Least favorite sequal [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

InvisibleBison

2023-12-31, 10:07 PM

While I wouldn't say I hate any of these stories, there are some series that started off great and ended quite badly:

The first is the Rama series, by Arthur C. Clarke and some other guy. The first book in the series, Rendezvous at Rama, by Clarke alone, is a fascinating story of a team of astronauts exploring a mysterious alien spacecraft that is flying through the solar system, and ends with a lot of unanswered questions. The subsequent books, ostensibly co-written by Clarke and the other guy but if I recall correctly all but entirely written by the other guy, are essentially the first book told over again, but less well and with a bunch of boring political drama between the explorers, and end with one of the worst explanations for a mysterious phenomenon I've ever seen in fiction.

The second is the Novels of the Change by S. M. Stirling. The first book, Dies the Fire, is a really well done apocalypse story. The premise is that all modern technology - anything that uses electricity, combustion engines, or explosives - abruptly stops working, and the story follows a few groups of people who manage to survive the ensuing collapse of society and start to build something new from the wreckage. The next two books, set a few years later, are about a conflict between the societies established in the first book and are pretty good, though there's a bit of a suggestion of supernatural phenomena at some places and one of the secondary characters, the child of two of the protagonists of the first book, is kind of irritating. In the subsequent books, things go completely off the rails; the supernatural stuff that previously was just hinted at has become the main plot and the obnoxious kid has grown up to become a full-blown Mary Sue protagonist. Things got so bad that I eventually gave up on the series, and in retrospect I waited far too long to do so.

And thirdly, just because someone has to say it, so we may as well get it out of the way, the Star Wars sequel trilogy.

Errorname

2023-12-31, 10:15 PM

Pacific Rim was an instant favourite of mine when it came out, and the second movie took everything I liked about it and threw it in the bin. Staggering amount of bad choices that didn't get what made the first film cool and what good ideas they had were executed very badly

And thirdly, just because someone has to say it, so we may as well get it out of the way, the Star Wars sequel trilogy.

Honestly, by the standards of modern Hollywood legacy sequels the Sequel Trilogy are top of the pack. Like they're at least interesting, which is more than the Jurassic World movies managed

Dargaron

2024-01-01, 12:42 AM

The second is the Novels of the Change by S. M. Stirling. The first book, Dies the Fire, is a really well done apocalypse story. The premise is that all modern technology - anything that uses electricity, combustion engines, or explosives - abruptly stops working, and the story follows a few groups of people who manage to survive the ensuing collapse of society and start to build something new from the wreckage. The next two books, set a few years later, are about a conflict between the societies established in the first book and are pretty good, though there's a bit of a suggestion of supernatural phenomena at some places and one of the secondary characters, the child of two of the protagonists of the first book, is kind of irritating. In the subsequent books, things go completely off the rails; the supernatural stuff that previously was just hinted at has become the main plot and the obnoxious kid has grown up to become a full-blown Mary Sue protagonist. Things got so bad that I eventually gave up on the series, and in retrospect I waited far too long to do so.

Oh wow. I'd almost entirely forgotten just how much the Emberverse series went off the rails in the later books. I also bailed midway through their Great Trek East and from a quick glance at a summary of what follows, it's good that I did.

On topic: The Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft.

Before the torches and pitchforks come out, my reasoning: Up to BC, most if not all of the end-game bosses were in some way a direct threat to the people of Azeroth. Ragnaros, C'thun, Kel'thuzad etc were actively plotting Bad Stuff and the players put a stop to that.

Burning Crusade starts strong, with much of Hellfire Peninsula spent fighting the Burning Legion (another active, existential threat) and the local Fel Orcs (who aren't actually in league with the Burning Legion but you don't know that and it's a reasonable assumption that they are and they're hostile anyway.) But as you get to higher level zones, the player starts running into and fighting various forces loyal to Illidan, who is actively opposed to the Burning Legion after repeatedly failing them in Warcraft 3.

At this point, the best thing for the playable factions to do should probably be to stay out of it. There's no particular reason to conquer Outland from Illidan since he's already acting as a de facto bulwark against an endless legion of kill-happy demons. But instead progression demands that you fight your way through all the zones of Outland, alternately befriending or killing the locals and eventually make your way to the Black Temple to kill Illidan. Who...yes, probably has done enough Bad Stuff to deserve death in the abstract, but given that he's currently A: not a threat to Azeroth and B: fighting someone who is, going out of your way to kill him doesn't make much sense.

Blizzard also fumbled the pacing, because at least for a lot of players, the final patch (which came out after the Black Temple raid and involved an invasion of an island on Azeroth by...the Burning Legion) seemingly came out of nowhere, resurrected a character from an end-game raid as a much less powerful dungeon boss (so you're much more likely to kill his forms in reverse chronological order unless you'd played through BC content as it was being released) and just generally didn't mesh with a lot of the build up in the expansion.

It's also my personal pet peeve that basically none of our friends from Burning Crusade (or Wrath of the Lich King) showed up to help out in Cataclysm, when Blizzard revamped the "vanilla" zones against the backdrop of a potentially world-ending...well, Cataclysm. Sort of a "you helped us in our hour of need, now we're here to return the favor." Also, The Burning Crusade gave us Garrosh Hellscream, who proceeded to be...just the worst from Wrath of the Lich King onwards (the players snapping him out of his melancholic stupor caused him to instead become absolutely unhinged and yet still somehow get trusted with more and more responsibility despite showing no particular strategic or diplomatic skills until he finally snapped and became a boss for us to kill). Technically he's not a problem with Burning Crusade per say, but since that's where he was introduced, I will blame that expansion for him.

Zevox

2024-01-01, 01:37 AM

The Last Jedi. It (especially its handling of its villains and Luke) was so bad that it killed all desire I could have had to see the third entry in the sequel trilogy, to the point where I still have not watched The Rise of Skywalker despite having access to Disney+ through a family member that would allow me to do so effectively for free. Even if you're comparing it to its immediate predecessor rather than the Original Trilogy, The Force Awakens at least accomplished passable mediocrity, even if it was a poor foundation for a new trilogy and generally disappointing, so TLJ remains a pretty steep fall-off even compared to that.

Dragon Age: Inquisition. Dragon Age 2 was actually my favorite of the series, owing to a combination of improvements to the combat system compared to Origins and having the best story and characters of the series (IMO), despite its obvious faults elsewhere as a result of being blatantly rushed. It wasn't quite Bioware at their best because of those faults, but it was damn close I'd say. Inquisition then followed it up by largely sweeping the more interesting conflict it set up, the Mage rebellion against the Templars, under the rug in the early part of the game, having a pretty generic and forgettable villain and overall plot, and being padded to hell and back because they wanted their semi-open world design with massive areas dotted with shallow subquests and crafting items to pick up everywhere. And it also somehow managed to make the combat worse again, and aside from Varric returning from 2 the companions were pretty forgettable as well (though the fact that you didn't get party conversations if you rode your horse around those oversized areas may have contributed to that..). It's not a completely garbage game, I did beat it once, but it is the only Bioware game (that I've played) that I've never finished a replay of, and kind of doubt I ever will.

I'm not sure if this counts, but The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild also comes to mind. The reason I'm not sure it counts is because I've never actually played it, so I can't truly judge its quality overall. However, the reason I've never played it is because it's pretty damn clear from everything I've seen and heard of it that I would not like it, at all. The shift to open-world design just focuses on everything I don't like about that, at the expense of the elements I most liked about the series. And compared to how much I loved the Zelda series prior to that, it's kind of staggering that they managed to change the game so much that I wouldn't want to play it. For years after it came out I would've told you that Ocarina of Time was my favorite game of all time; even after it was displaced from that status, I still held quite a high opinion of it, and still do really. Even among other Zelda games I only ever found one I liked better - ironically enough, Breath of the Wild's immediate predecessor, Skyward Sword, which... well, I don't want to get long-winded about it (which I started to and deleted). Suffice to say that the big reason that it come to mind is that, in addition to going from my favorite game of the franchise to a game I don't even want to play, Breath of the Wild was hugely popular and now I can't reasonably expect any future Zelda titles not to use its design model, at least for the foreseeable future. So in a way, Breath of the Wild basically killed the franchise for me, when it used to be one of my favorites. Can't get a much bigger drop-off than that.

Errorname

2024-01-01, 02:03 AM

Zevox

2024-01-01, 02:13 AM

Couldn't disagree more, I think the Last Jedi's handling of Luke and the villains was easily the most compelling stuff in the sequel trilogy, and about as well as Johnson could have handled the setups Abrams gave him. Like there's a lot of stuff that doesn't work for me about Last Jedi, basically most of the B and C plots except for their payoffs at the climax, and how the movie continues for like half-an-hour after it should have ended.

But even though I liked Force Awakens when I first watched it, that is a movie composed entirely of "Hey, Star Wars is back!" with nothing under the hood, once you rewatch it without the hype it completely falls apart, and a lot of Last Jedi's problems come from having to work with the tools Force Awakens handed them.
I don't want to get into a huge discussion of the matter again, so let's leave it at "we couldn't disagree more," eh? Because I would definitely argue those things with you - especially the notion that there's anything remotely compelling in The Last Jedi, much less around the villains or Luke, which are far and away the worst parts of it or TFA IMO - but frankly the whole subject is so unpleasant as to not be worth such discussion any longer.

Errorname

2024-01-01, 02:22 AM

I don't want to get into a huge discussion of the matter again, so let's leave it at "we couldn't disagree more," eh? Because I would definitely argue those things with you - especially the notion that there's anything remotely compelling in The Last Jedi, much less around the villains or Luke, which are far and away the worst parts of it or TFA IMO - but frankly the whole subject is so unpleasant as to not be worth such discussion any longer.

For what it's worth I'm still not sure if I'd call Last Jedi 'good', I just know that compared to the rest of the crop of legacy sequels it at least feels like it was trying to be a real movie, so I give it a little more slack than something like Jurassic World.

Bohandas

2024-01-01, 02:33 AM

HALF-LIFE!

I don't know why so many people say that Half-Life 2 was one of the best games ever. It wasn't even good. It felt like it wanted to be some kind of hybrid visual novel/driving game that only grudgingly included first-person shooter elements. And the plot was clearly an unrelated story that had hamfistedly had characters and elements from the Half-Life inserted into it so that it could be sold as a sequel.

Another bad FPS sequel is Quake 2, which is full on unplayable, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the first game, not even in the hamfisted manner of Half-Life 2. But I don't have the same kind of animus towards Quake 2 as I do towards Half-Life 2 because it didn't recieve as much undeserved praise, and because, being unplayable, I didn't waste well over a dozen hours hoping I'd finally get to the good part.

Couldn't disagree more, I think the Last Jedi's handling of Luke and the villains was easily the most compelling stuff in the sequel trilogy, and about as well as Johnson could have handled the setups Abrams gave him.

He didn't handle them at all, he just tossed them out.

Your statement would be more accurate as a description of Rise of Skywalker, which spends the entire movie trying to fix Last Jedi's plot holes and poor storytelling decisions. For instance, bringing back Palpatime the way they brought him back was lame but they kind of had to because Last Jedi killed off the new villain.

For what it's worth I'm still not sure if I'd call Last Jedi 'good', I just know that compared to the rest of the crop of legacy sequels it at least feels like it was trying to be a real movie, so I give it a little more slack than something like Jurassic World.

Compared to the rest of Star Wars on the other hand, it's terrible.

I recently got the chance to see the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, which was famous for being terrible, and it was legitimately better than any of the Disney movies because at least it was true to the source material

DaedalusMkV

2024-01-01, 02:56 AM

For what it's worth I'm still not sure if I'd call Last Jedi 'good', I just know that compared to the rest of the crop of legacy sequels it at least feels like it was trying to be a real movie, so I give it a little more slack than something like Jurassic World.

The Last Jedi was clearly Rian Johnson's attempt to subvert Star Wars in a new and interesting way. Personally, I have to admit that it succeeded in that regard for me. It subverted Star Wars so hard that I stopped being a Star Wars fan and haven't consumed a single piece of Star Wars media since then. Did I hate it? Yeah. But I watched the whole thing, unlike Jurassic World 2, so it's got that much going for it. Personally, I wouldn't put in in a top 3 list of most hated sequels; Star Wars had been in decline for a while at that point, with the novels having pretty much petered away to nothing of value and even the video games largely being in a dearth of quality, so for me TLJ was something like the wick burning down to the bottom of the candle more than anything. If I had to make a top 3 list here...

Command and Conquer 4 would probably have to be on the list. It's an absolute travesty with basically no redeeming qualities, and it wouldn't be a good game even if it hadn't had the Command and Conquer logo slapped on it and a half-assed story shoehorned in. It's awful, I hate it, and the fact that it was technically the last ever Command and Conquer game is just... Sad. Even Red Alert 3 at its absolute worst never falls below the level of 'good game that doesn't quite live up to its pedigree', but C&C 4 is just horrid. The fact that it follows after C&C 3, which was actually one of the best games in the franchise (with probably the best story) just makes it hurt even more.

Sword of the Stars 2 tops my list. No question. I loved the first game and I had complete trust in the developers that the sequel would be something great. It's one of the very few games I've ever preordered, and I even booked some time off work around the release so I could really dig into it when it came out. Release date comes and... Loading the game is almost impossible. If you can get a game started it crashes quickly. Loading saves is impossible. It quickly becomes clear that the game is, at best, in an extremely early alpha state. Even six months later as it started to approach something akin to playability there just wasn't enough there for me to like it, and almost all of the changes from the first game were in my mind direct steps down compared to the first game. This one was a huge disappointment to me, and it's the reason I basically never preorder games.

For movies, I think Terminator 3 might be near the top of my list. The first two films are sci-fi classics and masterpieces of the action genre. Terminator 3... Should never have been made. The worst thing is that I was genuinely excited for it, so watching it in theatres and realizing just how boring and nonsensical it was hurt even more.

For books... Hmm. Last Animorphs novel? Yeah, I'm gonna go with the last Animorphs novel. Worst. Ending. Ever.

Saph

2024-01-01, 04:22 AM

• The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy: For reasons already mentioned. The Last Jedi was so bad that it basically made me stop being a Star Wars fan, which is pretty impressive when you consider that my status as a Star Wars fan survived midichlorians, the Expanded Universe novels, and Jar Jar Binks. Like Zevox, I've never watched Rise of Skywalker, and probably never will.

• Subnautica: Below Zero: The first Subnautica is a masterclass in immersiveness. Part of the way it accomplishes this is by using a silent protagonist and by giving you long periods of time alone, exploring this giant spooky, intimidating world in total isolation, uncovering the artifacts left behind by a mysterious, inscrutable alien race. For Below Zero the designers – for god alone knows what reason – decided that instead of a silent protagonist, they'd give you a protagonist who practically never shuts up. And you meet one of the "mysterious inscrutable aliens", who becomes your companion . . . and who turns out to be a total dweeb. Much of the rest of the game is then spent watching the annoying protagonist and the annoying alien embark on an cringingly painful quasi-romance.

• Tales from Watership Down: Watership Down is one of my favourite books ever. I was so excited when I learned that the author had written a second. Then I got to read it and . . . yeah. To this day I don't understand how an author can write such a good first book and such a bad sequel. Admittedly 25 years passed between the two books, which a lot of time for things to happen . . . but still!

Errorname

2024-01-01, 04:39 AM

I don't know why so many people say that Half-Life 2 was one of the best games ever. It wasn't even good. It felt like it wanted to be some kind of hybrid visual novel/driving game that only grudgingly included first-person shooter elements. And the plot was clearly an unrelated story that had hamfistedly had characters and elements from the Half-Life inserted into it so that it could be sold as a sequel.

I played them back-to-back and I don't know I think they flowed pretty well together. Half-Life 2 felt like it was iterating on a lot of the tech and design philosophy from the first. They're doing more talky bits and more vehicle sections because they have the tech to do them well now, but you could see the seeds of those ideas in the first game and I would gladly take Highway 17 over On A Rail. There's definitely a major shift in setting and tone, which I could see someone disliking.

He didn't handle them at all, he just tossed them out.

Your statement would be more accurate as a description of Rise of Skywalker, which spends the entire movie trying to fix Last Jedi's plot holes and poor storytelling decisions. For instance, bringing back Palpatime the way they brought him back was lame but they kind of had to because Last Jedi killed off the new villain.

Luke Skywalker as a bitter exile is basically the only way you can proceed from where Force Awakens left him, and having Snoke be a wannabe who gets got by his more dangerous apprentice is more interesting than just doing Palpatine again with the numbers filed off. Like, maybe I'd feel harsher about the Snoke thing if I thought he seemed like a good villain, but he's just Palpatine again and doing something different was absolutely the correct call.

I'm not saying it's what I wanted from a Star Wars sequel, but a sequel to Force Awakens was never going to be actually good. The bad choices made in that first movie doomed the entire trilogy, and Last Jedi managing to be an interesting failure puts it ahead of the others.

Majiy

2024-01-01, 04:40 AM

There was this sci-fi book that I don't remember the name of. Spaceship crashed on alien planet, encounters with foreign lifeforms, some AI stufff... so far standard sci-fi, not great but good enough. In the sequel the entire universe collapses (without explanation), the protagonists fall through some kind of black hole (without explanation) and somehow are transported back to the time of vikings (without explanation). I dont remember what happened in the rest of the sequel, but I remember that I was entirely unimpressed.

The entire thing just gave the impression that the author really wanted to write a completely different book, but instead of doing this they decided for some reason to make this a sequel of the first one, kick all the established worldbuilding in the garbage, and keep only a few characters.

Batcathat

2024-01-01, 04:53 AM

The first is the Rama series, by Arthur C. Clarke and some other guy. The first book in the series, Rendezvous at Rama, by Clarke alone, is a fascinating story of a team of astronauts exploring a mysterious alien spacecraft that is flying through the solar system, and ends with a lot of unanswered questions. The subsequent books, ostensibly co-written by Clarke and the other guy but if I recall correctly all but entirely written by the other guy, are essentially the first book told over again, but less well and with a bunch of boring political drama between the explorers, and end with one of the worst explanations for a mysterious phenomenon I've ever seen in fiction.

Seconding this so much. The original remains one of my all time favorites (I reread it just a few months ago for what must've been like the tenth time) but the sequels are just so silly. (Interestingly, a friend of mine have the completely opposite opinion and think the sequels are way better than the original).

To add something of my own, I think Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar books are some of the most uneven books I've read. While that's true of the first book as well (I remember thinking it was pretty bad for the first few hundred pages or so) I did end up genuinely liking it but found Silverthorn to be some of the blandest, most boring, least original fantasy I've ever read. The books continued bouncing between "pretty good" and "kinda meh" until I eventually lost interest.

Manga Shoggoth

2024-01-01, 07:18 AM

Well, I have twins!

I enjoyed the Belgariad (5 books) and The Elenium (3 books) by David Eddings. Reasonable stories, enjoyable characters and nicely playing with tropes. Both stories brought to suitable ends.

Then he decides to write sequels (and in the case of the Belgariad, prequels as well). They were ... lacking. In each case he had put a huge amount of effort to bring in the new story, and in the process tended to throw away half the lore he had already established. The stories were fun to read - although not as good as the originals - right up until the time you looked back to the originals and saw what was being changed.

Majiy

2024-01-01, 07:48 AM

One more. I really liked the Dragonbone Chair series by Tad Williams. There is a sequel series, but I never got past the first book because of the extremely unlikable protagonist. The grandchild of the original protagonist, written as moody, angsty, whiny teenager with no redeeming quality. Basically an entire book of "you all dont understand me, your old stories are boring, and I have no intention of showing the slightest initiative". If someone has read the entire sequel series, let me know if it gets better.

Toastkart

2024-01-01, 10:10 AM

Back to the Future 1 and 2 were both fantastic, 1 a little bit more than 2. But 3 was a significant letdown. The characters were all just caricatures of themselves and the comedy largely fell flat.

I actually quite liked Jurassic World. Yes, there was a little too much 'oh look, we're actually on the same island.' And nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. The kids weren't as annoying as some of the others in the series. But Fallen Kingdom and Dominion were almost insulting. Like someone got paid to write them, and someone else got paid to read them and give the ok that they get made in that state. Like I'd rather watch JP 3 than either of them, and that one was a mess.

I really love Dune and usually reread the series once every couple of years. I tried a couple of the 'prequel' novels by Frank Herbert's son and his co-author and they felt like amateurish fan-fiction. Like the gravitas was just gone. And the authors seemed to have this need to connect things and explain things that didn't need connecting or explaining.

National Treasure was a fun adventure movie. The sequel tried too hard. They tried to make the stakes higher, but they just weren't.

Dragonheart was an amazing fantasy action movie. The first two sequels were terrible and I gave up on more after that.

Watership Down and Rendezvous with Rama have already been mentioned, and I wholeheartedly agree with those sentiments. If you take the best bits of the Star Wars sequels and put them together you have one sorta ok movie. Like it really shouldn't have been hard to come up with something decent, but clearly no one had a plan for a trilogy and they banked on brand recognition alone.

Bohandas

2024-01-01, 10:46 AM

In regard to Star Wars, I personally consider Rogue One to be the worst of the series. It retroactively makes the opening of A New Hope completely absurd, it's tonally dissonant, it introduces characters for no reason and then kills them off just as inexplicably, it's riddled with diabolus ex machina, Tarkin somehow is not only not executed but also not even fired for destroying an entire imperial base in order to murder a rival, and what was up with Jedha city taking like five minutes to explode, that's not how explosions work.

Luke Skywalker as a bitter exile is basically the only way you can proceed from where Force Awakens left him

Force Awakens does paint him as a recluse, but any details beyond that were still up in the air. He could just as easily, more easily in fact, been the trope of the wise guru who lives in some hard to reach place. Like hoe in cartoons the wiseman is always on top of a mountain somewhere, excpet instead of a mountain it's a remote planet

and having Snoke be a wannabe who gets got by his more dangerous apprentice is more interesting than just doing Palpatine again with the numbers filed off

Perhaps, but that's definitely more of a last movie plot point, not something you do in the middle of the series. I admit that that was a good scene but it shouldn't have happened until midway through the third movie

Errorname

2024-01-01, 11:13 AM

I actually quite liked Jurassic World. Yes, there was a little too much 'oh look, we're actually on the same island.' And nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. The kids weren't as annoying as some of the others in the series. But Fallen Kingdom and Dominion were almost insulting. Like someone got paid to write them, and someone else got paid to read them and give the ok that they get made in that state. Like I'd rather watch JP 3 than either of them, and that one was a mess.

Jurassic World has a smugness to it that I loathe. It's self-aware about being a lazy nostalgia bait legacy sequel, but saying you knew better and did it anyways excuses nothing. If anything it makes it worse.

Honestly Fallen Kingdom might be the one I hate the least. It's still a Trevorrow script, but Bayona is a real director and the film is a lot nicer visually as a result. But "best Jurassic World movie" is a low bar, they're all bad.

In regard to Star Wars, I personally consider Rogue One to be the worst of the series. It retroactively makes the opening of A New Hope completely absurd, it's tonally dissonant, it introduces characters for no reason and then kills them off just as inexplicably, it's riddled with diabolus ex machina, Tarkin somehow is not only not executed but also not even fired for destroying an entire imperial base in order to murder a rival, and what was up with Jedha city taking like five minutes to explode, that's not how explosions work.

Eh, it was a rough production and ultimately I think the final product is middling at worst. Some good, some bad, nothing egregious. In a series that produced the Holiday Special and Attack of the Clones and Rise of Skywalker, I have a hard time saying that the worst one

Especially since without it we wouldn't have gotten Andor, which is some of the best Star Wars ever made

Force Awakens does paint him as a recluse, but any details beyond that were still up in the air. He could just as easily, more easily in fact, been the trope of the wise guru who lives in some hard to reach place. Like hoe in cartoons the wiseman is always on top of a mountain somewhere, excpet instead of a mountain it's a remote planet

He really couldn't be. He didn't become a recluse because he achieved some enlightenment, he went into hiding while a new empire rose because his apprentice turned evil and killed all his students, and those details are established in Episode VII

Force Awakens is the movie that established that he was a failure who ran away from the galaxy. Last Jedi had to try and make that work, and it's probably the best part of the sequel trilogy.

IPerhaps, but that's definitely more of a last movie plot point, not something you do in the middle of the series.

Strong disagree, it's absolutely a twist you pull in the middle. Enough time passed that you've established the fakeout villain, but enough time left that your real villain gets more than 20 minutes to be Big Bad before they get defeated

Bobb

2024-01-01, 11:26 AM

TLJ was the worst by a country mile.

I widely agree with Mark Hamill's take on "Jake Skywalker."

TLJ is the movie where a force ghost Yoda creates lightning to kill a tree.

I could go on at length but I don't want to.

Honorable mention to the Matrix trilogy. First movie was quite elegant and a proper open ended ending. The sequels dropped the ball. IMO

Talakeal

2024-01-01, 11:29 AM

Highlander 2 is the ur example of this. There can be only one.

snip.

I always felt like Burning Crusade went from world saving to overthrowing a tinpot dictator. Illidan was bad and deserved to die, but there was no real reason for us to be the ones to do it. The fact that he was holding back a greater evil and killing him caused us more problems in the long run, well, let’s just say there are a lot of real life parallels that aren’t appropriate topics for this board.

Batcathat

2024-01-01, 11:35 AM

In the video game category, mine might be Deus Ex: Invisible War. To be fair, it's actually a pretty decent game on its own merits and has some interesting ideas here and there but the original Deus Ex set the bar very high, so while it's definitely not my least favorite game, it might be my least favorite sequel game. Human Revolution restored my faith in the series and I suspect that part of the reason I still haven't played Mankind Divided is that I'm afraid of another Invisible War situation.

GloatingSwine

2024-01-01, 12:00 PM

Perhaps, but that's definitely more of a last movie plot point, not something you do in the middle of the series. I admit that that was a good scene but it shouldn't have happened until midway through the third movie

Midway through the third movie is way way too late. Gives the usurper no time to be the new villain.

Sith Martin Boorman was never going to be a good villain, having Kylo Ren chib him to fully embrace the dark and become the new villain was the best thing to do with him.

Precure

2024-01-01, 12:04 PM

The Last Jedi is simply too mean spirited.

Trixie_One

2024-01-01, 12:38 PM

Dragon Age: Inquisition. Dragon Age 2 was actually my favorite of the series

I feel about 2 the same way you do about Inquisition but even more so. DA2 is one of my least favourite games I've even played. I can not understate how much that game let me down. That and ME3 entirely broke me of my love for Bioware and I'd been fully in the tank up to that point.

I think it might be quicker to list what is good than what is bad. I like some of the characters... and that's about it. The gameplay is a carcrash. Constantly overly gamey with extra waves and the balancing in shocking. It is genuinely possible to run into a gamebreaking brick wall of a bossfight depending on how you've built your character and party, and that same fight can be a cakewalk speaking to little care taken when it came to making different approaches viable. Locations are constantly reused to the point you might actually get some amusement from it, the plot in places is on such strict rails that it's basically going 'choo-choo!', but by far the worst thing were the story bugs. The story is by far the most important thing in such an rpg and when that breaks any immersion is just entirely gone. For me it was when a companion broke down in grief over a massacre. Great performance and should have been really effecting. The problem was that the massacre hadn't actually happened yet.

Very much a case for that adage that a delayed game will eventually be good but a rushed game will always be bad.

I don't know why so many people say that Half-Life 2 was one of the best games ever. It wasn't even good. It felt like it wanted to be some kind of hybrid visual novel/driving game that only grudgingly included first-person shooter elements. And the plot was clearly an unrelated story that had hamfistedly had characters and elements from the Half-Life inserted into it so that it could be sold as a sequel.

I wouldn't be as harsh as this but I do also agree that it was wildly over-rated. It has such amazing presentation ("Wake up and smell the ashes" especially) and does have some really great bits like the horror section so I can see why people were taken in, but it's a curiously empty experience. That's also not getting into how they just stopped in the middle of the story with the dlcs.

I enjoyed the Belgariad (5 books) and The Elenium (3 books) by David Eddings

I actually have a lot of time for the sequel series. I suspect though that's due to my reading order was basically insane due to what was available from the library at the time. Of the Sparhawk series I think it was like 6,4,5,1,2,3 and so that rather give away the identity of the twist baddie.

I did read Belgariad in a more sensible fashion, and again I do prefer the follow up. It introduces by far the most interesting character Eddings ever came up with in the rogue character's royal brother. Belgariad is very much a LotR imitator while the follow up does some interesting things as the character's in the story notice that they're in a retread, a retread that has a solid in-plot reason, and do take advantage of the recurring themes. Yes there's a tad too much pairing up everybody but it's nowhere near as bad as that's going to get in the Eddings later works.

Saying all that the follow up novel based on the life of Polgara the Sorceress is absolutely shockingly bad, and does genuine damage to the characters involved. Yikes, that was seriously, seriously rough.

Warlawk

2024-01-01, 12:44 PM

Ender's Game (Book, not movie) was a fantastic book that I greatly enjoyed. Speaker for the Dead was an okay book that was completely different from everything that made the first book great. SftD used the same setting and characters as a backdrop for a story that departs from everything that would have drawn a reader to the first book. While I think it's worth the time to read, it's a completely different experience and likely to be disappointing if you're expecting more of the same after reading Ender's Game. Xenocide was just strange.

On the flip side Ender's Shadow was fantastic, perhaps rivaling the original. The various books detailing the conflicts to follow on earth are pretty good too, much better than SftD and Xenocide IMO.

Bohandas

2024-01-01, 01:32 PM

Jurassic World has a smugness to it that I loathe. It's self-aware about being a lazy nostalgia bait legacy sequel, but saying you knew better and did it anyways excuses nothing. If anything it makes it worse.

Honestly Fallen Kingdom might be the one I hate the least. It's still a Trevorrow script, but Bayona is a real director and the film is a lot nicer visually as a result. But "best Jurassic World movie" is a low bar, they're all bad.

Eh, it was a rough production and ultimately I think the final product is middling at worst. Some good, some bad, nothing egregious. In a series that produced the Holiday Special and Attack of the Clones and Rise of Skywalker, I have a hard time saying that the worst one

Oh it was much worse than the Holiday Special. ALL the Disney movies were worse than the holiday special. Holiday Special is solidly in the middle at this point.

He really couldn't be. He didn't become a recluse because he achieved some enlightenment, he went into hiding while a new empire rose because his apprentice turned evil and killed all his students, and those details are established in Episode VII

I'm pretty sure he could be, because you just described Obi Wan Kenobi

Manga Shoggoth

2024-01-01, 02:06 PM

I actually have a lot of time for the sequel series. I suspect though that's due to my reading order was basically insane due to what was available from the library at the time. Of the Sparhawk series I think it was like 6,4,5,1,2,3 and so that rather give away the identity of the twist baddie.

Excepting the two prequels, the characters themselves are what holds all four sets of books - so if you read them out of order and see the broken bits upfront it probably would be less jarring.

I did read Belgariad in a more sensible fashion, and again I do prefer the follow up. It introduces by far the most interesting character Eddings ever came up with in the rogue character's royal brother. Belgariad is very much a LotR imitator while the follow up does some interesting things as the character's in the story notice that they're in a retread, a retread that has a solid in-plot reason, and do take advantage of the recurring themes. Yes there's a tad too much pairing up everybody but it's nowhere near as bad as that's going to get in the Eddings later works.

The Belgariad sequel was the better of the two by far. While the "Everything is repeating" idea didn't work as well with me as it did with you, at least Eddings tried to do something with it. (And yes, the Royal Brother was one of the high points) With the Tamuli his approach appeared to be "Tear up the lore from the previous trilogy".

Saying all that the follow up novel based on the life of Polgara the Sorceress is absolutely shockingly bad, and does genuine damage to the characters involved. Yikes, that was seriously, seriously rough.

Oh ye Gods... It's like Eddings wanted to write a Strong Female Character(tm) and went straight to Mary Sue levels, completely forgetting that most of his female characters - especially Polgara - were already strong.

Errorname

2024-01-01, 05:43 PM

Oh it was much worse than the Holiday Special. ALL the Disney movies were worse than the holiday special. Holiday Special is solidly in the middle at this point.

No it wasn't. Literally the only thing the Holiday Special has going for it is that Lucas was involved and it was shot with the original cast (who are all phoning it in). It's a vision of a different version of the series, and while it's a fascinating artifact it's also quite awful.

I'm pretty sure he could be, because you just described Obi Wan Kenobi

Obi-Wan and Yoda also failed and became reclusive hermits, although you're right that they don't have the same bitterness. I do think it's necessary to have him be a lot more cynical, since the way the sequel timeline is laid out Luke peaced out back before things went completely to hell, which I dislike as a choice but was also something established by Force Awakens.

Trixie_One

2024-01-01, 06:07 PM

Excepting the two prequels, the characters themselves are what holds all four sets of books - so if you read them out of order and see the broken bits upfront it probably would be less jarring.

Yeah, it was even kind of fun reading the earlier books knowing just how wild some of the character arcs would go, and that goes trebly for who would end up being Sparhawk's daughter :smallbiggrin:

So to me the Tamuli trilogy wasn't jarring at all and I don't remember any really egregious retcons when I did come back to the first set. Final boss in the sixth book was kinda rubbish and uninspired but again I had got him out of the way first so that did help.

I do think of the Sparhawk ones the second book of the six is the best as that has all the shenanigans with the fantasy pope election which is both not something you often seen in a fantasy novel and was almost Pratchettian at times.

ecarden

2024-01-01, 07:24 PM

Kareeah_Indaga

2024-01-01, 07:44 PM

Warning, spoilers.

Phases 4 and 5 of the MCU - out with any semblance of coherent world building, in with a bunch of girl bosses ranging from flat and boring to horrible monsters the narrator still seems to expect me to root for.

Book 6 of the Kingfountain series - Books 1-5 are decent, maybe a little repetitive when they start focusing on the daughter but readable. But book 6 is a terrible pretzel plot so the daughter can get her perfectly happy ending, running roughshod over every other character’s characterization in the process. Every single chapter for about the first third of the book feels the need to end with some new disaster to the point that I stopped caring when it happened because I knew it was going to be overwritten or superseded by the end of the chapter afterwards. The major plot point with the chess set from book 4 or 5 gets retconned, there’s a big chunk of the book that crosses over with some of the author’s other series (which, full disclosure, I hadn’t read at the time) where our protagonist gives a verbal and illusionary dressing-down to the antagonist of a completely different series with whom she has no meaningful background before she gets back to her own world and it turns out her brother isn’t dead but her alliance-marriage husband is as good as - he was the antagonist of books 4 and 5 and he dies off screen so she can marry her childhood crush, who got a complete personality re-write so she could agree to marry him and also magic powers of his own grafted on more or less out of no where.

So, yeah. Books 1-5 are worth a read, but pretend Book 6 doesn’t exist.

Mewtwo Returns - Except for somewhat wobbly art and the bizarre choice of music for the final fight scene, Mewtwo Strikes Back is easily the best Pokémon movie. Mewtwo Returns is an embarrassment for everyone involved.

First off, there are Pokémon both Legendary and otherwise with whom a green aesop works. Mewtwo, being an artificial super-clone…really isn’t one of them. So of course 80% of the film is focused on this wonderful magic spring that heals everything that drinks out of it, amazingly pure, all natural, blah blah blah to the point that Mewtwo is a shoehorned-in guest star in his own movie.

Compounding that, the only ones who aren’t complete idiots are the bad guys, but that’s relative to the protagonists: even Giovanni has a few stupid moments. (‘If this goes on much longer [Mewtwo’s] body will be destroyed before its will is!’ …Giovanni, my bad sir, Mewtwo is a Psychic type Pokémon the fact that his will is stronger than his physical form should not be a surprise.)

But back to Mewtwo. Mewtwo could literally have ended the movie as soon as the bad guys show up, and this is provable because once he gets his movie one epiphany back, he does. Giant pillar of light, all the bad guys whisked away with their memories wiped, movie over…but because there would be no movie if he did that, first he has to just sit there and let Team Rocket kidnap all his friends so the Rockets can blackmail him. Bearing in mind, Mewtwo is within shouting distance of Giovanni’s helicopter when this happens, and Giovanni is discussing this plan with one of his subordinates right in front of him.

The voice acting for Mewtwo in the sequel is bland and terrible, and largely responsible for my dislike of Dan Green as a voice actor. The dialogue is clunky (never say die!). The setup is contrived. The characters of the day are also stupid, and preachy to boot - and while I can forgive the scientist chick for being clueless about the Pokémon being clones, I can’t forgive the writers.

The only thing it has going in its favor is that the animation is better and not lumpy like movie one. The tradeoff is not worth it.

• Subnautica: Below Zero: The first Subnautica is a masterclass in immersiveness. Part of the way it accomplishes this is by using a silent protagonist and by giving you long periods of time alone, exploring this giant spooky, intimidating world in total isolation, uncovering the artifacts left behind by a mysterious, inscrutable alien race. For Below Zero the designers – for god alone knows what reason – decided that instead of a silent protagonist, they'd give you a protagonist who practically never shuts up. And you meet one of the "mysterious inscrutable aliens", who becomes your companion . . . and who turns out to be a total dweeb. Much of the rest of the game is then spent watching the annoying protagonist and the annoying alien embark on an cringingly painful quasi-romance.

I never really got romance vibes between those two, my issue was that we have the plot set up to find out what happened to the sister and then we take a hard left into remaking an alien body for the voice in our head. When we’re already likely to be finding the plot points out of order, the course change doesn’t really work.

I also disliked that some of the biomes (EX: the one with the eye jellyfish) are a lot emptier than they should be, and the game as a whole feels a lot less dangerous - Chelicerate vs. Seatruck feels more weighted in favor of the Seatruck than Reaper vs. Seamoth. And the ‘notice me’ air plants really feel more like a checkpoint in a video game than a natural part of the environment compared to the brain corals in game 1. It used to be that the UI was better in Below Zero, making the quality more of a toss-up, but at some point they patched the improvements into game one and now it’s the clear winner.

That said, I’m still looking forward to Subnautica 3, so it wasn’t bad enough to chase me off the franchise, unlike the last two Phases of the MCU.

Errorname

2024-01-01, 08:11 PM

Mass Effect, though whether the drop is ME2->ME3 or ME trilogy->Andromeda, I'm not entirely sure...

ME3 holds the distinction of being the only piece of fiction which actually upset me enough that I wrote to the creators (nicely) to express my confusion and disappointment.

I think there's a pretty strong case that Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2 was also a pretty sharp drop, although personally I think Mass Effect 2 is a much better executed game visually and mechanically and the writing is more of a lateral move, but I can't ignore that a lot of the problems that sank ME3 were presaged pretty heavily by ME2.

I also don't know if Andromeda is worse than Mass Effect 3. It's hard to judge. Mass Effect 3 coasts on good will and setups from the previous two games but pretty thoroughly burns it all by the end and leaves Andromeda in a very difficult place. I think I judge the game that broke everything harsher than the game that merely failed to fix things.

DrakeRaids

2024-01-01, 08:32 PM

Rise of Skywalker remains one of the worst things I've ever walked out of.

Sir_Norbert

2024-01-02, 12:37 AM

Bohandas

2024-01-02, 02:15 AM

I would nominate the sequel to Wreck-It Ralph, except that I've rechecked my memory and I'm pretty sure they never made one. Very wise decision. Sometimes one movie is all you need to tell a complete story.

I'm pretty sure there was one. Wreck It Ralph Breaks the Internet or something like that.

KorvinStarmast

2024-01-02, 09:37 AM

National Treasure was a fun adventure movie. The sequel tried too hard. Concur, it was a disappointment.

Honorable mention to the Matrix trilogy. First movie was quite elegant and a proper open ended ending. The sequels dropped the ball. IMO A big let down in both cases. Too much emphasis on FX, for my tastes.

Highlander 2 is the ur example of this. There can be only one. Yep.

Won't comment on Star Wars, but I will say that for a prequel, Rogue One was enjoyable.

Millstone85

2024-01-02, 09:42 AM

Trixie_One

2024-01-02, 09:51 AM

I think there's a pretty strong case that Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2 was also a pretty sharp drop, although personally I think Mass Effect 2 is a much better executed game visually and mechanically and the writing is more of a lateral move, but I can't ignore that a lot of the problems that sank ME3 were presaged pretty heavily by ME2.

I agree with this. ME1 is still top five best games ever worthy for me, and one I absolutely rinsed for absolutely everything in it, including two completions on Insanity. ME2 has a lot good going for it, but there's so many reasons that I gave up about half way through my second playthrough as the gameplay was just such a downgrade to ME1's. I'm also fully aware that the experience of ME2 having played it like that compared to say just playing ME1 the once and not really touched any of the deeper lore side quests was so wildly, wildly different it's basically night and day, and I'm sure I'd be much, much more of a fan of ME2 otherwise. You get that much extra experience of ME1 Cerberus and the Geth (the opera singer bit especially), and it makes it so hard to buy into what ME2 does with them.

After ME3 and DA2 I was more than happy enough to skip both Andromeda and Inquisition. After those two disappointments there was no way I was going to invest anymore time into these game universes as it would just be more reminders of how much potential and good will was thrown away.

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-02, 09:58 AM

So I am told and I am not surprised. The Last Jedi was such a shaggy dog story that the whole setting seems unsalvageable past this point.

I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what a sequel to TLJ was supposed to entail. A lot of people insist that there was so much JJ Abrams could have worked with, but nobody can give me a working outline of a plot that would have done so.

There have been a lot of bad sequels, but it's hard to think of one that so quicky and utterly took down a cultural touchstone like Star Wars.

Dishonorable mentions:
Batman vs Superman and Wonder Woman 1984
Every Terminator move after 3 (3 was bad, but holy crap was everything that came after worse and worse)
Alien Covenant
Black Widow

GloatingSwine

2024-01-02, 09:59 AM

Saph

2024-01-02, 10:01 AM

Alien Covenant

Oh god, yeah. I'm changing my answer to retroactively include the Aliens series. Going from Alien and Aliens (two of the best sci-fi/horror movies ever made) to Prometheus and Alien: Covenant . . . that was honestly painful to watch.

awa

2024-01-02, 11:05 AM

There have been a lot of bad sequels, but it's hard to think of one that so quicky and utterly took down a cultural touchstone like Star Wars.
]

funny thing for me, I actually liked all the movies of the sequel trilogy taken individually. I think if last Jedi were a stand alone property in a star wars inspired world it would not get quite so much hate, but as it is it sometimes felt like it was created by someone who didn't like star wars or at least someone who wanted to subvert expectations as a primary goal and thus they shot the franchise in the foot. The first movie had a lot of plot hooks that the second one just removed not even resolving just removing without really making any new ones for movie 3.

Sapphire Guard

2024-01-02, 12:21 PM

Any story that hates its predecessor and tries to fix it in a spiteful way.

The_Snark

2024-01-02, 01:09 PM

I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what a sequel to TLJ was supposed to entail. A lot of people insist that there was so much JJ Abrams could have worked with, but nobody can give me a working outline of a plot that would have done so.

Personally, I thought "the Empire is now under the command of a wildly unstable teenage megalomaniac, it's definitely going to implode on its own in short order but it could still do catastrophic damage in the process, so our protagonists have to Do Something About That" was a potentially intriguing hook. I'm not sure exactly what it would have looked like, but after TFA that was kind of a plus, honestly? TFA felt like it had been extensively focus-grouped by corporate management to ensure that it felt as much like the original trilogy as possible, at the expense of doing anything new. TLJ felt like a wild overcorrection: the writer was determined to subvert everything, up to and including the audience's expectation that subplots should have some kind of payoff. So I was kind of hoping that whoever did the third movie could find a happy medium between the two, but unfortunately, no.

DrakeRaids

2024-01-02, 01:37 PM

I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what a sequel to TLJ was supposed to entail. A lot of people insist that there was so much JJ Abrams could have worked with, but nobody can give me a working outline of a plot that would have done so.

There have been a lot of bad sequels, but it's hard to think of one that so quicky and utterly took down a cultural touchstone like Star Wars.

Recent interviews from Adam Driver on his recent press tour touched on this a little. Apparently The Last Jedi followed the arc he had been told when he was taken to play the role, Snoke was always supposed to go down and Kylo was supposed to double down on dark side and be the villain in the last movie.

Rise of Skywalker then tossed all that out, presumably due to poor response from TLJ and JJ was forced to effectively scrap everything for the uh "Suddenly Palpatine" plotline in all its awfulness and then spend the rest of the movie trying to retcon the previous two movies.

The main TLJ change that we know Johnson made was that Rey was apparently intended to be a Kenobi.

Errorname

2024-01-02, 01:47 PM

I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what a sequel to TLJ was supposed to entail. A lot of people insist that there was so much JJ Abrams could have worked with, but nobody can give me a working outline of a plot that would have done so.

If I wanted to write fanfiction for a fixed version of the sequels I'd start with the Force Awakens.

Part of the reason I cut Last Jedi a bit of slack is that it's doing it's best to work around bad decisions made with Force Awakens, and that's not really the case with Rise. They had a workable lead villain in Kylo from a film that (correctly) swerved from "what if we did the Emperor again?" and decided to hastily swerve back to doing the Emperor again.

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-02, 02:45 PM

Personally, I thought "the Empire is now under the command of a wildly unstable teenage megalomaniac, it's definitely going to implode on its own in short order but it could still do catastrophic damage in the process, so our protagonists have to Do Something About That" was a potentially intriguing hook. I'm not sure exactly what it would have looked like, but after TFA that was kind of a plus, honestly? TFA felt like it had been extensively focus-grouped by corporate management to ensure that it felt as much like the original trilogy as possible, at the expense of doing anything new. TLJ felt like a wild overcorrection: the writer was determined to subvert everything, up to and including the audience's expectation that subplots should have some kind of payoff. So I was kind of hoping that whoever did the third movie could find a happy medium between the two, but unfortunately, no.

Recent interviews from Adam Driver on his recent press tour touched on this a little. Apparently The Last Jedi followed the arc he had been told when he was taken to play the role, Snoke was always supposed to go down and Kylo was supposed to double down on dark side and be the villain in the last movie.

Rise of Skywalker then tossed all that out, presumably due to poor response from TLJ and JJ was forced to effectively scrap everything for the uh "Suddenly Palpatine" plotline in all its awfulness and then spend the rest of the movie trying to retcon the previous two movies.

The main TLJ change that we know Johnson made was that Rey was apparently intended to be a Kenobi.

If I wanted to write fanfiction for a fixed version of the sequels I'd start with the Force Awakens.

Part of the reason I cut Last Jedi a bit of slack is that it's doing it's best to work around bad decisions made with Force Awakens, and that's not really the case with Rise. They had a workable lead villain in Kylo from a film that (correctly) swerved from "what if we did the Emperor again?" and decided to hastily swerve back to doing the Emperor again.

So that's three more examples of people insisting that TLJ left Abrams with material to work with for a sequel, but not being able to come up with a workable plot for one.

Dargaron

2024-01-02, 02:52 PM

If I wanted to write fanfiction for a fixed version of the sequels I'd start with the Force Awakens.

Part of the reason I cut Last Jedi a bit of slack is that it's doing it's best to work around bad decisions made with Force Awakens, and that's not really the case with Rise. They had a workable lead villain in Kylo from a film that (correctly) swerved from "what if we did the Emperor again?" and decided to hastily swerve back to doing the Emperor again.

You could even still have Palpatine around as a cameo (and let Ian McDiarmid have his fun) without dominating the film by having Kylo consult a holocron he made that feeds his false hope of being able to pull some kind of miraculous victory by just fighting hard enough.

"Evil Sorcerer's knowledge is a corrupting influence even from beyond the grave" is a legitimate enough fantasy trope.

JNAProductions

2024-01-02, 02:54 PM

Star Wars Sequel Trilogy is definitely the big example that comes to mind for me.

Story-wise, Mario Galaxy 2 is a huge step down from Galaxy, but it's a first-party Nintendo game. It doesn't need good story, just good and fun gameplay.

DrakeRaids

2024-01-02, 03:02 PM

So that's three more examples of people insisting that TLJ left Abrams with material to work with for a sequel, but not being able to come up with a workable plot for one.

I don't think that's what any of those words meant but if you're waiting for someone to make a script for you I don't think many will bother.

ecarden

2024-01-02, 03:03 PM

Rodin

2024-01-02, 03:28 PM

So that's three more examples of people insisting that TLJ left Abrams with material to work with for a sequel, but not being able to come up with a workable plot for one.

...They gave you a workable plot. Right there in the posts. Kylo Ren was meant to be the main villain, to be redeemed (possibly dying in the process) by Rey. Snoke is a paper-thin character because he was never meant to be the main villain, Kylo was.

The bulk of the plot in the third movie is haggling over details, in my opinion. There's two main character arcs that are set up:

Kylo Ren is wannabe Darth Vader in TFA. He's tormented by how he doesn't measure up to his grandfather and his rejection by Luke. In TLJ, he does something Vader never could - he overthrows his Sith master. He embraces the Dark Side, but like Vader before him there is still good in him. From a villainous point of view the third movie would explore Kylo Ren's conflict between the good person he used to be and the rage that keeps driving him to the Dark Side. In the meantime, he's a threat to the whole galaxy because he's a deeply unstable person with a massive army at his beck and call.

Rey in the meantime has undergone an aborted Chosen One arc. She starts out believing in TFA that her parents are important, that therefore she is important instead of just an orphan girl. She finds out in TLJ that this isn't true - her parents were not important, they were nobodies. This, along with Luke's rejection (Luke really screws up in the sequels) nearly drives Rey to the Dark Side. Yet despite her connection with Kylo Ren, she still decides to go and save the Resistance. The third movie is Rey becoming the hero she believed she was - not because of her parents or being Luke's Chosen One successor, but because she's willing to step up and risk it all. She goes into the lion's den to confront Kylo to bring him back from the Dark Side.

And if that all sounds derivative of the OT, well...yeah. It is. It's hard not to be when the first movie is a point-for-point retread of A New Hope and the second movie is Empire meets Return with a TWIST! But it would have worked a hell of a lot better than the fever dream of Abrams we actually got. Actually fixing the sequel trilogy to make a good story would require tearing down the script and building a new one before the first camera was turned on for TFA, but absent that I'm confident they could have gotten a decent movie out of Rise. They just needed to lean into the parts of TLJ that actually worked instead of trying to sweep the entire movie under a rug and invent a standalone third movie.

-----

As for my nomination for worst sequel, I'll just gesture vaguely in the direction of the horror genre. How any of those franchises stayed alive to make a dozen sequels is beyond me. The genre is too crowded with terrible franchise entries to swing a zombified serial killer.

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-02, 04:05 PM

...They gave you a workable plot. Right there in the posts. Kylo Ren was meant to be the main villain, to be redeemed (possibly dying in the process) by Rey. Snoke is a paper-thin character because he was never meant to be the main villain, Kylo was.

"Kylo is the villain" isn't a plot. It's barely even a plot point. It's a trite observation about the first two movies.

I don't think that's what any of those words meant but if you're waiting for someone to make a script for you I don't think many will bother.

I'm confident that they won't, because any attempt to do so will run into the same problems that JJ Abrams ran into. If they are going to insist that there was some great missed potential there, however, it is entirely fair to ask them.

Metastachydium

2024-01-02, 04:06 PM

As regards the sequel trilogy, I'll argue that as a sequel, specifically, TFA is the worst of the three. Yes, TLJ and TRoS go out of their way and jump through hoops to undo the previous one movie in increasingly idiotic ways; however, what TFA does is, essentially, to undo the entire original and prequel trilogy in increasingly idiotic ways, so as to then rehash one of those six shamelessly with a side of "but don't worry, our teenaged Mary Sue will fix it all". The victory of the good guys back in TRoJ? Meant less than Palpatine's in Revenge, because it didn't even set up anything remotely functional for a second. Luke? Well, he's a failure who failed than stomped off to mope, leaving his sister, his brother-in-law (and dear friend) to clean up the mess. Han? Well, he's back to square zero, just older, too. Also, he gets shanked like a shmuck halfway through, as a failure in literally all ways possible. This leaves us with Leia, who's at least somewhat competent in comparison, but not taken seriously by anyone ever for some reason and Chewbacca, but even Leia forgot he exists. That's insulting, not throwing out Abrams's mystery boxes or hitting CANCEL on Johnson's weird ****.

(Also the TFA!Luke/ANH!Kenobi comparison doesn't withstand scrutiny. One is a village guy whom the viewers get to watch grow up into a hero and clean up after his father, redeeming the latter in the process, before becoming a mopey failure who does nothing mid-nowhere; the other comes online as a Jedi already far enough into his training to go on diplomatic missions, is a main character in a story about the downfall of the Republic, so ANH doesn't undo any of his achievements; and he was on Tatooine to doggedly continue his service as a Jedi, protecting/watching Luke and waiting for him to be ready anyway.)

DrakeRaids

2024-01-02, 04:11 PM

"Kylo is the villain" isn't a plot. It's barely even a plot point. It's a trite observation about the first two movies.

I'm confident that they won't, because any attempt to do so will run into the same problems that JJ Abrams ran into. If they are going to insist that there was some great missed potential there, however, it is entirely fair to ask them.

If your position will necessitate a complete movie draft for you to shift from it then, I can assure you you're well entrenched.

Errorname

2024-01-02, 04:34 PM

So that's three more examples of people insisting that TLJ left Abrams with material to work with for a sequel, but not being able to come up with a workable plot for one.

I'm not interested in writing fanfiction about movies I don't particularly like to win an internet argument

Honestly for all people talk about Last Jedi being subversive, it was basically just Empire Strikes Back again? Like there's the twist with Snoke, and the Yoda figure swoops in to sacrifice their life heroically at the end, but it's still basically just Empire. There was nothing stopping them from just running it to the finish with a mediocre Return of the Jedi retread and calling it a wrap.

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-02, 04:38 PM

If your position will necessitate a complete movie draft for you to shift from it then, I can assure you you're well entrenched.

This is pure hyperbole. The gaps between "Kylo is the villain", "outline for a workable script" and "finished draft" are massive. Pretending that I have set the standard at "finished draft" is just a way to avoid admitting that nobody can even get close to "outline for a workable script".

Also, I have never claimed not to be entrenched. This does not change the fact that if TLJ had created some great potential for a sequel, somebody should be able to produce an outline for one. It would be greatly embarrassing to me if somebody did, which makes offering the challenge such an effective rhetorical display of confidence.

EDIT: Oh, and I should note that one of the people who has failed to accept this challenge is Rian Johnson. He has never, at any point that I've seen, explained to us what he had planned for a follow-up or what it would look like.

Errorname

2024-01-02, 04:49 PM

This is pure hyperbole. The gaps between "Kylo is the villain", "outline for a workable script" and "finished draft" are massive. Pretending that I have set the standard at "finished draft" is just a way to avoid admitting that nobody can even get close to "outline for a workable script".

Also, I have never claimed not to be entrenched. This does not change the fact that if TLJ had created some great potential for a sequel, somebody should be able to produce an outline for one. It would be greatly embarrassing to me if somebody did, which makes offering the challenge such an effective rhetorical display of confidence.

If I thought that the Last Jedi had created some great potential for a bold original sequel, I might see the need to outline it. I don't think it did. It's most interesting elements are Luke Skywalker, the Snoke twist, and the dynamic between Kylo and Rey, only the latter of which really carries over into a sequel and is obviously weaker than Luke's dynamic with Vader. Last Jedi is not nearly so subversive as people give it credit for, and by the end of the film you're basically in position to do "return of the jedi again" with Kylo as your big bad. Which would have been fine.

Would it have been particularly interesting, no, but as far as I'm concerned that ship sailed with Force Awakens. But they could have easily run it over the finish line and ended up with a not great but basically coherent trilogy at the end. Rise of Skywalker bringing in Palpatine and a fresh new revelation about Rey's heritage was a completely unforced error, there was absolutely no need to do any of that.

Dargaron

2024-01-02, 05:07 PM

Kylo Ren is wannabe Darth Vader in TFA. He's tormented by how he doesn't measure up to his grandfather and his rejection by Luke. In TLJ, he does something Vader never could - he overthrows his Sith master. He embraces the Dark Side, but like Vader before him there is still good in him. From a villainous point of view the third movie would explore Kylo Ren's conflict between the good person he used to be and the rage that keeps driving him to the Dark Side. In the meantime, he's a threat to the whole galaxy because he's a deeply unstable person with a massive army at his beck and call.

TBH, I really don't think this would fly because neither of the movies have given any sign of Kylo being a "good person" aside from "sometimes he's hesitant about doing blatantly Evil things and/or feels uncomfortable after doing them." And also both movies have him being given no-strings-attached chances at redemption and rejecting them all, many of which have a lot more emotional punch than "a girl I've known for maybe a few months wants me to turn to the light side."

Like, at what point in TFA or TLJ does he ever show compassion for another living thing? Inconvenience himself for the sake of someone else? Better someone else's life, either at cost to himself or even just when given the choice between taking and giving? He's second-in-command of the First Order, you could 100% show him doing stuff like this: even blatantly pragmatic things like sparing a subordinate who failed him, or praising one who did well. But instead they chose to show him hacking up computers when he gets mad.

For one, Rey turning Kylo back to the light side by the Power of Love has a really icky "you can fix your abusive boyfriend if you just don't give up on him" undertone.

For another, spending so much time giving Kylo chances to redeem himself after turning them down violently clashes terribly with all the characters who don't get the same courtesy. Does Kylo deserve to be redeemed because he's a force-user? Wow, Star Wars is back to being about a two-tiered system where force-users' lives are the only ones that matter. Is it because he's related to characters we know? We're back to "Star Wars is about dynasties." Meanwhile indoctrinated child soldier Phasma gets zero offers of redemption, and the heroes freely gun down Stormtroopers who were abducted from their families as children like they're AI in a video game.

Luke redeeming Darth Vader works because the attempt is presented as extraordinary. Someone with a recognizable personal connection to Darth Vader shows him, the incredibly-powerful Dark Lord of the Sith, mercy. It would not have worked if the past two films had every random character he murdered lecture him about how there's still good in him and then get shanked anyway.

Trixie_One

2024-01-02, 06:32 PM

Like, at what point in TFA or TLJ does he ever show compassion for another living thing? Inconvenience himself for the sake of someone else?

Can think of one which is him hesitating to fire on Leia, and so one of the other pilot's takes the shot that leads to her flying through space.

Also as a super hot take, I think there are some good bits in TLJ though unfortunately there are more bad than good, but I do actually like Leia pulling that force feat off and would count it as a good bit cause I know that a huge vocal crowd do not. It was neat to see that unlike Han or Luke she's actually significantly improved in her time away.

Dargaron

2024-01-02, 06:34 PM

Can think of one which is him hesitating to fire on Leia, and so one of the other pilot's takes the shot that leads to her flying through space.

"Not shooting someone who's personally important to me" is an incredibly low bar.

ecarden

2024-01-02, 06:35 PM

Okay, my stab at a couple of different sequels for TLJ, just the crawl as they set things out fairly quickly.

Evil is self-defeating and unable to work together:

Confusion reigns! The First Order is in chaos. Kylo Ren has slain Supreme Leader Snoke and seized the reins of power, but General Hux and the military leadership feel no loyalty to this Jedi-trained outsider and plot against him. In the shadows, the seeds of the old Resistance sprout again, gathering old allies and new, they prepare to strike back, seeking to fracture the First Order!

Oh, right the stormtroopers are kidnapped, brainwashed child soldiers:

Freedom comes! After extensive studies on Finn and captured stormtroopers, the Resistance has discovered a weakness in the First Order brainwashing. If they can complete the macguffin and get it to the fortified broadcast center, then the First Order will fall! Meanwhile Kylo Ren hunts for Rey, leaving command of its armies in the hands of General Hux!

We win by saving what we love:

The New Republic rises! After disastrous defeats, Leia Organa has rallied the surviving worlds of the New Republic and they prepare to sign a treaty recreating the New Republic. Though the First Order is more powerful than any individual world or sector, they cannot match the might of the free galaxy and know it, so they prepare to strike before their enemies can unify.

ETA: Having posted this, maybe we should shift this conversation to the Star Wars thread, unless its aged into obsolescence in which case we should maybe launch a new one?

Millstone85

2024-01-02, 06:36 PM

Yes, TLJ and TRoS go out of their way and jump through hoops to undo the previous one movie in increasingly idiotic ways; however, what TFA does is, essentially, to undo the entire original and prequel trilogy in increasingly idiotic ways, so as to then rehash one of those six shamelessly with a side of "but don't worry, our teenaged Mary Sue will fix it all".I still consider TLJ worse because, among other nonsense, it presses the reset button a second time and even harder! At the beginning of TFA, the New Republic and the First Order are both struggling to regain control of the galaxy, with the former stupidly accepting a truce. By the end of the movie, the New Republic has suffered the destruction of several important planets, while the First Order lost the weapon responsible for this destruction along with much of its troops. TLJ could have followed with the portrayal of a galaxy further thrown into chaos. Heck, Canto Bight could have been introduced as the birthplace of a new power, like a more mafia-like version of the prequels' Trade Federation. Not entirely original, sure, but still more so than what we got in TLJ's opening crawl:

"The FIRST ORDER reigns. Having decimated the peaceful Republic, Supreme Leader Snoke now deploys his merciless legions to seize military control of the galaxy.

Only General Leia Organa's band of RESISTANCE fighters stand against the rising tyranny, certain that Jedi Master Luke Skywalker will return and restore a spark of hope to the fight."

It is even closer to the situation at the beginning of the original trilogy than TFA was. And then, then, TLJ ends with the Resistance reduced to a single ship, so it is like the movie moved backward from the beginning of the original trilogy to the end of the prequel trilogy. All this in the second movie of what is supposed to be the sequel trilogy!

TFA is a very very lazy remake. TLJ is a complete train wreck without rhyme or reason. Unless Rian Johnson was purposefully trying to destroy a franchise he hates, a possibility that I am very much not ruling out.

Errorname

2024-01-02, 07:13 PM

I still consider TLJ worse because, among other nonsense, it presses the reset button a second time and even harder! At the beginning of TFA, the New Republic and the First Order are both struggling to regain control of the galaxy, with the former stupidly accepting a truce. By the end of the movie, the New Republic has suffered the destruction of several important planets, while the First Order lost the weapon responsible for this destruction along with much of its troops. TLJ could have followed with the portrayal of a galaxy further thrown into chaos.

I can't really blame that one on Last Jedi, honestly. You could maybe do a sequel where the New Republic is still a factor, but I think the intention in the Force Awakens behind blowing up a thinly veiled Coruscant stand-in was pretty clear. We blew up the politics planet, no more politics in Star Wars, just Rebels vs Empire like you remember. It's an awful decision and if Last Jedi had changed course it probably would have been a better movie, but this was a case where it stuck with what the previous film was putting down.

TFA is a very very lazy remake. TLJ is a complete train wreck without rhyme or reason.

I've never understood this. It's just a sloppily executed Empire Strikes Back remake, and even though there's a lot of stuff I don't like about that movie it's not too hard to figure out the thought process behind the choices made.

Bohandas

2024-01-02, 07:27 PM

The weird thing about Last Jedi is that it wasn't even really a bad movie, but it was a terrible sequel.

Like, if you completely removed all the Star Wars branding and IP - so that now, for instance, the cynical hermit character isn't someone who's already been established to have a different personality, FTL hasn't been established to not work that way, the evil supreme leader hasn't been built up as having important unanswered questions about his past, etc. - It would be a decent standalone science fiction movie

EDIT:
Except for the scene with the sand skimmers. That was eight different kinds of stupid

Errorname

2024-01-02, 07:47 PM

Like, if you completely removed all the Star Wars branding and IP - so that now, for instance, the cynical hermit character isn't someone who's already been established to have a different personality, FTL hasn't been established to not work that way, the evil supreme leader hasn't been built up as having important unanswered questions about his past, etc. - It would be a decent standalone science fiction movie

I'm shocked at how common critiques of Last Jedi pick on the best parts. The Hyperspace Ram is like one dialogue revision away from being perfect, Snoke was a boring mystery box and his usurpation was the best thing they could have done with him, and bitter jaded Luke is the only way to make his absence in the last movie make sense and he's easily the most compelling part of the film.

Like a solid two-thirds of this movie do not work, basically everything with Poe sucks and they relegate their second lead to a completely disconnected C-plot, there's a lot to complain about, I have no idea why it always ends up being the cool stuff.

Kareeah_Indaga

2024-01-02, 08:28 PM

The more I hear about them the more I'm glad I've never seen the last two of the Star Wars sequel trilogy.

But in the interest of re-railing the thread, I was warned away from the third Blade movie, is that anyone's least favorite sequel?

Talakeal

2024-01-02, 11:37 PM

But in the interest of re-railing the thread, I was warned away from the third Blade movie, is that anyone's least favorite sequel?

The plot sucked, the villain was the most boring Dracula ever, and Wesley Snipes was phoning it in at best.

But the supporting cast of Jessica Biel, Ryan Reynolds, Parker Posey, and even HHH are all very entertaining and make the movie worth watching.

Bohandas

2024-01-03, 01:59 AM

I'm shocked at how common critiques of Last Jedi pick on the best parts. The Hyperspace Ram is like one dialogue revision away from being perfect

Ok granted I suppose that that would have worked if they had added in some line about the whole realspace chase having been to give them time to do extra hard hyperspace calculations and that it takes super long to calculate a jump into a ship sized moving target or something like that and any normal battle would have been long over by the time. Which would have potentially cleared up some other plot holes as well. But it's pretty clear that none of that stuff ever even occurred to them

Psyren

2024-01-03, 02:39 AM

Matrix Revolutions. The setting had.... so much potential, but the third movie flopped so hard that it completely eradicated all interest.

Errorname

2024-01-03, 03:11 AM

Ok granted I suppose that that would have worked if they had added in some line about the whole realspace chase having been to give them time to do extra hard hyperspace calculations and that it takes super long to calculate a jump into a ship sized moving target or something like that and any normal battle would have been long over by the time. Which would have potentially cleared up some other plot holes as well.

Basically all the ramming needs to justify is an acknowledgment that this wouldn't usually work and a justification for why it's going to work here.

Personally I think they could have had there be countermeasures that would have stopped it but that they weren't active. Maybe Finn and Rose can knock out the shields somehow or Hux can lower them to direct more power to the weapons, something like that.

Bohandas

2024-01-03, 03:24 AM

Matrix Revolutions. The setting had.... so much potential, but the third movie flopped so hard that it completely eradicated all interest.

The only thing that movie had going formit was Smith's villain monologue at the very end. Other than that it was terrible; even the fight scenes weren't any good

Millstone85

2024-01-03, 05:10 AM

there's a lot to complain about, I have no idea why it always ends up being the cool stuff.Because the harder the movie tries to be cool, or deep, or pull any sort of big moment, the harder it fails.

Like yes, Finn's entire C-plot sucks, but of course I am most going to remember the "grand" free-the-animals escape, the "shocking" reveal that rebel and imperial ships come from the same market, or Rose's "heartfelt" declaration of love. All the times I was clearly supposed to go "Wow!" but instead went *facepalm*.

It is the same with Holdo's maneuver or Luke's apparent return to the cause.

Errorname

2024-01-03, 06:01 AM

Like yes, Finn's entire C-plot sucks, but of course I am most going to remember the "grand" free-the-animals escape, the "shocking" reveal that rebel and imperial ships come from the same market, or Rose's "heartfelt" declaration of love. All the times I was clearly supposed to go "Wow!" but instead went *facepalm*.

Since I wasn't arguing that Canto Bight was good I don't know what "Finn's plotline mostly sucks" is supposed to prove to me. I thought I was pretty clear about what bits of the movie I thought were the cool bits (The A-plot with Luke, the Snoke twist, the Hyperspace ram) and the stuff I thought was not functional, and Finn's story falls pretty firmly into the latter camp.

It is the same with Holdo's maneuver or Luke's apparent return to the cause.

Okay. I obviously don't agree, and while I'd love to elaborate on why this gives me basically no indication of why you think these scenes don't work.

paddyfool

2024-01-03, 06:31 AM

2016 was a terrible sequel to 2015 (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CSWJq-jUTMc&pp=ygUaTWFuIHdobyBzbGVwdCB0aHJvdWdoIDIwMTU%3D), though subsequent sequels have been far from great either, and some even worse.

Although if you go back a bit, 1914 was a truly disastrous sequel to 1913 that arguably messed up the next few decades of sequels.

“History is just one f***ing thing after another.” (Alan Bennett, The History Boys)

Saph

2024-01-03, 06:43 AM

Okay. I obviously don't agree, and while I'd love to elaborate on why this gives me basically no indication of why you think these scenes don't work.

The hyperspace ram is a terrible writing decision because it implicitly breaks several fundamental rules of how Star Wars space combat is supposed to work, and retroactively turns everyone else into a moron because apparently no-one else was capable of thinking of this incredibly obvious tactic.

It's made worse by the fact that it's executed by an admiral character that we're told is supposed to be an amazingly competent hero, but whose actual actions on screen mostly consist of making an unbroken string of stupid decisions that Rian Johnson clearly expects us to admire. It's particularly galling because Star Wars ALREADY had a minor but much-loved admiral character with a long history in the EU. Remember, Admiral Ackbar? They could have just used him. But instead he gets unceremoniously killed off so Rian Johnson's purple-haired OC can get the spotlight.

As for Luke, his entire participation in the sequel trilogy is one very long exercise in character assassination. Some of his most defining traits in the original trilogy are his belief in redemption and his persistence. He never gives up, not once. Then we get the sequel trilogy, which rewrites his personality so that he has a try at teaching some new Jedi, fails, then gives up and runs away and spends the next few decades sitting on his butt doing nothing. Why? So the new merchandising opportunity heroine can do everything instead. And eventually she shows up and emotes at him a bit and convinces him to go and sacrifice himself in a rather pointless way so that the remaining eleven members of the Resistance can escape out the back door, but don't worry guys, those seven women and four men will totally turn the tide against the Empire First Order.

God, even remembering this is painful. TLJ is such an utterly awful movie. It really did deserve every bit of the hate it received.

Errorname

2024-01-03, 07:38 AM

The hyperspace ram is a terrible writing decision because it implicitly breaks several fundamental rules of how Star Wars space combat is supposed to work, and retroactively turns everyone else into a moron because apparently no-one else was capable of thinking of this incredibly obvious tactic.

Literally all it requires is a justification for why the tactic does not usually work and why it worked in this scenario. I think it's a fair criticism that they could have included dialogue to that effect in the sequence (I think having them lower the shields for some reason and narrowly fail to raise them in time would have been effective) but I also don't think it breaks the sequence and I also get why you don't want to interrupt your emotional climax with exposition.

It's made worse by the fact that it's executed by an admiral character that we're told is supposed to be an amazingly competent hero, but whose actual actions on screen mostly consist of making an unbroken string of stupid decisions that Rian Johnson clearly expects us to admire. It's particularly galling because Star Wars ALREADY had a minor but much-loved admiral character with a long history in the EU. Remember, Admiral Ackbar? They could have just used him. But instead he gets unceremoniously killed off so Rian Johnson's purple-haired OC can get the spotlight.

The Poe/Holdo plotline was a questionable concept executed badly and easily the weakest part of the movie, there's a lot of missteps with Holdo's characterization and the hyperspace scene is hurt badly by being the payoff to a pretty weak setup.

But as audience members attempting to analyze the choices made in a movie, we should ask why might the film have used a new character for the Admiral role instead of a familiar and iconic character? What is this Admiral character's role in the movie outside of her final sacrifice? Because if you think about it for even a second it becomes blindingly obvious why the role demanded a new character, because the audience is initially meant to be suspicious and mistrustful of the character so that we side with Poe in his mutiny. Ackbar is a character the audience is likely to trust more than Poe, and side with him when Poe is insubordinate.

As for Luke, his entire participation in the sequel trilogy is one very long exercise in character assassination. Some of his most defining traits in the original trilogy are his belief in redemption and his persistence. He never gives up, not once. Then we get the sequel trilogy, which rewrites his personality so that he has a try at teaching some new Jedi, fails, then gives up and runs away and spends the next few decades sitting on his butt doing nothing.

Agreed, I think Force Awakens deciding that Luke abandoned the galaxy and the Jedi Order he built was destroyed offscreen sucked. That's the hand Last Jedi was given, and they played it about as well as they could, the stuff with bitter hermit Luke is the best part of the movie. Hamill's great, they make excellent use of the location, and training with a weird hermit has always been something that Star Wars was good at.

Saph

2024-01-03, 08:04 AM

But as audience members attempting to analyze the choices made in a movie, we should ask why might the film have used a new character for the Admiral role instead of a familiar and iconic character? What is this Admiral character's role in the movie outside of her final sacrifice? Because if you think about it for even a second it becomes blindingly obvious why the role demanded a new character, because the audience is initially meant to be suspicious and mistrustful of the character so that we side with Poe in his mutiny. Ackbar is a character the audience is likely to trust more than Poe, and side with him when Poe is insubordinate.

But none of this matters, because the end result is a dumpster fire. It's can be mildly interesting to analyse how something got to be a dumpster fire, but that doesn't make it less of a dumpster fire.

Agreed, I think Force Awakens deciding that Luke abandoned the galaxy and the Jedi Order he built was destroyed offscreen sucked. That's the hand Last Jedi was given, and they played it about as well as they could.

Actually, in general story terms, it's hard to think of a way they could have played it worse. Force Awakens was very bad, but it was the kind of bad that would still theoretically have been recoverable. TLJ was the kind of bad that you can't come back from.

Lemmy

2024-01-03, 08:09 AM

I will say the Matrix sequels because all of them got increasingly worse than the previous one by orders of magnitude.

Errorname

2024-01-03, 09:04 AM

But none of this matters, because the end result is a dumpster fire. It's can be mildly interesting to analyse how something got to be a dumpster fire, but that doesn't make it less of a dumpster fire.

It matters to explain why they didn't use your proposed alternative of putting Ackbar in the Holdo role

Actually, in general story terms, it's hard to think of a way they could have played it worse. Force Awakens was very bad, but it was the kind of bad that would still theoretically have been recoverable. TLJ was the kind of bad that you can't come back from.

I struggle to imagine better payoffs to the setup of Force Awakens than what Last Jedi did (with the Luke/Rey/Ren A-plot mind, the Finn and Poe stuff sucks). Bitter Hermit Luke is the only progression from "Luke's nephew turned evil and murdered all his students and then Luke ran away into exile" that makes sense. Is that where I wanted his character to go? No, but it's what a sequel to Force Awakens basically has to do.

Like I don't think Last Jedi is a good movie. It has a solid A-plot and a good climax that are undercut by two bad secondary plotlines and an overlong epilogue, but I think it was an admirable attempt to salvage a bunch of bad decisions made by Force Awakens.

Millstone85

2024-01-03, 09:08 AM

Since I wasn't arguing that Canto Bight was good I don't know what "Finn's plotline mostly sucks" is supposed to prove to me. I thought I was pretty clear about what bits of the movie I thought were the cool bits (The A-plot with Luke, the Snoke twist, the Hyperspace ram) and the stuff I thought was not functional, and Finn's story falls pretty firmly into the latter camp.I was taking the C-plot with both dislike and showing how my critique would focus on the bits that some would call highlights, in the hope of conveying a parallel with my critique of the movie as a whole.

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-03, 10:23 AM

Literally all it requires is a justification for why the tactic does not usually work and why it worked in this scenario. I think it's a fair criticism that they could have included dialogue to that effect in the sequence (I think having them lower the shields for some reason and narrowly fail to raise them in time would have been effective) but I also don't think it breaks the sequence and I also get why you don't want to interrupt your emotional climax with exposition.

Even if this was true (and I have some issues with that assertion), it's completely irrelevant because they *didn't* do that. There are lots of things TLJ *could* have done that would have made scenes work better, set up material for RoS, or made Rian Johnson's "subversions" more substantive and less of a ****-waving exercise. The fact that the movie consistently failed to do those things is the problem.

The weird thing about Last Jedi is that it wasn't even really a bad movie, but it was a terrible sequel.

Like, if you completely removed all the Star Wars branding and IP - so that now, for instance, the cynical hermit character isn't someone who's already been established to have a different personality, FTL hasn't been established to not work that way, the evil supreme leader hasn't been built up as having important unanswered questions about his past, etc. - It would be a decent standalone science fiction movie

Would it, though? Without being "Star Wars", a lot of the movie's artifice would be broken. The movie is almost entirely an exercise in "subverting" Star Wars, and while that can be done with a deliberate knock-off setting (ala Watchmen) it takes a lot more work that TLJ is interested in doing. Without going into the movie with a pre-existing emotional investment in Luke, nobody would care enough about Jake Groundcrawler for "OMG! He's a grumpy old man now!" to matter. Again, you can do that kind of character in your own movie, but it takes work to establish them, and TLJ is allergic to that sort of thing.

Case in point:

Agreed, I think Force Awakens deciding that Luke abandoned the galaxy and the Jedi Order he built was destroyed offscreen sucked. That's the hand Last Jedi was given, and they played it about as well as they could, the stuff with bitter hermit Luke is the best part of the movie.

"Bitter Luke" was the most compelling part of the movie, until I realized that they had no intention of justifying that bitterness, giving Luke a coherent reason for not wanting to rebuild the Jedi Order anymore, or even keeping him in character long enough to not have him play pranks on Rey while "training" her.

Even putting aside that TFA never told us why Luke was in hiding, and there were plenty of non-character assassinating options available (having to guard something important, training new recruits in secret, trying to perfect some ancient Jedi art that would help him save Kylo), TLJ executed "bitter Luke" about as badly as it possibly could have. It wasn't that Luke had repeatedly and consistently failed, or that everything he ever did was undone, or that there was no hope in sight. It wasn't that he had tried to take on Snoke and failed. The Galactic Republic was still alive and well as of TFA.

One thing went wrong- one setback- and Luke instantly gave up. And not only did he give up, but he also rejected the entire Jedi philosophy for vague, unspecified reasons, which he promises to tell us but never does. The scenes on Luke's planet are constantly promising us something. Or making stupid, tension-breaking jokes. Or doing whatever the blue titty milk thing was. But sometimes they're giving us a weird force pocket dimension thing where Rey can have some random visions and then ah, **** it- hey, look, Porgs! Aren't they cute?

"Bitter Luke" wasn't the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that the execution is a complete, tangled, multi-dimensional mess on every level. And the reason it's that way is because Rian Johnson does not care. "Bitter Luke" doesn't work because Rian Johnson doesn't commit to making things work anywhere in the movie. I've put more effort into this post than he ever did with the idea. He comes up with an idea that "subverts expectations", comes up with a half-assed explanation for it, then throws the whole thing in the trash and moves on. At least Abrams had the decency to leave his successor with an unopened mystery box instead of creating a mystery box, opening it up to show us there was a turd inside, laughing at himself, and then setting it on fire.

Rodin

2024-01-03, 10:34 AM

The only thing that movie had going formit was Smith's villain monologue at the very end. Other than that it was terrible; even the fight scenes weren't any good

The latter is the worst part of it for me. The Neo/Matrix side of the plot is somewhat excusable because Revolutions was trying to pick up the complete mess of a plot that was Reloaded. Reloaded spent so much time navel-gazing that it really only established 3 plot points of importance:

1) "The One" is another measure of control that the machines put in.

2) Smith is replicating out of control and threatening to destroy the Matrix, the machines, and all of humankind.

3) Neo can affect machines outside the Matrix.

If Reloaded spent more time setting up the first two and ditched the third you could get a lot of mileage out of Neo needing to subvert the Chosen One tropes and find some third option, with Smith putting pressure on the machines. With Neo affecting machines outside the Matrix they had to lean into the Chosen One business again, because that's something nobody has been able to do before it it leads us to the whole Messiah archetype. Revolutions would have had to do a lot of work to come up with a compelling plot, and I'm not surprised they failed.

A worse sin is failing to have entertaining Matrix fights. It's been a long time since I saw Revolutions, but as far as I'm aware there are precisely two Matrix fights in the entire film - the brief "upside down gunmen" fight and the final fight between Neo and Smith. The Neo/Smith fight is hampered by dated CGI, but I think it's better than most give it credit for. But that's the only fight of note, with the bulk of the movie being taken up by the pointlessly long battle for Zion which looks terrible, has terrible tactics (let's build power armor with the squishy human bit on the OUTSIDE!), and is generally pointless filler involving characters we don't care about.

I rewatch the Matrix on a regular basis, and I go through Reloaded and watch the fight scenes (except for the sterile, zero stakes fight with Seraph). I never touch Revolutions because there is no reason for me to - it spends all its time either on filler or trying to build a decent plot out of what little Reloaded gave it.

KorvinStarmast

2024-01-03, 10:35 AM

Apparently The Last Jedi followed the arc he had been told when he was taken to play the role, Snoke was always supposed to go down and Kylo was supposed to double down on dark side and be the villain in the last movie. They sure messed that up.
"Suddenly Palpatine" plotline Was a deep disappointment to my son and I when we went to go and see it.

There's two main character arcs that are set up:

{snip} They just needed to lean into the parts of TLJ that actually worked instead of trying to sweep the entire movie under a rug and invent a standalone third movie. Said what I was thinking better than I could, thank you.

As for Luke, his entire participation in the sequel trilogy is one very long exercise in character assassination. {snip}
God, even remembering this is painful. TLJ is such an utterly awful movie. It really did deserve every bit of the hate it received. Yes. I am also grateful, given the preceding conversation, that I chose not to comment on Star Wars. You all have done more than I could have hoped to. :smallsmile:

Millstone85

2024-01-03, 10:46 AM

I will say the Matrix sequels because all of them got increasingly worse than the previous one by orders of magnitude.My turn to partially defend an unpopular sequel. While Reloaded was far too verbose, and often so open to interpretation that it might as well say nothing, I think it still added great worldbuilding on top of what the original movie had already done:

The Machines see red pills as a necessary evil so the rest of the human population can be properly blue pilled. They created Zion as a second level of control. The fan theory that there is outright a second virtual reality is nice but redundant. Zion already does its job well as a corroded tin can under the ground.
The One is, if not also of the Machines' design, at least a recurring issue the Machines have been coaxing into becoming part of a system reboot. The original movie presented Neo as the second coming of the One but he is actually the sixth or so.
There exist dissensions among Machines, or rather individual AIs, notably when it comes to the deletion of those deemed deviant or obsolete. A program called the Merovingian runs a sort of mafia in altered parts of the Matrix. The Oracle is revealed to be a program too and her true allegiance is called into question.

Where the movie really starts to go wrong IMO is with Smith's explanation of his return. It would be one thing if, I don't know, a backup copy of Smith was activated, to help analyze the program's defeat at Neo's hands, and then Smith went rogue to avoid permanent deletion from the system. But it instead looks like Neo failed to destroy Smith and actually made the program stronger by leaving some part of his One-ness within. Now okay, I get it, Th-o-m-a-s versus S-m-i-th, they have been polar opposites all along. But that's worse because now it looks like Neo still hasn't completed his journey away from being Thomas. Big oof!

Then Revolution was, alas, all about Smith (when it wasn't about disappointing warfare) and I guess him fusing/annihilating with Neo again? Only for that to be undone aaagain by Resurrections. Are these two in quantum vacuum fluctuation or something? :smallamused:

DrakeRaids

2024-01-03, 10:56 AM

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-03, 11:11 AM

Eh, the real problem with the Matrix Sequels is that the Matrix was never constructed to support an expanded universe.

I talked about this back during the Resurrections thread- the plot of the first movie establishes a setting where "Wait for the One to show up" -> "Neo becomes the One" -> "Neo uses his god powers to free everyone from the Matrix" is overall plot trajectory, and of those three only the middle part is actually interesting. The first part is just people twiddling their thumbs, and the third is an exercise in raising logistical questions about what you do with all of the coppertops when the matrix is turned off.

If you want to turn that into a series, you need to fix the fundamental premise. The sequels couldn't do that, though, so instead they just downgraded Neo from "god" to "better at fighting and has a few extra super powers" and gave him a super-agent to fight. Everything else was just a distraction or excuse for someone to talk about some basic philosophical concept in an overly verbose way.

EDIT: Oh, I just remembered that Mortal Kombat: Annihilation exists.

Talakeal

2024-01-03, 11:26 AM

I actually liked Revolutions better than Reloaded, both are worse than the original. Resurrections is by far the worst. They couldn't even get Hugo Weaving for a thirty second cameo at the climax when "Agent Smith" reveals himself and turns on the new villain, that would have alteast allowed it to end on a high note. Total garbage.

I actually liked the Rey / Luke stuff in TLJ. The Finn / Rose stuff was boring and pointless, with a muddled message and no Lando. But the Holdo / Poe stuff is actually insulting; the hyperspace ram retroactively destroys every battle in the entire franchise, and the directing and camera work is filmed to trick the audience into thinking she is a scenery chewing villain and obvious traitor only to then try and make you feel stupid for being tricked.

Trixie_One

2024-01-03, 11:29 AM

My turn to partially defend an unpopular sequel.

I agree it adds some interesting things, and you lay them out well. The problem was that I'm not sure it's worth it.

The ending of the original Matrix was pretty much thematically perfect.

Yes it's been horribly co-opted since, and even without that can be a bit 'wake up sheeple!', but if we can put that unfortunate baggage aside, it's so dang well done.

It's a cinematic revelation that this mundane life can be so much more, and perhaps you can even believe that a man can fly. He's not just a dude in a trenchcoat doing kung-fu using neat camera tricks, with the all the not at all subtle messiah stuff, he's Jesus Christ mixed with Superman here for the second coming to show all the peoples that there's a better way.

For me Reloaded goes off the rails is with a single word early on. Neo has a strike blocked by an Agent and goes "Upgrades" to explain why the Agent is able to do that. That it, with that single word, he's just a dude in a trenchcoat again doing kung-fu but now with often rather shoddy cgi.

Yes, I totally get why they had to do that if they wanted to do sequels, and hey I can give them points for being so efficient about it, but again it wrecks that perfect ending to the first film, and so yeah I don't think it was worth it.

Millstone85

2024-01-03, 11:39 AM

For me Reloaded goes off the rails is with a single word early on. Neo has a strike blocked by an Agent and goes "Upgrades" to explain why the Agent is able to do that. That it, with that single word, he's just a dude in a trenchcoat again doing kung-fu but now with often rather shoddy cgi.Yes, that was indeed a fundamental problem the sequel could not escape.

A worse sin is failing to have entertaining Matrix fights. It's been a long time since I saw Revolutions, but as far as I'm aware there are precisely two Matrix fights in the entire film - the brief "upside down gunmen" fight and the final fight between Neo and Smith.My favorite fight in Revolutions is actually a "non-Matrix" one. And it doesn't involve the weird mini-mechas either. I am talking about the fight aboard the Logos, between Neo and the possessed Bane.

https://youtu.be/C_v2eZ9dQE0
While Jonathan Groff recently played a very unconvincing Smith, the performance of Ian Bliss was magnificent! The fight itself is short but appropriately conveys that, while they both "know Kung-Fu", this time they are limited by regular flesh and blood.

Metastachydium

2024-01-03, 11:50 AM

A few new ones so it's not all Star Wars:
–the Telegony to the Trojan Cycle in general and the Odyssesy in particular;
–American Psycho 2; we all know what it did;
and an odd edge case,
–the Euripidean Iphigenia in Tauris, which is a far inferior sequel of sorts to Electra and Orestes, but really only shines as truly horrible garbage when compared to Iphigenia in Aulis, technically a prequel.

I still consider TLJ worse because, among other nonsense, it presses the reset button a second time and even harder! At the beginning of TFA, the New Republic and the First Order are both struggling to regain control of the galaxy, with the former stupidly accepting a truce. By the end of the movie, the New Republic has suffered the destruction of several important planets, while the First Order lost the weapon responsible for this destruction along with much of its troops. TLJ could have followed with the portrayal of a galaxy further thrown into chaos. Heck, Canto Bight could have been introduced as the birthplace of a new power, like a more mafia-like version of the prequels' Trade Federation. Not entirely original, sure, but still more so than what we got in TLJ's opening crawl:

"The FIRST ORDER reigns. Having decimated the peaceful Republic, Supreme Leader Snoke now deploys his merciless legions to seize military control of the galaxy.

Only General Leia Organa's band of RESISTANCE fighters stand against the rising tyranny, certain that Jedi Master Luke Skywalker will return and restore a spark of hope to the fight."

It is even closer to the situation at the beginning of the original trilogy than TFA was. And then, then, TLJ ends with the Resistance reduced to a single ship, so it is like the movie moved backward from the beginning of the original trilogy to the end of the prequel trilogy. All this in the second movie of what is supposed to be the sequel trilogy!

Meh. It's bad, but what it kills was already nonsensical bovine excrement to begin with. The big hard to forgive thing about it is not that it tries (and fails) to be subversive; it's that it keeps the most insulting aspects of TFA and never bothers to reset those. It's still "all the previous guys from the previous movies are shmucks" and "it's Mary Sue versus Emo Guy, who are so much better snowflakes" reigning more supreme than the First Order.

TFA is a very very lazy remake.

Disagreed. It's a very lazy remake that is trying to sell the idea that it is so much better than the useless original with its useless original cast of characters at every possible juncture. It's not just bad and derivative; it is actively trying to trample what it is derived from into the mud and replace it with its own painful mediocrity (or worse).

Errorname

2024-01-03, 12:12 PM

Yes. I am also grateful, given the preceding conversation, that I chose not to comment on Star Wars. You all have done more than I could have hoped to. :smallsmile:

I'll say this for the sequel trilogy, they stuck in the popular consciousness and still inspire heated discussions. You never see this sort of arguing about the Jurassic World movies or any of the other bad legacy sequels. Like did you guys know there was an Indiana Jones 5 this year? Feels like nobody even knew it existed.

it's that it keeps the most insulting aspects of TFA and never bothers to reset those. It's still "all the previous guys from the previous movies are shmucks" and "it's Mary Sue versus Emo Guy, who are so much better snowflakes" reigning more supreme than the First Order.

Eh, it's not like a frantic backpedal from the previous movie's setups would have made it good. We all know what happened with TROS.

Disagreed. It's a very lazy remake that is trying to sell the idea that it is so much better than the useless original with its useless original cast of characters at every possible juncture. It's not just bad and derivative; it is actively trying to trample what it is derived from into the mud and replace it with its own painful mediocrity (or worse).

I don't think that's accurate, active scorn and disdain would have probably resulted in a more coherent movie. Force Awakens clearly loves the original movies and wants to be like them very badly, and in it's desire to recapture them makes the story into a tragedy without even seeming to know what it's done.

Metastachydium

2024-01-03, 12:15 PM

I don't think that's accurate, active scorn and disdain would have probably resulted in a more coherent movie. Force Awakens clearly loves the original movies and wants to be like them very badly, and in it's desire to recapture them makes the story into a tragedy without even seeming to know what it's done.

Ah, okay. So you think it's a lazy remake that failed at being a lazy remake, even and retroactively butchered the previous 6 movies with their story arc as a result of that?

Batcathat

2024-01-03, 12:18 PM

I'll say this for the sequel trilogy, they stuck in the popular consciousness and still inspire heated discussions. You never see this sort of arguing about the Jurassic World movies or any of the other bad legacy sequels. Like did you guys know there was an Indiana Jones 5 this year? Feels like nobody even knew it existed.

I feel like that's less about their flaws or merits and more about them being Star Wars. Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones are certainly popular franchises but I've rarely if ever seen them inspire the sort of nigh-religious fervor that Star Wars does for some reason.

Metastachydium

2024-01-03, 12:20 PM

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-03, 12:43 PM

Errorname

2024-01-03, 12:58 PM

Ah, okay. So you think it's a lazy remake that failed at being a lazy remake, even and retroactively butchered the previous 6 movies with their story arc as a result of that?

Yeah, basically. Admittedly it's a common problem for lazy legacy sequels which are so reverent and nostalgic for the original they wrap back around to be extremely disrespectful, but Force Awakens had it bad

The Sequel Trilogy came out when there was still good reason to believe that something good could come from them. TFA created a lot of good will because it did things well that the prequels failed on, and was very much written as a "Part One" that was always going to be made better or worse by what followed. When the franchise hit the wall with TLJ, it hit it *hard*. If the franchise had continued with the mediocrity of TFA or had come out the gate with the incoherence of RoS, neither of those movies would still be talked about in the same way today.

Force Awakens did not actually do very much well. It had iconic Star Wars things and a charismatic cast, but actually going back to it after the follow-ups it becomes clear that whatever came after was going to be beholden to it's bad decisions and empty setups. That movie coasted on hype and nothing else.

Ionathus

2024-01-03, 01:00 PM

I'm going to suggest a distinction here on the Star Wars Sequels that may help the debate:

I think whether or not a movie is good and whether it's a good sequel are different things. Regardless of the individual films' qualities, I believe The Rise of Skywalker is a much, MUCH worse sequel than The Last Jedi.
Okay now, Ionathus, show your work :D
The Last Jedi did a decent job of continuing the story set out by The Force Awakens. It did interesting things with its three main leads (Poe, Finn, Rey). It took each of them on unique journeys that changed their perspective. It gave Luke a compelling reason to have been in exile for years and years. It cut away the dead weight of Snoke and Captain Phasma and (to a lesser extent) General Hux, characters that I didn't really have much interest in, and refocused the story on Kylo, setting him up for being the main baddie of Sequel #3. It introduced the "anybody could be a Jedi" concept, which IMO was much-needed in a franchise that's unhealthily obsessed with the Skywalkers.

In short, I think TLJ did a good job as a sequel of making the world of The Force Awakens more complicated, more interesting, and gave the third movie in the trilogy a lot of story threads to work with. That was a shot in the arm for me as a Star Wars fan, because The Force Awakens was such a blatant nostalgia cash-in ("A Death Star that kills GALAXIES!" "Another Palpatine!!" "ANOTHER Desert Orphan!" "ANOTHER Boba Fett!!") that it didn't really make me excited for the rest of the trilogy at all.

I agree that TLJ has a lot of really awful shortcomings as an individual movie. The plot is an absolute mess (casino sidequest, slow-speed starship cruiser chase, Holdo never explaining anything), the gleeful nostalgia-bashing gets old, and the less said about Luke drinking blue milk the better. A lot of it was weird and offbeat, not in a good way. But I do believe it took the plot threads from TFA, turned them into something interesting, and offered Sequel #3 some far more interesting opportunities to follow up on than TFA did for TLJ.
By comparison, The Rise of Skywalker was a passable popcorn flick that's somehow one of the worst sequels I've ever seen. It took all those questions The Last Jedi asked and threw them in the dumpster. It completely abandoned both Rose's and Poe's character arcs, it undid all of the "anyone can be a Jedi" work of TLJ, it retreated to the warm embrace of "whatever, just do Palpatine again lol." It was the most blatant and soulless nostalgia bait I've ever watched, and it was impossible to ignore how desperately Disney was backpedaling and trying to placate fans who hated TLJ.

Which, hey, I get it. TLJ pissed off fans and Disney freaked out and pulled their heads back in their shells. But if you spend your entire 3rd movie trying to blatantly "fix" your 2nd movie...well, you're going to wind up with a trilogy that never went anywhere. I will never understand why they didn't begin the sequel trilogy with a unified vision for all three movies, but once your second movie is out there you kiiiiiiiiiiind of have to work with what you've got. Don't waste your time trying to placate Star Wars fans, because they're never going to agree: the only thing Star Wars fans hate more than other Star Wars fans is Star Wars itself. It's become too big for everyone to like it, and sanding all the edges off everything left the sequel trilogy soulless by the end.

That said, The Rise of Skywalker had some really cool moments. I liked the lightsaber fights. The spaceship battle was cool and so was Palpatine's ship-destroying lightning. The first 2/3s dragged a bit but we got more interesting setpieces than in TLJ. So I think it's a more entertaining movie in a vacuum. But it's an absolute failure as a sequel to the movie that preceded it.
TL;DR -- TLJ is a worse movie than ROS, but ROS is absolutely a worse sequel.

At the end of the day, TLJ built on the foundation of TFA in interesting ways that made me excited for Part 3. That should be the goal of any sequel.
By comparison, ROS spent its entire runtime undoing TLJ. That's, like, the definition of a bad sequel. I get that they wanted to do damage control, but they overcorrected way too hard.

Back to the Future 1 and 2 were both fantastic, 1 a little bit more than 2. But 3 was a significant letdown. The characters were all just caricatures of themselves and the comedy largely fell flat.

See, I liked 3. It was totally off the rails from 1 and 2 but it was fun and, most importantly, it completed Marty's arc of "nobody calls me chicken" which had gotten him in trouble throughout 1 and 2. Maybe that's not the most ringing endorsement, but seeing a main character actually grow (rather than just romp around in his family's past and future) is a real bonus for me.

National Treasure was a fun adventure movie. The sequel tried too hard. They tried to make the stakes higher, but they just weren't.

Agreed. I also was very annoyed with the second one for doing the "main couple is broken up for stupid reasons" plot at the start of the movie. And the villain's entire motivation was...questionable. The first one's plot is a little nonsensical but the main characters have clear motivations and threats, and it comes out as good campy fun. The second one requires way too many contrivances for the plot to keep going and it becomes clear the writers just want to get to the setpieces.

Oh it was much worse than the Holiday Special. ALL the Disney movies were worse than the holiday special. Holiday Special is solidly in the middle at this point.

...have you seen the Holiday Special? It's a low-budget acid-trip Carol Burnett Show -- if Carol Burnett was a screaming Wookiee without subtitles. For all of their many, many flaws, every Disney SW production is better by default.

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-03, 02:28 PM

Force Awakens did not actually do very much well. It had iconic Star Wars things and a charismatic cast, but actually going back to it after the follow-ups it becomes clear that whatever came after was going to be beholden to it's bad decisions and empty setups. That movie coasted on hype and nothing else.

This is just hindsight bias. It's the inverse of people insisting that TLJ had interesting setups for RoS to follow up on but not being able to elaborate on them. TFA had flaws, but the idea that you couldn't have made the "Rey's parents" story interesting is just a reflection of the fact that TLJ failed to make it interesting. The idea that Rey was hoping her parents were somebody important was, itself, an invention of TLJ. In TFA, she doesn't care that they're "nobodies", she just wants a family.

There's an incredibly obvious way to do something interesting with that: In TFA, Rey finds a new family in the friends she makes along the way. In the sequel, she finds out that her "real" family is still out there. In the final movie, she has to decide between abandoning her friends to find her "real" family, or realizing that it's her found family that really matters. This is pretty basic storytelling, but you could hang a lot of drama off of that.

But RoS couldn't have done that, because TLJ doesn't just misunderstand the plot and tell us that they were "nobodies" as if Rey was expecting them to be Skywalkers or Kenobis or something, but it has to make them dead so that the whole plotline is dead any it doesn't matter anymore.

Or another example: TLJ didn't have to completely do away with the New Republic. TFA did a bad job of telling us much about it, but all that TFA did was blow up its capital. It was TLJ that decided that the entire thing just vanished overnight and now the First Order rules everything and we're back to the opening crawl of A New Hope with the empire and the rebellion.

Meanwhile, TFA did more to establish Snoke as a main villain than ANH did for the Emperor. In fact, ANH did very little to explicitly set up anything for the future. It establishes a lot of stuff, but almost everything it builds is for immediate use. The difference is ANH did actually build stuff, instead of just destroying it, and that ESB built on ANH instead of just tossing every plotline in the trash. Star Wars, as the franchise that we know today, was probably defined more by ESB and the direction it established than ANH, and without it a lot of ANH would just look like "empty setup".

DaedalusMkV

2024-01-03, 02:37 PM

At the end of the day, TLJ built on the foundation of TFA in interesting ways that made me excited for Part 3. That should be the goal of any sequel.
By comparison, ROS spent its entire runtime undoing TLJ. That's, like, the definition of a bad sequel. I get that they wanted to do damage control, but they overcorrected way too hard.

Obviously this is subjective, and I can't compare RoS to TLJ because I never watched RoS, but... I didn't leave TLJ excited for part 3. I left TLJ numb and tired and unable to muster up a single ounce of care for any of these characters, except perhaps for some secondhand outrage on Poe's part for being treated so damn poorly by the movie despite absolutely not doing anything to deserve it (he remains probably the only character from the sequel trilogy I actually like). I had no excitement for the future. No desire to see what happens next. I just didn't care any more, about any of it. TFA, for all its many flaws, left me excited for what comes next. We had shaken off the weight of Old Star Wars (hopefully), anything could happen now! And then TLJ burned the galaxy down just because it could, and I was done. Why should I care about any of these people? Rey was... I guess maybe slightly more of a character than before, but the only thing I can really remember about her arc in the movie now is her being mocked and belittled for, as an orphan, wanting to connect with her parents. Finn was an idiot who kept being abused for trying to engage in character growth, Poe spends the entire movie making good decisions with the information he has available and then being told he's an idiot for it, admiral pinky is possibly the worst leader I've ever seen in a piece of fiction without the writers specifically trying to make them a terrible leader (all she needed to do was say two words! TWO WORDS! Just tell Poe "Operational Security", just tell him you have a plan but can't tell him what it is! Like any halfway competent leader would!) and Rose is perhaps the most hateworthy character in the entire Star Wars universe, contending closely with Jar-Jar. Every single microsecond she spends on screen is an argument that we'd have been better off if that movie had never been made, and the knowledge that she would be in the next movie was an excellent deterrent to me ever seeing it.

That's my experience of TLJ. I can't offer an opinion on RoS, because TLJ guaranteed I would never watch it.

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-03, 02:51 PM

Obviously this is subjective, and I can't compare RoS to TLJ because I never watched RoS,

You didn't miss much.

admiral pinky is possibly the worst leader I've ever seen in a piece of fiction without the writers specifically trying to make them a terrible leader

Holdo is another example of how you can't say that TLJ did "the best it could", because we've seen what it tried to do with Holdo done far more competently.

Captain Jellico from Star Trek: TNG is a coded as an antagonist when he shows up and him and Riker wind up so at odds that Jellico suspends him from duty and confines him to his quarters. But he also turns out to be highly competent, succeeds in his mission, saves Picard, and the episode even has him admitting his faults and being a mature enough person to bring back Riker when he needs him. They don't have to make him stupid or irrational, nor do they have to pretend that the problems he caused weren't his responsibility as the commanding officer to sort out.

There's a fundamental disconnect between someone being coded as a villain and them being a competent commander, because part of being a competent commander is, well, morale. Star Trek shows that disconnect in action and admits it as a flaw in Jellico's style of command. TLJ expects us to flip on a dime as soon as a new piece of information is revealed, but that can't possibly work.

Bohandas

2024-01-03, 03:08 PM

...have you seen the Holiday Special? It's a low-budget acid-trip Carol Burnett Show -- if Carol Burnett was a screaming Wookiee without subtitles. For all of their many, many flaws, every Disney SW production is better by default.

I managed to find a copy of it over the holidays. For all it's flaws it at least comes off as a legitimate Star Wars movie, which is more than can be said for The Last Jedi or Rogue One

Metastachydium

2024-01-03, 03:19 PM

I'm going to suggest a distinction here on the Star Wars Sequels that may help the debate:

I think whether or not a movie is good and whether it's a good sequel are different things.

Which is explicitly why I think TFA might be the worst of the three as a sequel, yes.

...have you seen the Holiday Special? It's a low-budget acid-trip Carol Burnett Show -- if Carol Burnett was a screaming Wookiee without subtitles.

I mean, the animated bit makes no sense, yes, but it has a certain charm to it? (Also, it has a DINOSAUR. Everything is better with DINOSAURS.)

I managed to find a copy of it over the holidays. For all it's flaws it at least comes off as a legitimate Star Wars movie, which is more than can be said for The Last Jedi or Rogue One

I don't remember either of the latter two featuring what is commonly understood to be VR Wookiee porn, though. (Also, it absolutely seems to be set in at least two alternate universes, each one different from the main continuity of the franchise, so…)

Errorname

2024-01-03, 05:50 PM

This is just hindsight bias. It's the inverse of people insisting that TLJ had interesting setups for RoS to follow up on but not being able to elaborate on them. TFA had flaws, but the idea that you couldn't have made the "Rey's parents" story interesting is just a reflection of the fact that TLJ failed to make it interesting. The idea that Rey was hoping her parents were somebody important was, itself, an invention of TLJ.

If "who are Rey's parents" was the only baggage you might have a point, but Force Awakens made a lot of bad decisions in terms of how it chose to set-up the core conflict and where it started all of it's characters, that most of it's hooks were empty mystery boxes simply didn't help. Unless you want to argue that resetting the status quo and doing New Hope again was a good decision. People mocked it at the time and it's only gotten worse with hindsight the clearer it becomes that they had basically no idea what they were doing.

For the record none of the theories about who Rey's parents were or who Snoke was were ever actually compelling to me, and after Last Jedi none of the alternative 'what the rey/snoke reveal actually should have been' ideas seemed any good either. You could argue the execution wasn't ideal, but I think they picked the right answers to those questions.

Holdo is another example of how you can't say that TLJ did "the best it could", because we've seen what it tried to do with Holdo done far more competently.

Maybe I've been unclear about this, I think TLJ did the best it could with a lot of the dangling threads of the previous movie, mainly in the A-plot with Luke, Rey and Ren. This does not mean I think the movie is some flawless masterwork, Last Jedi scores high relative to other legacy sequels but there's a lot about it that just flatly sucks and basically the entire Poe plotline is inexcusably bad.

There's a fundamental disconnect between someone being coded as a villain and them being a competent commander, because part of being a competent commander is, well, morale. Star Trek shows that disconnect in action and admits it as a flaw in Jellico's style of command. TLJ expects us to flip on a dime as soon as a new piece of information is revealed, but that can't possibly work.

Jellico's a useful point of comparison and I thought about bringing him up earlier. It's complicated a little bit because the characters are similar but not the same, Last Jedi has some different themes they're exploring with Holdo (trying to, at least) and it means the character ends up getting played very differently. Jellico is meant to come off as a harsh, unpleasant and demanding man, and while the two-parter ultimately vindicates many of his choices this initial impression is still accurate. Meanwhile, Holdo is initially played as incompetent, with later scenes meant to reveal that this initial impression was false, but it's quite easy for 'appears incompetent' to become 'actually incompetent' and they came down decidedly on the wrong side of that line.

It's a difficult task and they didn't pull it off, but unlike the stuff with Bitter Exile Luke there was nothing about the Force Awakens that was forcing their hand here (and also the end result isn't nearly as good). Nothing was forcing them to do a mutiny plotline, but they did, and the end result is easily the worst part of the movie.

I managed to find a copy of it over the holidays. For all it's flaws it at least comes off as a legitimate Star Wars movie, which is more than can be said for The Last Jedi or Rogue One

I really hate to say that people are lying about their art opinions, it's very subjective and we all have our own standards for things, but you can't possibly seriously think that.

I refuse to accept that anyone seriously believes that the holiday special feels like a legitimate Star Wars movie. The entire reason it's interesting is that it's a glimpse at a path not taken, a different and almost unrecognizable vision of what the franchise might have become.

gbaji

2024-01-03, 06:34 PM

He really couldn't be. He didn't become a recluse because he achieved some enlightenment, he went into hiding while a new empire rose because his apprentice turned evil and killed all his students, and those details are established in Episode VII

Force Awakens is the movie that established that he was a failure who ran away from the galaxy. Last Jedi had to try and make that work, and it's probably the best part of the sequel trilogy.

I'd have to re-watch the series again (and I'm not really up to it), but I don't recall that TFA established at all why Luke was on the planet, only that he had disappeared and they were trying to find him. IIRC, it was in TLJ that the details of what happened with him and (most importantly) the effect it had on him is revealed. Prior to that point, they could literally have had his motivation and reason for being there be anything.

Johnson took the Abrams' mystery box about Luke and made it "Luke was so bitter about his failure with Kylo Ren, and the loss of his students, that he turned his back on the dream of rebuilding the Jedi". That was 100% Johnson's choice and it was 100% done in TLJ and *not* in TFA.

Having said that, I still think that TLJ, while it went in a different direction than I would have liked, was still a better sequel than RoS. Johnson took the mystery boxes, picked a direction, and went in that direction. Like it or don't like it, he laid out a plan (more or less), that could have simply been followed up on in the third film in the set in a meaningful and consistent manner. Abrams chose to just chuck it out into the garbage, light it on fire, and then replace it with complete nonsense that not only didn't make any sense with regard to the previous two films, but also didn't make sense as a standalone story either.

The latter is the worst part of it for me. The Neo/Matrix side of the plot is somewhat excusable because Revolutions was trying to pick up the complete mess of a plot that was Reloaded. Reloaded spent so much time navel-gazing that it really only established 3 plot points of importance:

1) "The One" is another measure of control that the machines put in.

2) Smith is replicating out of control and threatening to destroy the Matrix, the machines, and all of humankind.

3) Neo can affect machines outside the Matrix.

If Reloaded spent more time setting up the first two and ditched the third you could get a lot of mileage out of Neo needing to subvert the Chosen One tropes and find some third option, with Smith putting pressure on the machines. With Neo affecting machines outside the Matrix they had to lean into the Chosen One business again, because that's something nobody has been able to do before it it leads us to the whole Messiah archetype. Revolutions would have had to do a lot of work to come up with a compelling plot, and I'm not surprised they failed.

Or... You actually go with the fan theory, and the obvious direction the first two films were going in, and make the "real world/Zion" also just be another layer of the matrix. That was the obvious set up. And it really felt like they realized this was what the fans expected so they decided to "put a spin on it", and go in another direction instead. And... predicably, that other direction didn't work as well.

It's almost like when you have two films that set up a third film, even in (arguably expecially in) obvious/tropish ways, and you fail to deliver on that expected story, it will be a dumpster fire. There's like a lesson in basic storytelling here somewhere.

Not doing what's expected purely for the sake of not doing what is expected, is rarely the smart move that many film writers/directors seem to think it will be.

Meanwhile, TFA did more to establish Snoke as a main villain than ANH did for the Emperor. In fact, ANH did very little to explicitly set up anything for the future. It establishes a lot of stuff, but almost everything it builds is for immediate use. The difference is ANH did actually build stuff, instead of just destroying it, and that ESB built on ANH instead of just tossing every plotline in the trash. Star Wars, as the franchise that we know today, was probably defined more by ESB and the direction it established than ANH, and without it a lot of ANH would just look like "empty setup".

This is actually a really good observation. ESB absolutely picked up the "mystery boxes" left by ANH, picked a direction, and went with them. In ESB, we learn who the Jedi actually are/were. We learn more about the politics within the empire itself (and the whole Vader/Emperor thing). We learn what a Sith is (kinda). We learn about the light/dark sides of the force. And we learn the relationship between Luke and Vader. The whole thing builds up the universe and the characters, and the plot and puts us in a direction.

And yeah, like I said above, I'm not as totally down on TLJ as to say it "toss(ed) every plotline in the Trash" (just didn't do what I maybe would have liked). But it did at least pick a direction. It set up the whole "Luke abandoned the Jedi teaching, but then kinda has a change of heart and Rey decides to pick things up anyway". It set up "Ren is conflicted about his path, and he takes out Snoke to become the new leader. But which direction will he go...?". It clearly sets up both Rey and Ren as opposed "sides" to a force conflict. It puts the rebels into a tough spot, with few resources against a growing First Order, poised to take over the galaxy. All of this is set up, poorly IMO, but set up in TLJ.

And then... we get RoS. Yikkes. It would be like if RotJ's plot was Count Dooku returns from the dead and resumes the Clone war with a secret hidden fleet, and Darth Vader and Luke have to join forces to stop him from <doing something super bad>; Vader sacrifices himself to save the day, leaving a weary Luke to try to pick up the pieces, but with the Empire and Rebels still more or less left where they were at the end of ESB. The End! Yeah. I'm pretty sure that would have gone over about as well as a lead balloon too.

Oh. Someone mentioned Highlander 2. Yup. That's still probably the worst sequel of all time though. My understanding is that the studio basically had the rights to do a Highlander sequel, but no script, and they had a (arguably pretty interesting) sci-fi script about a future where some climate disaster has resulted in the need for a shield to protect the planet, but now there's a muder mystery involved in a coverup that the shield is actually no longer needed, and the corp that owns it is just perpetuating a hoax to keep it's power and wealth. And they just kinda mushed the two together. Oh... And then spackled on some really nonsensical stuff to explain where the immortals came from (which was clearly written by someone who had never seen or given 3 seconds thought to the original film).

It was bad. Just... really bad. I mean. Aliens 3 and 4 are "mostly bad", in a "cheesy sci-fi" kinda way. But are at least bearable (and actually Aliens 4 had some fun bits in a "hah. this is basically an RPG group in space" kind of way). But at least they more or less continued following a basic pattern/trend. The good news is that the Highlander series, which started about a year after the second film, ignored it entirely, and actually did a lot of really good stuff with the franchise.

I'd almost put in an honorable mention for the entire Starship Troopers set of films, but there wasn't actually a "good one" to start with. Do we get an honorable mention for "worst film interpretation of a book ever?". I mean, the first film was actually decent. It wasn't Startship Troopers, but it was a fun flick (and yeah, the rapidly "direct to video" sequels were predictably less good/fun). But yeah... Not sure that actually fits with the topic.

HolyDraconus

2024-01-03, 06:34 PM

I will add one in here for a slightly different reason.

Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse. I was hyped to see this movie. Went in expecting a great film. Arguably I got that. What made me add it to here though is that I went in thinking it was a stand alone film like the first one was. More stories or windows into their lives. I did NOT go in knowing that it was a two parter, and finding that out while watching the movie killed it for me. It doesn't make it terrible, but in the context of this thread it is added to the list of not liked sequels.

Dragon Ball GT gets tossed on there as well, with the last arcs being the only thing good about it (which introduced ss4), and as a whole was not a good product.

Double Dragon 3. The one with what looked to be cut out body parts for the animations. I liked 1. 2 is iconic. 3 should of been a slam dunk, and instead nearly buried the franchise til 4 came out and did something good with it.

Everything after the Sword of Truth.
Look, personal bias aside, I ENJOYED the Sword of Truth. It was weird. It had rules though. And it tried to stay true to those rules. I honestly bought the thing twice. But its like the longer that series goes on the more.... perverted? I guess you can say, it gets from its own message from the Sword of Truth. 13 books and its just... I dunno. The world could be kept if you want, but Richard's family needs to be axed if you want to play in it.

Metastachydium

2024-01-03, 06:47 PM

Everything after the Sword of Truth.
Look, personal bias aside, I ENJOYED the Sword of Truth. It was weird. It had rules though. And it tried to stay true to those rules. I honestly bought the thing twice. But its like the longer that series goes on the more.... perverted? I guess you can say, it gets from its own message from the Sword of Truth. 13 books and its just... I dunno. The world could be kept if you want, but Richard's family needs to be axed if you want to play in it.

Do you mean the Sword of Truth books, with everything after being The Law of Nines and the whole second series with The Omen Machine and beyond? If so, I disagree. The sequels are garbage of course, but The Law of Nines is far more tolerable overall than anything in the main series.

If, instead, this is the weird old "Wizard's First Rule wasn't that bad", I must disagree HARD. It's the book with the highest quota of ideas abandoned and forgotten by Goodkind pretty much immediately after they first appeared. It is the book that introduces Confessors and the Mord-Sith, the two single most cringe worldbuilding elements in the man's whole oeuvre, which is quite the feat. It has an Ersatz Gollum. Half of it is a really bad non-consensual BDSM romp. Even the writing is somehow worse than that found in later books. More purple and amateurish. It's the worst, sorry. The absolute low point. Worse than The Soul of Fire, even. Shockingly bad.

HolyDraconus

2024-01-03, 06:59 PM

Do you mean the Sword of Truth books, with everything after being The Law of Nines and the whole second series with The Omen Machine and beyond? If so, I disagree. The sequels are garbage of course, but The Law of Nines is far more tolerable overall than anything in the main series.

If, instead, this is the weird old "Wizard's First Rule wasn't that bad", I must disagree HARD. It's the book with the highest quota of ideas abandoned and forgotten by Goodkind pretty much immediately after they first appeared. It is the book that introduces Confessors and the Mord-Sith, the two single most cringe worldbuilding elements in the man's whole oeuvre, which is quite the feat. It has an Ersatz Gollum. Half of it is a really bad non-consensual BDSM romp. Even the writing is somehow worse than that found in later books. More purple and amateurish. It's the worst, sorry. The absolute low point. Worse than The Soul of Fire, even. Shockingly bad.

And you wouldn't have had the spin offs if it wasn't for the Sword of Truth. I even stated that world could be kept if you removed Richard and his family. It had some ideas, but you can't say they are abandoned if the sequels to that book wasn't made, at that point they would be just unexplored, background noise, lore.

Bohandas

2024-01-03, 08:40 PM

I really hate to say that people are lying about their art opinions, it's very subjective and we all have our own standards for things, but you can't possibly seriously think that.

I refuse to accept that anyone seriously believes that the holiday special feels like a legitimate Star Wars movie. The entire reason it's interesting is that it's a glimpse at a path not taken, a different and almost unrecognizable vision of what the franchise might have become.

Holiday special felt like Star Wars tonally and in terms of characterization and worldbuilding and set design and character design and so forth; whereas TLJ felt more like a bad Star Trek knockoff, and Rogue One felt like they weren't sure whether they wanted to do an action film or a tragedy but they knew the one thing they knew they definitely didn't want to do was a Star Wars heist film

Millstone85

2024-01-03, 09:08 PM

Or... You actually go with the fan theory, and the obvious direction the first two films were going in, and make the "real world/Zion" also just be another layer of the matrix.I seriously don't see the appeal.

Is there something in particular that people wanted from the real-er world? Something like:

The same wasteland, except there is no Zion because nobody actually woke up before.
A spaceship en route to a new planet, its human passengers in suspended animation.
Humanity won the war by infecting the Machines with a simulation of their victory.
Neo realizing he is just a brain in a jar, with no way to tell what might exist beyond it.
Neo transcending matter and spacetime to meet Azathoth, the dreamer of all things.

I found the reveal of the Machines' lies extending beyond the simulation to be much more elegant. Neo's newfound telepathy with the Machines was also cool IMO.

Bohandas

2024-01-03, 10:47 PM

What if he was a butterfly?

DaedalusMkV

2024-01-04, 02:00 AM

It's a difficult task and they didn't pull it off, but unlike the stuff with Bitter Exile Luke there was nothing about the Force Awakens that was forcing their hand here (and also the end result isn't nearly as good). Nothing was forcing them to do a mutiny plotline, but they did, and the end result is easily the worst part of the movie.

Well, now, while I certainly hate the Poe plotline in TLJ, it's hardly fair to call it the worst part of the movie. At least it matters. At least it leads to something somewhat important to the story as a whole or a character's development, stupid though those contributions may be. Finn's plotline is trash from beginning to end, serves no purpose and actively undermines the A-plot with Rey on several occasions, plus has Rose in it and thus is just immeasurably worse as a result. It's Finn's plotline that gives us the hilariously insipid 'Capitalism, not space Nazis or evil Wizards, was the real villain of Star Wars' speech being rammed down our throats, and it's what gives us the utterly incomprehensible decision to have Rose interrupt Finn's heroic sacrifice and give us a deeply problematic speech about how sacrifice is stupid and evil immediately before Luke's heroic sacrifice which is portrayed as just and right and inspires a new generation to rise up against oppression, which probably would have made me walk out of the movie on the spot if that hadn't been the end anyways.

Rey's plotline in TLJ is serviceable. I don't think it's great, but it's fine. Kylo's plotline is borderline good, or at least I don't remember having major complaints about it. Poe's is terribly executed and completely incompetent and makes no sense, but it probably wouldn't have been enough to stop me watching a Star Wars movie ever again by itself. At least Poe was in it, and I'd much rather watch Poe do stuff than any other sequel trilogy character. Finn's is a travesty, utterly pointless and completely devoid of any value from beginning to end and actively sabotaging the rest of the movie's theme and tone at every opportunity. Finn's story is the worst part of the movie, and frankly would have been pretty bad even if it had been part of Battlefield Earth, much less a main-line Star Wars movie.

Bohandas

2024-01-04, 02:08 AM

Yeah, one of the problems from TLJ that Rise of Skywalker didn't address was the sandskimmer scene with Rose. They should have gone ahead and made her be a First Order spy, as that's pretty much the only thing that would make that scene make sense

Errorname

2024-01-04, 02:58 AM

Holiday special felt like Star Wars tonally and in terms of characterization and worldbuilding and set design and character design and so forth

I could see the argument that the Disney films do not feel like Star Wars, I don't agree but what makes a series feel like itself is a subjective matter, but I can't see a version of that argument which is that the Disney films don't feel like Star Wars and the Holiday Special does. Because uh, the holiday special does not feel like Star Wars. It kind of looks like Star Wars, mainly because of prop and actor reuse, but the low-budget childish variety show presentation is so utterly alien to what Star Wars became.

Bohandas

2024-01-04, 04:09 AM

I struggle to imagine better payoffs to the setup of Force Awakens than what Last Jedi did (with the Luke/Rey/Ren A-plot mind, the Finn and Poe stuff sucks). Bitter Hermit Luke is the only progression from "Luke's nephew turned evil and murdered all his students and then Luke ran away into exile" that makes sense. Is that where I wanted his character to go? No, but it's what a sequel to Force Awakens basically has to do.

He could have been doing any number of things in exile beyond just moping. Studying holochrons, making a holochron, channeling the spirits of the dead, just to name a few

GloatingSwine

2024-01-04, 04:20 AM

If "who are Rey's parents" was the only baggage you might have a point, but Force Awakens made a lot of bad decisions in terms of how it chose to set-up the core conflict and where it started all of it's characters, that most of it's hooks were empty mystery boxes simply didn't help. Unless you want to argue that resetting the status quo and doing New Hope again was a good decision. People mocked it at the time and it's only gotten worse with hindsight the clearer it becomes that they had basically no idea what they were doing.

For the record none of the theories about who Rey's parents were or who Snoke was were ever actually compelling to me, and after Last Jedi none of the alternative 'what the rey/snoke reveal actually should have been' ideas seemed any good either. You could argue the execution wasn't ideal, but I think they picked the right answers to those questions.

That's because there were never any good answers. "Who are Rey's parents" is a dead question by the end of The Force Awakens.

In order for it to be a meaningful question then their identities would have to be meaningful to Rey. In order to be meaningful to Rey it would have to have been someone Rey has actually met and has an opinion of, but Rey is a desert recluse who has functionally met nobody else outside of the cast of the first movie.

There were no good answers because there were never meant to be good answers, there was only meant to be discussion on the Internet in between episodes. It was never meant to mean anything within the movie, only outside of it.

Errorname

2024-01-04, 04:25 AM

He could have been doing any number of things in exile beyond just moping. Studying holochrons, making a holochron, channeling the spirits of the dead, just to name a few

The thing is I don't think that would have been better. Less tragic perhaps, but the Force Awakens already turned the original trilogy into a tragedy, and as mentioned I think the grouchy hermit angle was the best part of the sequels.

GloatingSwine

2024-01-04, 04:51 AM

Yeah, when the question is "why has Luke ****ed off into the middle of nowhere whilst everything he fought for is ground into paste?" no answer makes him look better.

The starting point of TFA isn't even the starting point of the OT. It's worse than that. All of the heroes are fallen and useless, reduced to the worst versions of themselves, lower than they were at the start of their original arcs. Everything they built is dead, even before the First Order euthanises the Republic it is too weak to fight for its own survival. There are no new Jedi. Nothing good was built and lasted, not even within the souls of the characters. Han and Chewie are nobodies on the fringe, Leia is playing toy soldiers with a resistance with less support than the old rebellion had, and Luke has disappeared.

And ultimately it also doesn't matter what Luke is doing. It's not his story. He's not going to come back and be the protagonist again, so the absolute most he can do is pass something on to the new protagonists. Which he does, whether he wants to or not.

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-04, 09:22 AM

Yeah, when the question is "why has Luke ****ed off into the middle of nowhere whilst everything he fought for is ground into paste?" no answer makes him look better.

I'll point out, once again, that this was TLJ's premise, not TFA's. When TFA started, the New Republic was still the dominant power. When it ended, they'd suffered a serious blow, but so had the First Order. It was TLJ that started with "...and so now the First Order has completely won and is in control of everything everywhere".

The fact that people keep attributing TLJ's innovations to TFA is as close as objective proof as you can get that TLJ was the movie that screwed things up. People can't even separate the two anymore because of thoroughly it rewrote TFA and Star Wars in general.

GloatingSwine

2024-01-04, 09:35 AM

I'll point out, once again, that this was TLJ's premise, not TFA's. When TFA started, the New Republic was still the dominant power. When it ended, they'd suffered a serious blow, but so had the First Order. It was TLJ that started with "...and so now the First Order has completely won and is in control of everything everywhere".

The fact that people keep attributing TLJ's innovations to TFA is as close as objective proof as you can get that TLJ was the movie that screwed things up. People can't even separate the two anymore because of thoroughly it rewrote TFA and Star Wars in general.

The entire Republic government and military was blown up in TFA, and even at the start of the film they were unwilling or unable to confront the First Order, to the point that Leia had to run off and play toy soldiers to actually fight them.

The New Republic was so small, weak, and rubbish in TFA that it only merited being blown up off screen.

Nothing the original or prequel trilogy showed people fighting for mattered, nobody built anything that was worth showing in the sequels, everything they did was disposed of offscreen.

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-04, 09:57 AM

The entire Republic government and military was blown up in TFA, and even at the start of the film they were unwilling or unable to confront the First Order, to the point that Leia had to run off and play toy soldiers to actually fight them.

The New Republic was so small, weak, and rubbish in TFA that it only merited being blown up off screen.

Where is any of this established in TFA? TFA told us nothing about the politics between the New Republic and the First Order. TFA blew up a few planets on-screen. TLJ off-screened the rest.

It's really telling that people have to resort to this kind of thing to defend TLJ. TFA certainly doesn't need TLJ's problems to be criticized on its own ("TFA told us nothing about the politics between the New Republic and the First Order" is a problem in and of itself). This isn't some kind of ambiguous thing that people can have different opinions on. These are simple, basic facts about the sequence of events in the narrative that people are trying to shift from one move to the other.

GloatingSwine

2024-01-04, 10:48 AM

Where is any of this established in TFA? TFA told us nothing about the politics between the New Republic and the First Order. TFA blew up a few planets on-screen. TLJ off-screened the rest.

It's really telling that people have to resort to this kind of thing to defend TLJ. TFA certainly doesn't need TLJ's problems to be criticized on its own ("TFA told us nothing about the politics between the New Republic and the First Order" is a problem in and of itself). This isn't some kind of ambiguous thing that people can have different opinions on. These are simple, basic facts about the sequence of events in the narrative that people are trying to shift from one move to the other.

It starts in the opening crawl. The Republic is not fighting the First Order directly, it is funding a guerilla operation instead. That's what you do when you can't or won't fight for yourself.

Then when Starkiller base fires the immediate response is "it's all gone", the Republic's fleet and government are destroyed, entirely, by a single strike. Those six planets held everything. And whilst there was a fractionally brief scene of what is presumably Hosnian Prime that is still not actually showing anything about the Republic.

The Republic, the whole thing that the characters of the first two trilogies were fighting to protect and then re-establish, was not worth showing us in the sequels and was swept aside because it was irrelevant.

Turned out Luke was short for Lucius Cornelius Sulla, showed up to "reestablish the Republic" then quietly went away so it immediately turned back to its worst habits, it just skipped several Caesars to go straight to Caligula for its trouble.

Errorname

2024-01-04, 11:11 AM

I'll point out, once again, that this was TLJ's premise, not TFA's. When TFA started, the New Republic was still the dominant power. When it ended, they'd suffered a serious blow, but so had the First Order. It was TLJ that started with "...and so now the First Order has completely won and is in control of everything everywhere".

The fact that people keep attributing TLJ's innovations to TFA is as close as objective proof as you can get that TLJ was the movie that screwed things up. People can't even separate the two anymore because of thoroughly it rewrote TFA and Star Wars in general.

There's a grain of truth here, which is that TLJ had enough wiggle room that they could have walked back TFA's destruction of the New Republic had they chose, and I think it's reasonable to hold that against it. But that is a failing of Last Jedi refusing to walk back a choice made in Force Awakens, it is not some new idea introduced in Last Jedi. Force Awakens is very clear that blowing up not-Coruscant is meant to take the Republic off the board and take the politics out of Star Wars to return the franchise to scrappy underdog rebels vs the evil overwhelming empire.

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-04, 11:31 AM

It starts in the opening crawl. The Republic is not fighting the First Order directly, it is funding a guerilla operation instead. That's what you do when you can't or won't fight for yourself.

That's what the US and the Soviet Union did back during the Cold war when both were at the height of their military power because direct confrontation would have been disastrous for both.

The Republic, the whole thing that the characters of the first two trilogies were fighting to protect and then re-establish, was not worth showing

This part, right here, is true and is a valid criticism of TFA. Everything else would have been an unsupported assertion until TLJ came along, and in fact if you go back and look at pre-TLJ speculation you won't find these assumptions. Where the hell would anyone even get the idea from that The New Republic was only six planets? Given the pre-established scale of the franchise, that would be a major continuity error.

That's probably the most important take away there: Go back and re-watch some reviews/podcasts discussing TFA that were made right after its release. I challenge you to find me one in which people were able to predict the direction that TLJ took things in. I challenged you to find me a pre-TLJ speculation thread where people didn't have wildly different ideas of what the sequel was going to be about. If all of these things were really established in TFA, and TLJ was just working with what TFA left it, these should have been obvious predictions to make. But they weren't, and nobody made them.

That's also the more relevant and pertinent criticism of TFA here- the movie was so insubstantial and so reliant on a sequel to do something interesting with the mystery boxes it built that it was always going to live or die on how the next two movies turned out. They could have turned out much better, but they didn't, so all TFA has to fall back on is Abrams' direction, a good cast, nostalgia bait.

Batcathat

2024-01-04, 11:44 AM

Where the hell would anyone even get the idea from that The New Republic was only six planets? Given the pre-established scale of the franchise, that would be a major continuity error.

To be fair, Star Wars has pretty much always gone in the classic sci-fi trap of wanting their numbers to be soooooo big but being utterly incapable of actually depicting it. (Don't get me wrong, that scene is still like seven layers of stupid, of course).

GloatingSwine

2024-01-04, 11:59 AM

That's what the US and the Soviet Union did back during the Cold war when both were at the height of their military power because direct confrontation would have been disastrous for both.

Even that basically points out that the original heroes failed, they did not overthrow the Empire they merely inconvenienced it sufficiently for a rival to emerge that still wasn't strong enough to fight it.

This part, right here, is true and is a valid criticism of TFA. Everything else would have been an unsupported assertion until TLJ came along, and in fact if you go back and look at pre-TLJ speculation you won't find these assumptions. Where the hell would anyone even get the idea from that The New Republic was only six planets? Given the pre-established scale of the franchise, that would be a major continuity error.

Not the whole New Republic, but its whole government and military. And we are supposed to believe that is what has happened, because that's what the characters say when they see it happen.

That's probably the most important take away there: Go back and re-watch some reviews/podcasts discussing TFA that were made right after its release. I challenge you to find me one in which people were able to predict the direction that TLJ took things in. I challenged you to find me a pre-TLJ speculation thread where people didn't have wildly different ideas of what the sequel was going to be about. If all of these things were really established in TFA, and TLJ was just working with what TFA left it, these should have been obvious predictions to make. But they weren't, and nobody made them.

Right, people were too busy speculating which character they had heard of before Rey was going to be descended from (but Rey hadn't heard of them so it would be meaningless to her and affect her character not one bit by finding it out), and which super-secret villain Snoke was going to be, even though those are dumb things with no interesting answers.

That's also the more relevant and pertinent criticism of TFA here- the movie was so insubstantial and so reliant on a sequel to do something interesting with the mystery boxes it built that it was always going to live or die on how the next two movies turned out. They could have turned out much better, but they didn't, so all TFA has to fall back on is Abrams' direction, a good cast, nostalgia bait.

Mystery boxes are empty by design.

That's not just me saying that. That's how JJ Abrams writes. He even says it in the TED talk he did. The point is not to have a good payoff within the story but to make people talk about it in the office in between episodes of Lost.

That's why I say there were no good answers possible, because to have a satisfying mystery and payoff you have to have an idea for what the payoff is going to be when you set up the mystery, so you can refine the clues and red herrings around the mystery not just do some portentous bollocks and hope someone fills it in later.

Ripping the boxes open and showing how empty they were was the only way forward.

Errorname

2024-01-04, 12:10 PM

This part, right here, is true and is a valid criticism of TFA. Everything else would have been an unsupported assertion until TLJ came along, and in fact if you go back and look at pre-TLJ speculation you won't find these assumptions. Where the hell would anyone even get the idea from that The New Republic was only six planets? Given the pre-established scale of the franchise, that would be a major continuity error.

Because Force Awakens obviously does not care about the Republic and is super eager to sweep it off the board and go back to Rebels vs Empire? It's pretty clear in the movie that blowing up not-Coruscant was a death knell to the new Republic, regardless of whether or not that makes sense.

This is the movie which had a laser beam split apart to hit five different planets and it had it be visible from some random bar on the other side of the galaxy. Force Awakens does not care about making what happened make sense, they want to rush through it so they can get back to doing a worse retread of New Hope.

That's why I say there were no good answers possible, because to have a satisfying mystery and payoff you have to have an idea for what the payoff is going to be when you set up the mystery, so you can refine the clues and red herrings around the mystery not just do some portentous bollocks and hope someone fills it in later.

Yeah, it's probably noteworthy that literally every fan theory about who Snoke was or who Rey's parents were was bad.

gbaji

2024-01-04, 02:47 PM

I seriously don't see the appeal.

Is there something in particular that people wanted from the real-er world? Something like:

The same wasteland, except there is no Zion because nobody actually woke up before.
A spaceship en route to a new planet, its human passengers in suspended animation.
Humanity won the war by infecting the Machines with a simulation of their victory.
Neo realizing he is just a brain in a jar, with no way to tell what might exist beyond it.
Neo transcending matter and spacetime to meet Azathoth, the dreamer of all things.

I found the reveal of the Machines' lies extending beyond the simulation to be much more elegant. Neo's newfound telepathy with the Machines was also cool IMO.

It's not about the appeal though. It's about making the story consistent. It's also about making the entire thing make sense. The idea of using human bodies as living power generators is so ridiculously ludicrous that it had to be a lie. There had to be "another level of the matrix" that explained why that lie existed in the first place. What exactly that was isn't nearly as important as having it be in the first place.

But yeah. To then just reverse course after all of that and say "Nope. There is no other layer to the matrix. That's actually real. The machines really are using humans as power generators" was just like a complete let down of the premise of the entire series (that what you are seeing is not what is real).

And to me? The whole bit with Neo having some telepathic control over the machines (without this being an artifact of him actually being inside another level of matrix), was the dumbest thing in the entire series. It shifted the story from "really interesting interpretation of virtual reality and how those within would perceive it", and into "we're just going to go with magic". That was... dumb. The only direction to go in the third film after the reveal of Neo's abilities at the end of the second in the "real world" that didn't devolve the entire thing into "it's magic" (and therefore dumb), was to have what they thought was the real world be more simulation. That was the setup. It should have been followed up on. But some numbskull writer decided that the value of doing a fake out was greater than that of having a setting that made sense.

And so. Instead of an actual reveal of the "real truth" (whatever that was) in the third film, we instead got treated to a mind numbing waste of time, watching fights that didn't matter, and battles that didn't matter, on battlefields that didn't matter, for a resolution that... wait for it... didn't matter.

That's also the more relevant and pertinent criticism of TFA here- the movie was so insubstantial and so reliant on a sequel to do something interesting with the mystery boxes it built that it was always going to live or die on how the next two movies turned out. They could have turned out much better, but they didn't, so all TFA has to fall back on is Abrams' direction, a good cast, nostalgia bait.

Interestingly enough, you can say that same about ANH though. I suppose with the massive distinction that ANH was the "first Star Wars", and so didn't need more than what it had, while TFA was building on an existing franchise and kinda did. But... go back and read the title scroll for ANH. Block out what you know about the Star Wars universe and just watch the film. What do you know about the Empire? What do you know about the Rebellion? How significant was the destruction of Alderaan to the rebellion? There is just as much argument to be made that the use of the death star in ANH "crushed" the rebellion just as powerfully as the use of starkiller base in TFA had on the New Republic. In neither case are we informed of their actual significance. In both cases, that significance and effect is not revealed until the title crawl of the next film.

The title crawl for TLJ could just as easily have read:

"In response to the Star Killer attack, the galaxy has risen in outraged response. Thousands of worlds have joined the Republic, to rebuild it and RESIST the rise of a new EMPIRE. The FIRST ORDER has been beaten back, it's forces retreating to the rim of the galaxy.

But now <blah blah blah> new threat <blah blah blah> Jedi something <blah blah blah> Sith somethiing <blah blah blah> REBELLION/RESISTANCE <blah blah>"

It's literally TLJ that decides what the outcome of TFA actually is, and how it affects the story going forward. It coud very very easily have gone in a completely different direction. But it didn't.

And yes, in exactly the same was that ESB's title scroll determined what the aftermath of the battle at Yavin was. How much did this cost the empire? How much did it cost the rebellion? What was the effect of the destruction of Alderaan? Did it have the effect of terrorising the other systems into submission as Tarkin wanted? Or did it cause more worlds to "slip through your grasp" as Leia predicted? The first Star Wars film was not written with a sequel in mind, so it was much more obvious that ESB was charting the course. But if you actually go back and watch TFA, it's pretty clear that Abrams intended to do essentially the same thing with that film. Just set things up, and then pick a direction later. I'm not sure that was the best approach (actually quite certain it wasn't), but the parallels are certainly there. We can certainly blame Abrams for *not* being brave enough to pick a direction and plotline and firmly set us on that path. But it was Johnson who did actuallly set a direction in TLJ. Certainly in regards to how badly the Republic vs First Order conflict was going, and certainly in regards to Luke's actions as well.

Although, if RoS is any indication, I firmly believe that Abrams should just stick to creating mystery boxes and letting other people decide what is in them. So there is that...

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-04, 03:08 PM

Interestingly enough, you can say that same about ANH though. I suppose with the massive distinction that ANH was the "first Star Wars", and so didn't need more than what it had, while TFA was building on an existing franchise and kinda did. But... go back and read the title scroll for ANH. Block out what you know about the Star Wars universe and just watch the film. What do you know about the Empire? What do you know about the Rebellion? How significant was the destruction of Alderaan to the rebellion? There is just as much argument to be made that the use of the death star in ANH "crushed" the rebellion just as powerfully as the use of starkiller base in TFA had on the New Republic. In neither case are we informed of their actual significance. In both cases, that significance and effect is not revealed until the title crawl of the next film.

This is partially true, but substantially untrue.

The difference is that ANH was written as a stand-alone film and did not explicitly set things up for a sequel. If you watched ANH and never saw ESB or RotJ, you'd still be left with a complete story. Also, we know that the rebel base isn't on Alderaan, because saving the rebel base is what the climax of the film is about. TFA... not so much. The story explicitly requires continuing, because most of the payoffs haven't happened yet. ANH ends with the adventure continuing in a much more vague way, not with specific plot threads needing to be resolved.

The rest- that ESB did more to define 'Star Wars' than ANH- is something that I explicitly said on this very thread. ESB could have gone in any number of directions, and Star Wars could be completely different than what it is today.

That's why I say there were no good answers possible, because to have a satisfying mystery and payoff you have to have an idea for what the payoff is going to be when you set up the mystery, so you can refine the clues and red herrings around the mystery not just do some portentous bollocks and hope someone fills it in later.

Ripping the boxes open and showing how empty they were was the only way forward.

Really now?

So now I've seen it as well and can join in with all the cool kids.

I thought it was good. It wasn't pants ruiningly good, but it was good. The characters were people who were fun to watch, they all developed in ways informed by their actual characters not based on the requirements of the plot, and the shootbang parts shot and banged well, the escape from Jakku was particularly good, near itano circus levels of whooshing around. It wasn't perfect though, I think my criticisms have all been said, but I'm going to say them again.

1. The movie needed more room to breathe. The first three movies all had lulls in their action which made the action scenes stand out more, whereas this new one is just all shootbang all the time. I think we could possibly have done without the bit with the tentacle monsters, that could, and probably should, have been the quiet talky bit instead.

2. The new "death star but bigger this time" was a bit perfunctory. It blew up some people nobody on screen knew or cared about and then it got exploded. Yay?

3. Probably should have left finding Luke to the next movie. That last few minutes of time with R2 randomly waking up and giving them the rest of the map (PS a five year old could solve that puzzle with a few minutes and some printouts on acetate, in fact it used to be what you had to do for copy protection on old games!) could have been better, for my money the map should have been lost and Rey should have left with the force to guide her, and the last scene is her and Chewie leaving. That would also free up some more space in the middle for breathing room.

Now, people are allowed to change their mind. That's fine. But nobody in that thread is saying that everything TFA set up was impossible to deliver on. There are plenty of complaints, but the ones being given in this thread are uniquely post-TLJ complaints. It's a fact- an objective, demonstrable fact- that TLJ has heavily colored peoples' impression of TFA.

Edit: This one's hilarious:

There's no way that a girl with mysteriously potent Force powers, a mysterious background, and a mysterious connection to Luke Skywalker's lightsaber is just going to have shiftless nobodies for parents. Having her abandoned on Jakku by off-planet parents, and having her self-describe her background as "classified", are both unnecessary complications if her parents aren't going to be significant.

Metastachydium

2024-01-04, 03:53 PM

And you wouldn't have had the spin offs if it wasn't for the Sword of Truth.

So we're talkiong about the entire main series? I'm still somewhat unsure.

I even stated that world could be kept if you removed Richard and his family. It had some ideas, but you can't say they are abandoned if the sequels to that book wasn't made, at that point they would be just unexplored, background noise, lore.

Also, the one spinoff does have Marty Stu's family (specifically a distant descendant of his half-sister) as well a character probably related to Mother Mindrape's father's family. (Also also, Goodkind's worldbuilding is sloppy at its best and atrociously offensive at its worst. Yuck.)

KorvinStarmast

2024-01-04, 03:56 PM

It's still "all the previous guys from the previous movies are shmucks" and "it's Mary Sue versus Emo Guy, who are so much better snowflakes" reigning more supreme than the First Order. That got a laugh out of me.

It's not just bad and derivative; it is actively trying to trample what it is derived from into the mud and replace it with its own painful mediocrity (or worse). Salieri was probably a producer. (Yes, that's a vague reference to Amadeus)

Like did you guys know there was an Indiana Jones 5 this year? Feels like nobody even knew it existed. Number of hoots given: zero.

Also, this is the forum where given time, every discussion somehow reveals itself to have always been a Star Wars discussion. Sad but true.

That movie coasted on hype and nothing else. That is almost the review my son offered as we walked out of that film. But we both had hopes for Finn's character growth in the second film ... oops.

I think whether or not a movie is good and whether it's a good sequel are different things. Regardless of the individual films' qualities, I believe The Rise of Skywalker is a much, MUCH worse sequel than The Last Jedi. I like how you presented that.

If, instead, this is the weird old "Wizard's First Rule wasn't that bad", I must disagree HARD. It's the book with the highest quota of ideas abandoned and forgotten by Goodkind pretty much immediately after they first appeared. {snip} Shockingly bad. I read it, and by the time I was done asked myself "Why did TK write a BDSM stroke book?" I tried to read the second book and didn't get very far into it before I bailed out. I congratulate him for getting published, and for getting a miniseries made out of his books, but ... no. Not good.

Yeah, one of the problems from TLJ that Rise of Skywalker didn't address was the sandskimmer scene with Rose. They should have gone ahead and made her be a First Order spy, as that's pretty much the only thing that would make that scene make sense Would have been better than what they ended up doing.

He could have been doing any number of things in exile beyond just moping. Studying holochrons, making a holochron, channeling the spirits of the dead, just to name a few Drinking milk was what he really wanted to do. I hear that stuff's as good as single malt scotch! :smallbiggrin:

Yeah, when the question is "why has Luke ****ed off into the middle of nowhere whilst everything he fought for is ground into paste?" no answer makes him look better. Luke asked himself "WWYD" and the answer is "buzz off to a planet nobody will be able to find."
What Would Yoda Do?

... so the absolute most he can do is pass something on to the new protagonists. Which he does, whether he wants to or not. He had a cool scene where he faked out Kylo, though.

Turned out Luke was short for Lucius Cornelius Sulla, showed up to "reestablish the Republic" then quietly went away so it immediately turned back to its worst habits, it just skipped several Caesars to go straight to Caligula for its trouble. Cackles. Recently read a good book on the century before Caesar, and I love your take on this.

Finn: this was what irked my son and I the most. They had a potentially great character and did nothing to exploit the opportunity.

In TFA, we get this guy named Finn who was a Storm Trooper who had some internal quams about being one and who had the moral courage to walk away (at risk of his own life) and he ended up as a rebel.
The chance for a great character arc/development, and maybe some force power in him, was all there for the taking.
And they went basically nowhere with it in TLJ and RoS.
Arrgggghhh!

Tyndmyr

2024-01-04, 04:07 PM

Batcathat

2024-01-04, 04:17 PM

Finn was really fascinating at first. The open to TFA was genuinely interesting, and I was really looking forward to seeing the perspective of a Stormtrooper losing faith in the Empire. I was looking forward to see what he was going to do, and then it turned out to be almost nothing.

They really did Finn dirty in these films.

Yeah, as someone with a rather tepid interest in Star Wars to begin with I don't have nearly as strong feelings as many others in regards to the sequels but I did get disappointed by Finn's story (though I should really have known better, considering the franchise's spotty track record at handling anything not Very Heroic or Super Evil).

I also kinda hate the scene where he fights the guy with the electric baton or whatever it is. Every time a Stormtrooper has ever seen someone with a lightsaber, they've tried to shoot them only to have their shots deflected. But the one time the guy with the lightsaber probably wouldn't be able to do that the Stormtrooper just happens to prefer close combat? Yeah, that one took an electric baton straight to my suspension of disbelief. :smallsigh:

ecarden

2024-01-04, 04:21 PM

Yeah, when the question is "why has Luke ****ed off into the middle of nowhere whilst everything he fought for is ground into paste?" no answer makes him look better.

As pointed out, this isn't what TFA says. TFA says he's missing. Personally, I would have gone with...Luke is dead. After Ben killed everyone, Luke followed him to a Sith planet where he was trying to, I dunno, summon Sith ghosts or something. They fought, Luke wins, but, as he did with his father, lays down his lightsaber and implores him to come back to the light. Ben refuses and attacks him, but despite dropping his lightsaber, Luke is able to evade and hold him off, only to be struck down by someone else from behind (can be stormtroopers sent by Snoke, can be Snoke, can be Sith ghosts, whatever, the key point is Ben rejected redemption, but couldn't defeat Luke and knows it).

But, as he's dying...well, 'strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can imagine.' And indeed, Force Ghost Luke rises, Ben flees, taking on his new name as he rejects any possibility of another path and hides the fact that he was defeated, repeatedly. Force Ghost Luke is trapped on Sith ghost planet, or has to suppress them, or whatever and so cannot travel around teaching people.

But if you aren't doing that, the obvious thing to do is have him be pulling an Obi-Wan, he's off somewhere in the back of beyond protecting someone/something or even training people.

Instead, they have him be pulling a Yoda, just without the excuse of actually having been defeated, watching everything he loved burn and being ~1000 years old and close to death.

gbaji

2024-01-04, 04:53 PM

The difference is that ANH was written as a stand-alone film and did not explicitly set things up for a sequel. If you watched ANH and never saw ESB or RotJ, you'd still be left with a complete story. Also, we know that the rebel base isn't on Alderaan, because saving the rebel base is what the climax of the film is about. TFA... not so much.

The resistance base in TFA is also not on any of the planets that were destroyed. Those planets were political/logistical sources for the new republic, in much the same way that Aldraan was a political/logistical source for the rebellion but also not the actual rebel base. Read the scroll text for ANH. Leia is trying to get to Alderaan with the plans for the death star, not to a rebel base. Presumably, Alderaan is where her power was, and Alderaan was an important contact/resource for the rebellion (otherwise why was she going there?).

Knowing nothing more than we knew at the time the final credits rolled on each film, the results are pretty much the same. The political power center for the good guys that we know about has been destroyed, but the actual fighters survived to fight another day. The super weapon used to destroy that political power center is destroyed, but the bad guys presumably also continue on as well. It's the same darn story, with the same ending. There was no reason to assume that, upon the destruction of those planets, the entire republic would crumble into nothing anymore than we could have assumed that with Alderaan's destruction, the entire rebellion would crumble into nothing. At the time of the ending of both films, we simply do not know enough to make any assumptions at all.

It's the title crawl in the next film in each case that tells us what the outcome is.

The story explicitly requires continuing, because most of the payoffs haven't happened yet. ANH ends with the adventure continuing in a much more vague way, not with specific plot threads needing to be resolved.

Yes. I've acknowledged that ANH was written without any sequels in mind, while TFA was expressly written to be the opening of a three part trilogy. So yeah. There were extra plot lines left dangling. But the direction those plot lines could take were left very much in the air at the end of TFA.

The rest- that ESB did more to define 'Star Wars' than ANH- is something that I explicitly said on this very thread. ESB could have gone in any number of directions, and Star Wars could be completely different than what it is today.

Yes. And my point is that TLJ was the analog to that in the ST. It was positioned to define that period and story in the Star Wars universe. So... if you liked Luke being trained by Yoda, and then rescuing his friends from Darth Vader, but hated Luke hiding out and not wanting to train Rey, then trying to destroy the Jedi library, and then sacrificing himself to let the rebels escape, then that is 100% because of decisions made in TLJ and *not* in TFA. If you liked the chase through the asteroid field, and adventures on Beskin, but hated the whole rebel fleet chase scene and side trip to rescue animals on some random planet (all of which accomplished absolutely zero), then that was also 100% because of decisions made in TLJ and also *not* in TFA. If you liked the ominous conflict and reveal between Luke and Vader, but hated the vison connection, then kidnapping, and then sorta fighting together to kill Snoke with Rey and Ben, then that is... wait for it... 100% because of decisions made in TLJ and *not* in TFA.

See where I'm going with this? None of this was stuff that had to happen the way it happened because of events in TFA. Johnson was more or less handed a blank canvas with some very very broad strokes of events and characters to work with. Everything he did with it was his own decision to make.

And yes. I happen to think Abrams was a cowardly writer for *not* putting more direction into TFA than he did. But the fact is that he did leave things extremly wide open for interpretation, and Johnson filled it in with TLJ. So folks that don't like all of that stuff? Not Abrams fault, and certainly not something that Johnson had no other choice.

And just to be complete, despite all of the stuff that I suspect I'm not alone in thinking was bad about TLJ, it's worth repeating that what Abrams then did with RoS was many many many times worse. Which is, at the very least, an amazing accomplishment.

I think you and I are actually in agreement with regards to TLJ "steering the ship" so to speak. I think the only difference is that I don't actually have as much of a problem with that fact. I'm not sure how much of TFA was Abrams just being Abrams, and how much was deliberately following in the same pattern that ANH/ESB followed (there certainly did seem to be a fair amount of that going on).

And I'm pretty much certain that we do agree that a lot of the things that people are blaming on TFA in this thread, are things that only happened the way they did because of events written into TLJ. Luke was not known to be a hermit who had abandoned the Jedi at the end of TFA. We literally had no knowledge of what he was doing there at the end of TFA. And, from my memories of the various postings on the interwebs at the time, most people assumed he was studing the force, or training a new set of Jedi in secret, or otherwise doing something "really really important". No one thought it was "gave up on the Jedi entirely out of despair for his failure with Ben". Well, except the folks who actually wrote TLJ, I suppose.

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-04, 05:09 PM

Yes. And my point is that TLJ was the analog to that in the ST. It was positioned to define that period and story in the Star Wars universe.

You're arguing with the wrong person then, because that's the point I started off by making.

I think you and I are actually in agreement with regards to TLJ "steering the ship" so to speak. I think the only difference is that I don't actually have as much of a problem with that fact. I'm not sure how much of TFA was Abrams just being Abrams, and how much was deliberately following in the same pattern that ANH/ESB followed (there certainly did seem to be a fair amount of that going on).

I don't have a problem with the basic concept, just the result in this instance. TFA could have been better on its own, and done a better job of setting the table, but even at the time people were conscious that it wasn't designed as a stand-alone film and were judging it on that basis.

Zevox

2024-01-04, 05:11 PM

HolyDraconus

2024-01-04, 05:26 PM

So we're talkiong about the entire main series? I'm still somewhat unsure.

Also, the one spinoff does have Marty Stu's family (specifically a distant descendant of his half-sister) as well a character probably related to Mother Mindrape's father's family. (Also also, Goodkind's worldbuilding is sloppy at its best and atrociously offensive at its worst. Yuck.)
Editors can go a long way into making something coherent from an assortment of ideas. speaking of....

Finn was really fascinating at first. The open to TFA was genuinely interesting, and I was really looking forward to seeing the perspective of a Stormtrooper losing faith in the Empire. I was looking forward to see what he was going to do, and then it turned out to be almost nothing.

They really did Finn dirty in these films.

Finn. The character I was interested in when TFA was first spoiled. The character that is actively fighting Jar Jar for most annoying in the franchise. How did they screw him up that badly? I remember peeps speculated that he was related to Mace, explaining away the Force sensitivity, and I myself was hoping they would pull a modified Knights of the Old Republic story of stormtrooper to jedi knight. If I would of known what TLJ was going to be back then I wouldn't of held out any hope. TLJ as a whole just destroyed Star Wars for me. Didn't see Rise. Refuse to. Every single piece of Star Wars media released is a prequel: because there's no real coming back from that smoldering crater of a black hole that the Sequel Trilogy ended up becoming, outside of pulling a Star Trek and introducing multiple Time Lines... but you can't cause a key member of the old school cast has passed away. Just... eh.

Dr.Samurai

2024-01-04, 05:31 PM

I think one thing we can all agree on is that I hope someday there's going to be a documentary/autopsy with interviews and research on "What the **** happened to the Star Wars sequels" because every bit of information that slowly trickles kur is fascinating on what went wrong and I'd watch the hell out of someone interviewing the cast and crew. I hope they didn't get nda'd indefinitely.
I do think one day there will be a series looking back at this time in media in general and talking about how freaking terrible it is and all of the subversion that went around trying to reinvent the wheel and convince everyone that **** is good and enjoyable.

TLJ is terrible. No, it's not just Empire Strikes Back. No, it's not just bad for a sequel. It's a terrible movie because it lacks heroes. Everyone is made out to be mistaken and/or incompetent. Poe fails, Finn fails, Luke fails. Rey meanders through the movie accomplishing **** all until she happens to fly her ship to the cave where everyone needs to be rescued. The idea that Kylo is an "interesting" villain is hilarious. The idea that "bitter" Luke is a strong point of this movie and also the "only" way it could have been done is preposterous.

Someone went out to **** on Star Wars, accomplished that, and the fandom is predictably bitter about it. And if you strip all of the Star Wars out of TLJ, you still have a terrible movie that lacks heroes, and includes so many twists everyone leaves the movie with whiplash. You can feel Rian Johnson looming over you through the entire runtime of this movie.

ecarden

2024-01-04, 09:57 PM

While that does sound immensely better than what we got (at least as far as Luke goes), unfortunately it couldn't ever be how they followed up TFA, because one of the few things TFA does establish about Luke's status is that he's alive and well, when Rey finds him in its final scene.

Ah...right. I will say, one thing that absolutely was a **** move as the first movie in a trilogy is setting something up which basically means that the next film has to start instantly, with no time skip. I guess you could try to pull an Infinity War and go with a timeskip after the first ten minutes of the movie, but he would have left a lot more options open if she lands, sees Luke's ship and that's it.

But the more I hear about the history here, the more I think my original belief that the issue was lack of coordination was wrong and what actually happened is TFA->TLJ->Backlash, freakout, abort original plan, change course, produce total garbage. Now, since I think TLJ was actively bad, I understand changing course, but wow did it not work.

Talakeal

2024-01-05, 12:20 AM

As pointed out, this isn't what TFA says. TFA says he's missing. Personally, I would have gone with...Luke is dead. After Ben killed everyone, Luke followed him to a Sith planet where he was trying to, I dunno, summon Sith ghosts or something. They fought, Luke wins, but, as he did with his father, lays down his lightsaber and implores him to come back to the light. Ben refuses and attacks him, but despite dropping his lightsaber, Luke is able to evade and hold him off, only to be struck down by someone else from behind (can be stormtroopers sent by Snoke, can be Snoke, can be Sith ghosts, whatever, the key point is Ben rejected redemption, but couldn't defeat Luke and knows it).

But, as he's dying...well, 'strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can imagine.' And indeed, Force Ghost Luke rises, Ben flees, taking on his new name as he rejects any possibility of another path and hides the fact that he was defeated, repeatedly. Force Ghost Luke is trapped on Sith ghost planet, or has to suppress them, or whatever and so cannot travel around teaching people.

But if you aren't doing that, the obvious thing to do is have him be pulling an Obi-Wan, he's off somewhere in the back of beyond protecting someone/something or even training people.

Instead, they have him be pulling a Yoda, just without the excuse of actually having been defeated, watching everything he loved burn and being ~1000 years old and close to death.

I personally would have gone with a Sixth Sense style twist to TLJ. Luke has been dead the whole time, and Rey has been interacting with his ghost. That is why he leaves no footprints, and has a blue saber, and why blaster bolts pass right through him in the final battle, and only at the end does Rey (and the audience) realize this. Very similar outcome to the actual movie, but subtly different mood.

I actually really liked Rey being a nobody. I also liked the idea that Snoke was pretending to be Darth Plaguis but is actually just one of the keepers of the Sith archives as was hinted at by his ring (which might be canon?). It makes him sort of a dark parallel to the (imo amazing) Don Quixote Jedi from the old Marvel comic books.

As for the Poe and Finn subplots, I got nothing.

Errorname

2024-01-05, 02:58 AM

TLJ is terrible. No, it's not just Empire Strikes Back. No, it's not just bad for a sequel. It's a terrible movie because it lacks heroes. Everyone is made out to be mistaken and/or incompetent. Poe fails, Finn fails, Luke fails. Rey meanders through the movie accomplishing **** all until she happens to fly her ship to the cave where everyone needs to be rescued.

Plenty of movies either lack heroes or have heroes who fail. Notably, including Empire, which is a movie where all the protagonists manage to accomplish is surviving.

The idea that Kylo is an "interesting" villain is hilarious.

I mean I think the idea that he's more interesting than Snoke is pretty defensible.

As for the Poe and Finn subplots, I got nothing.

You could probably defend the idea of them, but the actual execution leaves so much to be desired and Finn's plotline in particular is just so disconnected from the rest of the movie. They're really bad.

DaedalusMkV

2024-01-05, 03:57 AM

You could probably defend the idea of them, but the actual execution leaves so much to be desired and Finn's plotline in particular is just so disconnected from the rest of the movie. They're really bad.

I don't think you could even defend the idea of Finn's plotline. You could probably defend the idea of something vaguely like Finn's plotline, where instead of going to random casino planet and freeing the poor animals so we can get a message about how Capitalism Is Evil only for none of it to matter at all, he instead infiltrates a First Order base, gathers intelligence that allows the heroes to do something important and starts a revolution of First Order grunts against the fascist leaders. That would have been a great place for Finn to go - he spends the first movie freeing himself from the First Order, and then discovers in the second that he can free others as well. It would give him a role in the theoretical third movie as well - convince the rank and file of the villains to lay down their arms, because the war will never and was never intended to benefit them. You know, something resembling a character arc. It also lets you take advantage of literally his only established skill set - knowing how the First Order works and being able to blend in with them. Maybe this time he ultimately comes to Poe's rescue, letting us reverse the beats from the first movie and setting up a Poe-Finn romance, which I genuinely wish the ST had been brave enough to go with. He has probably the best setup for any ST character, his introduction in TFA was easily the best part of the Disney movies (I felt empathy for a Star Wars character outside of the original trilogy!), and the fact that they literally never use it for anything aside from the occasional joke is just sad.

Poe's plotline... Broadly could maybe work, if you changed almost all the details. Tense chase scene where the characters need to use their wits to escape from certain doom is not an inherently bad concept. Great way to build tension and induce urgency while the other characters do their things. But almost everything aside from those very broad strokes would need to change or you're still going to be left in an infuriating situation where the audience hates the person they're supposed to respect, feels offended on behalf of the character who was supposed to learn a lesson and confused at the fact that a plan which has been explicitly confirmed to not work by previous canon suddenly does work now - but still leads to an outcome where the heroes need a second Deus Ex Machina to not all die anyways. But yeah, the core concept is theoretically fine, it's just more that the details are all stupid and the execution is terrible.

Errorname

2024-01-05, 05:13 AM

I don't think you could even defend the idea of Finn's plotline. You could probably defend the idea of something vaguely like Finn's plotline, where instead of going to random casino planet and freeing the poor animals so we can get a message about how Capitalism Is Evil only for none of it to matter at all

I would say the core problem with Finn's plotline is not that the ideas themselves are inherently bad. I don't mind the idea of going to a space casino, or meeting a weird shady guy who can't be trusted, or talking about arms dealers profiting off of all the Star War going on. All of those are ideas that absolutely could have worked, if you told me that Andor season 2 was going to showcase where Rebels get their X-Wings from or feature an arms dealer, I'd be pretty hyped for that.

The problem is that Last Jedi just does not have room for them. They're shoved into a C-plot where the film has neither the time nor the focus to develop them into a compelling form, and doing a plot about where the factions get their weapons from would require massively reworking the political situation into something even vaguely coherent which the film just is not up for. They should have just had Finn stay with the Rebels.

Poe's plotline... Broadly could maybe work, if you changed almost all the details.

Maybe. I think Poe and Holdo both have pretty fundamental problems as characters, but a tense chase and a space mutiny are things that could maybe have worked. Putting Finn in the lead role might have helped, it's easier to justify why an imperial defector might be mistrustful and insubordinate and also much easier to justify why he might not be trusted with key details, as opposed to Poe who should both know better and be better trusted.

But the mutiny is a risky plotline in the first place, especially since they've elected not to have a mole manipulating either party onto whom responsibility can be hoisted. It demands that at least one of the characters the audience is meant to like is going to make a serious mistake and appear pretty unsympathetic, and frankly in the film itself both characters end up looking pretty bad. It also feels like the film doesn't recognize just how bad the situation is come the end of the film, an organization in the hundreds to thousands is reduced to enough people to fit inside the Millenium Falcon.

Precure

2024-01-05, 06:08 AM

Errorname

2024-01-05, 07:23 AM

Yeah, just recently watched TFA and TLJ. TFA simply established that Luke "vanished" before the rise of First Order and allegedly searching for the first Jedi Temple. The only person actually claim that the Republic has ended is General Hux, from the movie it seems more akin to bombing Washington DC, nothing suggests that other systems/states have fallen into First Order control. Also it's pretty much hinted that Rey was dreaming about the planet with the first Jedi Temple since she was a child, so "her parents were nobodies" makes very little sense to me.

It's established that Luke vanished after his new Jedi Order was destroyed by Kylo Ren. The catastrophic failure of everything he tried to build and his absence in the fight against the First Order were already set in stone.

I also can't watch the Starkiller scene and not think the movie wanted that to knock the New Republic off the map, they wouldn't have constructed that movie like that if they had any interest in using the New Republic going forward, they rushed through anything to do with it so they could go back to Rebels vs Empire, a bad decision that is haunting the Mandolorian and it's spinoffs to this day.

My stance on the Rey parentage thing is that all of the 'your parents are actually important force users' theories basically sucked. Rey Palpatine, Rey Kenobi, Rey Skywalker, Rey Gon Jinn, they're all bad. Rey not having some special dynasty is the best payoff for what Force Awakens established, with the qualifying factor that the mystery in Force Awakens is not good.

Morgaln

2024-01-05, 07:34 AM

I've got two examples of least favorite sequels:

1. Pirates of the Caribbean
I saw the first Pirates movie in theaters and enjoyed it a lot. It just was a fun and enjoyable ride, with good characters, including a rare case of a sympathetic villain. But then they released the sequels and they were terrible. To the point where I can't even enjoy the first movie any longer, knowing what they did to it.

2. The Hobbit
I liked the first hobbit movie. It couldn't compare to the LotR trilogy (which I consider timeless classics) but I didn't expect it to. They did a good job with the first part of the book, even bringing in some of the songs; and I loved Martin Freeman's portrayal of Bilbo. Of course seeing Andy Serkis as Gollum again was a treat. Then came Desolation of Smaug and I was pissed. They turned it into an action movie. Every single scene that in the book is solved by Bilbo's wit was instead made into some stupid action scene (running from Beorn, the spiders in Mirkwood, going down the river in the barrels, Smaug's lair, there are a lot of examples). They could have left Bilbo out of that movie and nothing would have changed. In a movie called "The Hobbit!" In addition, they undid all of the character development between Bilbo and Thorin from the first movie, they introduced a mustache-twirling Disney villain in Laketown and for some reason thought we needed a love triangle between two elves and a dwarf. As you can probably tell, I hate that movie with a passion.

KorvinStarmast

2024-01-05, 08:13 AM

and convince everyone that **** is good and enjoyable. TV producers have been doing that since the 50's. :smallyuk:

The idea that Kylo is an "interesting" villain is hilarious. Whining like a teenaged drama queen does not make for a character anyone wants to see on screen.

Someone went out to **** on Star Wars, accomplished that, and the fandom is predictably bitter about it. That's a nice and concise assessment.

Notably, including Empire, which is a movie where all the protagonists manage to accomplish is surviving. The movie opens up with a successful military operation against the Empire's strike force. Yes, the bad guys score a few successes as well during the movie, and the good guys get away to fight another day. Return of the Jedi started out well, but then we got The Teddy Bear revolt, which hosed the tone and threw suspension of disbelief out of the window.
I don't think I am the only person who found the Ewoks to be a poor idea ... and I had heard a rumor that originally, Endor was supposed to be a planet that was home to wookies (and thus a tie in with Chewbacca) but someone got really miserly on the production budget as regards extras and costumes ...

You could probably defend the idea of something vaguely like Finn's plotline, where instead of going to random casino planet and freeing the poor animals so we can get a message about how Capitalism Is Evil only for none of it to matter at all, he instead infiltrates a First Order base, gathers intelligence that allows the heroes to do something important and starts a revolution of First Order grunts against the fascist leaders. That would have been a great place for Finn to go - he spends the first movie freeing himself from the First Order, and then discovers in the second that he can free others as well. It would give him a role in the theoretical third movie as well - convince the rank and file of the villains to lay down their arms, because the war will never and was never intended to benefit them. You know, something resembling a character arc. It also lets you take advantage of literally his only established skill set - knowing how the First Order works and being able to blend in with them. Maybe this time he ultimately comes to Poe's rescue, letting us reverse the beats from the first movie and setting up a Poe-Finn romance, which I genuinely wish the ST had been brave enough to go with. He has probably the best setup for any ST character, his introduction in TFA was easily the best part of the Disney movies (I felt empathy for a Star Wars character outside of the original trilogy!), and the fact that they literally never use it for anything aside from the occasional joke is just sad. Not a bad idea. What were the writers thinking, I wonder?

I've got two examples of least favorite sequels:

1. Pirates of the Caribbean The first one was a joy. The follow ons were "the franchise" at work.

2. The Hobbit Could have been done in two movies. (Heck, could have been done in one). They did The Hobbit dirty.

Errorname

2024-01-05, 08:18 AM

I saw the first Pirates movie in theaters and enjoyed it a lot. It just was a fun and enjoyable ride, with good characters, including a rare case of a sympathetic villain. But then they released the sequels and they were terrible. To the point where I can't even enjoy the first movie any longer, knowing what they did to it.

I feel fonder of the second and third movies with hindsight, there's a lot of very impressive stuff in those even if the scripts aren't great, a lot of evocative visuals and memorable sequences.

But they got completely entranced by the character of Jack Sparrow. Depp gives a franchise stealing performance, but I really do think they'd have been better off with a different actor. You wouldn't have had the same instantly recognizable performance and character, but the movie would have worked with a more traditional Long John Silver type and the sequels might have remembered who the actual main characters are.

The movie opens up with a successful military operation against the Empire's strike force. Yes, the bad guys score a few successes as well during the movie, and the good guys get away to fight another day.

The Battle of Hoth is not exactly a glorious victory for the Rebels. They manage to bloody the empire's nose and survive long enough to run away, it's only a victory in the sense that they didn't all get slaughtered, they still definitively lost Hoth and inflicted only minor casualties.

InvisibleBison

2024-01-05, 08:42 AM

Also it's pretty much hinted that Rey was dreaming about the planet with the first Jedi Temple since she was a child, so "her parents were nobodies" makes very little sense to me.

Could you explain your reasoning here? I don't see why Rey having prophetic dreams necessarily means her parents were important people.

Kareeah_Indaga

2024-01-05, 08:43 AM

Could have been done in two movies. (Heck, could have been done in one). They did The Hobbit dirty.

This. So much this. One for the dragon, one for the Battle of Five Armies would have worked nicely.

Batcathat

2024-01-05, 08:45 AM

But they got completely entranced by the character of Jack Sparrow. Depp gives a franchise stealing performance, but I really do think they'd have been better off with a different actor. You wouldn't have had the same instantly recognizable performance and character, but the movie would have worked with a more traditional Long John Silver type and the sequels might have remembered who the actual main characters are.

I can see what you mean, but on the other hand the intended main character is rather bland. Orlando Bloom does an alright job, but Will Turner pretty much feels like Standard Hero Type 1A.

paddyfool

2024-01-05, 09:05 AM

2. The Hobbit
Could have been done in two movies. (Heck, could have been done in one). They did The Hobbit dirty.

Only good things about the sequels was some of the acting / voice acting (from people you’d expect to do well at this) and the “I see fire” song. Scriptwise and plotwise they were a mess.

Errorname

2024-01-05, 09:37 AM

I can see what you mean, but on the other hand the intended main character is rather bland. Orlando Bloom does an alright job, but Will Turner pretty much feels like Standard Hero Type 1A.

Right, but I think that sort of character is necessary for this to work. Will and Elizabeth are necessary contrasts as more stable characters for Jack to orbit around as a very memorable supporting player.

ecarden

2024-01-05, 09:37 AM

Could you explain your reasoning here? I don't see why Rey having prophetic dreams necessarily means her parents were important people.

This goes to my theory, back before it was pointed out to me that nothing from the PT is going to get referenced, was that they were setting up Rey as either an Anakin parallel, or the Force going one step further, as one could argue that Anakin's connection to his mother is part of what sent him down the Dark Side path and she's, in fact, a spontaneously Force created child.

Wintermoot

2024-01-05, 09:46 AM

Errorname

2024-01-05, 09:49 AM

This goes to my theory, back before it was pointed out to me that nothing from the PT is going to get referenced, was that they were setting up Rey as either an Anakin parallel, or the Force going one step further, as one could argue that Anakin's connection to his mother is part of what sent him down the Dark Side path and she's, in fact, a spontaneously Force created child.

I wonder if her parents being literally nobody would have gone over better than her parents simply being nobody important. I do agree that her being a literal child of the force would have been preferable to most of the fan theories.

And if people didn't like it you could still do the "She was a Palpatine all along" reveal!

Just as Anakin was "the chosen one" and created by the Force as a spontaneously force created child, Rey was created by Palpatine's sinister manipulation of the force to create a Sith equivalent. His final and greatest weapon, a living death star, a Sith "chosen one" which is why she had no parents. It explained why she was so natively gifted and Luke's strong adverse reaction to her.

I cannot be persuaded that Palpatine isn't Anakin's father through his manipulation of the force. That's what the Opera scene implies, even if nobody's been willing to unambiguously canonize it.

And frankly this would run into most of the problems the Rey Palpatine in the actual movies ran into. The mechanics are secondary, whether her father was a clone or if Palpatine made her with the force, it's still basically the same story.

ecarden

2024-01-05, 09:50 AM

I remember I had the theory that Rey was going to be the third death star.

Just as Anakin was "the chosen one" and created by the Force as a spontaneously force created child, Rey was created by Palpatine's sinister manipulation of the force to create a Sith equivalent. His final and greatest weapon, a living death star, a Sith "chosen one" which is why she had no parents. It explained why she was so natively gifted and Luke's strong adverse reaction to her.

And then, she would overcome this programming and become greater and better than what Palpatine intended, thus defeating his final legacy.

Also potentially fun. I will say though, I actually liked Rey Nobody and wish they'd stuck with it. It's the one plot beat in TLJ that actually landed for me, even if the discussion around it (outside the movie) was unbearable.

LibraryOgre

2024-01-05, 11:06 AM

Yeah, when the question is "why has Luke ****ed off into the middle of nowhere whilst everything he fought for is ground into paste?" no answer makes him look better.

I mean, the destruction of the Temple, everything he'd worked his adult life for, was just six years ago. Yoda went into hiding for more than 20 years before Luke dragged him out... in order to find him, Obi-wan literally had to come back from the dead to tell Luke where to go. And then Yoda fought (seriously or not) becoming a Jedi Master again. And what was Obi-wan Ben Kenobi doing six years after the destruction of the Jedi? Hiding in the desert under an assumed name, perhaps?

The actions of Luke Skywalker are almost exactly the actions of Yoda and Obi-Wan. Temple destroyed, almost all of the Jedi killed by a former pupil? Go into exile until a new Jedi comes to carry on the tradition. Obi-wan offered training; Yoda and Luke resisted (again, perhaps seriously, perhaps not). Yoda died in his bed; Luke and Obi-Wan sacrificed themselves to allow the next generation to survive.

If the movies had come out in chronological order, I'd be willing to bet folks would be talking about the assassination of Obi-wan and Yoda's characters in ANH, TESB, and ROTJ.

Trixie_One

2024-01-05, 11:20 AM

I cannot be persuaded that Palpatine isn't Anakin's father through his manipulation of the force. That's what the Opera scene implies, even if nobody's been willing to unambiguously canonize it.

See I thought it was Palpatine's master, Darth Plagueus the Wise, before Palpatine betrayed and killed him. That's part of why he's so smug in that Opera scene.

This is more speculative but I think that Palpatine didn't know where Anakin was which was why he didn't make a move to do anything with him while he was a slave on Tatootine. Now not only has he found his master's most impressive creation and is corrupting him into being his apprentice, he also gets to tell that creation just how he killed his master, and all without Anakin ever picking up on that all important subtext.

Dr.Samurai

2024-01-05, 11:23 AM

Plenty of movies either lack heroes or have heroes who fail.
Plenty of Star Wars movies? TLJ is actively anti-heroism.

Poe
1. Smacked in the face and rebuked for saving the rebellion in the opening sequence of the movie (btw no movie would be possible if Poe hadn't done this, since we learn that the Imperials can track them and the ship Poe destroyed would have annihilated the rebels had it been left intact).
2. Poe is being purposely left in the dark and led to believe that no action is being taken to save the rebellion, so, as a hero, he trusts his instincts and takes action to save everyone. Laser blast to the chest at point blank range and revealed to have been wrong and working against the well being of the rebels.

Finn
1. In TFA Finn infiltrated Starkiller Base to save Rey. In TLJ, he's trying to slink off the ship to escape. He gets hit with a stun baton for his cowardice.
2. Finn takes on the Canto mission just to escape the ship.
3. Finn entrusts the fate of the rebels to a very obviously shifty criminal he meets in a jail cell, and causes the rebel plan to be found out, putting everyone in danger.
4. Finn tries to engage in a heroic sacrifice, redemption for his cowardice and incompetence, and is denied that as well, again violently, by one of the other protagonists.

Rey
1. Um... unwittingly helps Kylo defeat Snoke and take over the First Order?
2. Happens to escape the First Order timely enough to rescue everyone off the salt planet?

Luke
1. Trolls Kylo Ren so Rey can save everyone off the planet.
2. Dies.
3. (I don't remember if Rey ever gets to punch Luke in the face to make a Hat Trick here.)

I'd say the heroic beats in this movie that aren't undermined by the messaging (action bad, following orders good) are Holdo's sacrifice and Luke's holo-trolling. Both are undermined by the character performing them. In Holdo's case, it was a terrible choice to have her telegraph the entire time that she wasn't doing anything and that she didn't trust our hero Poe. In Luke's case, turning him into a bitter cynic was a terrible choice and marred his heroic sacrifice in the end.

Notably, including Empire, which is a movie where all the protagonists manage to accomplish is surviving.
I think you will need a bit more than "it's basically Empire" going forward.

There are defeats and failures in Empire, but the heroes are earnest and, more importantly, the movie itself is earnest in its portrayal of good people trying to do good things. The actions in Empire are understandable and relatable. Luke is a hero in the battle of Hoth, taking down enemy walkers despite being out-gunned, no one smacks him or shoots him for taking action. Han is a hero braving the freezing environs of Hoth to rescue Luke and keep him warm and alive through the storm, he doesn't get hit with a stun gun upon his return.

The double-cross - Lando is an old friend, so it makes sense that Han would trust him to help them. But Lando is compromised under threat of the Empire, and it makes sense that he would betray them. This is not the completely arbitrary fiat of getting stuck in a cell with a perfect stranger that can escape and get you onboard an imperial ship and crack a code, only to double-cross you and reveal that simply pushing a button would have foiled the rebel plan all along.

Like, Lando is arbitrary too; George Lucas has to invent an old friend of Han's, that is close enough to reach, and has the authority and capability to harbor them from the Empire. But it's done in a way that feels real and organic. Further more, when Lando realizes that the Empire has no intention of adhering to their agreement, he double crosses them, helps the heroes, and becomes an integral part of the Rebellion, confirming to us his character and that Han wasn't a complete fool for trusting him in the first place; Han just didn't know that Lando was already leveraged when they arrived to Bespin.

You have none of this with DJ and Finn in TLJ. They just happen to be put in a cell with a codebreaker, who can also bypass the cell security and escape, who can also help them infiltrate the Supremacy. Who also happens to have a moral philosophy that both sides are equivalent and there is no good and evil. Who is also empowered with an "enhance scan" button so he has a way to double cross the Rebellion. This is all just super convenient writing. It's nonsensical and the idea that the First Order wasn't using their already superior scanning is asinine. But this writing is jammed in to make the plot work.

Good and Evil entwined - Luke and Vader are connected not only because Luke is the burgeoning new Jedi to stand against the Sith, but also because Vader murdered Luke's father. Luke abandons his training to trigger a trap because his friends are in danger and he feels compelled to rescue them. We then discover that Vader did not murder Luke's father, but IS Luke's father, and is giving Luke a choice to join the Empire and the Sith.

The dynamic between Kylo and Rey has none of this. There is no connection here except that, for reasons not explained until TRoS, they can see and hear each other through the Force. They are not family, they had never met each other before Kylo kidnapped and tortured Rey in TFA, and it seems unearned that Rey would be driven to redeem Kylo and risk everything to try.

It's one thing to say that TLJ is derivative of Empire, but that's different than saying "it's basically Empire, what are you complaining about?".

I mean I think the idea that he's more interesting than Snoke is pretty defensible.
This seems to have the benefit of hindsight, and I still disagree.

Rian could have made Snoke very interesting, and he chose not to. I don't think he succeeded in making Kylo interesting.

Bobb

2024-01-05, 11:48 AM

Plenty of Star Wars movies? TLJ is actively anti-heroism.

Poe
1. Smacked in the face and rebuked for saving the rebellion in the opening sequence of the movie (btw no movie would be possible if Poe hadn't done this, since we learn that the Imperials can track them and the ship Poe destroyed would have annihilated the rebels had it been left intact).
2. Poe is being purposely left in the dark and led to believe that no action is being taken to save the rebellion, so, as a hero, he trusts his instincts and takes action to save everyone. Laser blast to the chest at point blank range and revealed to have been wrong and working against the well being of the rebels.

Finn
1. In TFA Finn infiltrated Starkiller Base to save Rey. In TLJ, he's trying to slink off the ship to escape. He gets hit with a stun baton for his cowardice.
2. Finn takes on the Canto mission just to escape the ship.
3. Finn entrusts the fate of the rebels to a very obviously shifty criminal he meets in a jail cell, and causes the rebel plan to be found out, putting everyone in danger.
4. Finn tries to engage in a heroic sacrifice, redemption for his cowardice and incompetence, and is denied that as well, again violently, by one of the other protagonists.

Rey
1. Um... unwittingly helps Kylo defeat Snoke and take over the First Order?
2. Happens to escape the First Order timely enough to rescue everyone off the salt planet?

Luke
1. Trolls Kylo Ren so Rey can save everyone off the planet.
2. Dies.
3. (I don't remember if Rey ever gets to punch Luke in the face to make a Hat Trick here.)

She strikes him to the ground while his back is turned, attacks him afterwards and escalates until she's standing over him with an activated lightsaber.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfGuecGfhas

One of the many tells of dark side impulses from her which is blithely glossed over in the films.

LibraryOgre

2024-01-05, 11:49 AM

Poe
1. Smacked in the face and rebuked for saving the rebellion in the opening sequence of the movie (btw no movie would be possible if Poe hadn't done this, since we learn that the Imperials can track them and the ship Poe destroyed would have annihilated the rebels had it been left intact).
2. Poe is being purposely left in the dark and led to believe that no action is being taken to save the rebellion, so, as a hero, he trusts his instincts and takes action to save everyone. Laser blast to the chest at point blank range and revealed to have been wrong and working against the well being of the rebels.

Poe was smacked in the face for disobeying orders... but also privately congratulated for having saved everyone. He was kept in the dark by the replacement of the person who smacked him for disobeying orders, because he was demoted and had a track record of not obeying orders.

Finn
1. In TFA Finn infiltrated Starkiller Base to save Rey. In TLJ, he's trying to slink off the ship to escape. He gets hit with a stun baton for his cowardice.
2. Finn takes on the Canto mission just to escape the ship.
3. Finn entrusts the fate of the rebels to a very obviously shifty criminal he meets in a jail cell, and causes the rebel plan to be found out, putting everyone in danger.
4. Finn tries to engage in a heroic sacrifice, redemption for his cowardice and incompetence, and is denied that as well, again violently, by one of the other protagonists.

Finn's actions, ever since he met her, were based on a desire to save Rey. That's what he does. He's trying to leave the ship because he wants to get to safety with Rey. He takes the Canto mission because he wants to get off the ship, because he wants to save Rey.

Finn's redemption is earlier... where he commits to the cause of the Resistance. Where he stands up to Phasma, the embodiment of his past, and announces that he is "Rebel Scum". Rose preventing him from killing himself is pointing out that his sacrifice would have been pointless... it wasn't going to do what he wanted. It was striking out against what he hated, without saving what he loved.

Rey
1. Um... unwittingly helps Kylo defeat Snoke and take over the First Order?
2. Happens to escape the First Order timely enough to rescue everyone off the salt planet?

Rey shows her dedication to becoming a Jedi, overcoming Luke's reluctance, and facing truths about herself she didn't want to, while being actively manipulated by Kylo Ren towards the Dark Side.

Luke
1. Trolls Kylo Ren so Rey can save everyone off the planet.
2. Dies.
3. (I don't remember if Rey ever gets to punch Luke in the face to make a Hat Trick here.)

Luke acts no differently than Obi-wan and Yoda, his own masters.

Fundamentally, the three stories in TLJ are about time... Luke, Rey, and Kylo are reactions to the Past, Poe is understanding the present, and Finn and Rose are about one's view of the future.

Luke is running from his past; it has hurt him, and his reaction was hiding and avoidance, until Rey comes along. Rey and Kylo are both seeking to embrace a past... Rey's past is one of idolized service, but Kylo's is one of idolized power. Both, in the end, dedicate themselves to their vision.

Poe fundamentally does not understand his place in the present... he sees himself as the Hero, and thinks that absolves him of everything. Not everyone shares his vision; Leia has a command structure to maintain, and though she privately applauds his actions, she cannot allow them to go unchallenged. Holdo, with no connection to Poe, and coming straight off his reprimand for being a loose cannon, doesn't trust him with sensitive information.

Finn and Rose have opposing views of the future, at first. Finn's is selfish; he wants to protect himself and the one he loves. Rose's view of the future is that one that is more expansive... that you protect what you love by changing systems. This is a big part of the point of Canto Bight... Finn seeing that a self-centered view of the future leaves many grovelling in fathier poodoo, and that he must commit to a vision of the future that resists that. Rose, however, pushes him beyond revenge and into protection.

Sir_Norbert

2024-01-05, 11:59 AM

This. So much this. One for the dragon, one for the Battle of Five Armies would have worked nicely.

The problem there is that although the amount of material is more suited to two movies than to one or three, the dragon comes at the 2/3 point of the story, and everything up to there is a succession of short episodes with no really natural big break at close to the halfway point. Perhaps the best way to break it in two would be to end the first part when the dwarves are captured and imprisoned by the Wood Elves.

Trixie_One

2024-01-05, 12:03 PM

1. Pirates of the Caribbean

I'll stand up for the second Pirates being just as good as the first one. Elizabeth kissing Jack with the ultimate aim of feeding him to the kraken might be my favourite moment in any of those films. The work on Davy Jones and his crew is superb and has still rarely been bettered since. It's one of the very rare times when someone has tried to emulate the darkest before the dawn vibes of Empire and actually pulled it off.

Third film though... oh boy, now that was not good in the slightest.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-05, 12:13 PM

The problem there is that although the amount of material is more suited to two movies than to one or three, the dragon comes at the 2/3 point of the story, and everything up to there is a succession of short episodes with no really natural big break at close to the halfway point. Perhaps the best way to break it in two would be to end the first part when the dwarves are captured and imprisoned by the Wood Elves.

Also that the Battle of Five Armies isn't supposed to be a triumphant climax. It's a horror inserted into the denouement of the story. The climax is when Smaug falls and the rest of the book is a slow reveal that killing the dragon didn't solve anyone's problems. It created a whole bunch of new ones, too. The dwarves have their treasure, but it didn't bring the Mountain back to life. The humans are still living in a shanty town that's half burned now. The elves show up because, as much as they look down on them, they're as greedy as the dwarves. There's more than enough treasure to go around, but the dwarves want to keep all of it, and they're all so busy squabbling about loot and eager to fight that they don't notice the real villains marching in.

It's about as preachy as Tolkien gets in his writing. Bilbo gets knocked out so there's no real action sequence and when he wakes up, it's a somber scene full of regrets. Tons of dead, including many of the characters we spent the book with, and a parting word about how if we valued people more than money, things may have turned out better. It'd be difficult to make a movie out of that without completely missing the point (see the old adage about how no war movie is an anti-war movie.)

Errorname

2024-01-05, 12:18 PM

See I thought it was Palpatine's master, Darth Plagueus the Wise, before Palpatine betrayed and killed him. That's part of why he's so smug in that Opera scene.

Also reasonable, although it's not my preferred interpretation.

1. Smacked in the face and rebuked for saving the rebellion in the opening sequence of the movie (btw no movie would be possible if Poe hadn't done this, since we learn that the Imperials can track them and the ship Poe destroyed would have annihilated the rebels had it been left intact).
2. Poe is being purposely left in the dark and led to believe that no action is being taken to save the rebellion, so, as a hero, he trusts his instincts and takes action to save everyone. Laser blast to the chest at point blank range and revealed to have been wrong and working against the well being of the rebels.

Yeah, it's a huge problem that Poe successfully destroys the Dreadnought, especially since their hangars get blown up anyways. It justifies the action that the movie wants to present as reckless and foolish. It would have been very easy for Poe's bombing run to fail horribly and for the Dreadnought to survive without changing the movie in any way, because it turns out that the First Order had a spare even bigger Dreadnought just offscreen. Basically inexcusable, and the only reason you'd do it is if you weren't willing to commit to Poe making an actual indefensible error.

The film is trying to have it both ways with Poe. He's reckless and insubordinate but he's also still basically reasonable and justified. Him exceeding his orders and getting a bunch of pilots killed is a perfectly reasonable thing to demote him for, but also it was a fleet-killer that could have killed them all and those pilots would have died when the hangars got bombed anyways, so it's not that bad. Him plotting to seize control of the ship is a blatant mutiny, but he only did it because he was out of the loop and once he heard the plan he immediately agreed that it was the right course.

In TFA Finn infiltrated Starkiller Base to save Rey. In TLJ, he's trying to slink off the ship to escape

To meet up with Rey, for what it's worth. TLJ decided that Finn was committed to his friend/crush but not to the greater cause, and thus needed a field trip to this cool idea for a setting that Rian Johnson had but can't work into the script anywhere else. It's not unreasonable from where the last movie left him, and it's probably inspired by Han wanting to leave to pay off his debt to Jabba, but it's a dreadful call that ruins his character.

It's especially frustrating, because Finn needing to learn to trust in the Rebellion as an institution would have actually made a lot of sense as a character thing. He's an imperial defector, mistrust of authority figures is a reasonable thing for his character and him being mistrusted by high ranking rebels makes a lot more sense. But Poe gets that instead and Finn gets shipped off to the C-plot.

I'd say the heroic beats in this movie that aren't undermined by the messaging (action bad, following orders good) are Holdo's sacrifice and Luke's holo-trolling. Both are undermined by the character performing them. In Holdo's case, it was a terrible choice to have her telegraph the entire time that she wasn't doing anything and that she didn't trust our hero Poe. In Luke's case, turning him into a bitter cynic was a terrible choice and marred his heroic sacrifice in the end.

Holdo's sacrifice plays well out of context, it's a very striking sequence, but yes it would have worked better had it been the culmination of something good instead of the worst plotline in the movie.

The movie probably should have ended with the Rebels escaping in the chaos of the First Order fleet getting shattered, the entire epilogue on Crait is an unnecessary indulgence, but Luke's diversion and goodbyes are basically the only thing about that sequence that works.

It's one thing to say that TLJ is derivative of Empire, but that's different than saying "it's basically Empire, what are you complaining about?".

I can see why you'd interpret it that way, but that's not really what I meant. The fact that Last Jedi is clearly drawing on a plot structure used in a previous movie means that issues likely come down to specific details rather than the overall concept of 'movie where heroes fail'. Most of the beats in Last Jedi have clear counterparts in Empire, and the ones that don't are simply drawn from earlier/later movies

This seems to have the benefit of hindsight, and I still disagree.

Rian could have made Snoke very interesting, and he chose not to. I don't think he succeeded in making Kylo interesting.

Snoke as presented is the Emperor again, except worse and more expensive. I don't think there's much to work with there, and I don't think he's worth the effort to make him interesting.

I'll stand up for the second Pirates being just as good as the first one. Elizabeth kissing Jack with the ultimate aim of feeding him to the kraken might be my favourite moment in any of those films. The work on Davy Jones and his crew is superb and has still rarely been bettered since. It's one of the very rare times when someone has tried to emulate the darkest before the dawn vibes of Empire and actually pulled it off.

Third film though... oh boy, now that was not good in the slightest.

I think the Second and Third are pretty comparable. The scripts for both are weaker than the first, but they both have some killer setpieces. Dead Man's Chest probably comes out to better, the Wheelmill Fight and the Kraken are killer, but there's good stuff in the third too.

zlefin

2024-01-05, 12:31 PM

I feel like that's less about their flaws or merits and more about them being Star Wars. Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones are certainly popular franchises but I've rarely if ever seen them inspire the sort of nigh-religious fervor that Star Wars does for some reason.

There's a few different ways of defining a franchise; in some ways I wouldn't really call jurassic park or indiana jones franchises, because it's just the movies, and not that many of them; so I might prefer to call them a movie series rather than a franchise. Whereas Star Wars has a much more expansive universe, with tons and TONS of old expanded universe content, then later tv shows, and other such stuff.

While the arguing over the flaws in the SW sequel trilogy is mildly interesting, I think ultimately it doesn't matter which one is worse because they're all garbage. The prequels, while flawed, I found ultimately interesting enough and wiht some redeeming moments so I've watched them a few times each. the sequels I've never felt inclined to rewatch even once. They were just plain boring. Tons of bad writing, uninteresting characters, and the effects weren't that interesting in addition to how many ways it screwed up prior lore; but worst of all like I say, it was just boring. Whereas some action movies have bad writing but are still at least fun.

At this point, and indeed after movies 7 or 8, if I were in charge I'd have said "we're just going to openly retcon the situation. As in literally say those movies were bad and are no longer canon." Because that's the cleanest and most effective way to move forward. Rather than trying to force a bunch of garbage to fit into the world by tweaking the subsequent sequels, just delete it wholesale. Sure I could come up with some not complete garbage ways to partly fix things at various points, but the end product would've still suffered for those.

The way I heard it awhile ago; part of the flaw with the SW sequel trilogy is that what disney had been doing was mining the old expanded universe content for ideas, and they built it out of one set of books which was a rather poor set of books; I forget which exact one it was called. But if they'd built it out of a different, better set of the old EU ideas it had much more potential. From what I've heard (never read them myself), if they'd not put whassisname in Rebels, and saved him so they could use the well-regarded Zahn books for the sequel trilogy, we'd have had a much better result.

Personally, the first time watching episode 8 I felt the explanation for Ren's turn to evil was acceptable, because it felt properly operatic, and there's a reason Star Wars is called a space opera; but after hearing the other points I have to agree its too inconsistent with Luke's character. Yoda being cool was about the only really good part of that film.

Overall I do feel that the SW sequel failures is my least favorite, though I haven't seen all of the ones mentioned in this thread.

Onto other topics;
The hobbit later movies were indeed weak; imho the basic problem was pretty fixable, they should've just made one movie. The lotr books were some 1500 pages, the hobbit was just 200 or so; making the trilogy into 3 movies worked fine, the hobbit book just wasn't long enough for it. One long movie or 2 short-medium ones would've worked fine; and they didn't need to do their questionable tweaks, or at least not most of them. I quite disliked how they fundamentally messed up/changed some of the justifications for things, and how they made it so Bilbo and the expedition didn't contribute anything substantive to defeating the dragon. The old animated hobbit is still great at least. And even the later of the new movies are at least mildly entertaining with some good points.

I wanted to think of video game sequels I didn't like; but I really couldn't think of much. In part it's because I haven't been into video games as much as when I was young; and back then in NES and SNES era, there simply weren't many bad sequels. Some of that is because for the most part they weren't relying on good writing but good gameplay, and it's not that hard for a sequel to at least have similar quality gameplay. Also the growth of tech and budgets made it easier for sequels to be as good/better because there was more learning happening and increased capabilities available. Another factor being that the SNES Square RPGs were just pretty good on the whole.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-05, 12:31 PM

To meet up with Rey, for what it's worth. TLJ decided that Finn was committed to his friend/crush but not to the greater cause, and thus needed a field trip to this cool idea for a setting that Rian Johnson had but can't work into the script anywhere else. It's not unreasonable from where the last movie left him, and it's probably inspired by Han wanting to leave to pay off his debt to Jabba, but it's a dreadful call that ruins his character.

It's especially frustrating, because Finn needing to learn to trust in the Rebellion as an institution would have actually made a lot of sense as a character thing. He's an imperial defector, mistrust of authority figures is a reasonable thing for his character and him being mistrusted by high ranking rebels makes a lot more sense. But Poe gets that instead and Finn gets shipped off to the C-plot.

Finn and Poe's plots in TLJ actually make me wonder if there was more planning than they admit. We know Poe was never meant to be a main character; he died in the crash in the original script. Finn and Poe both have similar plotlines about their distrust for authority in TLJ, even if there's different motivations behind them. Finn is lacking commitment and Poe thinks he knows better.

Put them together though and you can see a plotline that actually makes some sense. FinnPoe, high off his successes in TFA and new responsibilities to the Resistance, is taking increasing risks in combat which leads to the bombers getting destroyed and his reprimand. He ends up leaving and traveling to Canto Bight where he witnesses the heart of the corruption in the galaxy, which spurs him to undertake some mission that brings him back to the Resistance with a new respect for what they're dealing with. In the final battle, still feeling guilt over abandoning them, he attempts to make a big sacrifice only to be shot down and told there's a better way. They kind of tie together into a coherent arc for a character in the movie, instead of two that basically end with "Yeah, you did everything wrong, but you're a protagonist so we can't get rid of you."

LibraryOgre

2024-01-05, 12:34 PM

This. So much this. One for the dragon, one for the Battle of Five Armies would have worked nicely.

I like where they ended the first one, and how they moved the story a bit to put Bilbo as being somewhat dedicated to the mission.

I tend to agree, though, that you could have fit the rest into a second movie, especially one of Jacksonian run-time.

Gnoman

2024-01-05, 12:36 PM

Veering away from Star Wars for a second, I'd put Superman IV as one of the worst sequels ever. The first film in the series is Superman in his purest form, and is probably the best adaptation of the character yet made. II is mostly a gem with a few rough patches, and III is a rough patch with a few gems that still kind of works in a somewhat campy way.

IV? IV had a terrible concept, a worse execution, and the core ending was basically a lecture to the audience.

Bohandas

2024-01-05, 12:40 PM

Batcathat

2024-01-05, 12:47 PM

The first film in the series is Superman in his purest form, and is probably the best adaptation of the character yet made.

Personally, I think the whole movie was tainted by the ending. It's one of the more memorable cases of a fake-out where it looks like the hero might actually have to make a hard choice but wait, a deus ex machina makes everything perfect. It's probably neither the first nor the worst example, but I saw it at an impressionable age (now that I think about it, it might be part of the reason for me not liking Superman very much).

Errorname

2024-01-05, 12:50 PM

Finn and Poe's plots in TLJ actually make me wonder if there was more planning than they admit. We know Poe was never meant to be a main character; he died in the crash in the original script. Finn and Poe both have similar plotlines about their distrust for authority in TLJ, even if there's different motivations behind them. Finn is lacking commitment and Poe thinks he knows better.

Put them together though and you can see a plotline that actually makes some sense. They kind of tie together into a coherent arc for a character in the movie, instead of two that basically end with "Yeah, you did everything wrong, but you're a protagonist so we can't get rid of you."

Might be the case. Poe is very clearly a character who should have died when he was supposed to, especially if they weren't willing to let him and Finn kiss, and I do think the Mutiny plotline was conceived after Canto Bight, which is weird considering that in the final product Canto Bight feels like an unnecessary detour but if it was a more natural fit in the original vision that might explain why Rian wasn't willing to cut it, he got attached to the setting and kept it even when the movie evolved to a point where it no longer needed it. Depending on how far along some of the production design work was it might not have been feasible to cut it, although as director and writer he'd still ultimately bear the blame for not catching it sooner.

I do definitely think the movie would be stronger if they had committed to either Canto Bight or the Chase, and kept the cast together more. As it stands your three leads get divided into their own plotlines with separate casts for each, and only Rey gets well developed characters to play off of.

At some point I need to see the sequels after the first two. Those first two sequels were terrible - they had maybe enough interestig material between then for one normal length movie - but the later sequels, which I never gkt around to seeing, looked much batter. Especially since Will's arc seems to jave concluded in part 3. He was originally written as the main character and I think the writers still hadn't broken out of that mindset when they wrote the sequels

You really don't, they're quite bad. Stranger Tides is (allegedly) the most expensive movie of all time and you'd never guess it to look at it, and the fifth one marks the point where Disney realized the franchise was unsalvageable.

They do make it apparent how necessary Will and Elizabeth really were, the movies get much worse when it's just Jack Sparrow and their cut-rate replacements.

Zevox

2024-01-05, 12:51 PM

The way I heard it awhile ago; part of the flaw with the SW sequel trilogy is that what disney had been doing was mining the old expanded universe content for ideas, and they built it out of one set of books which was a rather poor set of books; I forget which exact one it was called.
I don't believe that's true at all. I can think of only a few similarities between old EU stories and the sequel trilogy:

- Several EU stories, mostly early ones, did Death Star style superweapons again, at least once including just straight-up having the Hutts trying to build a new Death Star. Nothing specifically like TFA's version existed though - prior superweapons that could destroy multiple planets at once did so by causing their star to go supernova, not by shooting multiple Death Star style beams.
- Kylo Ren somewhat resembles what they ultimately did with Jacen Solo, Han and Leia's oldest child in the EU, in that he eventually fell to the dark side. Besides who they're related to and becoming a dark sider there's no real similarities between them though. (And Kylo was many times worse...)
- Palpatine coming back was something an infamous EU story (comic?), Dark Empire, did. I've never read that one, so I can't speak to how similar they are, but outside of Palpatine's return I haven't seen claims of other similarities.

As all three points are from different stories and aren't more than broad parallels, I doubt any were deliberately taken from those EU stories, just cases of people having similar (bad) ideas.

Errorname

2024-01-05, 12:56 PM

prior superweapons that could destroy multiple planets at once did so by causing their star to go supernova, not by shooting multiple Death Star style beams.

I want to know whose idea that was and why they thought they were too good for 'blow up the sun'. Were they worried audiences wouldn't understand it? Did J.J just not want to repeat himself from his Star Trek movie and decided to swap out a reasonable sci-fi doomsday thing for something incredibly stupid?

Batcathat

2024-01-05, 01:01 PM

I want to know whose idea that was and why they thought they were too good for 'blow up the sun'. Were they worried audiences wouldn't understand it? Did J.J just not want to repeat himself from his Star Trek movie and decided to swap out a reasonable sci-fi doomsday thing for something incredibly stupid?

I would be surprised if there was any more thought put into it than "Death Star but bigger".

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-05, 01:02 PM

As all three points are from different stories and aren't more than broad parallels, I doubt any were deliberately taken from those EU stories, just cases of people having similar (bad) ideas.

The EU was also hundreds of novels and comics. No matter what they wrote for the sequels, it was bound to resemble something that already existed.

Talakeal

2024-01-05, 01:16 PM

My stance on the Rey parentage thing is that all of the 'your parents are actually important force users' theories basically sucked. Rey Palpatine, Rey Kenobi, Rey Skywalker, Rey Gon Jinn, they're all bad. Rey not having some special dynasty is the best payoff for what Force Awakens established, with the qualifying factor that the mystery in Force Awakens is not good.

Hey! I won’t hear a bad word about Rey Rey Binks!

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-05, 02:05 PM

There's a few different ways of defining a franchise; in some ways I wouldn't really call jurassic park or indiana jones franchises, because it's just the movies, and not that many of them; so I might prefer to call them a movie series rather than a franchise. Whereas Star Wars has a much more expansive universe, with tons and TONS of old expanded universe content, then later tv shows, and other such stuff.

They certainly tried to make Indiana Jones a franchise. Outside the movies, there were several comic runs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_(comics)), over a dozen video games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Indiana_Jones_video_games), and a television show. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Indiana_Jones_Chronicles) It's just that a pastiche of the 1930s doesn't have the enduring thrill and capacity for storytelling that Star Wars has. Same issue with Jurassic Park. Both IPs are honed in to a much narrower degree than "retrofuture 70s space fantasy." You can pull a whole lot off in the Star Wars universe but the moment you stop robbing tombs in Indiana Jones or take the dinosaur disaster park out of Jurassic Park, it's not faithful to the franchise.

The hobbit later movies were indeed weak; imho the basic problem was pretty fixable, they should've just made one movie. The lotr books were some 1500 pages, the hobbit was just 200 or so; making the trilogy into 3 movies worked fine, the hobbit book just wasn't long enough for it. One long movie or 2 short-medium ones would've worked fine; and they didn't need to do their questionable tweaks, or at least not most of them. I quite disliked how they fundamentally messed up/changed some of the justifications for things, and how they made it so Bilbo and the expedition didn't contribute anything substantive to defeating the dragon. The old animated hobbit is still great at least. And even the later of the new movies are at least mildly entertaining with some good points.

Lord of the Rings is actually less than 1200 pages total, with the Hobbit (310 pages) comparable in length to The Two Towers (352 pages). Your point holds water, though. The Hobbit was enough for a single movie. Maybe two if they really wanted to include supplementary content so Gandalf had more screen time making it worth Ian McKellen's paycheck. Sorry, I just rankle a bit anytime I see it mentioned like the Hobbit is a breezy children's story. It's still a substantial read for a lot of adults*.

*Which is, of course, its own can of worms.

Trixie_One

2024-01-05, 02:25 PM

but there's good stuff in the third too.

Like?

I only saw that film once, and one of my contact lenses was inflicting eye trauma based suffering so maybe I missed it but from what I remember I can't think of anything.

I suppose starting the film with kids being hanged is pretty ballsy for a disney film.

The trippy Sparrow is dead stuff is way too trippy and self indulgent that goes on for way too long.

Then they managed to be even more self indulgent by getting in Keith Richards, and also that dog is his btw which was also pretty self indulgent.

Lots of nonsense about pirate politics that again goes on for way too long.

Elizabeth gives a speech. Frankly this is not playing to Keira Knightley's talents, and even with the extra good will that she went to the same dire secondary school as me I'm still not impressed.

Big battle around a whirlpool where it seems to be based on that silly logic where you take out the boss ship then all the others are also defeated.

Oh wait, I do have something! The death of that british navy guy as the ship explodes around him is legit superb.

Errorname

2024-01-05, 02:43 PM

World's End doesn't hang together as well as the first two, especially the first, but I think the action's still a lot of fun. Does it make sense, not really, is there way too much Jack Sparrow, yes, but I still like it

Trixie_One

2024-01-05, 02:48 PM

yes, but I still like it

Fair enough, that's all that matters really.

Talakeal

2024-01-05, 03:00 PM

KorvinStarmast

2024-01-05, 03:18 PM

Two movies could work, but the problem is there isn't really a good breaking point.
The logical break point is the escape from the Elf King's dungeons.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-05, 03:33 PM

The Hobbit book is written in a much simpler style than Lord of the Rings, the prose isn't nearly as dense, and there isn't as much detail and dialogue. As such, a lot more happens in it proportional to the page count.

Trying to do it as one movie would be extremely disappointing, it would have to cut out a ton of content or just be a quick summary of the events. Rankin Bass did it fairly well, but it was for the most part really shallow.

Two movies could work, but the problem is there isn't really a good breaking point. The first two thirds of the book are mostly just episodic encounters, and cutting it at the death of Smaug would require a first movie that was cut to the bone and a second movie that is padded with action movie filler (kind of like the one we got).

I disagree wholeheartedly. The Hobbit isn't an epic fantasy. It's a fun adventure story that doesn't need to ruminate on the weight of every scene. Expanding it out and trying to make Bilbo tricking the trolls or rolling barrels into the river a big deal just ties the movie down when you really want to keep the action moving. The Rankin Bass adaptation already covered the story in a decent amount of detail and clocked in at only 78 minutes. You could easily push a live-action movie to a full 120 runtime following the same RB structure, using the extra 42 minutes to flesh out the key scenes, and it would've been an amazing film.

Zevox

2024-01-05, 04:56 PM

The Hobbit book is written in a much simpler style than Lord of the Rings, the prose isn't nearly as dense, and there isn't as much detail and dialogue. As such, a lot more happens in it proportional to the page count.

Trying to do it as one movie would be extremely disappointing, it would have to cut out a ton of content or just be a quick summary of the events. Rankin Bass did it fairly well, but it was for the most part really shallow.

Two movies could work, but the problem is there isn't really a good breaking point. The first two thirds of the book are mostly just episodic encounters, and cutting it at the death of Smaug would require a first movie that was cut to the bone and a second movie that is padded with action movie filler (kind of like the one we got).
Largely agreed, although I think there is a good break point to do it in two, which is pretty much where they ended the first movie. After escaping the Misty Mountains, before meeting Beorn. You make the escapades in the mountains and Bilbo getting the ring from Gollumn the climax of the first movie, then start the second off with them getting somewhere safe before proceeding on. You just need to not turn the Battle of Five Armies into a huge thing that needs every detail shown off, and not add totally unnecessary padding like the love triangle.

Really, the first movie did a fairly decent job, at least when it was telling the actual story of The Hobbit. Some of the extra material wasn't handled as well as it could've been, but I can completely understand why they would want to include what Gandalf was up to when he just leaves the group with little explanation at Mirkwood, and having some setup for that in the first movie makes sense. But yeah, boy did things go downhill significantly in the second movie, and reach quite a nadir in the third.

Precure

2024-01-05, 04:56 PM

An ideal Hobbit trilogy would be:

First movie ending: Goblins and entering Rhovanion
Second movie ending: Death of Smaug
Third movie ending: Bilbo's return to home

It's established that Luke vanished after his new Jedi Order was destroyed by Kylo Ren. The catastrophic failure of everything he tried to build and his absence in the fight against the First Order were already set in stone.

We still don't know that what he was planning to do.

Could you explain your reasoning here? I don't see why Rey having prophetic dreams necessarily means her parents were important people.

It linked her to the first Jedi Temple, there must be a reason that she's having these dreams.

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-05, 04:57 PM

They certainly tried to make Indiana Jones a franchise. Outside the movies, there were several comic runs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_(comics)), over a dozen video games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Indiana_Jones_video_games), and a television show. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Indiana_Jones_Chronicles) It's just that a pastiche of the 1930s doesn't have the enduring thrill and capacity for storytelling that Star Wars has. Same issue with Jurassic Park. Both IPs are honed in to a much narrower degree than "retrofuture 70s space fantasy." You can pull a whole lot off in the Star Wars universe but the moment you stop robbing tombs in Indiana Jones or take the dinosaur disaster park out of Jurassic Park, it's not faithful to the franchise.

Alternatively: Indiana Jones and Jurrasic Park are far more typical of what a successful franchise looks like, and Star Wars is a massive outlier.

Zevox

2024-01-05, 04:58 PM

It linked her to the first Jedi Temple, there must be a reason that she's having these dreams.
Being force-sensitive is all the reason you need to have prophetic dreams in Star Wars.

Precure

2024-01-05, 05:02 PM

Being force-sensitive is all the reason you need to have prophetic dreams in Star Wars.

She keeps having those dreams since childhood, when she feels lonely at Jakku and cry for her parents, so there is an implication that the planet with Jedi Temple is her real home and somehow linked to her parents.

Trafalgar

2024-01-05, 05:02 PM

Star Trek Into Darkness is a horribly bad movie.

BloodSquirrel

2024-01-05, 05:05 PM

Star Trek Into Darkness is a horribly bad movie.

The Next Gen movies weren't that great either, but Insurrection and Nemesis kinda killed the TNG movie franchise.

GloatingSwine

2024-01-05, 07:37 PM

I disagree wholeheartedly. The Hobbit isn't an epic fantasy.

It's not an epic fantasy, but it is a book that leaves a lot of room for imagining the things that happen in between scenes in a way that wouldn't work well if presented on screen.

If you just turned the text of The Hobbit into a script it would be snappy but disjointed (or 33% travel montage with songs), because film doesn't invite the imagination the same way writing does.

Ramza00

2024-01-05, 07:42 PM

the 2005 zorro movie to the 1998 zorro movie

how can the director for goldeneye, casino royale, and the good zorro movie make such a bad sequel? oh they had the star trek into darkness writers ✍️ write this zorro flick *sigh*

gbaji

2024-01-05, 07:46 PM

The logical break point is the escape from the Elf King's dungeons.

Yup. If I were doing it in two films, that would be the most logical one for me. It breaks it up into two parts: "Traveling to our destination"; and "Dealing with everything once we get there".

An ideal Hobbit trilogy would be:

First movie ending: Goblins and entering Rhovanion
Second movie ending: Death of Smaug
Third movie ending: Bilbo's return to home

Um... Isn't that essentially what the actual trilogy did? I mean, you've shifted the death of Smaug from the first 10 minutes of the third film, into the last 10 minutes of the second, but other than that, not much difference. The problem is that this seriously bloats what was basically denoement in the book, into an entire film. And to be fair, that's exactly what they did in the actual trilogy, but that's what made the final film really kinda bad. It was super obvious that they were just making stuff up, and adding in additional conflicts and whatnot just to pad the events in that film. And when in doubt? Massive battle sequence.

To be fair to the Jackson trilogy, I did really appreciate some of the additional details they put into it. Jackson was not just telling the story of the Hobbit, but fitting it more firmly into the entire MIddle Earth setting, and tying it more tightly into LotR as well. The Hobbit was written prior to LotR, so "the ring" was just a ring of invisibility, and goblins and orcs were just monsters along the way. There was a ton of additonal stuff that Tolkien wrote later that attached greater significance to the events in the Hobbit to the larger events going on involving Sauron, so including that in the film(s) made total sense and was very much enjoyed (the White Council stuff, the Necromancer stuff, the Dwarf history involving their rings and the Arkenstone, tie ins to Moria, etc).

What was not enjoyed were the additional, and unnecessary character side plots and stories. The whole romance thing was just nonsense, for example. And really waay too much time was spent on silly plots and character interactions in and around the Elves and Laketown. And this got progressively more apparent as we got though the films. The first one? Pretty darn good. Covered all the stuff in the book. The additional stuff served legitimate historical/setting purposees. Worked well. Second film, we start to see more "fill in more stuff just to fill in time" stuff. By the third film, about 75% of that film was just filler. I mean, I actually got that they wanted to do a big deal with the Battle of the Five Armies, but they didn't need all the side fighting, running here, runnning there, intrigue and intergroup conflicts, etc. I think I've watched it twice, and both times, I spend about the first 2/3rds of the film thinking "ok, when are they just going to get on with the battle?". There was just a too much setup, and talking about setup, and going to and fro, and then going fro and to, that it was kinda ridiculous. And too much posturing. Way way too much posturing.

So yeah. Could have been done in two films. I do kinda get why they went for three, because the whole "encounter dragon and then big battle" are really big elements that you probably want to spend a lot on for a film, but in the book, they actually happen quite quickly. May also have had budget issues. By breaking it into three films, they could justify more budget for each of the "big scenes" in each film, where if they were compressed into one, maybe they couldn't? Dunno. I see it. I can understand why they did what they did with the project. But I'm not super happy with it.

I don't place them in the "worst films of all time" category, just not as good as they could have been. The films themselves look great, and tell the stories they're trying to tell. And they certainly fulfilled the objective that Jackson was going for (more world building/telling). I guess if I had to choose between a film version of the Hobbit that glossed over stuff and didn't fill in the extra gaps, and the one we got, I'd choose the one we got. Doesn't mean that I don't think it could have been done better though.

Errorname

2024-01-06, 01:16 AM

The Hobbit films remind me a lot of Peter Jackon's King Kong and TinTin films, there's good stuff in there but it gets buried beneath a mountain of indulgent nonsense. Especially the action sequences, he can do anything he wants and he never stops to think about whether or not he should and the end result is cartoonish and weightless

2D8HP

2024-01-06, 03:43 AM

Errorname

2024-01-06, 04:22 AM

Return of the Jedi was very disappointing to me, I found Luke smug, and I didn’t like how he abandoned his comrades and instead palled around with villainous Dad; and I really didn’t like the Vietcong teddy bears!

In my experience this is a decently common opinion among people who were old enough to be around when the original movies were coming out.

Trixie_One

2024-01-06, 04:42 AM

Personally I think you can fix the Hobbit films rather like Phantom Menace back in the day only instead of cutting Jar Jar Binx you're cutting that Laketown guy.

I really like the first two (okay the ending of the second is a serious WTF you're stopping here?!) but the third has so much screentime for that guy it's almost like he's got blackmail material on Peter Jackson.

The Hobbit films remind me a lot of Peter Jackon's King Kong and TinTin films, there's good stuff in there but it gets buried beneath a mountain of indulgent nonsense. Especially the action sequences, he can do anything he wants and he never stops to think about whether or not he should and the end result is cartoonish and weightless

I can't let that slander stand. King Kong sure is utterly indulgent nonsense.

Tintin though is one of the most underrated films of all time as far as I'm concerned. The chase scene with the map where a tank gets involved is genuinely one of favourite action setpieces period. It's just glorious. Yes, it's hella cartoony but I love every second of it.

Errorname

2024-01-06, 06:41 AM

Tintin though is one of the most underrated films of all time as far as I'm concerned. The chase scene with the map where a tank gets involved is genuinely one of favourite action setpieces period. It's just glorious. Yes, it's hella cartoony but I love every second of it.

Tintin gets away with some of the more cartoonish stuff because it's based on a cartoon, but a lot of the action feels like it's the wrong kind of cartoony to me.

LibraryOgre

2024-01-06, 10:20 AM

Return of the Jedi was very disappointing to me, I found Luke smug, and I didn’t like how he abandoned his comrades and instead palled around with villainous Dad; and I really didn’t like the Vietcong teddy bears!

Everyone has seen the fanzine letter where people say they're quitting Star Wars because of how back Empire Strikes Back was, right?

Lemmy

2024-01-06, 11:55 AM

Everyone has seen the fanzine letter where people say they're quitting Star Wars because of how back Empire Strikes Back was, right?
There will always people unhappy with the state of things... Nothing has 100% approval or 100% rejection...

But a few letters on a fanzine 40 years ago definitely isn't the same as the massive decline in popularity and profitability as the sequel trilogy.

2D8HP

2024-01-06, 12:19 PM

Return of the Jedi was very disappointing to me, I found Luke smug, and I didn’t like how he abandoned his comrades and instead palled around with villainous Dad; and I really didn’t like the Vietcong teddy bears!

In my experience this is a decently common opinion among people who were old enough to be around when the original movies were coming out.

I was just under 15 years old when Return was released

Everyone has seen the fanzine letter where people say they're quitting Star Wars because of how back Empire Strikes Back was, right?

I’m not familiar with that

Errorname

2024-01-06, 12:27 PM

But a few letters on a fanzine 40 years ago definitely isn't the same as the massive decline in popularity and profitability as the sequel trilogy.

The Sequels definitely burned a ton of goodwill and lost a lot of prestige, but while Rise of Skywalker made less than the movies that came before it still pulled in over a billion dollars. There's nothing stopping the franchise from chugging along until the tides of nostalgia and secondary material solidify the sequels as 'legitimate' Star Wars in the eyes of younger fans. Same thing happened with the Prequels, my generation grew up with them and never experienced that visceral disappointment, the Prequels have been a part of the series for as long as I can remember.

Bohandas

2024-01-06, 12:59 PM

I'm not sure the prequels introduced the kind of gaping plot holes that the sequels did though

LibraryOgre

2024-01-06, 01:27 PM

LibraryOgre

2024-01-06, 01:30 PM

I’m not familiar with that

I can't pull the image (it's in a Reddit thread, and Reddit is blocked at work), but here's the thread (copying reddit links isn't blocked) https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/181rlit/march_1981_a_fanzine_quits_in_protest_because/

To me, I was old enough to see the screaming hatred the prequel trilogy got, and the consensus I see is still that RotS is the only not-bad one. There are suggested viewing orders that say "Skip the Phantom Menace entirely", to say nothing of the degree to which Ahmed Best and Jake Lloyd we bullied about their roles. Star Wars has seemingly always had rabid fans who hate everything about it.

Talakeal

2024-01-06, 01:34 PM

First movie ending: Goblins and entering Rhovanion
Second movie ending: Death of Smaug
Third movie ending: Bilbo's return to home

That's more or less what they ended up doing as is, although they saved Smaug's actual death for the opening of the third movie, as the promise of seeing the dragon in action is sure to get a lot of butts in seats!

The Hobbit films remind me a lot of Peter Jackon's King Kong and TinTin films, there's good stuff in there but it gets buried beneath a mountain of indulgent nonsense. Especially the action sequences, he can do anything he wants and he never stops to think about whether or not he should and the end result is cartoonish and weightless

IMO PJ's King Kong is the best Kaiju film of all time, and this is coming from a Godzilla fan who has seen just about every kaiju film ever made. The first half of the movie is just a perfect adventure film, and the second half really captures the weight of the story.

I disagree wholeheartedly. The Hobbit isn't an epic fantasy. It's a fun adventure story that doesn't need to ruminate on the weight of every scene. Expanding it out and trying to make Bilbo tricking the trolls or rolling barrels into the river a big deal just ties the movie down when you really want to keep the action moving. The Rankin Bass adaptation already covered the story in a decent amount of detail and clocked in at only 78 minutes. You could easily push a live-action movie to a full 120 runtime following the same RB structure, using the extra 42 minutes to flesh out the key scenes, and it would've been an amazing film.

I was thinking it was too much for a ~3 hour movie, trying to do it in two hours is insane! As an example, the Chronicles of Narnia books are between half and two thirds the length of the Hobbit, and both the Disney and BBC versions of those run 2.5-3 hours.

The Rankin Bass movie is really good for what it is, but it cuts a *lot* of stuff (Beorn, The Arkenstone, Bolg, Etc.), and much of what it leaves in is abridged to the point where it barely even an outline. IMO, the only stuff it really does justice is Gollum, Smaug, and a few of the songs.

The Hobbit is primarily an episodic adventure story. But it also has music, action, worldbuilding, characters, comedy, and drama. You could do some of this in two hours, but you sure couldn't do all of it.

The Hobbit has a very fairytale style where there are plenty of things that are mentioned with no context, or appear out of nowhere. Bard, Radagast, Giants, The Necromancer, Bolg, etc. have no real context in the book, and the PJ movies try and fix this. For example, in The Hobbit, the thirteen dwarves are more or less interchangeable, and the only reason there are so many is because they have funny rhyming names and there are several scenes in the book where the comedy depends on having dwarves that just keep on coming. PJ tried to give each of them a distinct look and personality, and according to interviews, the original cut of the movie had way more focus on the dwarves and their bonds with eachother and Bilbo than we got in the final cut. IMO, this is a good thing!

But as a whole, a movie needs a lot more "show don't tell" than the book, so it is going to take longer to make a faithful adaption in any case.

IMO, the best way to actually try and get everything into one movie would be to make it a full on musical. Keep the songs you have, and then write new ones, so that characters can sing exposition and tell the audience their motivations and personality during the action scenes. But that is a fairly radical departure from the tone of the LoTR and what audiences expect from a fantasy blockbuster, so I can see why they didn't!

The logical break point is the escape from the Elf King's dungeons.

That's about half-way through the book, so it makes sense. And it is also the point where it shifts from being an episodic travel story to a more traditional narrative. But it lacks a big climactic hook to end on. The scene with the orcs and the burning trees and the escape from Smaug were expanded in the movies to fix this, but I am not sure if you could do the same with the elves without some serious character assassination. Or perhaps literal assassination, if you want to end on Bilbo killing Thranduil and the company then fighting their way out!

wilphe

2024-01-06, 01:52 PM

Return of the Jedi was very disappointing to me, I found Luke smug, and I didn’t like how he abandoned his comrades and instead palled around with villainous Dad; and I really didn’t like the Vietcong teddy bears!

I legit love ewoks, but I think they should have gone all in on how terrifying they are.

They are diminutive, stealthy, cunning and antrophagic.

They took out an entire imperial legion of crack troops with rocks and sticks.

By all rights we should see a First Order veteran of Endor with PTSD who breaks whenever he hears the phrase "yub yub"

Basically they should exist in the same low-tech but terrifying adversary niche that IRL was occupied by peoples like the Apache, the Zulu or the Gurkhas and any faction with nous would show up with a generous contract offer to hire a Foreign Legion of them.

"Ok, you are good at fighting and just became aware the rest of the Galaxy exists, sign here and we will bootstrap your society up from hunter gatherers"

Errorname

2024-01-06, 03:06 PM

The Hobbit would be a really interesting project for a student editor. There's definitely stuff you would need to work around (I understand why they exist, but Tauriel and Azog were both mistakes) and some scenes are changed so badly you can't recover the book version (I remember being so disappointed by PJ's takes on the Beorn and Mirkwood scenes) but you've got good stuff in there and you could probably cut together a decent movie or two out of them.

I'm not sure the prequels introduced the kind of gaping plot holes that the sequels did though

Plot inconsistencies are a basically worthless metric for actual criticism. Jurassic Park's full of 'em and nobody cares, it's a classic, and while I can't think of any famous examples there's definitely films that have watertight logic but are still boring and bad. Frankly I think you could poke just as many holes in the Prequels as you can in the Sequels, and I don't think it really tells you anything useful about the films.

What matters is how entertaining the movies are and how interesting the stories they're telling are, and while both films got similar receptions I would say you have more to work with for a redemptive interpretation with the Prequels, they have ambitions and things to say, where the Sequels are basically just movies about Star Wars. That's all any of these legacy sequels are about, it's all just an endless self-referential ouroboros. Even Last Jedi, the one I think ultimately averages out to above par is still primarily a movie about Star Wars and what the franchise should be.

I do not think it's a coincidence that the best Star Wars thing since the Disney acquisition was Andor, because Andor is not a show about Star Wars. It is a Star Wars show which is about things.

LibraryOgre

2024-01-06, 03:29 PM

Errorname

2024-01-06, 03:59 PM

I get Tauriel, by why was Azog a mistake?

Honestly Azog might bother me more? Beefing up a literal one-line offhand reference into the main villain of a story is just needless, no good reason to do it. I'd be cool with introducing Bolg in the Goblintown and Warg sequences, that makes sense if he's coming back for the finale, but the Azog character just eats up screentime and messes with the tone.

Tauriel is at least defensible, the idea of having a named elf lady with a prominent role in the Mirkwood bits so your film has at least a named female character with a speaking role makes sense to me, my beef is more what they had her do. If they had just made her Thranduil's most prominent retainer in the Mirkwood sequence and the final Battle, I'd have zero problems with her. Alas, they were not content for her to just be a secondary character.

Ramza00

2024-01-06, 05:01 PM

the Hobbit may work better with the multiple type of tones, if we had Bilbo do more narration in between scenes

for to Bilbo all of this is new information, and new information is “flat” … it is a story about silly trolls, dwarves, goblins, elves, the were-bear Baron the skinchanger. Bilbo is the outsider, the point of view character, and he sees everything with an orientalist framing where everything feels foreign and exciting and Bilbo does not know how things get put together. Bilbo has the child like wonder and since he is a good person we forgive Bilbo not knowing the backstories for a dozen different cultures while he goes Marco Polo-ing with 13 dwarves and one magical wizard.

====

but to other points of view when Bilbo is not on screen. This is Thorin Oakenshield who has the tragedy of the dragon who has cursed his family, we have Tauriel who did a Romeo and Juliet among life long inter generational centuries long distrust, we have Bard the Bowman of the ancient city of Esgaroth but which the men merely call Laketown … Bard the Bowman a new song a new story, a slayer of the mighty smaug whose story is a fortnight old and is only three decades old.

There is so many layers here, things beyond the surface with depth. But to Bilbos eyes it is all surface for he is learning these lores for the very first time. It is exciting, it is an adventure!

Lemmy

2024-01-07, 11:25 AM

The Sequels definitely burned a ton of goodwill and lost a lot of prestige, but while Rise of Skywalker made less than the movies that came before it still pulled in over a billion dollars. There's nothing stopping the franchise from chugging along until the tides of nostalgia and secondary material solidify the sequels as 'legitimate' Star Wars in the eyes of younger fans. Same thing happened with the Prequels, my generation grew up with them and never experienced that visceral disappointment, the Prequels have been a part of the series for as long as I can remember.
Sure... I guess "produce no movies for 3 decades so that everyone forgets just how crappy the ST was" is a possible plan... But right now, it seems like Disney is intent on producing more and more SW content... And pretty bad content.

Say what you will about the prequel trilogy... It was still trying to expand SW, not sabotage and humiliate it. It's a good story told badly... The ST has no idea what story it wants to tell other than "let's subvert SW", it's a trilogy where every movie literally tries to undo and undermine the previous one. Its main character barely counts as a character.

Is it possible SW will get better? Sure... It probably will, at some point... But considering Lucasfilm is probably the worst manages studio out there right now and the people responsible for it are still employed... i have no hopes of it happening any time soon.

Errorname

2024-01-07, 12:55 PM

Sure... I guess "produce no movies for 3 decades so that everyone forgets just how crappy the ST was" is a possible plan... But right now, it seems like Disney is intent on producing more and more SW content... And pretty bad content.

Not producing Star Wars for three decades after the sequels is how you cause them to be remembered as something that killed Star Wars, but if you build more Star Wars around the Prequels, that embeds them within the larger franchise. The reason people like the Prequels now has just as much to do with a decade and a half of supplemental games, toys and cartoons that fleshed out the setting and the aesthetics as it does with anything from the actual movies.

Say what you will about the prequel trilogy... It was still trying to expand SW, not sabotage and humiliate it. It's a good story told badly... The ST has no idea what story it wants to tell other than "let's subvert SW", it's a trilogy where every movie literally tries to undo and undermine the previous one. Its main character barely counts as a character.

You say that, but I absolutely have heard the same sort of hyperbolic narrative about the Prequels. It wasn't true then and it isn't true now. The Prequels has the advantage of being from a strong singular creative vision, and that vision coming from someone whose eyes aren't clouded by having played with Stormtrooper toys as a kid. There is a vision, a set of themes and ideas that can be assembled into a coherent story, and a different take on the setting of Star Wars. Those are both advantages to redemptive readings, they give you a lot more to work with, but it doesn't make the movies good.

The Sequels are all pretty looking movies made by people who really love Star Wars, probably too much. There are already people who are ride or die for the Last Jedi, and even Force Awakens has it's defenders. It's harder to make a coherent narrative, especially since the Rise of Skywalker is such an obvious flinch, but it won't stop people from trying.

Is it possible SW will get better? Sure... It probably will, at some point... But considering Lucasfilm is probably the worst manages studio out there right now and the people responsible for it are still employed... i have no hopes of it happening any time soon.

Andor is legitimately one of the best anythings the franchise has ever produced, and some of the games are pretty okay. It's not exactly a golden age for the franchise, but uh, it's not really a golden age for anything right now.

Precure

2024-01-07, 02:58 PM

Everyone has seen the fanzine letter where people say they're quitting Star Wars because of how back Empire Strikes Back was, right?

They were right about Obi-Wan being turned into a liar.

That's more or less what they ended up doing as is, although they saved Smaug's actual death for the opening of the third movie, as the promise of seeing the dragon in action is sure to get a lot of butts in seats!

Um... Isn't that essentially what the actual trilogy did? I mean, you've shifted the death of Smaug from the first 10 minutes of the third film, into the last 10 minutes of the second, but other than that, not much difference. The problem is that this seriously bloats what was basically denoement in the book, into an entire film. And to be fair, that's exactly what they did in the actual trilogy, but that's what made the final film really kinda bad. It was super obvious that they were just making stuff up, and adding in additional conflicts and whatnot just to pad the events in that film. And when in doubt? Massive battle sequence.

Pushing Smaug's death into another movie is a very big difference. It basically cut the action in the middle, and forced them to create another climax for the second movie. Post-Smaug stuff might be 60 pages out of 280, but there is too much stuff in these pages.

Saph

2024-01-07, 03:07 PM

The Sequels are all pretty looking movies made by people who really love Star Wars, probably too much.

I never really got that feeling from any of them. TFA comes across as a designed-by-committee rehash by writers who don't really care. TLJ comes across as an attempted subversion by a writer who wants to look clever.

Andor is legitimately one of the best anythings the franchise has ever produced.

I finally watched Andor based on all the glowing praise it's gotten and . . . it's really not. It's a good, solid show, but based on what I've seen, I think the harsh truth is that the only reason Andor seems so amazing to the Star Wars fanbase is that the rest of the Disney Star Wars shows are so disappointingly bad that they make Andor look much better by comparison.

Errorname

2024-01-07, 03:21 PM

Saph

2024-01-07, 03:26 PM

I don't think there's much pre-Disney that comes close to Andor either.

All I can say is that I watched six episodes and didn't feel any particular need to watch the rest. I definitely don't regret watching those six – they had good pacing and good writing – but nothing in it really stuck with me.

Batcathat

2024-01-07, 03:35 PM

All I can say is that I watched six episodes and didn't feel any particular need to watch the rest. I definitely don't regret watching those six – they had good pacing and good writing – but nothing in it really stuck with me.

Interestingly, that's pretty similar to how I see the original movies, while I think Andor's pretty great. In my opinion (which is admittedly very much a minority one, I think) is that Andor took what I always thought was Star Wars' best quality – the amazing visuals – and added a more interesting story and some actual moral ambiguity (none of their antagonists turned uglier the more Evil they were or anything :smallwink: ).

Ramza00

2024-01-07, 06:01 PM

I finally watched Andor based on all the glowing praise it's gotten and . . . it's really not. It's a good, solid show, but based on what I've seen, I think the harsh truth is that the only reason Andor seems so amazing to the Star Wars fanbase is that the rest of the Disney Star Wars shows are so disappointingly bad that they make Andor look much better by comparison.

earnest question from an andor naive person

is Andor good for Star Wars is merely flash gordon, and if you are not doing fun flash… people get bored and thus Andor which is a different genre feels exciting?

Errorname

2024-01-07, 06:51 PM

is Andor good for Star Wars is merely flash gordon, and if you are not doing fun flash… people get bored and thus Andor which is a different genre feels exciting?

I'm not sure if I can answer that?

Bohandas

2024-01-07, 09:11 PM

Ramza00

2024-01-07, 09:59 PM

so I am going to defend the matrix here and also attack the matrix movies here

they are so creatures of their times, the 90s, with dozens upon dozens of references to the point of absurdity. The Matrix movies throws out references like the Simpsons throws out sight gags. It makes a bad story if you do not delight in this form of excess, and if you take delight in this type of excess the matrix will ruin your life and get you into a hyper fixation type thing.

Thus many of the matrix references are stories within stories, like this bit is referencing notes from the underground one of the first dystopic literature stories even though mary shelley the last man did it first, or this is plato’s divided line and the cave, so on and so on. This bit references ghost in the shell and this part references superman and that part is dragonball z. It is ready player one 12 years before RPO. It is the wish of the 80s to 00s and it was so exhausted by the mid 2010s but hey the first matrix movie was 1999.

It's not about the appeal though. It's about making the story consistent. It's also about making the entire thing make sense. The idea of using human bodies as living power generators is so ridiculously ludicrous that it had to be a lie. There had to be "another level of the matrix" that explained why that lie existed in the first place. What exactly that was isn't nearly as important as having it be in the first place.
in an earlier version of the script the ai live on human wetware inside the human brain as software, but this was abandoned for an exec did not like it and thus we got the human battery.

A 1950s to 1970s sci fi short story would do a twist of there is a second matrix but the Wachowski did not want to go that route. Instead they want to go the original Plato route if you do not like the city (the cave) you get banished if you caused problems. Still try to cause problems and the city kills you. That is the old school answer which is also the answer of Dostoevsky Grand Inquisitor. But the whole point of that Dostoevsky tale is showing a different path of escape and the loving kiss can change the nature of mankind / machine logic, for even machines hate machine efficiency for everything becomes a gear in a system if there is no loving kiss. (I am trying to avoid the boards religious rules for Dostoevsky also has more as an orthodox christian.)

But yeah the series is about magic for some people such as those two directors think love is a form of magic and other things also magic.

=====

Is the Matrix good movies? Not by most definitions, there is too much excess in them for the answer to be yes. For pete sake they made the architect into a freud parody, not freud the actual man, but specifically the first generation after freudian’s from the 1910s to 1950s who thought the world could be conservat–ized and just love daddy / authority. So Freud as caricature (which totally did happen in the real world, for better or mostly worse)

That character was supposed to be the audience breaking point to hate the excess you are given and just find something in the story to love. You are supposed to hate the architect, to stop looking for logic and authority, and allow other peoples code to infect you and change you in the process … while simultaneously saying not all code is welcome and it is okay to say no I do not think you have my best interests at heart. No code from the architect or smith, but it is okay to accept code from the oracle and the little girl program (sati) and so on. Code which literally rewrites who you are, you are not the same, you are trans•formed.

The world is too vast and large to run on only one system of rules and authority. And if the world is too vast for one symbolic chain, love and mutual aid has to exist to make the thing work or we are all going to die.

Lemmy

2024-01-08, 12:16 PM

The Sequels are all pretty looking movies made by people who really love Star Wars, probably too much.I honestly have no idea how anyone can watch those moves and come to that conclusion... TFA is basically a copy-paste of the original movie, but worse in nearly every way. TLJ seems made by someone who actively dislikes the franchise and is out to prove how he knows better than the millions of people who kept it alive and relevant for decades (which is actually a problem with a lot of franchises these days, TBH)

There are already people who are ride or die for the Last Jedi, and even Force Awakens has it's defenders.
Everything and anything will always have people who like it... And people who hate it. That doesn't mean much... Disney managed to ruin the popularity of SW. It turned decades of love and good will of fans who were, as you say, "ride ointo anger and, later, into something even more deadly to a franchise: apathy. A handful of fans of the new material isn't going to change much... Will SW die forever? No. But it's very likely that it'll never again be the major cultural phenomenon it used to be. It's just another franchise now. Just yet another soulless corporate product... And a pretty bad one at that.

Andor is legitimately one of the best anythings the franchise has ever produced, and some of the games are pretty okay. It's not exactly a golden age for the franchise, but uh, it's not really a golden age for anything right now.
I'd say that depends on how inclusive you want to be to call it "one of the best". Andor is alright. It's also a massive flop. And just like 1 bad mistake won't sink a big franchise, 1 decent production won't save or elevate it.

Batcathat

2024-01-08, 12:27 PM

Everything and anything will always have people who like it... And people who hate it. That doesn't mean much... Disney managed to ruin the popularity of SW. It turned decades of love and good will of fans who were, as you say, "ride ointo anger and, later, into something even more deadly to a franchise: apathy. A handful of fans of the new material isn't going to change much... Will SW die forever? No. But it's very likely that it'll never again be the major cultural phenomenon it used to be. It's just another franchise now. Just yet another soulless corporate product... And a pretty bad one at that.

Is that so different from how it was after the prequel trilogy came out though? (This is an actual question, not a rhetorical one, by the way). These days quite a lot of people seem to think the prequels are at least decent (possibly due to either being young when they came out or reevaluating them in light of the sequels) but at the time I remember it being rare enough that someone even thought they were "alright" and most people (or at least most geeks) seemed to hate them. When Lucas sold it, the general reaction seemed to be something along the lines of "Thank God, now he can't ruin it anymore".

Trixie_One

2024-01-08, 12:31 PM

All I can say is that I watched six episodes and didn't feel any particular need to watch the rest. I definitely don't regret watching those six – they had good pacing and good writing – but nothing in it really stuck with me.

I watched the first episode, and nothing about it struck me as worth continuing with. I'll certainly admit though that there was mitigating factors. This was last December when I was in and out of hospital for my eyes so I couldn't really admire the fine details of how it looked if there were any, and it probably was effecting my mood so I'd likely be viewing new unfamiliar stuff more negatively than I would normally. So i probably should give it another chance. When does it get good(tm)? Is this a case of the anime three episode role?

Bohandas

2024-01-08, 12:44 PM

in an earlier version of the script the ai live on human wetware inside the human brain as software, but this was abandoned for an exec did not like it and thus we got the human battery.

A perennial problem for mainstream movies. They have to be dumbed down enough for studio executives to understand them.

Batcathat

2024-01-08, 12:49 PM

A perennial problem for mainstream movies. They have to be dumbed down enough for studio executives to understand them.

That one has always annoyed me, especially since it seems so unnecessary even by movie standards. It's not like you need to be an expert in computers or neurology to understand "they want to use human brains as computers" as a concept.

Tyndmyr

2024-01-08, 01:09 PM

The Sequels are all pretty looking movies made by people who really love Star Wars, probably too much. There are already people who are ride or die for the Last Jedi, and even Force Awakens has it's defenders. It's harder to make a coherent narrative, especially since the Rise of Skywalker is such an obvious flinch, but it won't stop people from trying.

"Every one of these movies is a particularly hard nut to crack. There’s no source material. We don’t have comic books. We don’t have 800-page novels." -Kathleen Kennedy

Yeah, I'm gonna say that they didn't actually love Star Wars all that much if they were so unaware of the vast quantity of material to pull from. I'm not saying that they had to follow the EU exactly, but certainly there was a great deal of material out there to draw from.

Of all the folks working on it, only Filoni seems to fall into what you describe. The man does love Star Wars. I don't think that means he's good at telling tales about Star Wars, but he at least likes it. So, when he fails, he's at least failing in a different sort of way. The sequels, though....Rian's "Let the past die. Kill it if you have to" seems almost directed at the audience.

I finally watched Andor based on all the glowing praise it's gotten and . . . it's really not. It's a good, solid show, but based on what I've seen, I think the harsh truth is that the only reason Andor seems so amazing to the Star Wars fanbase is that the rest of the Disney Star Wars shows are so disappointingly bad that they make Andor look much better by comparison.

Agreed. Andor is a good show. Right now, that's exceptional....but it really shouldn't be.

I also haven't finished it. But I might go back to it and finish it. I can't say the same for Filoni's crap.

Ramza00

2024-01-08, 01:14 PM

That one has always annoyed me, especially since it seems so unnecessary even by movie standards. It's not like you need to be an expert in computers or neurology to understand "they want to use human brains as computers" as a concept.

self vs other distinctions often trigger disgust and horror

* especially things inside your body. Slime triggers aversion and revulsion, but saying the slime is inside me and not being yucky on the outside. Well it can be too much

too much horror, the out of body experience and people do not like the movie and tell their friends about it. I hate the change too but from a dollar and sense perspective it makes sense why the exec felt you need to do that.

and I will too remain annoyed by it

self vs other distinctions often trigger disgust and horror

* especially things inside your body. Slime triggers aversion and revulsion, but saying the slime is inside me and not being yucky on the outside. Well it can be too much

too much horror, the out of body experience and people do not like the movie and tell their friends about it. I hate the change too but from a dollar and sense perspective it makes sense why the exec felt you need to do that.

and I will too remain annoyed by it

sidenote i wonder how many peoples cognition did a nickelodeon exec change, compared to an imaginary default, via making nick the SLIME channel in the 90s?

Trixie_One

2024-01-08, 01:23 PM

A perennial problem for mainstream movies. They have to be dumbed down enough for studio executives to understand them.

See people will always dunk on execs with the Matrix battery thing, as it fits people's assumptions that they're know nothings who are the hated enemy to the noble creative types, and yet you will rarely ever see people bring up the exec who did a highly accurate breakdown of his problems with the plot of Star Trek Insurrection when it was still in production. Alas they did not listen to him, and we might well have got a better movie if they had. His comments in regard to the small numbers involved making it seem like a streetfight between two gangs was spot on the money.

I think that's one of the reasons why I appreciate the Pitch Meeting series, as he makes an effort to vary up who is the problem in each pitch where sometimes it's writer-guy and in others it's producer-guy as I suspect that's more true to life than a simple one side good one side bad narrative.

The sequels, though....Rian's "Let the past die. Kill it if you have to" seems almost directed at the audience.

Does confuse me how people came out of that film taking away the main message from something that was said by the villiain. It's like if people thought the message of Return of the Jedi was "Good, good, let the hate flow through you"... okay to be fair that does describe the ethos of quite a few Star Wars fans :smallbiggrin:

Even more as the film does subvert that message to some extent with Yoda playing word games for his own amusement because he knows that Rey took the sacred texts with her.

Batcathat

2024-01-08, 01:27 PM

See people will always dunk on execs with the Matrix battery thing, as it fits people's assumptions that they're know nothings who are the hated enemy to the noble creative types, and yet you will rarely ever see people bring up the exec who did a highly accurate breakdown of his problems with the plot of Star Trek Insurrection when it was still in production. Alas they did not listen to him, and we might well have got a better movie if they had. His comments in regard to the small numbers involved making it seem like a streetfight between two gangs was spot on the money.

Yeah, I imagine being a movie executive is not unlike being a referee in some ways. If you do your job poorly, people will absolutely hate you. If you do it well, people probably won't notice it.

Saph

2024-01-08, 02:30 PM

I watched the first episode, and nothing about it struck me as worth continuing with. I'll certainly admit though that there was mitigating factors. This was last December when I was in and out of hospital for my eyes so I couldn't really admire the fine details of how it looked if there were any, and it probably was effecting my mood so I'd likely be viewing new unfamiliar stuff more negatively than I would normally. So i probably should give it another chance. When does it get good(tm)? Is this a case of the anime three episode role?

Andor is divided into three-episode chunks, so episodes 1-3 form one mini-story, episodes 4-6 form another mini-story, and so on. So I'd say it's worth watching up to episode 3. That way you get to see the payoff for the setup of episode 1.

DaedalusMkV

2024-01-08, 02:47 PM

Is that so different from how it was after the prequel trilogy came out though? (This is an actual question, not a rhetorical one, by the way). These days quite a lot of people seem to think the prequels are at least decent (possibly due to either being young when they came out or reevaluating them in light of the sequels) but at the time I remember it being rare enough that someone even thought they were "alright" and most people (or at least most geeks) seemed to hate them. When Lucas sold it, the general reaction seemed to be something along the lines of "Thank God, now he can't ruin it anymore".

Honestly, it feels pretty different from where I'm standing. The prequels, despite the wrath of die-hard Star Wars nerds, were pretty popular on a wide scale. Say what you will about TPM, but it spawned a huge number of spin-offs and merchandise that were all over the place. In the prequel era you couldn't go anywhere without seeing Star Wars somewhere, and there were dozens of novels and video games and all the rest that were all successful, straight from the release of TPM to years after RotS as the Clone Wars TV show wrapped up. At the time the mainstream mostly liked the movies (less so Attack of the Clones, but TPM was always hugely popular with kids), and for all their flaws the internet was still pretty obsessed with them.

By comparison, as far as I can tell as a former Star Wars fan who just observes from the outside, the only Star Wars production which has really penetrated the cultural zeitgeist is The Mandalorian (which, admittedly, did so in spectacular fashion). Does anyone give a **** about anything in the sequel trilogy? Maybe BB8, but that's about it, and even it only in the wake of TFA. Probably second place would by Kylo Ren's lightsaber, and that's not exactly impressive. Disney's lasting contribution to Star Wars so far appears to be Baby Yoda and a whole bunch of memes about 'This is the Way'.

The difference, I think, is that the prequels were flawed. Some bad scenes and questionable performances dragging down something that could have been great. But every prequel movie still has elements of greatness; for all its flaws TPM has probably the best lightsaber fight in the franchise, a really nifty ground battle, a cool space battle, some very iconic villain designs with the Trade Federation and their droids and a few very popular characters (Qui-gon, Obi-wan and Maul). Attack of the Clones has the big climactic battle at the end. RotS is mostly just 'one of the good Star Wars movies'. What is there to like in the sequels? The starfighter battles in TFA are pretty cool I guess. And the opening scene of TLJ is actually pretty great right up until Holdo shows up to ruin the movie. But overall what even is there to like? You can't even talk about the character or ship designs being iconic because they're all just iPhone-ized retreads of the original trilogy versions!

Moreover, where are the successful tie-ins and video games? All of the Star Wars video games of the last decade have been unconnected to the sequel trilogy. You've got the Jedi Survivor series, based on the prequels/OT/Rebels TV show, you've got Battlefront and Battlefront 2 which were OT and a bridge between OT and ST respectively, and you've got one Lego Star Wars for TFA and nothing for the others. Novel-wise there's diddly and squat on my radar, though it's possible I've missed something. Nobody cares about the ST characters. The few people who cared after TLJ stopped caring when RoS **** all over that movie.

Admittedly, this is all through the lens of 'Someone who was a Star Wars fan through the prequels, and stopped being a Star Wars fan during the sequels', so obviously I'm biased. But I also think I'm in a large and powerful faction these days, whereas the same category was very rare during the prequels.

Bohandas

2024-01-08, 03:01 PM

Tyndmyr

2024-01-08, 03:41 PM

Lemmy

2024-01-08, 03:53 PM

Seems right. For all the blame that they get, I notice that when creative people lose all restraint, they often turn out some bizarre crap. Sometimes it's a good thing to have someone there to give feedback and to reign in the wilder impulses.

Neither creativity nor restraint alone are ideal, you need that balance.
That's true. it's like we skipped from one extreme straight to the other...

There are quite a few other directors and writers that are incredibly talented, as long as they have someone to say "No, man. That's dumb!" sometimes.

Ramza00

2024-01-08, 05:07 PM

Seems right. For all the blame that they get, I notice that when creative people lose all restraint, they often turn out some bizarre crap. Sometimes it's a good thing to have someone there to give feedback and to reign in the wilder impulses.

Neither creativity nor restraint alone are ideal, you need that balance.

sidenote the universe has been telling me / reminding me to watch Barton Fink (a cohen brothers movie) and I may actually have to do it 😛

gbaji

2024-01-08, 05:17 PM

Pushing Smaug's death into another movie is a very big difference. It basically cut the action in the middle, and forced them to create another climax for the second movie. Post-Smaug stuff might be 60 pages out of 280, but there is too much stuff in these pages.

I'm not really talking about a pacing issue though (I can see both sides of the "do we end on the cliffhanger of Smaug flying off towards Laketown, or end with him being killed?"). The problem is that if you remove the actual conflict with Smaug from the final film, there's almost nothing there. The way they did it (which I'm not saying is great), at least gave them an action sequence at the end of the second film, and then a big action sequence at the beginning of the third, followed by a ton of mostly boring stuff, then a big action sequence at the end.

Take that initial conflict out, and you've got 90minutes of boring movie to slog through before getting to anything interesting or exciting. Or... they have to invent even more filler to put in there to keep the audience interest. Again, I'm not saying one is innately better than the other, just pointing out that the difference of where you put Smaug's death in there doesn't matter much in terms of the total amount of made up filler you have to put into the films to make a 3 film trilogy out of The Hobbit in the first place.

in an earlier version of the script the ai live on human wetware inside the human brain as software, but this was abandoned for an exec did not like it and thus we got the human battery.

Yup. I'm aware of that. Would have been much better. But... they didn't go with that. And that decision was already made before they started writing on the second and third film. So that's not a great excuse for why they went in the direction they did go in those films.

A 1950s to 1970s sci fi short story would do a twist of there is a second matrix but the Wachowski did not want to go that route.

Again though. If that was the decision previously made, then write a different story in the second film. If the real world is "real", then make it real. Don't put magic abilities to control machines in there, which don't work or make sense if that's the actual model you are going with. My point is that "the twist" which was seemingly revealed at the end of the second film was that what they considered the "real world" likely wasn't. That's what the takeaway of Neo being able to use "magic" powers in the real world and drive away the Seekers was supposed to mean. Given that the second and third films were written and scheduled as a set (and this was known to the audiences), meant that this was the "reveal" which should have shown us the direction the third film would go (ie: promising yet another layer to the matrix, and "the real truth" to be revealed in the final film).

This created much fan excitement (as it should), only for it to turn to massive dissapointment when the third film was actually released and well, none of that setup and direction was actually used. Nope. Just a fake out, I guess. Unsurprisingly, fans were not amused by this.

Instead they want to go the original Plato route if you do not like the city (the cave) you get banished if you caused problems. Still try to cause problems and the city kills you. That is the old school answer which is also the answer of Dostoevsky Grand Inquisitor. But the whole point of that Dostoevsky tale is showing a different path of escape and the loving kiss can change the nature of mankind / machine logic, for even machines hate machine efficiency for everything becomes a gear in a system if there is no loving kiss. (I am trying to avoid the boards religious rules for Dostoevsky also has more as an orthodox christian.)

Again though, if that's the direction you are going, then go in that direction consistently. They didn't. If that was the actual direction they wanted to go, then drop the bits about Neo controling machines while outside the matrix, make is 100% about actually influencing the machines (both from outside and from within the matrix), and go from there. Make it about the dark cruel reality actually being dark and cruel, but having the benefit of being actually "real" (which, yeah, has some interesting philosophical angles to it). But if you are going that direction, you can't put "magic" into it at the same time.

The resolution they did, and not having another "layer" to reveal, also completely stepped on the entire Architect sequence in the second film. It's meaningless. Neo has no special purpose. There's no reason for why he appears over and over, and has tried the same thing multiple times. This makes sense if this is all a virtual reality. But if Neo's actions outside are "real", then it doesn't. Again, not without making the outside "reality" just as "unreal, but in a different way". Which yeah, is just unsatisfying. It's a cop out. It's we're going to dangle a reveal in front of you, but then not deliver on it.

But yeah the series is about magic for some people such as those two directors think love is a form of magic and other things also magic.

Sorry. If you have written the first two films in a trilogy with everything complying with the rules of science, and then decide to resolve your third film with "magic", you're going to fail and piss off your audience. Which is precisely what happened.

See people will always dunk on execs with the Matrix battery thing, as it fits people's assumptions that they're know nothings who are the hated enemy to the noble creative types, and yet you will rarely ever see people bring up the exec who did a highly accurate breakdown of his problems with the plot of Star Trek Insurrection when it was still in production. Alas they did not listen to him, and we might well have got a better movie if they had. His comments in regard to the small numbers involved making it seem like a streetfight between two gangs was spot on the money.

Who is "they" though? Presumably, execs who had higher status and power in the decision making chain. Which still leaves us with the same conclusion.

The difference, I think, is that the prequels were flawed. Some bad scenes and questionable performances dragging down something that could have been great. But every prequel movie still has elements of greatness; for all its flaws TPM has probably the best lightsaber fight in the franchise, a really nifty ground battle, a cool space battle, some very iconic villain designs with the Trade Federation and their droids and a few very popular characters (Qui-gon, Obi-wan and Maul). Attack of the Clones has the big climactic battle at the end. RotS is mostly just 'one of the good Star Wars movies'. What is there to like in the sequels? The starfighter battles in TFA are pretty cool I guess. And the opening scene of TLJ is actually pretty great right up until Holdo shows up to ruin the movie. But overall what even is there to like? You can't even talk about the character or ship designs being iconic because they're all just iPhone-ized retreads of the original trilogy versions!

I think the prequels accomplished exactly what they needed to accomplish. Some fans hated on them, but they were usually nitpicking details that they didn't like. And some complaints were just plain dumb. The prequels had to detail three things:

1. The fall of the republic and rise of the empire
2. The fall of the jedi and rise of Palpatine/Vader
3. The fall of Anakin to Vader, and origin of Luke/Leia

It did those things very very well. The story was complete, it was consistent, and it detailed every one of those (and included the Clone Wars in there as well). Everything else is window dressing along the way.

The ST, on the other hand, needed to take us beyond the republic/empire conflict. It really needed to show us what happened after the empire fell, and show us what rose in its place. It needed to show us what Luke and Leia did in terms of Jedi stuff as well. What we got was "everything failed". Jedi stuff? Failed. Republic stuff? Failed. Empire? More or less back. The ST could have been an excersise in "blank slate" writing (ok, mostly blank slate). Could have literally gone in any direction, and told any story they wanted to. Instead, we got a very poorly done retread of the original series, pushed into place by undoing everything accomplished in that series.

And no, I'm not opposed to or even adverse to having there be adversity along the way. Heck. I'm not even totally opposed to something involving imperial remnants floating around causing problems. But they could have done something more original with them instead of what they did.

I was also really disapointed in their inability to do anything force related other than retelling the same "jedi vs sith" stuff we've already seen a ton of. Was super disappointing because the title of the first film "The Force Awakens" actually suggested some "new direction" that force use might take. Some new threat. Some new allies. Something.

Unlike the PT, which was constrained in terms of history, and had to tell a very specific story, the ST was open and could have included actual new stuff. It didn't. And didn't do so to such a degree that they actually brought back the main villain just to show us how incredibly unoriginal they were going to be. Sheesh!

Batcathat

2024-01-08, 05:33 PM

The prequels had to detail three things:

1. The fall of the republic and rise of the empire
2. The fall of the jedi and rise of Palpatine/Vader
3. The fall of Anakin to Vader, and origin of Luke/Leia

It did those things very very well. The story was complete, it was consistent, and it detailed every one of those (and included the Clone Wars in there as well). Everything else is window dressing along the way.

I'd say that something like "telling the story well" qualify as a little more than window dressing. Personally, I was quite looking forward to seeing the fall of Anakin Skywalker, not to mention knowing that the movies kind of had to end on a tragic note (tragic endings are too rare in mainstream movies, in my opinion). And yes, I did get to see both of those things but I wouldn't exactly say I was satisfied with the window dressing.

Precure

2024-01-08, 05:47 PM

I honestly have no idea how anyone can watch those moves and come to that conclusion... TFA is basically a copy-paste of the original movie, but worse in nearly every way. TLJ seems made by someone who actively dislikes the franchise and is out to prove how he knows better than the millions of people who kept it alive and relevant for decades (which is actually a problem with a lot of franchises these days, TBH)

Funny thing is...What you said is applicable to the most fanfics out there, and they're written by hardcore fans.

Sapphire Guard

2024-01-08, 05:52 PM

Seems right. For all the blame that they get, I notice that when creative people lose all restraint, they often turn out some bizarre crap. Sometimes it's a good thing to have someone there to give feedback and to reign in the wilder impulses.

Neither creativity nor restraint alone are ideal, you need that balance.

Every piece of professionally produced media is already made like that, so that's not particularly helpful. It's very difficult to actually tell who is responsible for what, it's entirely possible in any given story that the creator was the one urging restraint and the execs told them no.

Bohandas

2024-01-08, 06:12 PM

I saw the prequels when they first came out and I didn't dislike them the way I immediately disliked Rogue One.

Also, while the prequels had their own plot holes their plotholes were mostly self-contained.

Metastachydium

2024-01-08, 06:12 PM

Funny thing is...What you said is applicable to the most fanfics out there, and they're written by hardcore fans.

↑This Flumph gets it.↑

Bohandas

2024-01-08, 06:26 PM

Also, the prequels had the advantage a strong overlap between the parts that were badly written, inconsistent or disappointing and the parts that were forgettable.

By contrast the most inconsistent part of TLJ was also one of the most memorable scenes in the movie

gbaji

2024-01-08, 06:53 PM

I'd say that something like "telling the story well" qualify as a little more than window dressing. Personally, I was quite looking forward to seeing the fall of Anakin Skywalker, not to mention knowing that the movies kind of had to end on a tragic note (tragic endings are too rare in mainstream movies, in my opinion). And yes, I did get to see both of those things but I wouldn't exactly say I was satisfied with the window dressing.

Right. But that's all well within the very subjective world of how any given viewer may enjoy or not enjoy the details/specifics of the story. But the story itself was complete and accomplished the story telling goals set for it.

Contrast this to the ST. What was the story? Was it about the Jedi? Well, we don't know. Did it end with the Jedi order being rebuilt, destroyed, broken, fixed? Um... Kinda in limbo and unknown, so basically no movement. How about the New Republic? Ok. Was there. Then capital planet(s) destroyed. Rebellion stuff, and then... what? Well, again, we don't know. Does the New Republic get rebuilt? Heck. Is the First Order even destroyed? I mean, they had enough ships and manpower to be stomping around the galaxy before the Exogol fleet was found and then destroyed? So... the entire conflict and resolution in the third film of the ST really doesn't even resolve anything involving the primary galactic conflict at all. Does everyone just leave after assembling for that big battle, or is something built on that? Again, we don't know.

And what was really resolved with the whole Rey/Ben conflict? Um... Nothing right? We introduced a new thing out of our butts, and then got rid of it, all in one film, all of which has zero impact or effect on the rest of the universe we're writing this story in.

The ST had tons of details any of us could also nitpick over (like in the PT), but *also* had a completely meandering story that lead us to absolutely nothing at the end. Nothing "resolved" at the end of RoS wasn't something completely invented and introduced in that same film. Literally, the only actual impact from that film that was a carry over from any previous film in the franchise was Ben dying. Everything else was a conflict both created and then elminated within RoS itself. Everything else was left status quo from where we left off after TLJ. So yeah... that's a heck of a non-ending to a trilogy. Where's the rest of the story?