ChainsawAsh said:
I don’t, however, get this feeling from the “You talk first” bit at all. I’ve never understood the issue people have with that one.It’s a joke quite out of tone that makes fun of the main threat. I would also add it’s not funny. TFA is the less Star Wars movie of the bunch with the way dialogues are written all along. It’s not that the dialogues are that bad, it’s just most of the time they don’t “sound” Star Wars to me. AotC has bad dialogues, but they still sound Star Wars, for example. And during the entire running time of TFA you get this kind of “out of SW” dialogues, giving the feeling of a bad fan fiction (the very weak script and the way older characters interact with the story and th new characters quickly transform what seemed to be a quite fun ride into a painful experience… not even mentionning that JJ filmmaking is very 90’s tv series oriented and looks cheap).
So I totally get that “TFA dialogues” qualifies as “the worst thing in any SW film”. But yeah, it’s not a scene or a sequence.
I loved the “You talk first” line and thought it was very funny and perfectly in line with OT Star Wars humor. It also established Poe’s personality instantly.
I thought the crank call at the beginning of TLJ was dumb and not very funny.
To me these two things are comedically very different. The former is very quick and feels very screwball to me, which is more in keeping with quick-fire humorous dialogue in the OT. The latter relies on a much more modern frame of reference and dwells on the joke for a very long time. Calling him General “Hugs” seems like something a 10-year-old would do. Also, the setup for the crank call was confusing. He calls Hux and then pretends he can’t hear him and then says he’ll hold. That’s not usually how crank calls work.
The Last Jedi stops for comedic pauses, while the other films let their humor run with the story.
Like the “Reach out” gag. Both actors pause and slightly break character for the sake of a punchline.
Nothing to do about the quality of the jokes, just the style. The “Who talks first?” bit is the same, but it’s the only moment in TFA with that style, as far as I can remember.
I think you nailed down the difference between TLJ and it’s predecessors in terms of the differences in humor. The jokes aren’t necessarily worse (though I happen to think they are), but it’s more so their execution that makes them fall flat. The crank call joke stops the movie dead and leaves one of those “Uh oh! Awkard!” silences that are more popular in modern humor. Imagine if Han Solo’s “reactor leak” conversation from Star Wars was paced the same way as Poe’s crank call from TLJ. It would be terrible.