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Post #1226477

Author
ZkinandBonez
Parent topic
Has Star Wars finally "jumped the shark"?
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1226477/action/topic#1226477
Date created
17-Jul-2018, 1:55 PM

DominicCobb said:

ZkinandBonez said:

dahmage said:

ZkinandBonez said:

I’m curious as to how people would have reacted to the “flying Leia” scene had something similar been done back in the 80’s. I really think this scene has the most polarized reactions in the entirety of TLJ. Some people love it, and others think it’s complete nonsense. Even my first reaction was “is this brilliant or silly?”. Maybe it’s the obvious CG-look of the moment that puts people off?

Or maybe it’s the fact that many anticipated a Leia death scene,

then all of a sudden she “flies” back to safety (it’s pretty jarring the first time). Or maybe GotG vol.2 was still to fresh in people’s memory and all they could think of was Yondu’s Mary Poppins scene.

I personally think it’s a really interesting idea, but I can’t help but find the execution of the scene to be a tad off. It’s the wide-shot of her flying (this shot) that weirds me out a bit. But none of this makes it a “bad” scene in my mind. Plus, it’s a scene that to me gets less weird the more I watch it, though I can’t tell if that’s a good or bad sign.

emphasis mine, i agree with much of your post, but that part stands out, and i think it is impossible for most of us to effectively gauge what our subconscious was doing as we watched this, but i strongly suspect that our collective thought was “ok, this is how she dies”, and then we were all wrong.

That’s exactly what I thought the first time I saw TLJ, so when her hand suddenly started twitching and her eyes opened it really caught me off guard. It’s a scene I didn’t really appreciate until I saw it a second time. For me that actually applies to all of the new films; I don’t properly watch them on their own terms until I sew it a second time.

I think the Internet has shifted a lot of the focus on the actual production of movies, and as a result we’re simply watching movies differently than before. Nowadays we expect so much beforhand, and there’s such a diverse range of opinions, preferences and pre-suppositions. Back in the 80s people really just wanted more SW. Now people want their interpretation of what SW should be. And of course there’s no established template for what that is.

This feels spot on. I had a similar experience watching TFA the first time where I had trouble accepting what it actually was trying to do and didn’t fully love it until my second viewing. Didn’t make the same mistake with TLJ and went in with no expectations and allowed it to tell the story it wanted to tell. Loved it right away.

The new SW movies have really taught me the importance of not projecting your own ideas onto movies and judge them on their own terms. I still have issues with certain things, but I now try to only judge the quality of the filmmaking.