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Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi

Kodiak said:
Film is a craft as well as an art, it's possible to have objective criticism. Sometimes things aren't done to craft expectations or broad consensus in the medium is that it is not done well. Examples:

-- "C plot just disappears without resolution,"
-- "B plot romance is missing logical scenes, why?"
-- "story lacks active protagonist,"
-- "deus ex machina, not previously established,"
-- "story is strictly formula,"
-- "random fight/chase, no stakes"
-- "editing has continuity errors,"
-- "actors static/poorly directed"
-- "primatively shot, does not use color filters or camera movement"

An objective criticism of the theatrical Battle of the Five Armies would be "so where the hell did the goats they're riding come from?" Obvious deus ex machina (we need fast animals) and continuity error. It's just bad.

Where criticism gets beyond objective is where someone has taste/choice issues or has an axe to grind such that any decision the filmmakers made is wrong.
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Absolutely.

I happen to think a lot of the TLJ "objective" criticism ends up being people with an axe to grind. :V
 
So, i saw a video a while back that argued the opening to the movie doesn't work because Leia must have approved.of Poe's plan for the other fighters and bombers to be ready and in formation, so it doesnt make sense that she suddenly doesn't approve anymore when he follows through with the plan.

Fair enough, but I have a potential counter argument.

Basically, the plan was proposed and approved before the Dreadnought arrived. The original plan was to distract the star destroyers while the transports got everyone off the ground and into hyperspace. Then the Dreadnought showed up and now the FO had more than enough anti-fighter capacity to make any sort of attack a suicide mission.

Leia then let Poe do the distraction part, because that was still something that could be pulled off relatively safely.
 
Reveen said:
Why do they need to be a convincing villain? The entire point of the conflict being a bunch of political economic bullshit is that the Jedi aren't heroes who save the day. They were the Republics goon squad.
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Well they could have been not coded as oriental stereotypes, but other than that, I do find they were satisfactory as well.

I mean, for the wider CIS, it would have been interesting to see at one point that underneath it all, there are lot of people who legitimately believe that they're fighting for freedom (perhaps even implying that a lot of these people and their spirit will go into the rebellion) but they've been co opted by a bunch capitalist pricks who are only fighting the war to make some profits. Yet another tragedy of the way Palpatine manipulated the galaxy.
 
tankdrop24 said:
Well they could have been not coded as oriental stereotypes, but other than that, I do find they were satisfactory as well.

I mean, for the wider CIS, it would have been interesting to see at one point that underneath it all, there are lot of people who legitimately believe that they're fighting for freedom (perhaps even implying that a lot of these people and their spirit will go into the rebellion) but they've been co opted by a bunch capitalist pricks who are only fighting the war to make some profits. Yet another tragedy of the way Palpatine manipulated the galaxy.
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TCW touched on it a little with the Bonteris, but they were never in focus enough for it to really matter.
 
Crazael said:
So, i saw a video a while back that argued the opening to the movie doesn't work because Leia must have approved.of Poe's plan for the other fighters and bombers to be ready and in formation, so it doesnt make sense that she suddenly doesn't approve anymore when he follows through with the plan.

Fair enough, but I have a potential counter argument.

Basically, the plan was proposed and approved before the Dreadnought arrived. The original plan was to distract the star destroyers while the transports got everyone off the ground and into hyperspace. Then the Dreadnought showed up and now the FO had more than enough anti-fighter capacity to make any sort of attack a suicide mission.

Leia then let Poe do the distraction part, because that was still something that could be pulled off relatively safely.
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Does the guy with the video also have gaming ones where they get smoked holding a screwed position and then rage at the rest of the team?
 
Dogboy said:
I could make a statement about declaring an entire work to be invalid based upon a single point, but I wont. I could also make a point about you misquoting the actual point to make it appear worse than it actually is. The point that he made isn't that it's worthless because Finn didn't leave him without spinal damage, it's that it's worthless because it's a setup with no payoff. You can say that, subjectively, the fact that the setup had no payoff didn't lessen the impact the two movies had on you. The fact that this setup had no payoff can be objectively said to be a flaw due to the fact that, in the previous star wars films at least, protagonists getting injured by lightsabers left lasting physical effects.
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Night touched on this very well but since you're responding to me, but I might as well respond.

It's worth noting that you didn't actually provide a single argument that was made and explain why it was objective and good, just asserting that it was really good objective criticism. I also did watch the next bit involving Luke, which complained about the lightsaber throwing scene because it was "intended to be comedic", nitpick parts of it that weren't even issues in the first place ("Why was Luke in that location at that time?") and say that it would have been better if instead of throwing away the lightsaber he'd simply let it fall, despite the throwing moment actually being really important as an introductory moment to the character. I thought that the first example sufficed.

Like, I genuinely have far better things to do in my life, both things I have to do and just... like, for fun, than sit through even 10-15 minutes of a nitpicky Star Wars critique that is far longer than the run time of the movies and takes him far too long to even get through a single scene, especially when I have in good faith tried this every other time I have gotten burned. So I gave the maker a shot- I didn't pick any particular point in the video that would make him look bad, I jumped to a random point and see how he argued and what his arguments were. Both failed to impress.

And I completely disagree. Now, part of his point absolutely was that the setup had no payoff; that was what he engages with when he responds to the idea of it being "subversive" (which is a strawman, nobody says that was one of the things Johnson subverts because as noted, it isn't a subversion), but the key thrust of his point is that it is meaningless in the end because there was no lasting damage, and as a result there is nothing to learn from, or nothing to remember it by; indicating that as a result it must be narratively worthless which completely negates both the narrative worth it had in that moment, and any narrative worth the event might then proceed to have later on in the story as a result of the thought and motivations behind making the choice that got him injured in the first place.

Directly, crippling consequences for an action are not the only way for an action to have narrative worth or for them to have residual memory beyond that scene or even that movie. Which turns the whole argument into a ludicrous statement that, again as noted, runs contra to literally every other equivalent scene in the franchise. Which leads one to the conclusion that maybe this criticism isn't particularly objective at all.
 
Again, what if with these people and being mad about there being jokes in a Star Wars movie? If anything Luke being sassy adds more to his character than just being a sad sack, which is what they want?

Dogboy said:
Mauler
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Ah, yes. Mauler. The "make seven hour long videos complaining about another, better Youtuber's one hour long Dark Souls video".

Definitely the good criticism boy right there.
 
Reveen said:
ANd Mauler made theeeeeeeseeeee videeeeooooos
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Like, I get it, you want to respond to critiques, and if those critiques are long the response is probably going to be long. That's not invalid. But why would you take a 1 hour video (which you can very easily trim), and respond "I need to spend several hours going on about how this one dude was Wrong On The Internet."
 
Broken Base said:
Like, I get it, you want to respond to critiques, and if those critiques are long the response is probably going to be long. That's not invalid. But why would you take a 1 hour video (which you can very easily trim), and respond "I need to spend several hours going on about how this one dude was Wrong On The Internet."
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Without watching, I'm guessing it's akin to the spaghetti posting effect. Writing an independent counter argument that stands on its own is hard, so you just atomize the opposition's argument and respond point by point, massively bloating your response.
 
As someone who watches Mauler's content, it's more that he does EVERYTHING longhand and as throughly as possible. His style of critical analysis is to take a work and proceed from start to finish commenting on pretty much every artistic decision made regardless if he considered the decision good or bad, breaking down the objective effects of these decisions, then providing his opinion on the matter. In addition he tends to provide a lot of comparisons to other works who have made similar choices to compare and contrast.

His response videos and criticisms of persuasive arguments on the other hand tend to be done differently. Rather than tackling each individual point the opposition, he instead tackles each argument, looks at the evidence provided, responds with his own argument/ counter claim, and then presents his own evidence and refutes the oppositions evidence. Standard debate procedure.

As for why he likes posting long videos refuting critical reviews? Mauler has very strong opinions on the role of objectivity and subjectivity in artiatic criticism. As such, he tends to have a very poor opinion of critics who ignore objective arguments as opinions.
 
andres said:
As to the rest, Just replace Snoke with Mon Mothma and the new order with the new republic. Make it a french revolution, "the king is dead all hail the emperor," thing and bam, things are tied in rather than disconnected. Now its a sequil to the OT rather than a new story entirely.
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Ah yes, Mon Mothma (Mothra?), that oh-so-memorable character that was so relevant in the canon of Star Wars that my friends had to literally talk to me about her for ten minutes until I vaguely remembered who she was and what she did in the movies, and even then I had trouble remembering her.

She would certainly be a truly amazing villain for an entire new sequel trilogy. Nothing comparable to what we actually got.
 
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spaceman1997 said:
His style of critical analysis is to take a work and proceed from start to finish commenting on pretty much every artistic decision made regardless if he considered the decision good or bad, breaking down the objective effects of these decisions, then providing his opinion on the matter.
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The more you say the word 'objective,' the more convinced I am that neither of you have a firm grasp on what that word means, and that he's one of those quasi-rationalist dips whose entire schtick is pretending that any shitty take they can offer any shred of evidence for whatsoever is automatically 'objective' and therefore better than everyone else's, as if interpreting what a work of art means only has one correct answer.

Also, jesus. Do they not cover basic essay writing wherever he went to high school, or is he just convinced he knows better than to respect his audience's time?
 
Renewal said:
Without watching, I'm guessing it's akin to the spaghetti posting effect. Writing an independent counter argument that stands on its own is hard, so you just atomize the opposition's argument and respond point by point, massively bloating your response.
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Which is really bad debate and it shows. There's no critical merit in attacking individual filmmaking decisions point-by-point. If it's a problem (rather than something creatives differ about) it will have more impact. Like everything wrong with Hobbit vs. LoTR trilogy can be summarized if one has to as "absolutely chaotic preproduction and production" in the former. The PT boils down to "Lucas with no supervision/peers can't be bothered to direct."
 
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Kodiak said:
There's no critical merit in attacking individual filmmaking decisions point-by-point.
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It's not actually possible, either. Seven hours is already getting absurd, but it's chump change compared to how long actually "commenting on pretty much every creative decision" in a multi-hour film with literally thousands of shots would take. He's absolutely picking and choosing what aspects of the work he's responding to. Which means his approach can be more accurately summed up as either being too illiterate to realize that's what he's doing or too undisciplined to do so with anything resembling restraint.
 
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It's really heartening to see people not who actually haven't seen the video's in question giving their hot takes on it without actually knowing what he says about the film. As one of my favorite youtubers, Hbomberguy, says "it's really easy to win a fight against an opponent made of straw."
 
Dogboy said:
It's really heartening to see people not who actually haven't seen the video's in question giving their hot takes on it without actually knowing what he says about the film. As one of my favorite youtubers, Hbomberguy, says "it's really easy to win a fight against an opponent made of straw."
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How long are these videos again? Just want to know how high the barrier to entry for this argument is.
 
Dogboy said:
It's really heartening to see people not who actually haven't seen the video's in question giving their hot takes on it without actually knowing what he says about the film. As one of my favorite youtubers, Hbomberguy, says "it's really easy to win a fight against an opponent made of straw."
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You shouldn't need to watch to understand why a 7-hour review of anything is total shit and has no value at all. A good rule of thumb is if you're criticism is longer than what you're criticizing you've already fucked up on a grand scale. If it's seven times as long you've failed on a level so absolute that it can barely be calculated. It doesn't matter if he's the most insightful person in the world, at that length, it's clear he's just stuffing a review with constant nitpicks. Write out your criticisms, cut out the ones that seem minor or tangential, cut out the ones that are common or obvious, and then after you've done all that cut out all but the ones you think are the most important and really need to be said. Only then is the critique worth sharing.
 
VolantRedX said:
You shouldn't need to watch to understand why a 7-hour review of anything is total shit and has no value at all. A good rule of thumb is if you're criticism is longer than what you're criticizing you've already fucked up on a grand scale. If it's seven times as long you've failed on a level so absolute that it can barely be calculated. It doesn't matter if he's the most insightful person in the world, at that length, it's clear he's just stuffing a review with constant nitpicks. Write out your criticisms, cut out the ones that seem minor or tangential, cut out the ones that are common or obvious, and then after you've done all that cut out all but the ones you think are the most important and really need to be said. Only then is the critique worth sharing.
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Moreover, what's their point? Criticism isn't just listing out every nitpick you have with something, regardless of whether they're related; a good piece of criticism is centered around some central premise that is backed up via either evidence or argument (ideally both). Thesis papers have summaries, non-fiction books have blurbs on the back, good video essays can be summarized in a sentence or two.

Everything I've seen summarized from these videos make it seem like it's a rambling point-by-minuscule point…thing…that has no larger argument in mind. Okay, the Resistance didn't use Y-Wings, how is that related to Finn not being physically crippled by his brief duel with Ren? What's Mauler's thesis? What's their conclusion? What point are they trying to make?
 
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