Khaos
Baguette, wine and cheese
Please explain better, I read your questions a few times and it seems to me I answered them entirely.
Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
- Thread starter tankdrop24
- Start date
- Movies
Um we tell pilots to fly their aircraft into enemies all the time. We just call them missiles, or if you want to go age of sail we call them fire ships. We have the entire trade federation to show us that robots can fly ships. Now I'm sure the EU is going to patch this up but the movie doesn't do anything to fix the hole. It is an almost textbook example of a fridge logic moment. It works and works beautifully in the moment but once that moment is past you have so many questions and the movie doesn't give you answers. As a nitpicking nerd that bothers me, in part because like one or two lines could have shut up the nitpicking part of my brain.
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
if all it would take is one or two lines then my dude I think the problem is not with the film
RoboRenee
Trans of gender
- Location
- FFXIV, probably
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yes, of course, you could remove any one or two lines from any film and not cause problems.
What makes you say that? A line or two can be very powerful in the right place. Most of the background world building in movies is done with a few lines or just dot jpeg on someone's screen. You can have someone's entire backstory reframed by a single line. What you say is powerful and also not saying something is also powerful. The difference between a good scene and a great scene can come down to a single line easily. Saying a scene could be better with a small change is pretty much the most uncontroversial thing you can say in movie criticism.
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
yeah cuz what Star Wars is really missing is fucking technobabble exposition
We're not talking about "I am your father" we're talking about "okay class now open your Hyperspace Physics book to chapter seventeen"
Ser_Serendipity
Building Character
You don't have to be snippy. It would have been nice to get a solid reason as to why Holdo chose to ram while the escorting ships who were shot down didn't. Even if we can infer one from the movie (and will probably get a concrete one in the novelization), it still would have been convenient/interesting.
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
The snark was more towards Lunatic for being a smartass.
I wouldn't be surprised if out of the 30 minutes of cut footage there was some offhand remark about hyperspace ramming, but given how fucking long the movie already is I also wouldn't wonder why it was on the cutting block.
Which is why when David Weber interrupted a chase scene in On Baskilisk station to explain how is ftl system works it didn't ruin the pacing of the book.
Edit: I know the books are terrible. Which is kinda why I chose it.
Last edited:
You are pushing what I want so far down the field I can't see it thanks to the curvature of the earth. In a movie with cloaked shuttles, cloak scans, hyperspace scanners, angeling deflector shields to the rear, and transgalactic homing beacons all explained with a single line another single line that says anything from 'she can't be doing that it is a 1 in a million shot' to 'I wonder if you know you can't stop this while your hyperspace scanner is on' is not some unheard of technobabble exposition. Hell make it another thing where the New Order are useless idiots as that would help with one of the themes of the film.
- Location
- United States
I'm still waiting for your rebuttal. Any time, champ.
Vyslanté
The self is a prison
- Location
- European Union
Who care about pacing when you can have technical details?Which is why when David Weber interrupted a chase scene in On Baskilisk station to explain how is ftl system works it didn't ruin the pacing of the book.
Edit: I know the books are terrible. Which is kinda why I chose it.
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
how about the both of you take this unresolved sexual tension to PMs where the rest of us don't have to watch
- Location
- United States
Hey, I'm willing if @changeling is.
Aw, too bad. I was looking forward to you actually contributing something of substance for a change. Oh well, maybe next time.
- Location
- Reno, NV
Still not destroyed. Damaged, beyond repair? Maybe. It is unknown. 2/3rds of the ship is still hanging around. The damage to one side is severe but the elevators and trams still worked across the majority of the ship, or how else did Hux get up to Kylo in the throne room, and how did they get to the shuttle? How did the AT-ATs, Gorilla Walkers and Battering Ram from the Supremacy to the planet? There was an entire Star Destroyer still docked with the Supremacy on the other side of the ship. Given that the Supremacy was designed to be a mobile Star Destroyer repair ship, the First Order could easily drag it over to Crait's orbit and just turn it into a Space Station. Sure it isn't a Ship anymore but it still serves a valuable function. This is also assuming that it would not be repaired, given enough funds and dedication.
You have to assume that Holdo was aiming for the center of the Supremacy, that way if it tried to dodge, there was still a good chance she would still hit it. Say she hit a third of the way down the right side of the Supremacy. A third of 30 km (half the ship's width) is 10 KM. The Resurgent-class Star Destroyer (the First Order's go to Star Destroyer class) is half as wide as it is long. So it is basically 3 km long, so it would be 1.5 km wide. If Holdo missed center mass of the Supremacy by 10 km, she would have thus wildly missed a Resurgent-class Star Destroyer.
Why do you think the Supremacy was designed to be 60 kilometers wide when all other Imperial/First Order ships are longer than they are wide? The whole point was to make it easier to justify the ramming. Its no different than what the creators of Star Trek Beyond did with the neck of the Enterprise. They made it thinner to justify something bad that happened to the Enterprise.
And Rey not only pilots a speeder regularly, but *knew the course*.
Kokurokoki
"IDW DA NYA!"
- Location
- Area S09
Warning For Marginal Behavior - Spaghetti Posting
Which is why Kylo is fighting just fine against both Finn and Rey until Rey decides to pull a deus ex machina with force powers that she hasn't trained at all and didn't even know was a thing until like 3 days ago and suddenly overpowers him despite having no formal training in both dueling or force sensitivity.
Which is wrong because said knowledge can be passed down though Force Ghosts, which Luke can communicate with due to his high force sensitivity. Yes, it might be degraded due to the lack of practical learning tools, but as we saw from TFA Kylo is implied to be proficient with the saber as well as the force.
"A lot of energy" with less than a month of training doesn't let you beat people with far more training and experience than you.
I'm fairly sure this is universally regarded as one of the worst scenes in the entirety of the SW franchise. Many fans were not fine with it and is one of the reasons why the prequel trilogies are criticized by fans. Rey doing something similar along those lines makes her just as worse and gender has nothing to do with it.
He's had years of experience fighting in wars and piloting starships, and specifically stated that his ability to fly the ship was irrelevant. Also, given that the CIS ship has drag fins it is implied to be atmosphere-capable. Not to mention that in Anakin's case, he has prior knowledge on starships to fallback on and the scene showcases his quick-thinking and ability to adapt to situations.
Where does he outfly anyone? He takes down a few TIE fighters, but the TIE fighters also decimate most of the Rebel fighters sent to destroy it. Wedge also has to save him from being shot down. In the end he had to be saved by not only Han Solo, but Obi-Wan's force ghost. Not to mention it's implied that he had been flying for a good part of his life. The T-16s that he flew on Tatooine are very similar to the X-Wings in how they control, which is noted by Biggs in the radio drama. Said airspeeders were also used by the Rebel Alliance to train their pilots.
The audience already knows that you can use the force to grab people through Darth Vader. Luke has also been training in the force for almost a year now at this point, and him using telekinesis is a brief show of character development that plays off of the final scene in the first film where Ben helps him to use the force to destroy the Death Star and when he was training to use the force in the first film.
Darth Vader is trolling Luke throughout most of the fight and trying to turn him to the dark side. Luke gets one lucky glancing blow against Vader. One. On the other hand Vader destroys Luke throughout the entirety of the fight and they clearly show the difference not only in mastery of the saber but mastery of the force.
Rey has no practical experience flying a ship. She straight up says she's never flown before. You don't just get into the cockpit of a ship and suddenly fly it. Even in Anakin's case with the pod racer, it's heavily implied that he'd been working on it for a long while and would know all the intricacies of the controls. And he's one of the worst examples of bad writing in the prequel movies.
Pulling ships apart for scrap does not make you a mechanic or an engineer. And from what I remember it's never implied anywhere in the film that she's been watching Unkar Platt modify it. FYI hyperdrives are not easy to fix. Even in Episode 1 they had to go around looking for junk parts in Mos Eisley to fix their ship. In ESB Han is essentially trying to MacGuyver the hyperdrive without any spare parts while also being chased by both the Empire and the bounty hunters they hired.
Rey has no Force training. None. She didn't even know the force existed until a few days ago. She's not a Jedi, she's not a padawan, she wasn't even a student from Ren's purge that Luke managed to save and hid away (which would have made for an amazing plotline btw compared to the one we got). How does she know how to suddenly use mind tricks, which are generally a more advanced technique that you don't learn without sufficient mastery over the force?
And no, Rey doesn't defeat Kylo Ren with superior fighting skills. She beats him because she pulls a deus ex machina with force powers despite having absolutely no training or experience with it, but is able to somehow buff herself with the force without any outside help or any prior training because she closes her eyes and thinks really hard.
Exactly. She had two days of unsupervised training that she did in her spare time not knowing what the fuck she was doing because she has no goddamned knowledge of actual saber techniques. So she essentially wasted all of her time swinging randomly at the air and hitting rocks. How does this let her overpower elite guards in charge of protecting VIPs? How does this let her fight almost on par with Kylo Ren, who has been religiously training with the saber and the force for years and dedicated nearly his entire childhood and teenage years to doing so while training under someone who has direct access to former masters via Force Ghosts? I guess Rey was just so good that she could instantly teach herself lightsaber techniques in the spare time of two days that she had to practice and then instantly put it into practice without any practical applications. This is totally not bullshit and is excellent and clever writing done by masters of their craft, right?
Yeah it's totally not because Rey is a poorly written character in a poorly written movie series made to do nothing but print money. People are just being totally misogynistic and afraid of the downfall of their patriarchy. Yeah, let's just keep crying misogyny because we can't have people criticizing our stronk female characters.
What makes it hilarious is that you think just because Luke and Anakin could get away with bad writing, that it's totally okay for newer protags--more specifically in your case, female protags since you want to turn this into a gender politics issue so much--to get away with it now too. Are we just not gonna hold newer films to a higher standard of writing now either?
Last edited:
I'm not going to do a blow by blow comparison between Star Wars protagonists, others have done this better than I can, but let me tell you more accurately where I'm coming from. Based on my view of the movies, this is how I see the Force : it's a kind of mystical energy field permeating most things. Force sensitive tends to be more immersed or more filled with it, take the image you prefer, than others. The Force gift its wielders with a general boost to their physical and mental abilities : all of them have faster reflexes and a great awareness of their surroundings and sometimes outright precognition. Those things can be improved with training and meditation. Such training can lead to the creation of specific uses of the force : mind trick, force push etc. But anyone gifted with a particularly great connection with the Force can emulate those without the required training, such as Chosen Ones like Anakin or Rey, the Force having selected them for a purpose it will make them or help them accomplish.
Consequently all main characters of SW are Mary/Gary Sue in the sense of the criticism heaped on Rey, and so, none of them are. If you condemn all the protagonists of SW as a bad case of the Sue syndrome or even if you say that Rey is a new level in this it's one thing, and not necessarily incorrect, but pointing to Rey as the sole offender of this seems wrong to me.
Edit : Also, the Force is a field of energy with a will of its own, so it basically guide its wielders in a way that supplement any kind of lack of training when needed. Which doesn't negate the need for training, meditation and such to attain the kind of connection with it that permit such effective and direct guidance, if one doesn't have a naturally deep connection with the Force.
Last edited:
- Location
- Reno, NV
If Ben were fighting just fine, then he would have cut Rey down without issue, not to mention a non-Force sensitive Finn.
Dude got shot with a Bowcaster and lived. Without wearing armor. His Stormtroopers were blown away by one hit, not to mention the fact that they were wearing armor.
We have no explicit mention of Obi-Wan or Yoda appearing to Luke and helping him train after they died. In fact, if they had been present to council Luke, I am pretty sure Ben never would have fallen to the Dark Side because Luke would have had mentors to seek guidance from when he first started thinking something was off with Ben.
If Obi could manifest and stay there for long periods of time, why would he not sit Luke down after A New Hope and train him?
Ser_Serendipity
Building Character
A. How do you know the Praetorians have any combat experience, or anything about their training, for that matter. You're just assuming they're hardened killers or something to make yourself angrier.
B. When you're using the Force, "a lot of energy" will take you a long way. Luke managed to clear an entire barge of Jabba's goons almost singlehandedly with no real lightsaber training, not to mention blocked three bullets while blind from point blank range despite "just having been told what the Force was."
Like, dude, step back, take stock.
Also this a lie. She says she's never flown "out of atmosphere" before. Just one thing I noticed: I probably missed several other inaccuracies. She also says "We've got one!" when Finn tells her they need a pilot, pointing to herself, so you missed two critical bits of exposition.
Last edited:
Their roles and movement do suggest strong fighters... that said, why are people acting like Rey's never trained to fight before? She handled multiple people with ease pre-force-powers in TFA. Rey's style is a bit rough, but that's 'school of hard knocks' fighting she's got. And now she's got force and some more practice behind it too.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It is completely reasonable to assume that the emperor's praetorian guard are well trained badasses.
Criticizing Rey as a sue for fighting them is still dumb, especially since the film goes out of it's way to show kylo as more skilled and effective during that fight and Rey struggling with one of them, but your argument is ridiculous.
Rey is a capable enough combatant pre force training, is better once trained, and her first duel with Kylo features him regularly slamming on his own bleeding gut wound to keep from falling unconscious and keep himself functional with dark side juice on account of just eating a hit with a fucking bowcaster.
Last edited:
Ser_Serendipity
Building Character
I don't think it's inherently so. The youth and lack of experience of the First Order is a big thing throughout the movie: I kinda assumed from the get-go that the Praetorians were more for show than actual effective guards, though they put up a pretty good fight against Ben and Rey, so... I dunno.
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
Violation of Rule 3: Be Civil
I'm honestly too tired to dig through the rest of your spaghetti, but I want to highlight the exact issue at play here as demonstrated in these two posts.
None of this is in the movies. Nowhere does anyone ever point out that Luke's T-16 is similar to an X-wing, or mention that Luke has been training super hard for years, or any of the other entirely reasonable explanations for this stuff. Yet whenever complaints arise people are quick to go "oh it's fine because *ancillary shit that was not in the films*" because Luke Skywalker's entire existence is inherently reasonable and deserve every benefit of the doubt.
Contrast with Rey, whose abilities are painstakingly justified in the films themselves but are immediately decried as outrageous, who is not allowed a tenth of the benefit of the doubt or supplementary explanations that Luke gets, who accomplishes a fraction of what Luke gets away with in his debut but is accused of being overpowered.
It's painfully obvious what the actual issue is, and I'm honestly so fucking done entertaining the fantasy that it's honest criticism two goddamn years after it should have died. It's sexism. It's always been sexism and it will never not be sexism. It's the same shit women have to deal with in the real world from insecure men who feel threatened by halfway competent women, and I was a thundering dumbass for believing the complaints would die down and people would move on and grow up.
Rey is not a Mary Sue. Die mad about it.