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Utopia Talk / Movie Talk / Star wars the last jedi
The Children
Member
Thu Dec 14 06:47:47
short verdict.

9 out of 10


long verdict. coming soon. just wanna say. FIRST.
McKobb
Member
Thu Dec 14 09:30:18
http://youtu.be/2Qydd0Ow-5o
Cherub Cow
Member
Wed Dec 20 00:36:10
Just saw it.
Awful fucking movie. Very rarely do I regret paying to see a blockbuster movie because at least blockbusters have their moments of senseless action, but "Last Jedi" had so fucking little that was redeemable that I definitely regret that I spent money to see it. I should have waited until it was on DVD/streaming, and even then it would be a low-priority watch.

As for all the things that were bad about it, it would be such a long list that I don't even know if it's worth the time — it feels like this movie already took too much of my time. Still, I'll add to a list over the next days and post it. The short version though would be:
— too much crappy CGI
— too many crowd service moments
— too many meta moments (moments that were about the writers having written a Star Wars movie or the actors reflecting on their being in a Star Wars movie)
- too many "check out this random CGI alien" moments
- too many "oh, let's get the kids involved" moments

Oh who cares.
McKobb
Member
Wed Dec 20 12:03:00
Just saw the originals and they were awesome still. This on...not so much.
Cherub Cow
Member
Thu Dec 21 02:25:46
Yeah I still like episodes V and VI. I never really liked IV very much. This new one seemed to have taken tips from later George Lucas: just trying way too much in one movie. It was almost like the "remastered" version of Lucas' original trilogy where they added in CGI aliens in the background of all random shots. Stupid shit like a random sea creature in the background waters while Rey climbs the temple stairs, or those little birds being in every shot when Chewy is fighting in the Falcon, or shots being composed around the reactions of those salt foxes (Seriously? Who approved that?).

Then we have to watch some stupid side quest with fat&ugly Asian girl and over-emphatic stormtrooper that has little to do with the main story but is a chance for the writers to add in some commentary on arms dealers playing both sides of a conflict (and also an "eat the rich" moment for audiences). I get their intention there (kind of a parallel to light and dark sides of the force — the arms dealers manipulating the Force balance), but I cannot care less about the pathetic history of fat&ugly Asian girl, yet it became a half hour priority of the movie. I get their intention there too: a human cost of the conflict and a show of how the First Order has driven people under foot. But if it's fat&ugly Asian girl who is the face of that, then maybe the First Order has been doing the right thing and needs to crush more peasants. Actually, the only time I smiled during the movie (i.e., the only part that I enjoyed), was when Leia said something about how hope had at last died. Until Luke showed up in that scene this idea was nice because that "hope" BS that they over-did with "Rogue One" and have tried to carry over into this episode is contrived garbage — a silly way to over-expand a concept of the original trilogy which was not even mentioned except in the title. Fuck hope. Blah. More rants to follow ;p
The Children
Member
Thu Dec 21 11:58:00
i liked it!

they were infinitely better than the prequels and infinitely better than force awakens.

i didnt like everything about it, but enough 2 make me say, yea "moniez well spend" coz tickets arent cheap no more.

i liked fat & ugly asian. she is a diversity and i liked how they portrayed someone who resembles a normal person rather than supermodel #431

i didnt like casino part, but im sure that codebreaker will have a story in episode 9.

i didnt like rey "self taught jedi master in 5 days". i dunt mind her actin and shit, i just dunt like her story how she "self taught herself 2 become a jedi in 5 days".

heck even poe and finn had some decent screentime this time around. poe portrayed as a hard head idiot. finn portrayed as a loser who cant get shit done.

what exactly was he doing when he tried 2 ram that giant laser...suicide?

i didnt even mind skywalkers turn in2 a grumpy old man. i think its how most people end up anyway. its kinda realistic.

how the fuck is snoke dead. how the fuck can they kill him off, just no fuckin way.

there is no fuckin way kylo giantbaby ren is the main villain for episode 9. just no fuckin way.
Palem
Person.
Fri Dec 22 11:32:09
I liked it, but I didn't love it and I get why some people hate it.
The Children
Member
Fri Dec 22 15:41:50
i just watched a bootleg version...i understand now. snoke is not dead. no way!

this must be some kind of trick, illusion. i think it started the moment he read reys mind. theres this one scene where he force grabbed rey and tortured her and read her mind. then after he started laughin about skywalker being wise and shit. whatever.

anyway, this is weird becoz in episode 8 he didnt want skywalkers return. but now upon learnin skywalker wunt return, why wasnt he happy. wazzup with that.

i think maybe he pulled his trick after that knowin kylo wuld turn on him. he must have seen this comin surely. skywalker looked into kylo ren and already saw how kylo wuld turn 2 dark and kill han solo and shit.

surely then snoke wuldve known. remember this one scene earlier on where he was roastin kylo ren about how disappointin he is and shit.

surely he wuldve known even then, he prolly saw kylo use a lightsaber against him.

The Children
Member
Fri Dec 22 15:47:56
if luke was able 2 hologram himself lightyears away, who is 2 say that snoke culdnt do the same?

maybe everything was a hologram. even his sliced body. maybe snoke was so powerfull in hologrammin himself that he culd even make his hologram being split in half makin the victim think he is dead. just like how sidious thought he killed plagueis.

babam!
Cherub Cow
Member
Fri Dec 22 18:53:49
That sounds just lame enough to work for these shit writers. It would be lame for the final episode to be Rey vs Ren, but it would be even lamer for Rey and Ren to team up against a ghost Snoke after some story where they all find out that they've been mind-controlled or some garbage. That sounds like another CGI fight brewing. I wonder which green screen character will win: a badly-rendered Snoke or Rey and Ren on platforms on a green-screen sound stage like Anakin and Ben's lava fight? :|

..
[TC]: "she is a diversity and i liked how they portrayed someone who resembles a normal person rather than supermodel #431"

There's a middle ground between being a super model and being fat&ugly&short, and diversity for its own sake is weak and contrived. When they first premiered her character I even suspected that they were going to play a lesbian angle, but maybe the writers reigned in just how lame they would become with that choice and so they avoided that and wrote it as "sisters".. It would have been a silver lining if they had actually killed her character, but like Marvel they fail to follow through and just want to keep every character alive and resurrecting until their movie-making slot machine stops getting max dividends. She was not a good actress, anyways. She reminded me of Sarah Steele, that terrible drama club girl from "Spanglish" — the type of person who thinks that maximum red-in-the-face emotion is somehow better acting. Speaking of which, Rey (Daisy Ridley) could probably learn that there's more to acting than turning yourself into a tear faucet. I'm sure that everyone on set was impressed that she could Knowshon Moreno-cry on demand, but there was little substance there.

This also highlights poor decisions in the casting department. Oscar Isaac may have been their only good choice in this franchise. Laura Dern's first appearance was an eye-roll moment for me. Even looking beyond the sad mistakes of wardrobe (the purple hair and the dress improperly-fitted for her height), her acting style did not fit into the world around her. She was also scripted with the "meta moments" I mentioned above: that whole scene where she's gushing over Leia ("May the Force be —") was barely within the story and far more so an excuse to throw a fan's mind into the movie and have her star-gazm over Carrie Fisher's "legacy". I half-wondered if they CGIed that scene in as some fucked up tribute to a dead person. Then there was also Benicio Del Toro, and while I normally like him I do not think that he fit in this story. These were box-office casting decisions (profits as calculated on an Excel spreadsheet), not the decisions of a production team that wants to tell a new story. Which also leads to..

More recycled scenes from the other movies. AT-ATs walking on a "snow" base with trenches out front in the style of Hoth ("Oh no! But this time it's *salt*! Not *snow*! It's just *visually* identical! But then we flip all that on its head by making red contrails when these weird fighter crafts skim the surface! Pretty novel, right??"). Or when the Millennium Falcon shows up and manages to re-create the scene from "Return of the Jedi" where it's traveling around the new Death Star's conduits while fighting TIE fighters — "Except this time it's *totally* different, because it's red crystals instead! Plus let's throw this bird in the foreground after Chewy screams! *Hilarious!* Kids love that kind of dumb shit! We can even have the falcon rise from a gaping tunnel like that 'Empire' scene in the asteroid field!" Or fuck it, "Let's completely re-create the scene between Luke, Vader, and Sidious, where in this movie Rey will deliver the exact fucking lines that Luke said to Sidious in an elevator while hand-cuffed, then they'll end up in a chamber with red-clad guards and a throne room and a visual of a doomed rebel fleet while Sidious/Snoke fatalistically mocks Luke/Rey and provokes a confrontation. But we'll modernize it by having the red guards wearing some kind of weird fucking Samurai-influenced gear, and Ren won't die because we still need to make at least one more of these shit movies."

And that "one more of these" might just be their motivation for being so shitty, but would it be worth it? That is, if the writers get some kind of undue credit for setting something hidden in motion, do they get one last chance because "They couldn't possibly sample any more classic Star Wars! Surely they've run out of scenes to redo frame-for-frame! *Now* it must be time to tell a new story!"? They may have fooled me with Episode VII — I thought they'd said farewell to all the fan service and recycled imagery in order to make space for a different story (this one; "Last Jedi"), but they just intend to do the same thing each time. A pointless spectacle for the decadent.

Oh, and Maz Kanata's hologram scene was also stupid. Like I guess it wouldn't be exciting enough to have a normal conversation with (awful CGI) Maz, so she has to be firing at some enemy while rocketing around. I bet the writers felt like they exercised restraint by not finding a way to put one of those birds in her hologram.
swordtail
Anarchist Prime
Fri Dec 22 19:43:34
somebody don't likey slanty eyed bitches....

it was a bleh movie overall says i.
Cherub Cow
Member
Sat Dec 23 06:20:00
I’m not hating on Asian people, just fat&ugly&short people :p

*”Rey will deliver the exact fucking lines that Luke said to [Vader] in an elevator”
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Mon Dec 25 14:47:16
yeah they definitely continued to lean on the popular trilogy a lot

i was worried about starting with the opening scrawl as it set it up exactly as in Empire (evacuating a base)... but they then moved the Hoth scene to the end

and I also didn't like the purple hair... and that casino place didn't feel like a Star Wars setting at all... and the premise of the capital ships move at exactly the same speed so they can't catch them... and the weepy porg making Chewbacca feel bad :p

Chewbacca and the Falcon were the best parts, I don't tire of seeing them
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Mon Dec 25 14:48:59
*I was worried about THAT starting with...
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Mon Dec 25 23:24:19
i panicked a bit when i thought they were going to make that white tuxedo'd geraldo into the next Han Solo

perhaps the most distressing moment of the film
hood
Member
Sat Dec 30 15:27:47
I think CC summed up my thoughts about this movie pretty well. Except for her hatred over fat and ugly asian girl. I didn't mind her too much; or rather, she wasn't actively making things worse. She was just kinda meh within the shitstorm of TLJ.
hood
Member
Sat Dec 30 15:43:14
Oh. One particular thing I found excessively awful: the origin of Rey.

Really? She's just a nothing? A nobody? "[she's] not part of this story"? What the actual fuck. You could have done any number of imaginative things with Rey.

Idea 1:
Leia also had twins like her mother, but instinct through the force led her to secret Rey away without anyone knowing. This proves valuable, as Ben Solo goes dark side and Rey Solo acts as his counterbalance for the light.

Idea 2:
Rey is Rey Kenobi. Obi-wan didn't stick to the Jedi code quite as well as it seemed (in the Clone Wars cartoon, they go into some romantic back stories for him) and Rey was again hidden to protect her from the dark side. Obi-wan would have to have been quite old when he fathered her; alternatively, star wars surely has the tech to make test tube babies. Obi-wan DNA was somehow replicated by a past love of his to give birth to a daughter the former love needed to replace the hole left when Obi-wan died. Rey was hidden from soon-to-be-dead Vader.

Idea 3:
Recall Rogue One. Recall that there were rumors that Rogue One was much darker in its first take than what it ended up being (CC mentioned the "hope" theme). Keep Rogue One dark. Jin Erso doesn't help the rebellion out of love for her father, she does it to spite her father, because she despises how he abandoned her. She destroys his greatest legacy (Death Star) by helping the rebels escape with the plans. However, she doesn't stick around because her motivations were about striking at her father; she doesn't care about the rebellion.

Jin survives until after RotJ where she ends up meeting Luke in a Cantina and they hit it off enough that she beds him. While Jin isn't so cold as to end the life inside her, she doesn't want to be slowed down by a child and so she gives the child to a couple on some trash heap. That couple ends up expiring shortly after and Rey must survive on her own.




But no. Instead of weaving an interesting tapestry, instead of trying to do something different, you make Luke flawed by being a grumpy old man? Rey is just a random nobody? Jin pulled a complete 180 on the rebellion and died for their cause? Meh. Lazy and shitty. Although Rogue One was still a good movie.
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Sat Dec 30 16:33:35
idea 1 is bad, they've reused too many things already
hood
Member
Sat Dec 30 21:47:22
Idea 1 is certainly not great. But it's better than "you're nobody, you don't have a part in this story."
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Sun Dec 31 01:12:36
it's actually more reasonable as she was just a random loser on a desert world who happened to come across a droid carrying important information

being a significant person again would be weirder
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Sun Dec 31 01:17:21
maybe finding an escaping droid with important information is what makes you strong with the force... :o
Forwyn
Member
Sun Dec 31 01:29:56
"random loser on a desert world who happened to come across a droid carrying important information"

Nothing wrong with that by itself, but "also coincidentally more powerful than a Skywalker, and masterful over her powers within days" is pushing it.
hood
Member
Sun Dec 31 03:35:56
^ what Forwyn said. Random loser from the desert being a jedi? Sure thing. Even one of the best jedi? Yeah, that's fine. Better than the bloodline of the chosen one? No, that's bullshit. Being the child of another jedi might at least give her some equal footing, but random hoes aren't THAT excessively skilled.
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Sun Dec 31 10:30:59
was it clear i was comparing her to Luke? ... Luke was a random loser on a desert world who found an escaping droid w/ important information

VII & VIII reached almost 'remake' levels compared to how Point Break & Red Dawn were remakes
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Sun Dec 31 10:39:19
...not saying i agree with her self-learning jedi mind trick on her 2nd try or whatever w/ no understanding at all, etc
hood
Member
Sun Dec 31 10:40:14
Luke wasn't random though. From the moment he needs obi-wan, Luke was told how important his lineage was. Just because he was presented as a random dude doesn't mean his backstory was random.
hood
Member
Sun Dec 31 10:40:48
Meets obi-wan *
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Sun Dec 31 11:10:30
he's a random loser from the world perspective, both only entering the saga by finding a droid

do only hidden away relatives of powerful jedi find escaping astromech droids containing important information for the rebels while living on remote desert worlds?
hood
Member
Sun Dec 31 11:22:10
Yes, that has how Star Wars has written their stories. The Force doesn't play dice, it does things for a purpose and puts important people in important situations.
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Sun Dec 31 13:28:10
...she even escapes the pursuit in the Millenium Falcon joining Han & Chewie just after leaving the planet instead of before

it's a remake i tell ya!

they still have the option of making her ancestor someone of significance... or Kylo to be a liar
The Children
Member
Sun Dec 31 14:35:37
she obviously not just a nobody from nobody on planet nobobody.

i think she is the prime jedi reborn. its only makes sense. the island is not new 2 her. she knows all the places and shit and the dark place was callin 2 her and shit.

obviously prime jedi.

tumbleweed
the wanderer
Sun Dec 31 16:38:19
we should be thankful midichlorians have not been mentioned

IX is basically a disappointment already... there's no competent or scary villain left & the rebels (now known as the resistance) has like 10 people left & Poe is about to be executed for mutiny (or maybe frozen in carbonite)

i think it should be
Episode IX: Rey & Kylo Make A Porno
(like Zak & Miri was about a star wars porno, so a nice reverse homage)

lots of material to work with... can make any sexy aliens you want, as seems to be a requirement that new species show up every episode
Billah
Member
Tue Jan 02 17:44:12
I thought Luke went out like a bitch.

And what was up with demented Yoda burning shit down??

The whole Rey and Darth Vader Jr. connection was kind of dumb.

I thought the movie that prequeotled this one was total crap.

Rogue One is much better than any of these ones in this line. Hopefully the next spinoff movie is better because this whole Rey New Empire Leia story is just dumb.
Billah
Member
Tue Jan 02 17:47:04
Its just sad to see the cheerful and chipper water farmer from Tatooine who used to like to bulls eye womp rats with his T-16 turn into a depressed old man. I thought Luke had more cojones.
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Tue Jan 02 22:56:00
he was really bad at landing X-wings
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Tue Jan 02 23:03:54
there's probably a dead astromech droid on that sea floor too since Mr. 'i'm not such a bad pilot myself' can't land on solid ground
chuck
Member
Sun Jan 07 19:45:17
If there's one thing we've learned about Yoda, it's that he's always down for a good arson-as-a-motivational-tool bit.

That little green Tyler Durden.
Cherub Cow
Member
Tue Feb 27 19:52:46
This Onion video isn't too funny, but it does make fun of how the Star Wars producers explained that they put lots of porgs in the movie because there were lots of protected puffins on that Irish island (the puffins were difficult to film around, so the producers CGIed them as porgs in post-production — not that this in any way justifies porgs in scenes where they did not belong at all).
"‘Call Me By Your Name' Producer Explains The Challenges Of Working Around The Jolly Italian Chefs That Run Wild Through The Countryside"
http://www...ains-the-challenges-1823368519
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