The Great Star Wars Watchthrough

[Peelee]

Montolio from the Drizzt books, Hawkeye Gough from Dark Souls. I'd probably count Matt Murdock from Marvel and Toph from Avatar, but that's stretching the term "sniper" a bit.

Toph is a powerful earthbender, IIRC, and Matt Murdock is a superhero. This is a monk who prays about the Force but canonically lacks any Force abilities.

But if you mean Star Wars specifically, there are the Miralukans. SFDebris played through the Imperial Agent storyline of Star Wars: The Old Republic as a Miralukan Sniper. https://sfdebris.com/videos/games/swtoragent.php

I'm actually not demanding specifically "sniper," but that amused me. Anyway. The Miraluka as a race see through the Force, true.

[Rakaydos]

Toph is a powerful earthbender, IIRC, and Matt Murdock is a superhero. This is a monk who prays about the Force but canonically lacks any Force abilities.

I think you're stretching "no force abilities" to include no force senses, when it's more that he has no ACTIVE force abilities. He never does anything to Control or Alter, but he's got the Sense tree maxxed out.

[Narkis]

Rogue One is BY FAR my favorite of the Disney Star Wars movies, followed by Solo and with TFA a distant third. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on TLJ.

And I don't care what canon says. Chirrut was obviously a powerful Force-Sensitive who would have been a great Jedi if he'd been trained by them.

[Fyraltari]

What other "blind sniper"s are there?

Here Take your pick.

[Peelee]

Here Take your pick.

Skipped straight to the Real Life folder. Was suitably impressed.

[Zevox]

Rogue One is BY FAR my favorite of the Disney Star Wars movies, followed by Solo and with TFA a distant third. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on TLJ.

And I don't care what canon says. Chirrut was obviously a powerful Force-Sensitive who would have been a great Jedi if he'd been trained by them.

Agreed on all counts. (Caveat: I have not seen Rise of Skywalker, so can't include that in such rankings.)

[Narkis]

Agreed on all counts. (Caveat: I have not seen Rise of Skywalker, so can't include that in such rankings.)

Neither have I, actually. We're in the same boat here.

[Peelee]

Agreed on all counts. (Caveat: I have not seen Rise of Skywalker, so can't include that in such rankings.)

Neither have I, actually. We're in the same boat here.

As someone who has seen Rise of Skywalker, I agree with that ranking.

[Zevox]

As someone who has seen Rise of Skywalker, I agree with that ranking.

So, you put Rise of Skywalker in between the other two sequel films, huh? Interesting. I've kind of suspected that's probably where it would land for me if/when I ever see it, but can't be sure until I do.

[Peelee]

So, you put Rise of Skywalker in between the other two sequel films, huh? Interesting. I've kind of suspected that's probably where it would land for me if/when I ever see it, but can't be sure until I do.

I should qualify that - my biggest problem with TROS is how insanely crammed it is. If they took the overall plot and spaced it out over three movies (and obviously with changes so that necessary events in the first two still happened in them), the entire trilogy would have been significantly improved and would be better than the prequels. As is, it has practically no breathing room, it's all rushing from one plot point to the next.

I still enjoyed it.

[super dark33]

There is no "force abilities" or "force powers" or "force skills"

Theres just The Force.

After all, it wasnt a system designed with math of math in mind, but a concept thought of by a Hippy named George Lucas!

The force just happens, its not a power.

[Tvtyrant]

There is no "force abilities" or "force powers" or "force skills"

Theres just The Force.

After all, it wasnt a system designed with math of math in mind, but a concept thought of by a Hippy named George Lucas!

The force just happens, its not a power.

I think the original conception this is true, but over time it has moved from the Way towards more Western conceptions of fate and energy.

[Peelee]

I think the original conception this is true, but over time it has moved from the Way towards more Western conceptions of fate and energy.

Bolting mine. Literally the first thing we learn about the Force is that it's an energy field.

[Forum Explorer]

Glad to see you enjoyed Rogue One. I think I'd put it as my favorite of the Disney movies as well.

But now on to The Last Jedi, which I put as my favorite of the Sequel Trilogy.

[Zevox]

I should qualify that - my biggest problem with TROS is how insanely crammed it is. If they took the overall plot and spaced it out over three movies (and obviously with changes so that necessary events in the first two still happened in them), the entire trilogy would have been significantly improved and would be better than the prequels. As is, it has practically no breathing room, it's all rushing from one plot point to the next.

I still enjoyed it.

I know, I've seen your comments about it in the main thread. Just interesting to know where it falls for you compared to the other sequel films, I guess, which I don't think I've seen you say over there.

[Devonix]

Glad to see you enjoyed Rogue One. I think I'd put it as my favorite of the Disney movies as well.

But now on to The Last Jedi, which I put as my favorite of the Sequel Trilogy.

I softened some on Rogue one. when it came out I hated it. While it's still not high up on my list of Starwars films. I don't rage at it anymore.

[Saph]

The Last Jedi (1/3)

Introduction

I have to admit, I’ve been putting this one off a bit. The Last Jedi is the most divisive Star Wars film since, well, ever. Half the people who saw it hated it, and the other half hated the half that hated it, which led to the first half hating the ones who hated the ones who hated it. It was so bad that the Giant in the Playground thread went to 50 pages and got a sequel which went on for another 30 pages, and from what I could see not much of the content in those 2,000 posts was positive.

Also, given how much I disliked TFA, I’m worried that I’m going to have a similar reaction to TLJ. While rants about how much a film sucks can be pretty funny, I don’t want to become one of those fans who hates the franchise that they’re supposedly a fan of.

On top of that, the Rotten Tomatoes critic rating is 91%, while the audience rating is 43%. Not a good sign.

But I said I’d watch it, and I will. Besides, after watching years of second-hand opinions about the film go flying over my head, I do kind of want to find out what everyone is so worked up about. So here we go.

Thoughts While Watching

• STAR WARS! Opening crawl time.
• ”The First Order reigns”? Wait wait wait, what? They just got their butts kicked nine ways to Sunday! Their planet-sized superweapon base and everyone and everything on it got blown up! How are they suddenly beating the New Republic?
• ”Only Leia’s Resistance” is left? What about the Republic? How did we go straight back to the beginning of Empire Strikes Back? Did all the previous victories just get erased?
• ”First Order speeds towards the rebel base, desperate escape . . .” We really did go back to the beginning of Empire Strikes Back, didn’t we?
• Star Destroyers jump in in the middle of the evacuation. Would be a lot more impressive if they aren’t being led by General Failure, aka Hux.
• ”Prime the dreadnought.” Uh, sure.
• And Poe flies up in a fighter. Okay.
• And mocks Hux for a while via comm. Jesus. Even the protagonists don’t take the First Order seriously.
• After a short scene where they try to destroy Hux’s villain cred (they fail since he never had any in the first place), Poe flies in and starts blowing up the dreadnought with his X-wing. On his own.
• In some more “tell, don’t show” the film explains that big guns can’t hit close range fighters and that they were supposed to have scrambled fighters of their own. Yes, yes, it would have made sense to do that, wouldn’t it?
• Leia orders Poe to back off and stop soloing the dreadnought. I mean, by all military logic Leia should be clearly right, but since we’re in Bizarro World here and Poe is currently winning, I’ve no idea what to think.
• Bombers go in. They look more like transports than bombers.
• Wait, they’re actual bombers? With gravity bombs? That they drop out the bottom of their space ship?
• There’s a long action scene inside the last bomber with an Asian girl getting thrown around by explosions. It’s supposed to be tense but isn’t.
• The bombs drop onto the dreadnought and blow the entire ship up in a Michael-Bay style explosion. Because one bomber can totally do that.
• Poe gets back and the fleet jumps away. We cut back to Hux. On his untouched Star Destroyer. Which just sat there and did nothing for the entire battle. Our villains, ladies and gentlemen.
• Snoke calls Hux. Vader, at this point, would have executed Hux for incompetence (actually, he would have executed him by his second appearance in Episode VII). Since this is the First Order and these guys are failures even at killing their own men, Snoke just throws Hux around for a few pratfalls instead.
• I’ve written about an A4 page about everything wrong with this opening scene and we’re only 13 minutes into the film. This isn’t a good omen for either the movie or my fingers.
• Finn wakes up shouting ‘Rey!’ She’s not going out with you, dude. Kylo’s the edgy love interest, you’re the comic relief.
• And we cut to Rey. At the end of the last film, she was presenting Old Man Luke with his lightsaber. Luke takes it in his metal-hand and bio-hand . . .
• . . . and throws it over his shoulder. What.
• And marches off. Rey pursues.
• The scenery here is beautiful (reminds me of the castle island in ICO) though Rey banging on the door like a frustrated debt collector is kind of out of place.
• Old Man Luke’s first words are “Go away”. Chewie shows up and they break the news about Han.
• Snoke is telling Hux “well done”. So . . . this guy is also an idiot?
• So this is Snoke. He looks like an old decayed Sectoid.
• He gives a speech about Kylo’s potential. So far this guy is coming across as a replacement Emperor, with much less presence or menace.
• Even he calls Kylo’s mask “ridiculous”.
• ”You’re no Vader. You’re just a child in a mask.” While I have to agree with Snoke here, it almost feels like Rian Johnson’s deliberately undermining JJ Abrahms. Continuing his series of temper tantrums, Kylo responds by smashing his mask.
• Back to Luke and we get told that Kylo’s “only getting stronger”. News to me. The First Order will control “all the major systems within weeks.” HOW CAN THEY CONTROL THE GALAXY? They suck at EVERYTHING!
• Luke: “You think what? I’m just gonna walk out with a laser sword and face down the whole First Order?” My EARS. This is the first full line we’ve heard from Luke and it’s horribly jarring. OT Luke didn’t speak like this. He spoke in classical, epic language. Old Man Luke speaks like an American college student.
• Farmer Luke does his rounds. Sadly, it’s the most interesting part of the film so far. Meanwhile, Rey embarks on the ‘annoy him into submission’ plan.
• Luke even has a copy of Yoda’s creepy cave, with the original Jedi texts.
• ”Why are you here?” ”Something inside me has always been there.” That’s a really bad answer . . .
• Luke declares that he’ll never train another generation of Jedi and that it’s time for the Jedi to die.
• Leia slaps Poe and demotes him. Wait, WTF? She SLAPS him? She’s supposed to be a general! A GOOD general! Are they trying to destroy ALL of the OT characters?
• Okay, look, this is awful. Leia rips Poe apart for disobeying her and following through with the attack. But Poe’s attack destroyed a super-capital ship at the cost of five bombers and half a squadron of fighters. Regardless of how stupid the scene was, that’s an AMAZING exchange rate. And on top of that, the dreadnought was about to blow up Leia’s ship, meaning she wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for Poe’s call, and her response is to blame him? WTF?
• More Star Destroyers jump in, including what vaguely looks like a Super Star Destroyer that we’re told is Snoke’s ship.
• Tedious exposition where we get it painstakingly explained to us that the Imperials have tracked them. Gee, what was your first clue, the fact that they jumped in right next to you in deep space?
• The SSD launches exactly four fighters. But one is Kylo Ren, so presumably he’s about to do something to justify his existence. I mean, they could just use their 10-1 capital-scale firepower advantage, but that would be too easy.
• Kylo just flies through the shields and blows up the hangar bay from the inside. I guess he’s got one of Poe’s magic super starfighters.
• Poe: “We need to get out of range of those Star Destroyers!” Leia: “We need to get out of range of those Star Destroyers!” Ackbar: “We need to what?” Leia: “Get out of range of those Star Destroyers and the fighters will fall back.” Is everyone in this film a moron? Because they act like morons.
• Having killed his father, Kylo flirts with attaining Self-Made Orphan status, but doesn’t pull the trigger. The other fighters do, though.
• Hux: “What is the point of all this if we can’t blow up three tiny cruisers?” It’s like the film is going out of its way to draw your attention to how incompetent its villains are.
• We see Leia’s frozen corpse in space. She then comes back to life and flies back into the ship. I just . . . what. It’s like they’re going out of their way to kill any possible emotional or story impact of anything in the movie.
• Sad Old Man Luke meets R2 again, who plays the Episode IV message. It’s actually the first time I’ve felt vaguely happy watching this. Anyway, it’s enough to move Luke on to the ‘well, I’ll teach you, but I won’t help you’ stage.
• Some random woman announces that Ackbar’s dead. Great, another much-loved character gone. But hey, that means we get to remove an alien from the Rebel leadership and put another human in charge instead, right?
• Random Woman hands over command to Random Purple Haired Woman.
• ”400 of us on three ships, we’re the last of the Resistance”. Yeah, that means you’ve lost. She tries to go on to give an inspiring speech that completely fails. I mean, probably the writers thought it didn’t fail, but watching it, it falls as flat as roadkill under a bus.
• Holdo’s first exchange with Poe is to deliver some catty put-downs and refuse to tell him anything that’s going on. Are they trying to make us hate this woman?
• Random Asian Resistance Girl 2 shows up and has an uncomfortable conversation with Finn before tazing him. She’s pretty annoying.
• We get to listen to the “They can track us through lightspeed!” conversation again.
• Finn, Poe, and Rose (I think that’s her name) come up with some plan involving sneaking on board the lead Star Destroyer. It sounds stupid, but I’ve yet to see the heroes fail at pretty much any of these plans, so I expect it’ll work.
• But they need to get through the codes . . . so they call Glasses Alien from TFA . . . and have a real-time conversation with her . . . while the fleet is still supposedly chasing them . . . where she tells them to go to some other place to find a ‘master codebreaker’ . . . on a casino . . . am I the only one who’s having trouble taking this seriously? I am? Fine.
• There’s some weird dual vision scene with Rey and Kylo.
• Kylo fails at another mind trick, Luke shows up . . . okay, guess we’re due for Lesson One. And this is about as much as I can handle for now, so time for a break.

First Half Section Thoughts

Okay, so I was planning to split this watchthrough in two, but given that this lumbering dinosaur of a film is two and a bloody half hours long, I’m going to go for three parts instead.

The movie’s feeling even longer than it is because I’m spending more time writing than watching because practically every scene has something bad or stupid that makes me pause and write a comment. Now, if it was the same thing each time, then I’d eventually stop mentioning it, because there’s no point beating a dead horse, but no! No, each scene somehow manages to come up with an entirely new and original way to be bad or stupid. It’s almost impressive. Serious creative thought clearly went into the question of “how can we make this movie as incompatible with the characters, tone, and universe of the Star Wars Trilogy, and as incompatible with all logic, emotional relatability, and common sense, as we possibly can?”

The core of the movie so far is the space chase/escape plot, and it just doesn’t work. At all. Capital ships just hang around without doing anything, except when they don’t, fighters easily wreck capital ships, except when they don’t. There’s no flow or consistency to anything that happens, so everything just feels like a sequence of forced plot events. The movie has to have long, boring exposition exchanges where they painstakingly narrate every move in the battle, because the viewers can’t figure it out for themselves based on the movie’s internal logic, because the movie HAS no internal logic. The big limiting factor on the Rebel Fleet is that they’re ‘running out of fuel’, which comes out of nowhere and has literally never been a problem for any Star Wars ship before. Everything is just forced into place for the sake of the plot.

As for the cast . . . is it just me, or does the space plot go out of its way to try and emasculate the male characters? Poe saves the fleet and his reward is to be slapped in the face by Leia and subjected to childish put-downs by an admiral who looks like she’s from the Capitol in the Hunger Games. Finn gets tazed by some random mechanic girl. Ackbar gets killed off like a chump for apparently no other reason than that Purple Hair can be put in charge.

So far, this movie sucks. I don’t have much hope that it’ll get better.

[Rakaydos]

The Last Jedi is the most divisive Star Wars film since, well, ever. Half the people who saw it hated it, and the other half hated the half that hated it, which led to the first half hating the ones who hated the ones who hated it.

I've never seen the bolded part. I've seen plenty of the 3rd part, but none of the supposed justification for it, just "haters" jumping into "non-haters" discussions to derail them.

[Peelee]

I want to point out here that there is a sizeable faction of fans who think this is the best Star Wars movie to date.

[Rodin]

I've never seen the bolded part. I've seen plenty of the 3rd part, but none of the supposed justification for it, just "haters" jumping into "non-haters" discussions to derail them.

Well, the second part does exist. Having the first part tell you in exhaustive detail about why you're wrong for liking something will do that. My opinion of TLJ has soured over the years, but I was one of those who liked it at the time and got annoyed at those who hated it for how strident they were.

This was especially the case when the trailers for Rise starting coming out, and people who had already sworn they would never see another Star Wars movies flooded the preview threads with hatred for the sequel trilogy.

[dancrilis]

It is a bad movie (and that is an understatement), however:

[*]”The First Order reigns”? Wait wait wait, what? They just got their butts kicked nine ways to Sunday! Their planet-sized superweapon base and everyone and everything on it got blown up! How are they suddenly beating the New Republic?[*]”Only Leia’s Resistance” is left? What about the Republic? How did we go straight back to the beginning of Empire Strikes Back? Did all the previous victories just get erased?

The republic capital worlds did appear to get destroyed in the force awakens.

[Peelee]

The republic capital worlds did appear to get destroyed in the force awakens.

Aye, their government and fleet have been destroyed. Also Starkiller Base was destroyed but the First Order still has their government and fleet.

[Saph]

The republic capital worlds did appear to get destroyed in the force awakens.

What capital worlds? We saw the red super laser blow up five unnamed planets and a few unnamed ships. We're told that this is supposed to be a blow against the Republic but basically nothing else. If the Republic has even a fraction of the power and territory of the Empire, it should have a vast starfleet spread out throughout hundreds of naval bases. Instead it just vanishes. Meanwhile, the First Order is apparently totally unaffected by losing their death star planet.

I know you can come up with justifications for why this is supposed to make sense (and I'm sure the books and outside material try to do that) but it all just comes across as an incredibly lazy way to push a reset button on the universe. The Republic doesn't exist in Episode V, so it doesn't exist in Episode VIII either.

[Daimbert]

Aye, their government and fleet have been destroyed. Also Starkiller Base was destroyed but the First Order still has their government and fleet.

Still, since it's been something like a couple of days since then, claiming that the First Order reigns seems a bit much as opposed to saying that the Republic is in chaos and the FO could exploit that -- if they weren't sending a much bigger fleet than they needed to wipe out a small Resistance force.

Also, TFA itself is not clear that the Republic Fleet was wiped out, which then would require some explanation here.

[Narkis]

We see Leia’s frozen corpse in space. She then comes back to life and flies back into the ship. I just . . . what. It’s like they’re going out of their way to kill any possible emotional or story impact of anything in the movie.

What's worse is that Carrie Fisher had been dead for a year by the time the movie came out. They had the perfect excuse to write her out, and they didn't take it. Rian Johnson's vision would accept no detours.

Aye, their government and fleet have been destroyed. Also Starkiller Base was destroyed but the First Order still has their government and fleet.

We didn't know that from TFA. It could easily have been a Pearl Harbor moment, shaking the sleeping giant of the New Republic out of its complacency. And the First Order suffered a huge blow as well with the destruction of Starkiller. For all we knew, it could have been crippling as well.

[dancrilis]

What capital worlds? We saw the red super laser blow up five unnamed planets and a few unnamed ships.

General Hux stated right before it fired:
"This fierce machine which you have built, upon which we stand, will bring an end to the Senate! To their cherished fleet!"
Then it fires and destroys the planets and Finn reacts with:
"It was the Republic ... the First Order they did it".

We are expected to believe that the Republic ended and that its fleet was destroyed.

It makes no sense (I do have a theory that explains everything nice and neatly but it isn't confirmed in the movies), it is bad writing, it happens in a scene where the most memorably thing is 'light does not work that way - how are the characters seeing this!?' ... but it is an issue with The Force Awakens rather then with The Last Jedi which in this one case - this one possibly singular case - is not to blame for the nonsense (but that is just my opinion of course).

I look forward to your thoughts on the remainder of The Last Jedi (in my opinion you have seen what could be called the 'good' pieces of the movie - so if you decided to pack it in and just move to Rise of Skywalker I would not blame you).

[Narkis]

General Hux stated right before it fired:
"This fierce machine which you have built, upon which we stand, will bring an end to the Senate! To their cherished fleet!"
Then it fires and destroys the planets and Finn reacts with:
"It was the Republic ... the First Order they did it".

We are expected to believe that the Republic ended and that its fleet was destroyed.

It makes no sense (I do have a theory that explains everything nice and neatly but it isn't confirmed in the movies), it is bad writing, it happens in a scene where the most memorably thing is 'light does not work that way - how are the characters seeing this!?' ... but it is an issue with The Force Awakens rather then with The Last Jedi which in this one case - this one possibly singular case - is not to blame for the nonsense (but that is just my opinion of course).

I look forward to your thoughts on the remainder of The Last Jedi (in my opinion you have seen what could be called the 'good' pieces of the movie - so if you decided to pack it in and just move to Rise of Skywalker I would not blame you).

General Hux is not a reliable authority on anything. And Finn has been raised in First Order propaganda. TFA can been blamed for a lot of things, but Rian Johnson was the one who made the choice to begin his movie with "the First Order reigns" instead of "A sleeping giant has awaken. War has engulfed the galaxy once more".

[Peelee]

General Hux is not a reliable authority on anything.

Given that ancillary material states that Hux was 100% correct, I find this comment more than a little confusing.

[Narkis]

Given that ancillary material states that Hux was 100% correct, I find this comment more than a little confusing.

It might help if I clarified I have no interest in the new EU and I'm going from the movies only, where Hux is not exactly portrayed as a level-headed man concerned with the exact accuracy of his propaganda statements.

[Peelee]

It might help if I clarified I have no interest in the new EU and I'm going from the movies only, where Hux is not exactly portrayed as a level-headed man concerned with the exact accuracy of his propaganda statements.

Fair. In that case, the first lines of the opening crawl of The Last Jedi states that Hux was 100% correct, so I still find that comment more than a little confusing.