NeverarGreat is bringing up some great points. I think the very fact that so many people (at least that I have talked to) thought that Rose crashing into Finn made no sense proves this. Because they felt (as well as I) that the movie set them up for Finn making a successful sacrifice.
That’s just how they interpreted the scene, as well as how I did. Doesn’t make it more right than an alternate interpretation, but that is kind of how movies work. They are meant to provoke different opinions from people and readings of the same material.
The Last Jedi in my opinion, for that scene, presented it in a manner that set us up to be angry and puzzled with Rose’s decision. Just my reading of the scene.
I think most disagreements over TLJ originate from people presenting their interpretations of certain scenes as the only valid—and therefore obvious—interpretations, with any interpretations running counter to theirs being completely wrongheaded.
I’m not trying to say every scene has only one proper interpretation, but rather that your preconceptions of how the story should go color how you interpret a scene. Knowing this is Star Wars and the heroes don’t die, Finn’s life is never at risk and there is not chance of him destroying the weapon because he has to live for the next film. That is a Star Wars Trope. So watching that scene and expecting to see Finn die is not a reasonable expectation of the scene. The purpose of that scene was to show that during the course of this film, Finn went from trying to save Rey to trying to save the Resistance. He has gone from a runaway Stormtrooper to a full on Rebel. That was his character arc. Rose helped him on the arc and then rescued him when the arc was complete. The details in the movie back this up. A speeder needs speed to do damage. One of the things to notice is that his speeder is moving slower in the growing force of the beam. Finn is on a pointless suicide mission because he wants to save the day. When you look at all the things in the movie that indicate it is pointless, Rose saving him becomes very natural. It isn’t the only interpretation, but it is the one that fits what we see, his story arc, and what is normal for Star Wars.
Others have already explained why the opposite interpretation is also valid, so I won’t rehash that. If it were as clear as you suggest, viewers would be more uniform in their interpretation.
As far as Star Wars tropes and “what is normal for Star Wars”, the director doesn’t get to subvert expectations in one scene and then fall back on tropes in the next. In New Star Wars, vessels can hyperjump into other vessels to destroy them and characters can develop Force sensitivity into Yoda powers within weeks. Why should I expect anything I’ve seen before to hold up in this new universe?
Jay said:
The RT audience score stands at 46%. If it only succeeds as a film with people who watch films for a living, it failed.A self selecting poll heavily brigaded by angry fans. (Just for comparison, TPM has 55% audience rating). Yeah, no that has no basis in reality.
I’ll take something like Cinemascore over that, which is based on actual market research. They give it an A, so its definitely succeeding with the general public.
The debate over the validity of different scores was done to death in the official TLJ review thread, I believe. TLJ fans like to point to the RT critic score while insisting the audience score is gamed. The CinemaScore sampling method is also flawed because it’s mostly conducted close to the premiere and immediately after the audience leaves the theater, which means an audience with a higher number of hardcore fans and lack of time for reflection over what they saw can skew the results.
You can count me among those who enjoy TPM more than TLJ, by the way.
Many (if not most) films feature protagonists that have to learn hard lessons. TLJ is not alone in this regard, even among Star Wars films.
Execution aside, the idea that making a hero learn a lesson will alienate the audience isn’t one that really makes sense.
That’s not what NeverarGreat said. Luke learned plenty of lessons in the OT and he’s universally loved because of that arc. What some of us aren’t buying is his need to learn this particular lesson and that Rey was the one to teach it. Same thing with our other heroes.
The validity of a score that invites people to leave their opinion is only as valid as the source of the opinions. If a group engages in the process of loading such a score with bad reviews then it will be falsely low. It can just as easily be falsely high. In the case of TLJ, we know that there was an effort to bring down the score of the film. But in any case, the accuracy is in question. Rotten Tomatoes is only a vague indicator of quality. It is not a random poll of people who viewed the movie and so should not be considered in any way accurate.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the critic reviews are 90%. The audience reviews are at 46%. 73% of Google users liked it. The Roger Ebert site gave it 4 of 4. Amazon reviewers gave it 3 1/2 stars out of 5. It has 5.5k up votes on YouTube out of 7.5k votes. It has 4 out of 5 stars on Google Play. And it has a 85 on Metacritic. To me that says the 46% on Rotten Tomatoes is a false outlier. A proper audience appreciation score would be between 70% and 80%.
Without knowing how they weigh their scores, they’re all suspect. It’s my understanding that RT doesn’t include 1-star reviews in their average, for example. MetaCritic is just a composite of critics’ reviews. We’re talking about audiences here though, not critics. Looking at user reviews that are less prone to gaming, you cited Amazon (70%), YouTube (73%), and Google Play (80%). Not exactly stellar numbers, but decent enough for a Star Wars movie that’s not in the OT.