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Mourning Star Wars - Leaks Destroy Hope.

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Re: Mourning Star Wars - Leaks Destroy Hope.
Post by The E   » Wed Dec 04, 2019 4:53 pm

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Michael Everett wrote:And is also being used as an example of how not to write a screenplay.
See a discussion about it here.


(ohh, argument from authority, nice one)

The beauty of film is that it is, ultimately, very subjective. Now, don't get me wrong: I am not claiming that TLJ was a perfect movie. It had flaws, in its script and elsewhere. But overall, in terms of the intent behind it, in terms of the messages behind it, as a giant piece of commentary on Star Wars as a media phenomenon and meditation on the Star Wars mythos, I thought it was great.

Oh, and it was also funny, tragic, thrilling and beautiful despite its rough parts.

See, I love that film. I get what Johnson was doing, and why he was doing it; If you don't, or you disagree with his intent, that's fair. That's as valid as any other opinion. Personally, I felt that TFA and TLJ, as companion pieces (with TFA rebuilding the old, pre-prequel Star Wars mythos and TLJ de- and then reconstructing it), are a fantastic statement of authorial intent (Of course, JJ Abrams being JJ Abrams, he's going to royally fuck up the ending, that's just par for the course for him): The desire to make reinvent Star Wars along more contemporary, post-Monomyth lines was desperately needed.

TLJ was a surprisingly multi-layered and nuanced film, in my opinion. It gave me things to think about, it asked questions about Star Wars that needed to be asked, and I am glad it exists.

The Last Jedi - A film about sentencing animals to a long, slow death from starvation,


If we're arguing at that level, Return of the Jedi ends with the spectre of Endor being bombarded by literally millions of tons of debris...

stealth systems which fail to cover the visual spectrum,


None of the Star Wars films to date have shown that this is a thing in the universe.

Also, making this point on the davidweber.net forums is very funny.

running out of fuel, failing to communicate, making bad personnel decisions


Wait, how is that a scriptwriting problem, I don't get it

and fight scenes so useless that they require stuntmen to aim for the weapons being held out as targets by the "heroes" between doing useless spins.


If that's an issue for you, you must hate watching the majority of all action movies in existence.

But hey, at least the ladies got to see John Boyega in a transparent suit... :roll:


This is something I legit do not get.
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Re: Mourning Star Wars - Leaks Destroy Hope.
Post by jchilds   » Thu Dec 05, 2019 8:51 pm

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What broke TLJ for me was the use of "Godspeed" (twice even). Other stuff in the movie bothered me, but hearing that word jarred me out of any suspension of disbelief like a needle dragged of a playing record disrupts the music.

I'm going to see Episode IX, but I'm not excited to go see it and that seems wrong and sad.
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Re: Mourning Star Wars - Leaks Destroy Hope.
Post by Imaginos1892   » Thu Dec 05, 2019 9:54 pm

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It’s Star Wars: The Dystopia.

It’s ‘gifted Jedi with a few weeks of training outmatches gifted Jedi with years of training by the same teacher followed by ten years of brutal kill-or-be-killed experience’.

It’s space battles where starships have to get within 200 meters to DROP BOMBS on other starships, and the bombs have to be released by ONE small, easily-lost remote control with NO BACKUP that’s NOT EVEN TETHERED TO ANYBODY OR ANYTHING!

If one of those bombers positioned itself ‘above’ my ship, I’d reverse the ship’s gravity field. Drop your bombs now, sucker!

It’s the few remaining characters not being themselves at all. Except, maybe, R2-D2.

It’s two and a half hours of Hollywood Stupid groaners with plot holes you could drive a Death Star through. Although it seemed longer. “Good grief, it’s not over yet?”

I saw no evidence that any of the screenwriters knew anything about anything. Cosmology, physics, tactics, strategy, logistics, logic, human nature, sensible military design, and plain simple common sense seem to be inexplicable alien concepts to everybody involved in making that movie. Its target audience must be people who are either unable to think, or choose not to.

I watched it for free on cable, and it was barely worth the price.
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Re: Mourning Star Wars - Leaks Destroy Hope.
Post by The E   » Fri Dec 06, 2019 3:27 am

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Why are you so mad about a movie?
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Re: Mourning Star Wars - Leaks Destroy Hope.
Post by Imaginos1892   » Sun Dec 08, 2019 2:42 am

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Why do you believe everyone who disagrees with you is ‘mad’?

Mostly what I feel about those movies is disappointed, and disgusted. They could have made great movies, or at least good ones, but instead they piled $300 million in special effects onto a $3 script. It’s like they weren’t even trying, didn’t care if it made any sense, and simply assumed that everybody was too stupid to notice.

Well, I noticed.

They have also betrayed the message of the first three Star Wars movies — that an alliance of independent people could take on an oppressive, unjust totalitarian empire, and win. The new message is, the totalitarians always win, so don’t dare to oppose them. You will only be crushed.

I do not care for that message.
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Re: Mourning Star Wars - Leaks Destroy Hope.
Post by The E   » Sun Dec 08, 2019 6:33 am

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Imaginos1892 wrote:Why do you believe everyone who disagrees with you is ‘mad’?


The bolded all-caps text, the bad arguments....

Like this one, for example:
They have also betrayed the message of the first three Star Wars movies — that an alliance of independent people could take on an oppressive, unjust totalitarian empire, and win. The new message is, the totalitarians always win, so don’t dare to oppose them. You will only be crushed.


I'll give you the bit about the message of the first films, that one I agree with. But looking at TLJ, a movie that structurally fills the same role ESB filled in the original trilogy, and taking away the message that "evil always triumphs" is .... well, to be quite honest, it's a display of media illiteracy that is quite astonishing.

I mean, the actual messaging here is more along the lines of "If we become complacent, evil will rise again": In TFA, it's made clear that Leia and the Resistance are working without Republic support, because the Republic's politicians believe that the imperial remnants no longer pose a serious threat. TLJ ends on pretty much the same note as ESB: Yes, the Empire/First Order has dealt some serious blows to the Rebellion/Resistance, but that is not the end of it, as our Heroes have a renewed unity of purpose and gained valuable experience and skills.

You are perfectly free to dislike TLJ, or any movie for that matter. However, I feel like doing so for really bad and stupid reasons is doing you a disservice; You can and should be better at criticism than this.
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Re: Mourning Star Wars - Leaks Destroy Hope.
Post by Michael Everett   » Sun Dec 08, 2019 8:58 am

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...okay.
Let us begin by ignoring the opening space battle and the way that the Dreadnought has only a pair of huge guns and an incredibly small number of anti-fighter weapons (sure, it's a bombardment craft, but it should be better armed and more flexible than just that given its size) or the way that the Starfortress Bomber really should have had missiles instead of bomblets in its detachable bomb-bay in order to give it better range (even though it was apparently as slow as an arthritic turtle and maybe as agile...)...

Having a total lack of communication between the Hero of the Resistance and the Admiral Of Arrogance led to much of the plot. Most of the issues could have been avoided by a simple "There is a plan and while you don't need to know it yet, it should allow us to escape."
Instead, the Heroes have to try and come up with a plan of their own since their leadership appears to be incompetent, then they don't even recruit the person they're searching for and instead grab someone purely in it for the money and thus very likely to betray them (total lack of thinking there).
Meanwhile, Luke has devolved into a whiny judgmental moron who gives the film's Mary Sue Character (her lightsaber skills are atrocious, how the hell did she beat off super-trained Kylo in the first movie?) three lessons to allow her Mary Sue-ness to shine through.

Once the slicer-for-hire betrays the heroes by telling the Bad guys to look out of the window (Yes! Seriously! What the f*** was the writer of that scene on?!), the rest of the heroes hide in a disused mine so that the Bad Guys can drag a Death-Star-inspired artillery piece at them and fire it. Cue Finn being prevented from making the attack that could have blown it up by Miss Preachy-Plot-Device, allowing the Bad Guys to fire it.
And with all that build-up? It simply punches a hole in the door, and not even a big hole! With the build-up and the tension, it should have carved a valley straight through the base, not duplicated a f***ing satchel charge! The overpressure doesn't even penetrate the caves the Good Guys are fleeing through! Hell, the blast alone should have taken out everyone in/near the cavern, but nooooooooooooooooo... they hide behind boxes so they're okay...

Then after what is admittedly one of the better scenes (the lightsaber fight that isn't) we cut to Mary Sue Whatsername (Seriously, she's so Mary Sue-ish that I find it hard to remember what her character's actually called) doing her "let me float all the hundred-plus rocks out of your way effortlessly after just having three lessons" when it took Luke lots more than that under Master Yoda to hit the point where he could (with a lot of concentration/effort) lift a half-dozen PEBBLES and one droid!
And how many Good Guys are left? Maybe a dozen and one ship. At least in ESB, the Good Guys managed a strategic victory in getting multiple ships away along with their most important vehicles/tech and even managed to regroup.

The whole thing can be summed up by Kylo's words. "Forget the past. Kill it if you have to." Disney had a chance to use Lucas' ideas for 7-9, which would have given better continuation on the story arcs, but instead chose to go a different route, introducing new characters that they could use for further films in the Star Wars brand but which they wouldn't have to pay anything to Lucas for.

And just to show how cheap they are getting, the comics are stealing fan-designs for the space-ships instead of trying to develop their own. Check out the Nebulon-K Starship for a good example. Marvel grabbed the 3D image from Sketchup and traced it from various angles in their comic.
They didn't even bother to credit the original artist...

At least The Mandalorian was written by actual star Wars fans...
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Re: Mourning Star Wars - Leaks Destroy Hope.
Post by The E   » Sun Dec 08, 2019 11:06 am

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Michael Everett wrote:Having a total lack of communication between the Hero of the Resistance and the Admiral Of Arrogance led to much of the plot. Most of the issues could have been avoided by a simple "There is a plan and while you don't need to know it yet, it should allow us to escape."


Let's imagine this whole sequence of events as if it were happening in an actual war with an actual military. You are Admiral Holdo, inheriting command of a Battlegroup under fire after the death of the previous CO. You have, under your command, a hotshot CAG who, in a previous action, sacrificed a strategic ressource (a fighter and bomber wing) for a tactical victory and who was demoted because of his demonstrated insubordination. He wasn't removed as CAG, but since his fighters have been destroyed, he is, at that point, literally nothing more than a passenger.
And yet, because he feels he is still important, he demands you explain your plan to him. When you refuse, because you have no personal reason to trust this idiot pilot who gets in your face about having no plan while your staff is already executing your plan, he goes off and starts a mutiny while you are still under fire.

You see, that whole plot wasn't about miscommunication. It was about Poe Dameron, Hotshot Warrior Pilot, needing to learn that he is a soldier in a military who needs to listen more and, at times, follow orders and trust the chain of command.
You say that whole plot could have been resolved if Holdo had just explained things to Poe, but that would've required Poe to be able to listen to someone who isn't his ego or Leia or for him to demonstrate some respect due a superior officer.

Also, when Poe figures out a part of the plan, he immediately calls his CO a coward. Not earning many points there, I think.

Instead, the Heroes have to try and come up with a plan of their own since their leadership appears to be incompetent, then they don't even recruit the person they're searching for and instead grab someone purely in it for the money and thus very likely to betray them (total lack of thinking there).


But that's the thing: They didn't have to come up with a plan. They thought they needed to, because Poe Dameron can't deal with not being important.
And sure, they fell for a slick-talking mercenary. That just makes them human, in my opinion; plus, even though that part of the plan fell through, it still gave Finn enough of a perspective on things that he abandons his original plan of just running away to a quiet place and hope this whole war can pass him by, which is the point of his personal arc.

Meanwhile, Luke has devolved into a whiny judgmental moron who gives the film's Mary Sue Character (her lightsaber skills are atrocious, how the hell did she beat off super-trained Kylo in the first movie?) three lessons to allow her Mary Sue-ness to shine through.


Ahh, the Mary-Sue complaint. Now, one thing to keep in mind about Rey and Kylo's fight in TFA: During it, Kylo is a) severely wounded and b) not trying to kill Rey. Rey, who has at least some experience fighting with hand weapons, is trying and failing to kill Kylo, who despite the aforementioned factors, is, as you say, still a superior fighter.

As for Rey's story arc: Hers was about self-sufficiency. In TFA, much of her character is built upon her hope that someone will save her from her miserable existance. Her parents, returning in glory and riches. Leia and the Resistance, giving her purpose. Luke, giving her training and taking the burden off her shoulders. But as the cave shows her, there is only herself; she cannot rely on others if she cannot first rely upon herself.

Now, if we're talking about Mary Sues, can we talk about Luke Skywalker for a minute? Only a massive Mary Sue could just casually go from piloting a civilian bush plane and plinking at critters to precision bombing runs while under fire. Oh, and he apparently developed telekinetic abilities all on his own; IIRC, there is no scene in ANH that shows Obi-wan teaching Luke how to move things with his mind, or even displaying that ability, so Luke can just suddenly do that thing when the plot calls for it. Total Mary Sue, he is.

You say Luke has "devolved". Did he? He definitely had and is working through a crisis of faith, brought on by his failure to train others. He went away to find the base truth of the Jedi, their origin, but what he found did not give him what he needed.
Luke, in the OT, was an idealist. He learned about his heritage, he learned about the ideals of the Jedi (which, as the prequels show us, were very much an ideal the Jedi themselves did not live up to), but his abortive Training never taught him to navigate the complexities of being an actual Jedi out in the world. Is it completely out of character for an idealist to become disillusioned, depressed even, when they fail in turning their ideals into reality?

I thought his portrayal really touching, and Mark Hamill's performance was brilliant. Having Luke go out in the best display of Jedi in action in Star Wars as a whole was satisfying and great.

Once the slicer-for-hire betrays the heroes by telling the Bad guys to look out of the window (Yes! Seriously! What the f*** was the writer of that scene on?!), the rest of the heroes hide in a disused mine so that the Bad Guys can drag a Death-Star-inspired artillery piece at them and fire it. Cue Finn being prevented from making the attack that could have blown it up by Miss Preachy-Plot-Device, allowing the Bad Guys to fire it.


And this is a problem because....?

Finn goes through quite a journey. From being scared and afraid and wanting to find a hole and cower in it while the galaxy burns around him, to willing to fight and die for a cause, to willing to live for that cause is pretty good.

And with all that build-up? It simply punches a hole in the door, and not even a big hole! With the build-up and the tension, it should have carved a valley straight through the base, not duplicated a f***ing satchel charge! The overpressure doesn't even penetrate the caves the Good Guys are fleeing through! Hell, the blast alone should have taken out everyone in/near the cavern, but nooooooooooooooooo... they hide behind boxes so they're okay...


You know, I can sort of see this point if we're talking about something like 5.56 rifle fire punching through the front armor of an Abrams or something that can easily be shown as being completely impossible in actual reality.

But you're watching Star Wars. You don't know anything about these weapons other than what is shown on screen; to complain that they are not what you thought they were is, to me, a bit silly.

Then after what is admittedly one of the better scenes (the lightsaber fight that isn't) we cut to Mary Sue Whatsername (Seriously, she's so Mary Sue-ish that I find it hard to remember what her character's actually called) doing her "let me float all the hundred-plus rocks out of your way effortlessly after just having three lessons" when it took Luke lots more than that under Master Yoda to hit the point where he could (with a lot of concentration/effort) lift a half-dozen PEBBLES and one droid!


Why is Rey being a more natural force user such a problem for you (and the literally hundreds of screamy manchildren on youtube making sweet sweet ad money by being performatively angry about this)?

And how many Good Guys are left? Maybe a dozen and one ship. At least in ESB, the Good Guys managed a strategic victory in getting multiple ships away along with their most important vehicles/tech and even managed to regroup.

The whole thing can be summed up by Kylo's words. "Forget the past. Kill it if you have to." Disney had a chance to use Lucas' ideas for 7-9, which would have given better continuation on the story arcs, but instead chose to go a different route, introducing new characters that they could use for further films in the Star Wars brand but which they wouldn't have to pay anything to Lucas for.


Hmm, yes, George Lucas' ideas, that sounds like a good plan after seeing how much the prequel movies are loved these days.

And just to show how cheap they are getting, the comics are stealing fan-designs for the space-ships instead of trying to develop their own. Check out the Nebulon-K Starship for a good example. Marvel grabbed the 3D image from Sketchup and traced it from various angles in their comic.
They didn't even bother to credit the original artist...


So because a marvel artist chose to use a fan design in a comic, the movie The Last Jedi is bad?

I don't get that one, help me out here.
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Re: Mourning Star Wars - Leaks Destroy Hope.
Post by Imaginos1892   » Mon Dec 09, 2019 2:17 am

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The E wrote:
Michael Everett wrote:running out of fuel, failing to communicate, making bad personnel decisions

Wait, how is that a scriptwriting problem, I don't get it

You don’t have the first clue what a movie script is, do you?

The script (also called the screenplay) IS the movie. Setting, background, plot, characters, dialogue, action — everything that appears on screen or blasts out of the speakers is part of the script. The only failings that don’t originate in a movie's script are bad acting and cheesy props. At least they managed to avoid the cheesy props.

A shitty movie comes from shitty scriptwriting.

The E wrote:The bolded all-caps text

That much concentrated Hollywood Stupid can only be conveyed by BOLD CAPS. Nothing less gets the full meaning across.

The E wrote:the bad arguments....

Just because you are unable to appreciate them, does not make them bad.

So, yet another idiotic hole in the plot — why didn't the first ship to run low on fuel and fall behind jump to hyperspace through the Imperial fleet? Or the second? Or the third, the fourth, or the fifth? Why, when they knew several ships were going to be in that situation and had hours to prepare, did they not rig one to jump on autopilot? Or, if they just made up some handwavium reason a ship can't jump to hyper on autopilot, using a droid pilot? Most folks in that universe consider droids expendable machines.

But then, if one ship can destroy most of a fleet with a hyperspace jump, none of the space battles in any of the movies made any sense at all. Any time a ship is about to be destroyed by a superior force, when they have nothing to lose, they just turn kamikaze on the attackers and wipe them out. Nobody would fight space battles with the tactics we've seen. One ship would have blown the original Death Star to smithereens.

Nope, they just didn't try, and assumed everybody would be too stupid to notice.
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Re: Mourning Star Wars - Leaks Destroy Hope.
Post by The E   » Mon Dec 09, 2019 3:27 am

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Imaginos1892 wrote:You don’t have the first clue what a movie script is, do you?


"running out of fuel", "failing to communicate", those are not scriptwriting problems, i.e. elements that make a script bad. They are problems that the script throws at the protagonists to solve and overcome; By themselves, they do not make a script good or bad. The way Michael phrased it (and I apologize if I misunderstood him in this) implied that the mere existence of these elements in the script made it bad, which is a somewhat baffling issue to take with it.

Just because you are unable to appreciate them, does not make them bad.


So what exactly was wrong with the reasoning I gave for why I thought the argument you made was bad?

So, yet another idiotic hole in the plot — why didn't the first ship to run low on fuel and fall behind jump to hyperspace through the Imperial fleet? Or the second? Or the third, the fourth, or the fifth? Why, when they knew several ships were going to be in that situation and had hours to prepare, did they not rig one to jump on autopilot? Or, if they just made up some handwavium reason a ship can't jump to hyper on autopilot, using a droid pilot? Most folks in that universe consider droids expendable machines.


Well, a) the Rebellion/Resistance does not seem to consider droids expendable, b) Making a sacrifice play takes an amount of willingness to self-sacrifice that is rather uncommon. Also, who knows? There are many factors that can be used, in-universe, to explain this.

But then, if one ship can destroy most of a fleet with a hyperspace jump, none of the space battles in any of the movies made any sense at all. Any time a ship is about to be destroyed by a superior force, when they have nothing to lose, they just turn kamikaze on the attackers and wipe them out. Nobody would fight space battles with the tactics we've seen. One ship would have blown the original Death Star to smithereens.


And you know this because.....

The basic error you're making is treating these films as documentaries: You're watching them the same way you'd be watching something like Band of Brothers or Midway, films or tv shows where you can look at what's on screen and make a fairly detailed list of things the people who made it got right or wrong about a given battle or a given person portrayed in it. The first words on screen in all Star Wars films are "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away....", words that imply that what you are watching is not a documentary, but a myth, a story handed down through the generations. It's almost as if you're reading Beowulf and are going "well, this monster is obviously a plot hole, there was nothing like that in ancient norse times".
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