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Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi

Mal-3 said:
It's not like George was ever particularly subtle about the politics of either the OT or the PT. George, bless him, figured that basic political messages like "fascism is evil and needs to be opposed at every turn" were a priori statements that everybody would accept.
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And, y'know, a prequel trilogy so topical about using Nixon and the politics of the 70's as direct inspiration for its descent into fascism that in 2005 everybody was asking if it was inspired by the Bush administration.

Neutral to contemporary politics the prequel trilogy wasn't, it was basically one big diatribe against war profiteering and executive power increases handwaved by paper tiger military threats.
 
Night said:
Hitler was a guy ranting and making overblown gestures who acted like a petulant child more than once. Does this somehow lessen the effort required to defeat him in the historical record?

Given enough power, an incompetent does more damage by using their power badly. A competent person would be more careful, more surgical, use proportionate force, have sensible objectives.
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He had competent people under him, though. We have yet to have any solid examples of anyone doing consistently competent stuff under Hux to show how the first order is a threat. If everyone was as troubled as Hux or Kylo, there'd be very little threat by the FO, because nothing would get done.
 
The OT Empire wasn't exactly a bastion of competence; most of the upper echelons were incompetent (Ozzel, Krennic), yes-men (Piett, Jerjorrod), or over-confident to the point of arrogance (Tarkin).
 
Chronologist said:
The OT Empire wasn't exactly a bastion of competence; most of the upper echelons were incompetent (Ozzel, Krennic), yes-men (Piett, Jerjorrod), or over-confident to the point of arrogance (Tarkin).
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And let us not forget the Imperial Stormtroopers, who had precisely one good showing on the Tantative IV and had miserable failures with occasional excuses the rest of the trilogy. First Order stormtroopers at least rank occasional miniboss status.
 
Mal-3 said:
Counterargument (which I think I might've made before? Or someone's made before, it's been a long fucking thread...): There is a marked tendency within SW fandom in particular but also the larger set of science fiction/fantasy fandom in general to glorify and fetishize the trappings of fascism. The snappy uniforms, the striking emblems, the legions of imposing-looking soldiers all marching in lockstep, all of that stuff is meant to reinforce that the legion of doom is powerful and inevitable. It's very easy to get swept up in the pageantry of fascism and think "maybe I don't agree with these guys 100% but clearly they're doing something right" -- which is exactly the point. They want people to think of them as mighty, because that's part of how they draw recruits and also how they cow dissent.

The truth of course is considerably different. The classical fascists were buffoons. Murderous buffoons who rampaged across Europe before finally being put down, yes, but the depths of their cruelty and atrocities doesn't obscure the fact that most of them didn't exactly have their shit together. Their cosplaying grandchildren are even worse in the having-their-shit-together department, thank fuck. Most of these people would have difficulty organizing a pissup in a brewery, and the main reason they get as far as they do is because of complacency or outside forces thinking they're useful idiots.

What does this have to do with the NT, and TLJ in particular? Well, I think that the greatest strength -- and at least where some of this massive fanCHUD ire originates -- of the NT is that it strips that fascist mystique away from the First Order. None of these people come off as cool or calculating, they're a collection of opportunists, barely-competent world burners and people for whom world-burning is a shade too rational. We look beneath the crimson banners and shiny uniforms and see a bunch of children throwing a tantrum with live weapons. Even as they break the Republic and whittle down the Resistance we see the true nature of the First Order and instead of being attracted to the powerful we're repulsed by how petty they are. The NT teaches us that things like the Empire and the First Order may be worthy of our caution, they are in no ways worthy of our respect. And that I think drives a certain class of fan absolutely fucking nuts.

But that's their problem.
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The main problem I have with the above is that while the general objective of making fascists look as ridiculous as they actually are is laudable, the execution in the ST is woefully lacking.

Actual fascists and fascist regimes are absurd and cartoonish and stupid and dangerous to large numbers of human beings because the one area they have some competence in is killing job lots of people, and regrettably managing to do so frequently when some of those people are fighting back.

A lot of the time, the First Order can't even manage that last bit.

In TLJ, the First Order wasted most of one woman's private army of, what, 800 people in three capital ships, but at a hilariously poor rate of return in lives and heavy metal. I don't know what the crew compliment of a Resurgence class Star Destroyer is but losing 7 of them, quite possibly with all hands, to one lady and one capital ship probably isn't a great trade indicative of military acumen.

They are less able and even more bufoonish than the Empire in the only area where fascist regimes can do anything with any sort of consistency i.e. murder, and as such I end up wondering how clown shoes literally everyone who fought them had to be to lose.

If a movie villain makes you wonder repeatedly at the stupidity of your heroes because said villain's painful inability to do anything right most of the time doesn't stop them nigh-totally crushing said heroes, you probably need to go back to the drawing board unless you're aiming for black comedy.



(and before anyone mentions the Republic getting blown up by a giant anti-planet planet-gun, centralising your Galactic government and armed forces on and around one star system whilst ignoring your sworn mortal enemies so totally that they can make a third anti-planet gunplanet to blow all your stuff up at once by surprise suggests more that you are an idiot, rather than imputing any masterful ability to your foes.)

(TL;DR the Republic and the Resistance look pretty fucking clownshoes at this point because they lost and keep losing to people who are so very much more dweebish than the already hugely dweebish Empire)
 
Night said:
Hitler was a guy ranting and making overblown gestures who acted like a petulant child more than once. Does this somehow lessen the effort required to defeat him in the historical record?
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"I wanna thank Hitler, for being such a funny guy on stage."
-Mel Brooks

Felt it was sort of apropos.

In all seriousness, people like the Empire the same way we would like other villains: because they look cool, are a credible threat (or are so unthreatening that it winds back to being hilarious), and (almost parodixically) aren't repulsive.

That last one seems odd, but it's the reason Disney Villains are a brand that give the corporation millions. They aren't so evil that you don't feel bad for enjoying their screen time. It helps that the Empire aren't shown explicitly to be nazis. Sure they have a bunch of fascist designs and iconography, but only the background fluff goes into their human supremacy and Palpatine's only similarity to Hitler that I can see is that he legally transformed his republican government into a totalitarian dictatorship.

Thus, the Empire kind of escapes stigma for most people, and it's made pretty clear that they're the bad guys when they blow up a planet full of sentient human life. No amount of "better for the galactic economy" can change that.

As for the First Order, they don't have an ideology anyway. They have EVEN MORE Nazi iconography and theatrics (including half the Hydra salute), but their Stormtroopers aren't fed any doctrine beyond "obey." Kylo Ren also doesn't care about ideology, not really joining for a reason bigger than to get back at Luke.

Tl;dr: The bad guys are only tangentially Nazi-like, that's why people want the bad guys to be threatening. That's also why Disney can parade Stormtroopers around Disneyland (but they REALLY shouldn't...I mean geez...)

(Please note, a good chunk of this was taken from Youtuber Lindsay Ellis [formerly The Nostalgia Chick] and her video on Disney Villains and The Ideology of the First Order).



 
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The Imperator said:
Yet the First Order managed to infiltrate the Republic, keep it preoccupied, and run an empire thats can produce some of the biggest war machines in the history of the galaxy, but they seem like petulant kids.

How, exactly, did they manage all that while barely being able to comprehend a prank call? Or be unable to stop of a single fighter from destroying lots of gun emplacements on their prized ship?

They dont need to be cool, but I want believable foes for my heroes to conquer. Foes that pose an actual challenge rather than a contrived challenge.

I enjoy seeing fascists broken, brought down, dashed against the rocks of fate like a pathetic wave. But I want those fascists to think they have it together before it all breaks and I get to gleefully watch their miserable lives break as their ideals fail them. I dont want them incapable of figuring out a prank call and failing to stop a single fighter.

Edit: was just at the holocaust museum in DC today, sorry that last but came off as a little overdramatic. It always boils my blood that it took so long to do something about the Nazis, and I guess that carried over here
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IIRC it was most due to the efforts of Rae Sloane to effectively pull the scattered forces of the Empire together to flee to the far corners of the Galaxy. Honestly it'd be super rewarding if Star Wars 9 opens with her, played by Viola Davis or Angela Bassett, just running down Hux and Ren as the two biggest chucklefucks she's ever seen. I'd love to see how the "true fans" react to seeing that.
 
I liked TLJ a lot. Not a perfect film, but certainly a daring one (especially compared with TFA).

I loved R1 when I saw it, and still do.

TFA is a film I think a little less of every time I think about it, to the degree that I now dislike it despite finding it okay when it came out.

I dislike the ST as whole thanks to everything fucking JayJay did to poison the well by going back to Empire vs Rebels 2.0 and undercutting the OT's accomplishments.


As for the competence debate...how do I put this? The original Empire was never really a bastion of hypercompetence, that much is true. And a certain degree of carelessness on the part of the villains is to enable the victory of the good guys is acceptable. But making the villains completely bufoonish and ineffectual in the name of "stripping away the mysticism of fascism" strikes me as anathema to good drama.

And the First Order were...pretty much completely undercut as a threat to the heroes by the end of TFA (Kylo Ren accomplishing little of note, Phasma tossed into the rubbish chute, stormtroopers failing to achieve victory over anything other than a village of civilians, Snoke being an empty pastiche etc). TLJ gave Snoke some actual personality and made Kylo Ren into an actually interesting character, but it largely continued the thread of the FO being a wannabe Empire that fails to live up to its predeccor. Heck, it even threw in Captain Canady, a silver fox ex-Imperial with a modicum of competence, to contrast with Hux and the other neo-Imperials!

Granted, in fiction we routinely have faith that the heroes will win in the end. But the thing about well written stories is that they can test our faith (assuming the bad guys don't outright win, as in Stover's RotS novelization). Thanks to the shaky foundations laid by TFA, the First Order just doesn't do it for me.
 
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VolantRedX said:
IIRC it was most due to the efforts of Rae Sloane to effectively pull the scattered forces of the Empire together to flee to the far corners of the Galaxy. Honestly it'd be super rewarding if Star Wars 9 opens with her, played by Viola Davis or Angela Bassett, just running down Hux and Ren as the two biggest chucklefucks she's ever seen. I'd love to see how the "true fans" react to seeing that.
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If Snoke didn't "demote" her.

Mechasaurian said:
I liked TLJ a lot. Not a perfect film, but certainly a daring one (especially compared with TFA).

I loved R1 when I saw it, and still do.

TFA is a film I think a little less of every time I think about it, to the degree that I now dislike it despite finding it okay when it came out.

I dislike the ST as whole thanks to everything fucking JayJay did to poison the well by going back to Empire vs Rebels 2.0 and undercutting the OT's accomplishments.
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I disagree with the first one. The more and more I think about it, TLJ gets worse and worse (and I'm starting to become aware of how big an issue a tone problem is in a narrative. I'll still take it over Jar Jar any day). I still like it, but I can't look at it quite the same way.

I agree with R1, whatever weakness in the first/second act (and there weren't too many), it was wiped away in the third.

TFA I like as a film and it doesn't have as much of a tone problem, still being the most genuinely funny of the ST. I do, however, hate what it represents and the problems that came from it made TLJ a worse film for it. If it took more risks and really put effort into its post-ROTJ world building (rather than JJ doing his thing and not thinking things through), TLJ might have had a better reception.
 
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Mechasaurian said:
I liked TLJ a lot. Not a perfect film, but certainly a daring one (especially compared with TFA).

I loved R1 when I saw it, and still do.

TFA is a film I think a little less of every time I think about it, to the degree that I now dislike it despite finding it okay when it came out.

I dislike the ST as whole thanks to everything fucking JayJay did to poison the well by going back to Empire vs Rebels 2.0 and undercutting the OT's accomplishments.


As for the competence debate...how do I put this? The original Empire was never really a bastion of hypercompetence, that much is true. And a certain degree of carelessness on the part of the villains is to enable the victory of the good guys is acceptable. But making the villains completely bufoonish and ineffectual in the name of "stripping away the mysticism of fascism" strikes me as anathema to good drama.

And the First Order were...pretty much completely undercut as a threat to the heroes by the end of TFA (Kylo Ren accomplishing little of note, Phasma tossed into the rubbish chute, stormtroopers failing to achieve victory over anything other than a village of civilians, Snoke being an empty pastiche etc). TLJ gave Snoke some actual personality and made Kylo Ren into an actually interesting character, but it largely continued the thread of the FO being a wannabe Empire that fails to live up to its predeccor. Heck, it even threw in Captain Canady, a silver fox ex-Imperial with a modicum of competence, to contrast with Hux and the other neo-Imperials!

Granted, in fiction we routinely have faith that the heroes will win in the end. But the thing about well written stories is that they can test our faith (assuming the bad guys don't outright win, as in Stover's RotS novelization). Thanks to the shaky foundations laid by TFA, the First Order just doesn't do it for me.
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This is such a minor point, but can we at least not use ridiculous nicknames like "Jar Jar Abrams" or "Jay Jay"? Even if you weren't too hot on TFA or think it's problems hamper TLJ, you can do it without resorting to C+ schoolyard nicknames.
 
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Arthur Frayn said:
This is such a minor point, but can we at least not use ridiculous nicknames like "Jar Jar Abrams" or "Jay Jay"? Even if you weren't too hot on TFA or think it's problems hamper TLJ, you can do it without resorting to C+ schoolyard nicknames.
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I think when he's saying he'd take it over Jar Jar any day, he's talking about the Prequels, or at least Phantom Menace.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
Oof, my mistake @WC-83, edited.
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No worries. But yeah, one reason why I didn't care about the tone problem at first was because I was the kid who liked Jar Jar too much, and me liking the genuinely funny humor of the ST is my penance. They should have thought about it more though, and TFA for what its worth had a consistent tone and knew when to joke and didn't flip between it too much and too hard.
 
If the First Order is "completely ineffectual" for killing 99% of the Resistance, I'd hate to see "actually competent."

They're enormously powerful. They're also, individually, arrogant idiots. This shouldn't be a very novel or shocking villain setup in general (it's hardly original), let alone for Americans in the modern day.
 
Ser_Serendipity said:
If the First Order is "completely ineffectual" for killing 99% of the Resistance, I'd hate to see "actually competent."

They're enormously powerful. They're also, individually, arrogant idiots. This shouldn't be a very novel or shocking villain setup in general (it's hardly original), let alone for Americans in the modern day.
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I never said they were completely ineffectual (not personally), but I will say the source of their power is suspect. They are a hermit state that needs to kidnap their Stormtroopers and are on short on man-power so they ditched their expendable troop doctrine in favor of making things bigger and more powerful to compensate for their fewer number, yet somehow had enough resources and manpower to carve out AN ENTIRE PLANET to make into a Starkiller Base that can kill solar systems. That's the thing that gave them the power, but even after it's been destroyed and a good chunk of manpower gone, they still have enough ships to take over the galaxy.

Also, conveniently, all the Republic's military was in the solar system, and no one else had enough ships to fight the First Order, leaving them cowed even though the source of much of their power was lost.

It honestly would have been better if Starkiller Base was handled differently, like if they were unable to destroy it with just X-Wings and its existence causes the surrender of the Republic and other systems in fear that their system would be next, like how the Death Star was meant to be.
 
Southshore said:
That's bullshit. People were practically desperate to have their concerns over the film be addressed. The only messages coming out of Lucasfilm and the media is that critics of the film are racist/sexist. If you raise valid criticisms and concerns and they go unacknowledged, while insults are hurled out in general what are you supposed to think? That as far as they're concerned, the only critics of the film that exist are racists and sexists.

That the movie is perfect and if you don't think so you must be one of these people. That's the game the studio is playing. It's very obvious that many people are upset or disillusioned with Star Wars now, but rather than try any kind of damage control, to mend fences, they're doubling down.
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Nooo, not really. They responded to some very notable harassment, and otherwise just remained quiet on the rest.

Most directors and studios don't respond to reviews. Period, not in any significant fashion. They thank fans and such, they listen to some complaints and work it into their plans, which might include a comment, when the next movie rolls around, about "we listened to fan comments and think they'll like what we're doing next," but they don't publicly respond to them in detail. There's absolutely no reason to think they would respond to normal criticisms- because very few do that and it's actually pretty unprofessional to do so, especially while working on the next one- or their response to attacks on actors and such was responding to that.

They responded to harassment. If you chose them responding to that as an attack against you, that's you, choosing to do so, not them aiming it at you.

They aren't playing a game, you're the one playing a game by choosing to decide specific comments are aimed at you despite it being really obvious who they're aimed at and why.
 
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VolantRedX said:



Honestly the people willing to talk about the actual flaws of the film are rarely the people who think the film is awful. Sure they might not like the film, but the failures it does have are really no different than in any of the other Star Wars films. In fact stuff like pacing and worldbuilding have always been a weakness of the franchise. The only thing the people who constantly rag on the film have to complain about is the fact that the main leads are either women or POC. The people who call for boycotts or demand Lucasarts gets full control again seem monofocused on the perceived political message that has non-male non-white heroes.
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Kinda disagree. The pacing was much worse for TLJ than ANH or ESB. RotJ and rogue One, much as I love them, were the same though- all first and third act, no middle.

Worldbuilding for TFA was also very clearly inferior to the original trilogy, to the point where it became a Sysphean trial for Rian Johnson to pick up where JJ left off.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
And let us not forget the Imperial Stormtroopers, who had precisely one good showing on the Tantative IV and had miserable failures with occasional excuses the rest of the trilogy. First Order stormtroopers at least rank occasional miniboss status.
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This is an exaggeration. They won big at Hoth and managed to hound Luke and the droids all the way to Hans hangar. Also, they were explicitly ordered, on screen, to let Han and friends go on the death Star, likewise on Bespin they were almost certainly ordered not to kill Luke.

And the ewoks, cute as they are, are the brightest and most vicious soldiers in the entire series. Losing to the cuddly viet cong isn't as big a blemish as you seem to make it out.:p
 
Undead Martyr said:
Kinda disagree. The pacing was much worse for TLJ than ANH or ESB. RotJ and rogue One, much as I love them, were the same though- all first and third act, no middle.

Worldbuilding for TFA was also very clearly inferior to the original trilogy, to the point where it became a Sysphean trial for Rian Johnson to pick up where JJ left off.
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I actually think the problem with RotJ it has a featurette instead of a first act.
 
Undead Martyr said:
This is an exaggeration. They won big at Hoth and managed to hound Luke and the droids all the way to Hans hangar. Also, they were explicitly ordered, on screen, to let Han and friends go on the death Star, likewise on Bespin they were almost certainly ordered not to kill Luke.

And the ewoks, cute as they are, are the brightest and most vicious soldiers in the entire series. Losing to the cuddly viet cong isn't as big a blemish as you seem to make it out.:p
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Ewoks are multi-domain warriors.
 
Hux is dangerous because he has a starship with big guns. That's all he needs to be threatening from a narrative standpoint and anything else is just quibbling over personal taste of what an antagonist should be. There's no rule in Zapp Brannigans big book of filmmaking saying that the villain needs to be scary or badass or competent.

The kind of antagonists Hux, Snoke, and Kylo are; namely a joke at the expense of fascism, a stock villain who exists solely to suffer for his own hubris, and a sad angry fuckboi acting out of his neuroses are all perfectly valid and viable villain archetypes.

Undead Martyr said:
Kinda disagree. The pacing was much worse for TLJ than ANH or ESB
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Making the comparison as a negative towards TLJ is kinda bullshit considering that TLJ was by necessity one half of a movie awkwardly bolted onto another full movie because the first movie didn't do it's job of while ANH and ESB were pretty functional as standalone movies and had no particular reason to not be smoother.
 
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On TLJ's story structure, I'm a fan of the four act model of its story. It gives a little more breathing room to how the story flows, especially considering how much Rian Johnson had to add to build upon TFA, and definitely puts complaints of "too much third act" in a better light—rather than being exhausted by a drawn out climax from the event on the Supremacy through the Battle of Crait, treating Crait as a separate act with different story goals helps the story's flow sit better in my mind.
 
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