#'its character assassination' shut tha fuck up

[fagknowledge]

If you guys shittalk the second season of TLOU like you did TLOU2 I'll be so fucking angry like what's actually wrong with you

[kegisaroused]

The Last Jedi

I have a lot of thoughts. A lot of them are not good. Thoughts are under the cut in no particular order. Probably a little rambling/incomplete maybe I’ll write something more put together later IDK

MAJOR HUGE SPOILERS OBVIOUSLY

Okay so first, stuff I actually liked:

-Luke seeing the two suns in his last moments. One of the few moments with Luke’s character that didn’t feel totally off. 

-Luke handing Leia the bauble from the falcon and the old love theme stabbing me right through the goddamn heart.

-Finn and Poe having very few actual interactions and still managing to be gay as hell.

-I love the Porgs and the Crait foxes fuck all y’all. 

-I also liked Rose a lot and would love to see her actually get better character development. Her tasering Finn was fantastic.

-Rose and Finn’s little side jaunt has me so torn because despite it being totally out of place and gimmicky it also had some of the better character interactions/development in the whole movie? Not that that’s saying much

-Luke basically trying to get Rey to leave by purposefully being as much of a creepy old weirdo as possible. 

-R2 playing Leia’s original message. MY HEART.

-Laura Dern ramming the cruiser into the First Order at hyperspeed was really fucking cool. 

-Yoda being Yoda (when he WAS Yoda, but that’s for the next section)

-Leia using the force FOR ONCE (though the how was real stupid, but again... next section)

-Rey being happy to see Finn having a bond with Rose and smiling at it rather than being jealous or something stupid like that.

-Rey NOT giving Kylo another chance at the end. Like... mmkay buddy I tried but you made the wrong choice I’m shutting the door in your face now BYE.

-That said, I was really afraid of the stuff between Rey and Kylo because the shippers with spoilers had been making it seem like the romance angle was REALLY played up but... it wasn’t? At all? Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t shut down that angle but the nature of their connection felt ambiguous. The music cues did not indicate a romance, and Snoke straight up SAYS that Kylo’s conflict and draw to Rey was something he was putting into his head so that he’d bring Rey to him. I also feel like Daisy and Adams acting choices were emphatically NOT hinting at a romantic dynamic. I was afraid the shirtless scene was gonna be some sort of awkward flustered Rey and instead it was her just being genuinely annoyed like STFU and put a fucking shirt on.

Now... on to THE BAD:

-The pacing. HOOOOLY HELL THE PACING. This movie was paced so badly. It felt simultaneously like it went on forever, but also moved so fast there was never breathing room. It felt manic and confused. Also the whole movie seems to take place over the course of like... a day. 

-EVERYONE was out of character at least half the time. Everyone either pulled shit that didn’t make sense for them to drive the plot or they completely rolled back their character development to rehash shit. TFA already dealt with Finn needing to stop running from his problems, why is he immediately trying to run away again? His attempted heroic sacrifice at the end would have been a good character moment... if we hadn’t already HAD that moment in the last movie. Poe was reduced to the “reckless hothead” archetype and not only had to learn a lesson that not only didn’t make sense for him, but he had to learn it twice. In the same movie. 

-The CGI gimmicks. It was treading pretty damn far into prequel territory with the unnecessary CGI animals where practical effects would have not only sufficed but felt much more organic. 

-I’m so happy they finally let Leia use the force but her floating herself back into the ship was SO STUPID LOOKING. I wanted to laugh and I am 100% sure that was not the intent. Carrie Fisher did not die for this. 

-Fake Luke at the end was stupid because it was immediately obvious. He was digitally edited to look younger, he was using a lightsaber that WE JUST SAW GET DESTROYED instead of the lightsaber he actually HAS, it was just... dumb. 

-Speaking of dumb: Luke’s entire motivation was stupid and made absolutely zero sense if you know anything about Luke Skywalker. You’re talking about the only person in the galaxy who believed Darth Vader could be redeemed. Like... that’s literally the WHOLE POINT OF HIS STORY IN THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY. You’re gonna have me believe that Luke Fucking Skywalker was so easily scared by the dark side that he (even for a SECOND) contemplated killing a teenager? No, no, no fuck right off with that shit. If anything it should have been REY who thought Kylo was an irredeemable monster and Luke convincing her to give him a chance. Even if in the end he throws away that chance. You can still make the point of “maybe not everyone can be saved” without committing character assassination on Luke. Like what the hell even was that.

-The dialogue was so clunky a lot of the time. Yoda for example: there were moments where he was perfect (him smacking Luke in the face and being like YEP FUCK IT BURN THE TREE WHO NEEDS IT were very in character actions) but a lot of his dialogue felt like someone doing a bad Yoda impression (important note: I’m referring here to his actual written lines, not the voice acting). Also his puppet was really weird looking I don’t know why but it did not look right at all. 

-Some of the jokes also felt very forced and unnecessary. Star Wars needs levity, but the tonal balance was just off and there were a lot of jokes that felt very shoved into scenes that did not need jokes.

-I didn’t buy the Finn/Rose romance. I don’t actually have a problem with that ship at all. Finn/Poe is obviously my preference but lets be real I’m not holding my breath and I’d be 100% fine if Finn/Rose is where they went. But it wasn’t developed at all? They had a couple bonding moments yeah and were definitely becoming good friends, but not nearly enough to make me believe THEY’RE IN LURVE. It was like they somehow thought her sacrifice couldn’t be meaningful if it was just about saving a friend instead of saving GUY I WANNA MACK ON which is kinda bullshit. 

-There was a continuous trend of showing HEY LOOK WE HAVE FEMALE CHARACTERS. LOOK AT ALL THESE LADY PILOTS AND GUNNERS only to kill them off immediately. Paige’s death I didn’t overly have a problem with as there was at least a reason and a point to it with her being Rose’s sister, and she was given a moment to shine and a heroic sacrifice at least, but with all the background characters it felt like they were so determined to be all LOOK WE HAVE GIRLS that we saw more girls die than guys.

-Also are Poe’s whole squad from the last movie just supposed to be dead now? Like... they got their own comic and everything and are fairly popular side characters. Are you really going to just say they’re all dead? 

-The fight choreography was really lacking. Luke fighting Kylo at the end could have been so cool but it was 90% stupid CGI and just felt silly. Especially comparing it to the Rey and Kylo (I refuse to type their names with a slash because seriously MISS ME WITH THAT SHIT) fight from the end of TFA which was so well done and just... ugh. Also Finn’s fight with Phasma was very anticlimactic and she was so underused.

-Finn and Rose’s side trip was completely pointless. Which is annoying because like I mentioned before it had some of the better character moments in a character-less movie, but it was literally pointless. I get that they wanted to set up some sort moral ambiguity or juxtaposition (OOOH THE ARMS DEALERS SELL TO BOTH SIDES SO IT’S A GREY AREA. OOOH THE POOR PEOPLE AND THE ANIMALS SUFFER FOR RICH PEOPLE’S ENTERTAINMENT. AM I DOING THIS RIGHT? IS THIS HEAVY HANDED ENOUGH?), but even if they had their hearts set on doing that (despite not needing to at all) there are a million other ways they could have done it without completely derailing the plot. Especially since in the end the plan didn’t even WORK an actually made things worse because if they never brought the stupid slicer on board the original plan would have worked and most of the resistance would have gotten away just fine. The slicer character himself was pointless and one dimensional.

-What is the First Order doing? They made sense in TFA because they were a fringe group who had been laying low and underselling their strength while they prepared to attack and overthrow the New Republic. But what are they doing now? Did they seize control and establish a new capital planet? Did they install a new governing body since they literally KILLED ALL OF THEM? What is their end goal? What is their motivation? There’s nothing there and there needs to be. 

-Why on god’s green earth didn’t Laura Dern just TELL POE THE PLAN? Why was she being needlessly cryptic and withholding? She wasn’t protecting anyone by withholding information and was actually making herself look really bad and incompetant for no reason? She didn’t even say she HAD a plan. It was so stupid and made no sense.

-Which leads me to a larger overall problem: the characters were not driving the story, the story was driving the characters. The characters did things because they had to to make the plot happen, rather than the plot happening because the characters did what they would naturally do. As a result almost all the characters felt incredibly stiff and there was pretty much no meaningful character development. 

-The movie wrote its self into a corner. I get that they wanted to push it into a more unsure ending ESB type situation but they went too far. The rebellion was in an unsteady place at the end of ESB but they still had, you know... a fleet? More than 10 people? They were also extremely inconsistent scene to scene with the number of resistance fighters left alive. They act like they’ve got almost nobody left, but then they have enough people to man the trenches on Crait? And a lot of those people clearly escaped back into the base but then when they’re escaping to the Falcon there’s like 5 of them? Am I supposed to believe that the 8 year old Rose gave a ring too is the savior of the resistance? None of it seemed to be done with any forethought to the future of the story.

-Where the hell is the rest of the Galaxy? I’ve never watched a Star Wars film that felt so isolated. Even with Rose and Finn’s B plot the galaxy felt empty and unpopulated. 

Overall the whole thing felt like a bunch of unfinished thoughts slapped together into a story without a proper narrating structure. The whole movie seemed confused about where it was going and what it was doing.

I’m hoping JJ Abrams can reel it back in with Episode 9 because it’s really gonna upset me if TFA was a fluke and the rest of this is just gonna be Prequel Trilogy 2.0