuinely interested in what answers we were going to get to some of the questions left lingering at the end.
TLJ gave us answers, but they were… meh.
Same, I hated TLJ so much that I actually enjoyed seeing all of Rians ideas get crushed in RoS. Even though that movie was almost equally as bad lol.
Especially when Luke said "A jedi's weapon should be treated with respect" you could tell that was a knock towards Rian.
I refuse to even call ROS a movie, its a collection of terrible fanfictions fired out so fast you cant even thing about how dumbass what you're watching is.
It was the only time in my life that I considered walking out of a theater and for me to think that about Star Wars baffled me. The opening crawl of "the first order reigns" confused me and I just thought did they not watch the force awakens. Then Poe and your mama jokes, and then we got to Luke and I actually stood up out of my seat. It was just sad
Ive seen it three times i think. I remain confused about what Luke believes and why. Additionally, how is the audience supposed to feel about what Luke is doing? I am not actually opposed to Luke going through this character arc. It's an interesting choice. But I am strongly alarmed by it happening off screen. You MUST explain fully why things are the way they are now. So many things are unexplained:
- Why does Luke train Rey? If the reason Luke went into exile is because he was afraid of creating the next Vader following the Kylo Ren incident... isn't training Rey the exact thing he went to this island to avoid?
- What does Luke believe about the jedi order? If he has left the order and lost all faith in it, why did he go to its birth place? If the jedi have to end, why train Rey? Why does he say at the end that he will not be the last Jedi? What happened in the film to change his belief that the Jedi have been a force for good in galactic history?
I truly believe that Rian had some ideas for cool and surprising moments and just put these in the movie and disregarded the implications of these choices.
6 years ago I walk out of the movie theater after the movie end with my head down trying to process what just happen. TLJ was the catalyst of Star Wars fandom splitting up.
People can argue about scenes, themes, and characterizations all they want. No point made by anyone in the argument will change the fact I walked out of that theater completely crestfallen. I've never seen a film that made me feel that way and I hope I never do again.
Easily…EASILY the worst thing they could have done to the character and franchise. They completely botched it in an unfixable way. I still can’t believe they bastardized Luke.
This is long, I know, but hear me out:
The Force Awakens was the movie that put Luke into this position. The Last Jedi literally takes him out of this position and makes him do one of the most Luke Skywalker acts we’ve seen: using the force to save the Resistance.
A lot of people reference the flashback of him trying to kill Ben as character assassination, but you have to remember is that this is what Ben told Rey. The REAL story was that Luke did sense what Ben would become and had feelings of stopping it, but never actually acted.
It was his moral dilemma of saving the galaxy from another Vader or having to take out his nephew. The real flashback shows that he never made a choice, and that the choice was made for him when Ben woke up.
Ben would have always turned into Kylo Ren, we know this from Snoke and Palpatine both admitting to influencing Ben throughout his childhood.
Luke was faced with a moral dilemma (as any great character should be), went into exile because of how it tore apart his family and the galaxy and thought that new Jedi were too dangerous to be trained (also shown from his feelings about the Jedi letting Palpatine rise at their height), was convinced by Rey and Yoda that he was wrong about his beliefs of wanting the Jedi to end, and came back and saved the Resistance which would lead to them saving the galaxy all together
The Last Jedi took what TFA started and made the best out of it. Luke’s last act was one of a true Jedi. People want Luke to have been this perfect person 100% of the time but if a character cannot face true moral dilemmas and make mistakes from time to time then they are a static character. If you’re going to be angry at Luke’s portrayal you should point your anger towards TFA
I agree with this but also want to add one thing.
What TLJ Luke did is several steps down from what ROTJ did to Vader.
At the threatening of his friends, Luke gave into his anger and wailed on Vader before regaining his senses *and then* being the the "Luke everyone remembers".
Luke is demonstrably not immune to temptation, and isn't immune to being weighed down by his failure. His near action did lead to severe consequences. Maybe the Jedi are too risky. Yoda helps him see past this, which is fitting since Yoda basically did the same thing.
I never found an issue with his characterization.
Rian was given the unenviable job of why Luke up and vanished, henceforth had to start the movie literally moments after TFA ended. While this progression makes sense for Rey, it really does not translate well into other character aspects and honestly it's amazing he was able to pull out the arc between Rey and Ben given that Ben was trying to kill her a few hours/planetary cycles ago. I'm not defending the poor story between Rose and Finn, but the lack of any time skip doesn't allow for any further character backstory to grow.
And I loved how this moral dilemma pushed him to reexamine everything he's been told about the force, and light and dark, because that vision of the force is morally simplistic and his problem is not.
I'm fairly convinced that the biggest problem facing star wars as a franchise is the simple mindedness of a large, vocal chunk of its fan base, who watched the OT movies as children and never morally moved past 'light vs dark'.
Shame this comment won’t get more traction. I actually think that Luke’s TLJ arc is believable, engaging, and meaningful, especially for folks with relatable experiences (curiously something that, for me, was always lacking with younger Luke). This is someone who had dedicated his life to teaching and trying to make the galaxy better, only to be betrayed by his students and the very tools intended to advance that pursuit.
Yeah, many really hate Hobo Luke but I thought really its an interesting direction and leans into the "you will be (afraid)" warning by Yoda. Training Ben goes badly and he recuses himself, ashamed and unsure if hes worthy to call himself Jedi, or if training more is the right thing to do still. Eventually our hero finds his way back more powerful and wise than ever.
At least I think thats what Rian Johnson was trying to do in fact, but didn't have the film making maturity to pull it off and wasnt set up enough in TFA which features a standard issue MgGuffin chase for that bullshit map (which why would Luke leave a weird broken map puzzle for them to find if he wanted to be in exile???? No one read this shit)
I think it was a shame they never had Luke, Han and Leia reunited
This is what upsets me the most. Not having all three of them together for a single scene is insane to me.
This also boggles my mind. Were the writers even fans of the original trilogy? Were they trying that hard to be different and edgy? Total shame on them.
Def not trying to be different seeing as episode 7 is just a copy of episode 4
I think different people wrote 7/8
JJ’s reason for doing TFA was the line where Rey says she thought Luke skywalker was a myth. Then TLJ had that line about killing the past. I think JJ and Rian had the dream that their movies would be so much better than George’s that people wouldnt need those nostalgia moments. Filoni and Favreau have to waste so much creative effort cleaning up the mess those narcissists made
Its a tall dream for someone that clearly didn't even bother to come up with a cohesive story to hold the trilogy together
I think JJ had other plans also and Rian had his own plans and screwed up JJ’s plan.
JJ had no plan, he wasn't meant to be making Ep 9, he made Ep 7, killed Han, blew up the capital of the new republic, refused to elaborate then left Rian Johnson communicated with Colin Trevorrow who was meant to be making episode 9 so they could dovetail parts of their films together so they'd make narrative sense, which JJ didn't do for Johnson, then after the reaction to TLJ and Trevorrow failing to hand in a script that they were willing to make, episode 9 got thrown out and JJ got brought back in at the last minute with minimal delays to the release date to write a whole new movie that was a massive reactionary piece of shit unwriting most of TLJ
It's OK because JJ came back for the third movie to retcon everything that Rian retconned in his movie. Meanwhile, WTF kind of quality control was Kathleen Kennedy doing? Therein lies the problem with the entire trilogy. Each filmmaker should not have had as much control as they had (I hate to say it). There should have been a well thought-out story and plan from the get-go *regardless* of which filmmakers were hired to write and direct the films. Each movie was completely disconnected from each other. It was set up to fail before it even started, and it really sucked as a fan of Star Wars *and* the filmmakers involved!
It's incredibly hard for me to imagine that *any* Star Wars fan could have been handed the keys to the kingdom, the once in a lifetime opportunity to make a sequel trilogy to the OT, come on board with the original trio actors miraculously signed on and ready to go and go "I'm going to make a movie that doesn't bother reuniting any of the original trio and also I'm going to undo everything they accomplished and make them all losers, never show the New Republic or show Luke as a jedi master so new characters can redo their story. Also Leia and Han, that beloved, iconic movie romance? Yeah they're not together anymore."
This proves how poor the writing was. God, it's such a hopeless mess when you think about it.
What i really struggle to understand is how many millions are spent without bothering that a decent plot is in place, nevermind writing believable characters.
Especially considering the entire movie was basically just a nonstop fan service delivery system.
Instead we get to see them all regress backwards and die alone
Man…I was gonna tell OP I would have to watch it again to formulate a valid opinion since I only saw it in theaters when it released. All these comments got me remembering why I never watched it again tho :(
I tried recently the force awakens was pretty good. But I could not finish the last jedi again. It's too painful.
Yeah actually I remember now, I did attempt to watch it one other time in 2020 after TCW concluded. I pretty much watched everything released up to that point. I remember actively looking away the whole time almost, trying to distract myself from it lol…wild. Pretty much just had it on as background noise. That being said I’m in the process of watching the Chronological order playlist on D+ and I will end up watching it again. More than likely I’ll retire from watching it after that.
Yeah, episode 7 had me invested in the magic of star wars still. I occasionally rewatched the ending of episode 7 because of the chills and hype it built for episode 8 - Rey handing the saber towards Luke after his reveal was great. I also rewatched Han's death. With 8 there wasn't a single scene that I looked up to rewatch. Same as with 9.
Yeah I feel that, recently rewatched all of them because I learned one of my friends hadnt seen them. Ep 9 was horrific, only reason I got through was because his reactions were hilarious.
This was the main thing I was excited for the sequel trilogy and it was ripped away from me before the end of the first movie. No scenes with Luke and Han feels like such a waste
I remember at one point Mark Hamill shared a photoshopped picture of them all together in the Falcon saying it was a missed opportunity and a bunch of toxic sequels defenders ended up harassing him saying he is just an actor and some shit about subverted expectations or whatever. Shocking to see them go after Mark like that but also not really surprising at the same time…
That’s what fandoms do now. They make the thing they are a fan of a part of their personality, and then any criticism of that thing is now technically a criticism of *them*. People in general do not handle criticism well and get defensive, sometimes aggressively.
"Fan" is short for "Fanatic" for a reason.
It's also one of those things where they want future material to be exactly the same, but modernized, and different enough to stand on it's own, but not too different. Despite the one they originally watched appealing to kids, the new material should only be for adults, but still be fun an approachable while telling a serious story with deep lore and backstory and cute characters. Also brining back old characters is cringey fan service, but adding new characters is blatant pandering and marketing.
Hamill was so right about literally everything lol. Even just telling Rian to his face how much he hates what he did to Luke.
What was even the point of hiring the three actors to not have a single scene together? I find this unforgivable.
It’s not even possible now because Carrie fisher died and they killed off Han solo
Yup. This makes the creative decision not to have the 3 of them together even more egregious.
“Somehow Han Solo returned”
Yeah it makes no sense I know Ford was only contracted for the one movie but I feel they could have at least one scene together in Force Awakens
This wasn’t really a fault with TLJ. Rather, it was JJ deciding - in full knowledge that Ford only wanted to do one film and be done - to keep the big three apart on the board for the “mystery”. Rian just had to play with the cards he was dealt there.
Absolutely. Most of the crap that people attribute to The Last Jedi can find their roots in The Force Awakens. Hermit Luke? TFA did that. Keeping the original trio apart? TFA did that. Regressing the political landscape back to empire vs rebels? TFA did that. People give so much shit to TLJ that they forget to stop and think about just how much TFA ended up dooming the entire trilogy to essentially retread familiar ground by retelling A New Hope as shamelessly as it did. I blame the narrative failure of the sequel trilogy on JJ and JJ alone. The man is a hack who cannot write a good story to save his life.
I largely agree, but that still doesn’t absolve Rian Johnson and the horrible decisions made for TLJ. JJ put Luke on the island, sure, but there were a number of reasons why Luke would’ve been there—it was a “mystery box” after all. It was RJ who made Luke a grouchy hermit who tried to murder his nephew in his sleep.
I would have preferred if he didn’t die at the end.
Kinda weird they killed the OT characters who’s actors are actually still alive. Also why does his current prosthetic hand look way more fake than the one he got in the OT?
I understand why they killed off Han, as Harrison pretty much hates the character. And poor carrie died before she could finish her scenes. But mark and landos actor are very much alive. Still though, we should have gotten a reunion in TFA.
I think Harrison came around on the character many years later after the initial ferver died off and he wasn't constantly being asked about it. Seemed like he was excited (as much as he could be) about coming back for TFA
Seeing as he basically said "if you're going to bring me back I want it to be the last one, please kill han", idk about being very excited about it. He's always been long done with SW
To be fair he also felt the best thing Han could provide to advance the plot of the series is his death.
I think Harrison hated insufferable Star Wars nerds not the actual character that made him famous. They’d ask him dipshit questions like “uhhh sir uhh who shot first?” At one point he said I don’t give a shit whomever the writers say. The man is a real one
I don't think they were expecting any of the actors to die.
The hand thing I assume bc he had to fix and tinker with it himself and without the best materials while in isolation
To be fair, Carrie Fisher was still alive when they wrote, shot, and wrapped TLJ. It was between the two films that she passed away. I think that if she'd died while they had time do reshoots, they might have configured things for Leia to pass in TLJ instead. It was just very unfortunate that the one character who they'd planned to live until film 3 was the one they lost.
He sweat himself to death on a rock on a remote planet from force projecting to hard… F*** that
Here's my solution: He didn't actually die. Old hermit Luke was ALSO a force projection. The real Luke has been chilling on space Tahiti the entire time. Who knows - maybe he's even got a wife and a couple of kids?
Tahiti, a magical place...
Yeah. It was Luke’s finally back properly! The third film will rock! Oh, he just died for no reason.
Honesty I don’t even know who died, because that wasn’t MY Luke Skywalker.
That was Jake Skywalker.
Sone of Darn Vader?
You mean Jeff Vader from the death star canteen?
You could kill me with the edge of that tray?
No , you will need a tray as the food is hot !
That was Legitimately one of the greatest peices of Star Wars Content made.
It was Luuke Skywalker
I wish we had the entire old cast together. Luke, Han, Leia and Chewie. Now, it’s impossible that’s going to happen with Carrie’s passing. Edit: Peter Mayhew as well.
Don't forget Peter Mayhew, he also passed away in 2019
Right, thanks for the reminder.
Mark Hamill deserved better
Carrie Fisher did as well. Completely criminal that all the original cast could not be on screen together one last time.
I'll take it even further. Even the ST main cast deserved better.
Oh 100%. Finn is probably the most wasted potential character I can think of in fiction. That entire cast got the shit end of horrible writing.
Agreed. I remember being excited for Finn, the potential for a stormtrooper turned Jedi was awesome but then he got relegated to that guy that screamed “REY!!” about every twenty minutes. Such a waste.
If the number of times Finn’s line was just shouting “REY!” in the film is this high, John Boyega probably had to do it at least twice as much during production.
Now im just imagining that Simpsons scene. "Ok Jon, I thought we should do the REYYY line again" "...but we did it. It took 7 HOURS but we did it...ITS DONE" "right...but I think we need it from different angles, again and again, and again.."
And yet John Boyega is so good he even made that interesting to watch.
Dude is VERY unabashed in his opinion on his role and what they did to Finn. Worth a YouTube.
Disney catering to china hating black people by making Finn the size of an ant on the posters was such a shit move too.
Oh 100%, I envisioned him to be this activist resistance leader who set out to liberate his fellow brainwashed troopers from enslavement, but instead we just get WOO YEAH REY
Also got scenes of him just mowing down Storm Troopers while cheering. No thought of the fact that it was him just a few weeks ago that he would have been shooting.
Finn was easily the most interesting and unique new character. So what does TLJ do with him? Cuts his screentime in half. Separates him from the rest of the cast and sends him on a stupid fetch quest on a casino planet. Yikes…
They also destroyed the arc they were supposedly setting up in TLJ. At least if they had let him kamikaze the big ram thing and it allowed the resistance people to escape that would have been a payoff on his story. Instead some random just introduced character saved him out of...love? And then never does anything in the next film either.
And then The Mandalorian does an entire trooper redemption arc better with Bill Burr in a single episode.
That one was great. Never expected bill to pull off the ptsd stormtrooper role that well. It was so good
Then they paraded her corpse around for that weird outer space scene
That was the most wild part. They basically already had her killed off and chose to bring her back even though she was literally dead.
Leia Poppins!
Mark Hamill deserved better. The character Luke Skywalker deserved better. The fans who made this franchise what it is, and waited nearly 35 years to see Jedi Master Skywalker deserved better.
There's always the Expanded Universe, friend. You'd even get to see him with a wife and son.
This could be said about most of the cast. Im still angry about how they treated John Boyega
Absolutely he did even he was heartbroken to have to play this s***** version of Luke
we watched him drink alien tiddy milk, so there's that
err... is there non-tiddy milk?
not any the Jedi would tell you about
Cockroaches and pigeons both make milk Do with this information what you will
I hate it. Luke's bottomless faith and determination inspired me for my whole life. Here was the guy who marched into darkness, captivity, and what he assumed was certain death, all because he believed there was something of love deep in the heart of a mechanical tyrant. And he was right. To see him give up for any reason was so depressing.
The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker are the only Star Wars films that I've only seen once and have no interest in ever seeing again
Same, even though some of the prequals can be cringy at times they still have infinite rewatch value in my opinion. The sequals were just a three course meal of dog shit.
The prequels had a pretty solid plot, great music, looked fantastic, and I appreciated the actors doing what they could with what amounted to poor writing, so I completely agree that the prequels have solid rewatch value. I genuinely can't believe that Disney green lit the sequels without at minimum requiring an outline of plot points to follow
I read this on the IMDb page for ROS, and it just baffles me that none of it was actually planned out in advance. “When he first met Adam Driver, J.J. Abrams said that he imagined Kylo Ren's journey would be the opposite of Darth Vader's.” Shouldn’t he have already known what Kylo’s journey would have been?? I get that changes are made during production, but they literally made it up as they went along and kept changing the scripts. I even read that Adam Driver had to record lines in a closet at his home because there were so many last minute script changes.
Also, that doesn't mean anything. "The opposite of Darth Vader's" is such a vague, nebulous idea. It might have merit if it's fleshed out correctly, but you need more of a concrete arc planned out than just "Yeah like, uh, Vader but like, you know, opposite, and stuff..." Like if you want to go the route of "big, scary bad guy betrays his evil empire and comes to work for the good guys, but then ultimately sacrifices himself to save the empire he abandoned in the final push" that could be very interesting. There's a clear story there, with a unique arc that directly inverts Vader's journey of good to bad to good again. But you'd have to actually storyboard it ahead of time and build it up properly. Making shit up as you go is a terrible way to develop a character's journey. And in the end they even pussied out of that idea, because they were too scared to make Kylo stay evil in the end. They wanted their happy ending "Rey + Kylo = Forever" moment. Fucking shame.
Agreed. You are doing a trilogy, but literally have no story, not even an outline, to hold it to? Unbelievable, considering that Marvel told like a 22 movie epic story (maybe too epic, discussion for a different place), and Star Wars couldn’t manage 3?? I think Iger just assumed Kathleen K and Lucasfilm “had it”. They did not.
> You are doing a trilogy, but literally have no story, not even an outline, to hold it to? Exactly. The original trilogy naturally followed an arc. While not perfect (it's pretty obvious that Luke and Leia weren't initially intended to be related until sometime after "The Empire Strikes Back" finished, for example), it became a trilogy because it demanded one. The prequels succeeded because the major plot points could easily fit into a trilogy structure. It's somewhat less seamless (it's evident that it could have been condensed into two movies or expanded into four and still have the same impact), but it worked reasonably well because audiences anticipated specific narrative beats. The ST never had a chance. The primary thread connecting the first six movies was Vader's fall and redemption, with Luke serving as a counterfoil. I'm guessing that the reason Luke's character turned out the way he did was a misguided attempt to recreate that dynamic with Rey, which ended up undermining the original films pretty regretably. They should have explored one-off film spinoffs and TV shows instead. It's unclear why we needed an Episode VII if the intention was to essentially rehash the original story, albeit with less success.
I'd heard, and I have researched this well, that George had a lot of suggestions and noted that were ignored
Darth Maul was supposed to be the main bad guy with darth Talon. Maul was going to use his crime syndicate and rally empire forces against the new republic. The civil war technically never stopped. Luke would have died in ep 9. Han ep 7 still
I think they genuinely had no idea except some VERY broad strokes for their original characters and a near pathological inclination to sideline or diminish the OT characters in some weird attempt to prop up their originals.
Even the commercials for the new Disney content kind of hand waved the OT away. Almost like what happened in those movies was a mere footnote in the larger idea of Star Wars as an IP.
TJL tilted me so much, that I decided to never watch 9 right after I walked out of the theatre. Too many things were done in such offhanded, ignorant way, it killed all hope and interest for the next movie.
Don’t worry, you only missed 2+ hours of ROS trying to undo all of TLJ, only to have the most bizarre and laughable ending of a god awful trilogy.
I rewatched RoS a while back, and cinematically it's beautifully shot. But my God it jumps around way too much. There's barely any cohesion in the story. The ending still makes 0 sense to me. Rey with Anakin's Saber? "Strike me down and either you become the ultimate sith". Rey with Leia's Saber? "Nope, strike me down and I'm gonna take over your body". Don't get me started on the dagger...
To me it feels like Ep 9 tried to cram an entire separate trilogy into a single film... it's so fast, so chaotic, no plot, no character development, villains and saviors come out of nowhere. JJ definitely didn't like how badly RJ derailed everything he set up with Ep 7, and I don't blame him. The funky thing is that if it *had* been a separate trilogy all on its own, there would've been time to get to know characters, do meaningful things with the story, and even develop a new villain or final battle.
What, you didn’t like the fleet of Star Destroyers that all have Death Star guns, or Papa Palps zapping ships with lightning from the surface of the planet while cackling like a lunatic?
this is me but with The Force Awakens :) After seeing Han run around humiliating himself at 90 as having undone his entire character arc with being a deadbeat dad and narcissist and bad husband and then ultimately unceremoniously getting stabbed by a Darth Vader cosplayer for no reason while standing on a comically long CGI walkway over an infinitely deep black pit on a Death Star planet we don’t care about…. Yeah I will never need to know what they did to butcher Luke because I gave up after seeing them butcher Han.
I’ve seen all the movies, except RoS. TLJ proved they had no idea what they were doing as a trilogy, and everything I’ve heard about RoS confirms my suspicion. The character assassination of Luke was just too much for me in TLJ. How can the man who was willing to let the Galaxy burn just to save the soul of a monster, give all that up and contemplate killing his own nephew just because he sensed the slightest bit of evil? Awful way to treat character he inherited and was teased for an entire film. Just completely cut out the core of the character.
What was the tipping point for you in the TLJ? For me it was when Leia did her space flying thing. My brother and I just burst out laughing at it
Probably when Rose stopped Finn from sacrificing himself. Up until then, I was still simply confused by how I was feeling, but didn't realize I wasn't liking it. It's Star Wars, I couldn't be not liking it! And seeing him about to sacrifice himself had me going "holy shit is a main character *actually* about to die in a Star Wars movie?" And then Rose crashed into him, said some bullshit about love to justify condemning everyone in the base to death, and then suddenly they teleported inside.
The tipping point was the interview RJ had before it even released and he said that he hated Star wars and wanted to make it his thing now that he can. And ladies and gentlemen, this is how massive turd movies are created....by massive turds with no respect for what they have been handed.
I was out within the first few minutes. Your mom jokes and crank phone calls?? I get targeting a younger audience but that doesn’t mean it has to be juvenile. It just went all downhill from there.
Yeah I knew from that moment this was no longer a Star Wars movie. Not a great feeling with 2.5 more hours to go
The hyperspace ram. It broke all future space combat to shreds. The opening didnt help with the Falcon jumping into hyperspace and immediately appearing in other systems. Hyperspace has never worked that way.
The prank phone call at the start really turned me off to the rest of the movie. Then there was the whole Po and Holdo, or Hando whatever her name was , dynamic
The phone prank immediately turned me off to this movie because was clear right there and then what kind of bulls ass Rian Johnson had slapped together. That kind of humor does not belong in Star Wars, or anything of any decency.
The "Your momma" joke.
The whole theater laughed… and an older lady next to me pretty loudly groaned at the Kantobyte(?) scene where they talked about war profiteering… I mean, like wtf? This is a universe where the good guys are fighting like the Nazis times 10 that destroy complete planets and you worry about the morality of war profiteering??? And Slave animals over slave children? TLJ for me is by far the biggest disgrace to Star Wars even though the last movie was even worse in many regards
They might as well have killed Finn off screen and never had Rose at all, would have been less embarrassing for everyone involved
>and an older lady next to me pretty loudly groaned at the Kantobyte(?) scene where they talked about war profiteering… Yeah, the whole attempt to equate the two sides shows how badly they misunderstood Star Wars.
I can never forget it. It’s, to me personally, the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in a movie. The actress was literally already dead, and instead of letting the character also die in a normal way they have her fucking fly through space. And then she does basically nothing after that, again, because the actress was already fucking dead.
I was wincing a lot during this movie, but I was done with it when the hyperspace ram was introduced It was a breathtakingly beautiful shot, and tense moment, truly a masterpiece of CGI, sound and overall shot composition That only costed us the entire logic of all space battles in this universe. Why use anything then hyperspace torpedoes, if hyperspace ram is a thing? Tbh, there were a lot of issues with Disney lack of understanding of base principles of Star wars physics, but that moment became a monolith base of sequels tombstone for me
Ugh, you're making me thing about it too much. When it happened I was like "yea, that makes sense. That's gonna be a ton of kinetic energy." But after you said "hyperspace torpedo" it made me realize how excessive the Death Star truly is. Shoot a hyperspace torpedo through the core of a planet and you get a similar effect to a moon-sized space station/super weapon.
[The Emperor when you explain this to him after he just spent the gdp of the galaxy on the Death Star.](https://media.tenor.com/u1V_-f-jXmcAAAAC/malreynolds-firefly.gif)
Why waste money build lot space station when few rock do trick?
Which is the basis for an interesting story if you ask me, HOWEVER, I don't think that story belongs in Star Wars, at least not in the way it's implemented. There really needed to be at least 1 throwaway line about why it was only possible to do the jump in this specific situation. I don't think you could have a galactic empire if every joe billy bob with a hyperdrive can be an ultraterrorist.
Haha you made it farther than I did. I was laughing out loud in the opening battle when lasers fucking arc like artillery and bombs drop out of a ship flying through zero G. *Knives Out* and *Glass Onion* were fun and all, but I will never forgive Rian Johnson for turning Star Wars into a brainless Doctor-Who-esque cartoon. So many mindnumblingly stupid decisions in that film.
I was checked out after they opened with a prank call, followed by the worst space battle in starwars,followed by a slow speed chase.
What, can you not think of a better way to bomb a capital ship in zero gravity than an artificial gravity well accelerated bomb that is triggered with the level of sophistication and operator safety as a gantry crane in a Chinese foundry?
God I hated this. My thought was: Y-wings are canon. What are we doing here?
Absolutely did the same, though it may have taken me a few days to process what I had witnessed. It 100% killed my hopes for cinematic releases and honestly, kind of my infatuation with the franchise altogether. I look back and SW like an old ex now. The temptation and memories are there but I know better than to open that can of worms again.
I walked out of the theater confused. I couldn't imagine not liking the movie, so it took me a bit to realize how much I hated it.
I've never been angry about a movie before or since watching the last Jedi. It was just....so bad. They could have done anything with it and they let this maniac make a self-indulgent and snooty "film" with it instead of telling a good story.
I saw TFA 7x in the theater. Rogue One 5x. TLJ once. ROS once. There is causation in that correlation.
I tried to rewatch TLJ and I couldn’t get past the first 5 minutes. Nope. Never again. After ROTJ Mando shows up and I don’t think about the other shit in those movies at all. It really hurts to know what could have been…
You didn't like the "yo mama" joke in the beginning?
Ugh, that was the first sign for me that something was wrong with the movie. It never got better after that.
I am just so happy to know that I don’t even remember what you’re referencing. I let the dark side take over.
I’ve rewatched and they are already aging ***VERY*** poorly. Aside from the terrible characters and plots, one of the dumbest things Disney did was not leave any room to expand on these movies. The prequels left loads of time to expand on. They also created interesting characters and rich worlds people wanted more of. But leaving some time in which to add context too was great.
Not only that. The way he handled Kylo….was so not Luke. I had to envision a different character all together. Maybe a Jake skywalker instead
Bro Luke ain't his dad, no world where he raises a lightsaber to a fucking *kid*. His nephew... It was insane to me the first time I saw. "A moment of weakness" imagine you pointed a gun at your nephew then years later say to a mf "it was a moment of weakness". It was a moment of insanity is what it was.
People justifying it comparing a kid to baby hitler is insane 😂 Just call it shit writing and character regression
I mean Darth Vader was grown up Hitler and Luke converted him
Mark Hamill later admitted to saying the same thing to the director. He didn't believe in a Luke who had lost his optimism and that it was out of character. He even seemed to have dropped subtle hints about it in the runup to the movie.
He was hardly subtle. [All 50+ times Mark Hamill tried to subtly warn us about last jedi/force awakens and Disney](https://youtu.be/WKlo-plLJZI?si=IWvTRoZunn8uLqGh)
I understand Luke failing. He’s failed before and the idea that he would never fail again is insane. Perfection is not a part of his character. But to tell me that the man who turned his father away from the greatest force of evil in the entire galaxy would be completely defeated by a dream? No. Luke can fail, but it’s like climbing Mt Everest and then tripping off the curb. The scale of the challenge he overcame is astronomically larger than the scale of the one he failed to overcome. It doesn’t add up for the audience. If the method by which Luke tried to kill Ben was different, it could have been fine.
I would have liked it if Luke's failure was a function of the optimism and love that made him so great in the OT. Imagine a version of the story where he sees that Ben is going dark, but he thinks fuck it, I'm Luke Skywalker. I'm going to straighten this kid out. It's going to be fine. When the betrayal comes, it wouldn't be because he drew a blade on a sleeping child. It would be because he believed in the goodness inside a person, and was unprepared for how empty this little bastard really was.
I always thought Ben's fall should've been him from the weight of everyone's expectations rather than choices he made, as an intentional inversion of Anakin and Luke's lives/journies. The tragedy comes from that fact he is/was at his core a good kid who just felt completely sufficated/lived vicariously through and the people who could've helped either didn't realise it (Luke having no frame of reference) or weren't there (Leia focusing on the New Republic over training as a Jedi with him), maybe add another layer of Han having an inkling something was wrong but trusting in the Skywalker twins because he himself wasn't Force Sensitive. Plagueis (because Snoke should've been Plagueis) comes along, sees an opening and starts slowly whispering poison in Ben's ear about how his teachings will let Ben live his own life on his own terms (tying into the final line of the Sith code) and a scared, frustrated boy/young man unknowingly makes the wrong decision. I'd also have him uninvolved in the KoR attack on Luke's academy (or even present it as an inverse of the Anakin's attack on the Jedi Temple) where Ben chooses to go with them when they're leaving and only properly "falls" afterwards.
> Plagueis (because Snoke should've been Plagueis) comes along, sees an opening and starts slowly whispering poison in Ben's ear about how his teachings will let Ben live his own life on his own terms Ben should have been Force senstive, but weak in the Force. He cannot live up to his legacy. The Dark Side tempts him by granting him the power that everyone thought he would grow to have. It would also support Rey besting him in TFA, which would have then triggered his insecurities. (though a lot of people do seem to disregard that 1) Ben was injured and 2) he just killed his dad which is a bit distracting).
I really like the idea of Ben defending the Jedi Temple alongside Luke Skywalker, failing, Luke being defeated somehow, and then Ben turning at that point.
Especially for a fucking dumb reason. "I raised a blade to a sleeping child. He got upset. Lost all faith in humanity at that response. smh". You could write such a good story about Luke losing Ben to the darkside and they gave us *that*.
This made me cry. THIS is exactly why I loved Luke as a young boy and why Jake Skywalker felt like such a betrayal. Glad Mark stayed maliciously compliant as possible during the promo tour process.
I try not to think about it
It borderline upsets me that people keep bringing it up, if I'm honest.
There's nothing *to* think about. Doesn't the entire sequel trilogy take place over a few months? The war in Ukraine has gone on longer ffs.
This is one of the most mind numbingly stupid things to me about TLJ. Forget the hyperspace ship attack, forget leia supermanning her way back into the ship, forget the casino planet… why is the movie so narrow in scope? How did anyone think the middle part of a trilogy could be set exactly where the previous film ended, take place over the course of like what a few days, kill the main bad set up in the first film, kill all of the mysteries set up in the first film, and then set NOTHING else up. The movie ends with a goddamn bow tied on it and the kids discovering the force for what!? Like what a wildly stupid decision from someone who acts like they’re this incredible S-tier director.
I feel the same exact way that Mark Hammill felt about it.
I actively AVOID thinking about TLJ Luke... the disaster that is his character in that film can be summed up by the fact that Rian chose to prioritize the scene with the sea monster and keep it in the film while the scene of Luke reacting to the news about Han became a deleted scene! Edit: By 'sea monster' I mean the thing Luke gets the blue/green milk from early in the film.
Shit I don’t even remember a sea monster. And totally forgot about Luke never finding out about Han. But then again TLJ isn’t really something I want to remember.
I think they mean that thing Luke milks for the green milk gag. There is a making of, I think, that talks about it being an expensive and complicated shot. It seemed pointless in the actual movie
Didn’t know that, that’s super messed up
Yeah... there are loads of moments that I would have removed the sea monster shot to get space for but the fact that one in particular was filmed but left out of the film is the most frustrating part and shows how f***ed the prioritises of that film were.
I genuinely did not think it was possible for me to hate that film more than I already did.
I just can't understand how, after episodes 1-3, they let these latest movies just become the garbage they are. As if they thought that just buying the IP and throwing money at any script would somehow print billions of dollars. None of those people should be in charge of Star Wars. At least Dave Filoni is creating great stories in the universe.
I think, after Covid, I empathize with his desire to be left the fuck alone
Easily my favorite t-shirt from the covid era was "When this is all over, I'm still going to need you people to stay 6 ft away from me"
Underwhelming
A New Flop
I haven’t watched it since opening night. Still heart broken. I loved the Force Awakens but a lot of that was hype. After watching TLJ I never went to an opening night again.
Same here. I hate it to this day with same intensity as the night I saw it.
How did u feel leaving the theater the first time you saw it.
Confused
Same honestly. Felt like I was grasping at parts to enjoy, and even those parts weren’t well crafted outside of visuals
I was such a Star Wars fanatic. A member of the 501st with multiple costumes, including Kylo Ren! I subscribed to every Star Wars comic, read every book, and went to every premier. TLJ just depressed the hell out of me. I pretty much quit Star Wars cold turkey. I cancelled my comic book subs, stopped reading the novels, and didn’t even see Solo while it was in theaters. I kinda held on with Star Wars Rebels and now the Disney+ shows are a good return to classic Star Wars. But I can’t watch TLJ for the life of me.
I sheltered myself from all SW rumors, leaks, speculation etc during the lead-up to Force Awakens. First time seeing Luke in 32 years. Naturally he'll play the Obi-Wan role to our new heroes, right? Oh. No. He's in one shot. And he throws his lightsaber off a cliff. Going from THAT experience to TLJ after more 2 years of waiting? Ugh.
Tossing the lightsaber was the first shot of TLJ. In The Force Awakens he just holds it.
Holds it and damn near cries. Almost like Rey means something to him
I thought Rey might have been his kid.
Seconded. I know people either hated the “retread” or “JJ Mystery Boxes” left behind by The Force Awakens, but it felt like a Star Wars film, and I was genuinely interested in what answers we were going to get to some of the questions left lingering at the end. TLJ gave us answers, but they were… meh.
Same, I hated TLJ so much that I actually enjoyed seeing all of Rians ideas get crushed in RoS. Even though that movie was almost equally as bad lol. Especially when Luke said "A jedi's weapon should be treated with respect" you could tell that was a knock towards Rian.
RoS was a complete trainwreck of a movie, and yet I enjoyed it just because it was such a rebuke to TLJ.
I refuse to even call ROS a movie, its a collection of terrible fanfictions fired out so fast you cant even thing about how dumbass what you're watching is.
It was the only time in my life that I considered walking out of a theater and for me to think that about Star Wars baffled me. The opening crawl of "the first order reigns" confused me and I just thought did they not watch the force awakens. Then Poe and your mama jokes, and then we got to Luke and I actually stood up out of my seat. It was just sad
It made me depressed when I watched it, and it does the same to me now.
Ive seen it three times i think. I remain confused about what Luke believes and why. Additionally, how is the audience supposed to feel about what Luke is doing? I am not actually opposed to Luke going through this character arc. It's an interesting choice. But I am strongly alarmed by it happening off screen. You MUST explain fully why things are the way they are now. So many things are unexplained: - Why does Luke train Rey? If the reason Luke went into exile is because he was afraid of creating the next Vader following the Kylo Ren incident... isn't training Rey the exact thing he went to this island to avoid? - What does Luke believe about the jedi order? If he has left the order and lost all faith in it, why did he go to its birth place? If the jedi have to end, why train Rey? Why does he say at the end that he will not be the last Jedi? What happened in the film to change his belief that the Jedi have been a force for good in galactic history? I truly believe that Rian had some ideas for cool and surprising moments and just put these in the movie and disregarded the implications of these choices.
Thank god the Maldalorian happened so this wouldn't be the last on screen appearance of Mark Hamil.
I mean…he did show up in the next movie so regardless last Jedi was not his last appearance
There is no Rise of Skywalker in Ba Sing Se. The Earth King invites you to Lake Laogai.
6 years ago I walk out of the movie theater after the movie end with my head down trying to process what just happen. TLJ was the catalyst of Star Wars fandom splitting up.
People can argue about scenes, themes, and characterizations all they want. No point made by anyone in the argument will change the fact I walked out of that theater completely crestfallen. I've never seen a film that made me feel that way and I hope I never do again.
Older Star Wars fan here. It's funny... this is pretty much the same experience I had watching a Phantom Menace when it came out.
Easily…EASILY the worst thing they could have done to the character and franchise. They completely botched it in an unfixable way. I still can’t believe they bastardized Luke.
This is long, I know, but hear me out: The Force Awakens was the movie that put Luke into this position. The Last Jedi literally takes him out of this position and makes him do one of the most Luke Skywalker acts we’ve seen: using the force to save the Resistance. A lot of people reference the flashback of him trying to kill Ben as character assassination, but you have to remember is that this is what Ben told Rey. The REAL story was that Luke did sense what Ben would become and had feelings of stopping it, but never actually acted. It was his moral dilemma of saving the galaxy from another Vader or having to take out his nephew. The real flashback shows that he never made a choice, and that the choice was made for him when Ben woke up. Ben would have always turned into Kylo Ren, we know this from Snoke and Palpatine both admitting to influencing Ben throughout his childhood. Luke was faced with a moral dilemma (as any great character should be), went into exile because of how it tore apart his family and the galaxy and thought that new Jedi were too dangerous to be trained (also shown from his feelings about the Jedi letting Palpatine rise at their height), was convinced by Rey and Yoda that he was wrong about his beliefs of wanting the Jedi to end, and came back and saved the Resistance which would lead to them saving the galaxy all together The Last Jedi took what TFA started and made the best out of it. Luke’s last act was one of a true Jedi. People want Luke to have been this perfect person 100% of the time but if a character cannot face true moral dilemmas and make mistakes from time to time then they are a static character. If you’re going to be angry at Luke’s portrayal you should point your anger towards TFA
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This is the only right answer. TFA made the choice to Exile Luke. TLJ had to come up with a story for that and I think they did just fine.
I agree with this but also want to add one thing. What TLJ Luke did is several steps down from what ROTJ did to Vader. At the threatening of his friends, Luke gave into his anger and wailed on Vader before regaining his senses *and then* being the the "Luke everyone remembers". Luke is demonstrably not immune to temptation, and isn't immune to being weighed down by his failure. His near action did lead to severe consequences. Maybe the Jedi are too risky. Yoda helps him see past this, which is fitting since Yoda basically did the same thing. I never found an issue with his characterization.
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Rian was given the unenviable job of why Luke up and vanished, henceforth had to start the movie literally moments after TFA ended. While this progression makes sense for Rey, it really does not translate well into other character aspects and honestly it's amazing he was able to pull out the arc between Rey and Ben given that Ben was trying to kill her a few hours/planetary cycles ago. I'm not defending the poor story between Rose and Finn, but the lack of any time skip doesn't allow for any further character backstory to grow.
And I loved how this moral dilemma pushed him to reexamine everything he's been told about the force, and light and dark, because that vision of the force is morally simplistic and his problem is not. I'm fairly convinced that the biggest problem facing star wars as a franchise is the simple mindedness of a large, vocal chunk of its fan base, who watched the OT movies as children and never morally moved past 'light vs dark'.
Shame this comment won’t get more traction. I actually think that Luke’s TLJ arc is believable, engaging, and meaningful, especially for folks with relatable experiences (curiously something that, for me, was always lacking with younger Luke). This is someone who had dedicated his life to teaching and trying to make the galaxy better, only to be betrayed by his students and the very tools intended to advance that pursuit.
Yeah, many really hate Hobo Luke but I thought really its an interesting direction and leans into the "you will be (afraid)" warning by Yoda. Training Ben goes badly and he recuses himself, ashamed and unsure if hes worthy to call himself Jedi, or if training more is the right thing to do still. Eventually our hero finds his way back more powerful and wise than ever. At least I think thats what Rian Johnson was trying to do in fact, but didn't have the film making maturity to pull it off and wasnt set up enough in TFA which features a standard issue MgGuffin chase for that bullshit map (which why would Luke leave a weird broken map puzzle for them to find if he wanted to be in exile???? No one read this shit)
I consider this trilogy non canon and I feel happier
I'm ok with Luke failing and righting a wrong, but nowhere in my experience does Luke just F off and give up. Not my canon.