DrDre

DominicCobb said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

Palpatine wasn’t someone of influence until the prequels, and we got to witness him dismantle the Republic throughout the PT in great detail. With Snoke it’s sort of an afterthought. The guy undid everything our heroes fought for somehow, but that’s not considered to be of importance, apparently. It appears to me, that what mattered most is giving us a redux of the OT conflict, and the OT aesthetic with different characters.

That isn’t an accurate assessment of the galactic situation. It is clear from the setup in TFA that the Republic is not very strong and that the great Republic of old has not been recreated. So what our heroes were fighting for in the OT has never been finished. If you look at history this is what often happens. The first government formed after a revolution doesn’t last. Usually it falls and is replaced with something else until that falls and something stronger rises in its place. All we have on the First Order is they rose from the ashes of the Empire. Clearly the production is an indication that Snoke ended up in control of an old Imperial shipyard. Who Snoke is makes little difference to the overall story. That he was there at the right time and place to create the First Order is all that matters. The rest is just filler.

That he was there “at the right time” is contrived, and diminishes the entire story arc of the OT imo. The writers just pushed the reset button and pulled another “Sith Lord” out of thin air to get us right back at the start of ANH. The New Republic is a token effort, just like stating that Kylo Ren and Snoke are not Sith Lords. The New Republic is just there to be blown away, and never seen again, such that the Resistance can become the rebels, and the FO the Empire, whilst Kylo Ren and Snoke are completely indistuinguishable from their Sith counterparts. Lucas spent an entire trilogy exploring how a democracy got turned into an Empire, whilst setting up the rivalry between the Jedi and the Sith, and showing how a young Jedi turns into a Sith Lord. The ST gives us very little context, and makes very little effort to show us how and why we’re right back at square one after two trilogies of seeing an Empire rise and fall. Meanwhile Kylo Ren is just evil, because he’s a bad egg, I guess. He’s given zero motivation for turning to the dark side. Snoke had won his heart is all we get, and Luke apparently pushed him over the edge, because that’s what Jedi do, when you need another Darth Vader.

While the story works fairly well seen on its own terms, in my view it simply doesn’t flow very well from the first six films, and clearly isn’t very original, in that it recycles an awful lot from the OT both visually and narratively. The fact that so many things are left unexplained, and unexplored only reinforces this. Snoke is thus just another Emperor redux like so many other things the ST “borrowed” from the OT. This is the real issue here. By giving Snoke an original backstory, and by making him distuinguishable from the Sith Lords that proceeded him the entire events of the ST are elevated, because it adds history and context, thus allowing the Star Wars universe and mythology to grow beyond simply rehashing what Lucas and his contemporaries did better some four decades earlier.

After six films of stories and events just plunging us into another OT inspired conflict with little context to connect the dots is not going to work for many people, because they are already too invested in the universe, and the characters. Saying Snoke is used not very differently from the Emperor in the OT, is not a defense, but an admission of guilt, because it ignores the fact, that we have had fourty years of story developments, and world building since that time. If the OT’s resolution is important, then how that happy ending got unraveled is as well. To say, that it doesn’t really matter how Snoke and the FO got to undermine the New Republic, and why the New Republic allowed itself to be overrun, is to say that the OT’s resolutions aren’t very important, because another Sith Lord can be pulled from behind the curtain to undo it anyway to extend the conflict ad nauseam. By extension this also undermines the resolution of the ST, because of the precedent it creates. The next writer can just create another Sith Lord from whole cloth, create the Second Order from the ashes of its predecessors, and have Rey moping on another island, such that the next false prophet can repeat the cycle, no explanation required. The Star Wars saga has thus become the movie equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.

I was pointing out that in the pre-PT world we had virtually nothing on Palpatine. The two characters are not very similar other than a lack of background the first time they are seen. And a lot of the ST is based on what they did in the old EU/Legends. Building a new Republic was not easy and they had to content with remnants of the Empire, like Thrawn. The Disney era Star Wars movies have been getting a lot of inspiration from the Legends books, though they are not really repeating anything. Knowing what happened in Legends, though I didn’t read most of them, really puts the sequels in perspective. Where you are seeing as parallels to the original, I see more parallels to Legends. Snoke has more in common with Trawn in many respects. And Snoke and his New Order have advanced things and created new technology where Trawn was fighting with left overs. But then that is a difference between 10 and 30 years after ROTJ. But the ST was always going to be about the next generation of the Skywalker family and I suspect that Ben/Kylo is going to end up with a very unique journey. If JJ and Rian have both been working off the same arc for the characters, which seems likely, then the third act is going to make this a very different trilogy from the last two. The OT was about taking down the bad guys, the PT was about the rise of the bad guys. The ST seems to be about finding the balance again. And that feels like a GL plot line. His prophesy of the chosen one bringing balance to the force seems like the core idea of what we are aiming for now. GL always denied that the force should be like ying/yang, but what Rian did in TLJ was very much ying/yang in nature, down to the image on the floor of the cave. It seems to be the answer to Luke’s unanswered quest of how to keep students from falling to the dark side.

And as for parallels, the PT very much paralleled the OT so I don’t see the ST following suit as much of an issue.

How does Snoke have more in common with Thrawn? The only commonality is, that Snoke took control of Imperial remnants. Other than that Snoke is a dark side user like Palpatine, with a former Jedi apprentice, that he seduced to the darkside, like Palpatine. He physically resembles Palpatine with a deformed body, and even gets to repeat many of Palpatine’s lines from ROTJ, after which he gets killed by his apprentice like Palpatine, because of his arrogance, and his belief that he cannot be betrayed like Palpatine.

The PT had a number of parallels with the OT, but that’s nothing compared to the ST. The PT was aesthetically and narratively totally different from the OT. The ST tells the same basic story as the OT with the same aesthetics (albeit a bit modernized), where a small band of rebels have to defeat an overwhelming Force oppressing the galaxy, and a Jedi prodigy has to seek out the help of a Jedi master to defeat a former Jedi student, who has fallen to the dark side, and is now under the influence of a dark lord.

Palpatine seized power through cunning. Snoke and Thrawn through luck and being in the right place at the right time. Palpatine took over the core of the Republic and turned it into an empire. Snoke and Trawn take over a tiny slice and build it into something to threaten the New Republic with. I see none of Palpatine’s cunning in Snoke and all of Trawn’s arrogance. If you want to focus on the force side, Snoke can’t even properly turn Ben to the dark side. He’s not even evil enough to kill his mother. Kylo Ren is not Darth Vader. And Snoke isn’t thrown into a chasm, he is cut in half by a light saber. And Kylo isn’t trying to save Rey from Snoke, Snoke thinks he knows Kylo and fails to read his deception where there was no attempt at deception from Vader. Only in the very broadest of strokes does the PT resemble the OT, but when you get down to the details it is a very different story with very different motives and agendas. In ROTJ, Vader killing Palpatine was the end of the story. Kylo killing Snoke is only the middle of the story. The similarities of TLJ to both TESB and ROTJ were not lost on me, but I found the blending to be intriguing because it leaves me wondering where they are going to go next. In the OT at this point Vader was dead and the Empire destroyed. We are at a very different place. Snoke is dead and Kylo Ren is very much alive. But which side is he on? How will his story play out now? We are way beyond any parallel with the OT at this point. The parallels have been minor at best. More structural than story. What confrontation will Rey and Kylo have in the next film? It is uncharted ground and that is what makes the ST different and unique.

Spot on. I’ll say that how Snoke got his power simply isn’t relevant to the story that’s being told. It is, of course, very relevant to the story of “what happened after ROTJ,” but that’s not 100% what the ST is about - it’s just as much it’s own story as it is a continuation.

The story being told has nine chapters, not three. For all the PT’s failings, Lucas told one overarching story with overarching themes. The ST feels tacked on, because it does not respect several of the overarching themes Lucas introduced in his six part saga, whilst also providing very little narrative glue to connect the last trilogy to the previous two. If the ST tells its own story, which is only very weakly connected to the previous trilogies in a continuity sense, then don’t call it episode IX of a larger story, I would say. Just tell your own story, and let the classic characters keep their happy ending.

I sympathize with those who expected TFA to be a direct sequel to ROTJ, but ultimately I personally don’t have any issues with their approach. The ST starts in media res with a lot of unknown happenings in the intervening years - in this way it much more accurately simulates the experience of watching the OT first, rather than the PT then the OT. Which I appreciate. I like that the trilogies are separated by more than just time - they tell different stories and some of the in-between needn’t be spelled out.

Well I do, if you’re going to continue Lucas’ story, then continue Lucas’ story. Don’t do a soft reboot and give us a remix of the OT. It’s a lot more difficult to tell an original new story, that respects the themes set out by Lucas, but that’s what a lot of critics were expecting. As it is now, a lot of people feel the classic characters’ arcs, and their victories were sacrificed, such that the new characters can relive many of the previous generation’s successes. The most original story element to come out of this thusfar, is Kylo Ren becoming the Emperor, and we’ll just have to see where they take his story. However, considering RJ’s decision to have both Luke, Leia, and Rey give up on the idea, that Ben Solo can be redeemed, the conclusion of the nine episode saga seems to be heading towards rebels defeat the Empire (again), but without the emotional backbone of a close family relation redeeming another in the process. In other words the nine episode saga will be emotionally a lot less satisfying to many than the original six episode saga. That would be a pretty hefty price to pay for a narratively unnecessary saga extension with diminished returns. So, I don’t envy Abrams. It’s up to him to bring balance to the Star Wars saga, and to get the fans that TLJ alienated back into the fold, since I don’t see the rift in the fanbase as a good thing personally, no matter what anyone might think of TLJ. I certainly hope, that episode IX will be liked by both fans and critics of TLJ, and that perhaps some of the critics like me will have more appreciation for TLJ when seen through the prism of the closing chapter of the saga.

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

Palpatine wasn’t someone of influence until the prequels, and we got to witness him dismantle the Republic throughout the PT in great detail. With Snoke it’s sort of an afterthought. The guy undid everything our heroes fought for somehow, but that’s not considered to be of importance, apparently. It appears to me, that what mattered most is giving us a redux of the OT conflict, and the OT aesthetic with different characters.

That isn’t an accurate assessment of the galactic situation. It is clear from the setup in TFA that the Republic is not very strong and that the great Republic of old has not been recreated. So what our heroes were fighting for in the OT has never been finished. If you look at history this is what often happens. The first government formed after a revolution doesn’t last. Usually it falls and is replaced with something else until that falls and something stronger rises in its place. All we have on the First Order is they rose from the ashes of the Empire. Clearly the production is an indication that Snoke ended up in control of an old Imperial shipyard. Who Snoke is makes little difference to the overall story. That he was there at the right time and place to create the First Order is all that matters. The rest is just filler.

That he was there “at the right time” is contrived, and diminishes the entire story arc of the OT imo. The writers just pushed the reset button and pulled another “Sith Lord” out of thin air to get us right back at the start of ANH. The New Republic is a token effort, just like stating that Kylo Ren and Snoke are not Sith Lords. The New Republic is just there to be blown away, and never seen again, such that the Resistance can become the rebels, and the FO the Empire, whilst Kylo Ren and Snoke are completely indistuinguishable from their Sith counterparts. Lucas spent an entire trilogy exploring how a democracy got turned into an Empire, whilst setting up the rivalry between the Jedi and the Sith, and showing how a young Jedi turns into a Sith Lord. The ST gives us very little context, and makes very little effort to show us how and why we’re right back at square one after two trilogies of seeing an Empire rise and fall. Meanwhile Kylo Ren is just evil, because he’s a bad egg, I guess. He’s given zero motivation for turning to the dark side. Snoke had won his heart is all we get, and Luke apparently pushed him over the edge, because that’s what Jedi do, when you need another Darth Vader.

While the story works fairly well seen on its own terms, in my view it simply doesn’t flow very well from the first six films, and clearly isn’t very original, in that it recycles an awful lot from the OT both visually and narratively. The fact that so many things are left unexplained, and unexplored only reinforces this. Snoke is thus just another Emperor redux like so many other things the ST “borrowed” from the OT. This is the real issue here. By giving Snoke an original backstory, and by making him distuinguishable from the Sith Lords that proceeded him the entire events of the ST are elevated, because it adds history and context, thus allowing the Star Wars universe and mythology to grow beyond simply rehashing what Lucas and his contemporaries did better some four decades earlier.

After six films of stories and events just plunging us into another OT inspired conflict with little context to connect the dots is not going to work for many people, because they are already too invested in the universe, and the characters. Saying Snoke is used not very differently from the Emperor in the OT, is not a defense, but an admission of guilt, because it ignores the fact, that we have had fourty years of story developments, and world building since that time. If the OT’s resolution is important, then how that happy ending got unraveled is as well. To say, that it doesn’t really matter how Snoke and the FO got to undermine the New Republic, and why the New Republic allowed itself to be overrun, is to say that the OT’s resolutions aren’t very important, because another Sith Lord can be pulled from behind the curtain to undo it anyway to extend the conflict ad nauseam. By extension this also undermines the resolution of the ST, because of the precedent it creates. The next writer can just create another Sith Lord from whole cloth, create the Second Order from the ashes of its predecessors, and have Rey moping on another island, such that the next false prophet can repeat the cycle, no explanation required. The Star Wars saga has thus become the movie equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.

I was pointing out that in the pre-PT world we had virtually nothing on Palpatine. The two characters are not very similar other than a lack of background the first time they are seen. And a lot of the ST is based on what they did in the old EU/Legends. Building a new Republic was not easy and they had to content with remnants of the Empire, like Thrawn. The Disney era Star Wars movies have been getting a lot of inspiration from the Legends books, though they are not really repeating anything. Knowing what happened in Legends, though I didn’t read most of them, really puts the sequels in perspective. Where you are seeing as parallels to the original, I see more parallels to Legends. Snoke has more in common with Trawn in many respects. And Snoke and his New Order have advanced things and created new technology where Trawn was fighting with left overs. But then that is a difference between 10 and 30 years after ROTJ. But the ST was always going to be about the next generation of the Skywalker family and I suspect that Ben/Kylo is going to end up with a very unique journey. If JJ and Rian have both been working off the same arc for the characters, which seems likely, then the third act is going to make this a very different trilogy from the last two. The OT was about taking down the bad guys, the PT was about the rise of the bad guys. The ST seems to be about finding the balance again. And that feels like a GL plot line. His prophesy of the chosen one bringing balance to the force seems like the core idea of what we are aiming for now. GL always denied that the force should be like ying/yang, but what Rian did in TLJ was very much ying/yang in nature, down to the image on the floor of the cave. It seems to be the answer to Luke’s unanswered quest of how to keep students from falling to the dark side.

And as for parallels, the PT very much paralleled the OT so I don’t see the ST following suit as much of an issue.

How does Snoke have more in common with Thrawn? The only commonality is, that Snoke took control of Imperial remnants. Other than that Snoke is a dark side user like Palpatine, with a former Jedi apprentice, that he seduced to the darkside, like Palpatine. He physically resembles Palpatine with a deformed body, and even gets to repeat many of Palpatine’s lines from ROTJ, after which he gets killed by his apprentice like Palpatine, because of his arrogance, and his belief that he cannot be betrayed like Palpatine.

The PT had a number of parallels with the OT, but that’s nothing compared to the ST. The PT was aesthetically and narratively totally different from the OT. The ST tells the same basic story as the OT with the same aesthetics (albeit a bit modernized), where a small band of rebels have to defeat an overwhelming Force oppressing the galaxy, and a Jedi prodigy has to seek out the help of a Jedi master to defeat a former Jedi student, who has fallen to the dark side, and is now under the influence of a dark lord.

Palpatine seized power through cunning. Snoke and Thrawn through luck and being in the right place at the right time. Palpatine took over the core of the Republic and turned it into an empire. Snoke and Trawn take over a tiny slice and build it into something to threaten the New Republic with. I see none of Palpatine’s cunning in Snoke and all of Trawn’s arrogance.

Since we know nothing about Snoke, he essentially has no character, or history beyond his relationship with Kylo Ren. As such, the idea that Snoke does not have Palpatine’s cunning is literally based on nothing, as Snoke’s character is nothing more than a plot device in the service of Kylo Ren’s character arc. So, Snoke is essentially little more than the OT’s Emperor with a condensed character arc. The difference between Snoke’s arc, and Palpatine’s is solely in Kylo Ren’s motivations for killing his master.

If you want to focus on the force side, Snoke can’t even properly turn Ben to the dark side. He’s not even evil enough to kill his mother. Kylo Ren is not Darth Vader. And Snoke isn’t thrown into a chasm, he is cut in half by a light saber. And Kylo isn’t trying to save Rey from Snoke, Snoke thinks he knows Kylo and fails to read his deception where there was no attempt at deception from Vader.

One might argue Vader isn’t evil enough to kill his son, and like Kylo he is conflicted in ROTJ, and both Palpatine and Snoke take notice. Whilst Palpatine doesn’t berate Vader, and only wonders if the Dark Lord’s feelings are clear, the sentiment is the same. Also lets not forget, that Kylo did kill his father. Both masters are aware of a weakness in their apprentices, and both are arrogant enough to believe, that they cannot be betrayed. Then there’s the fact that Vader also plotted against his master in TESB. So, in my view most of the essential elements that TLJ uses to tell its story are borrowed from the OT. The plot is more condensed, because TLJ provides a remix of both TESB, and ROTJ, whilst adding a few twists, but the story remains the OT with a few twists, and not its own story in my view.

Only in the very broadest of strokes does the PT resemble the OT, but when you get down to the details it is a very different story with very different motives and agendas. In ROTJ, Vader killing Palpatine was the end of the story. Kylo killing Snoke is only the middle of the story. The similarities of TLJ to both TESB and ROTJ were not lost on me, but I found the blending to be intriguing because it leaves me wondering where they are going to go next. In the OT at this point Vader was dead and the Empire destroyed. We are at a very different place. Snoke is dead and Kylo Ren is very much alive. But which side is he on? How will his story play out now? We are way beyond any parallel with the OT at this point. The parallels have been minor at best. More structural than story. What confrontation will Rey and Kylo have in the next film? It is uncharted ground and that is what makes the ST different and unique.

Yeah, but to me it’s very faint praise to suggest that finally after two installments of mostly rehashing, and remixing the OT’s story threads in a condensed form, we might finally get a mostly original story in episode IX, which for me is too little, too late.

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

Palpatine wasn’t someone of influence until the prequels, and we got to witness him dismantle the Republic throughout the PT in great detail. With Snoke it’s sort of an afterthought. The guy undid everything our heroes fought for somehow, but that’s not considered to be of importance, apparently. It appears to me, that what mattered most is giving us a redux of the OT conflict, and the OT aesthetic with different characters.

That isn’t an accurate assessment of the galactic situation. It is clear from the setup in TFA that the Republic is not very strong and that the great Republic of old has not been recreated. So what our heroes were fighting for in the OT has never been finished. If you look at history this is what often happens. The first government formed after a revolution doesn’t last. Usually it falls and is replaced with something else until that falls and something stronger rises in its place. All we have on the First Order is they rose from the ashes of the Empire. Clearly the production is an indication that Snoke ended up in control of an old Imperial shipyard. Who Snoke is makes little difference to the overall story. That he was there at the right time and place to create the First Order is all that matters. The rest is just filler.

That he was there “at the right time” is contrived, and diminishes the entire story arc of the OT imo. The writers just pushed the reset button and pulled another “Sith Lord” out of thin air to get us right back at the start of ANH. The New Republic is a token effort, just like stating that Kylo Ren and Snoke are not Sith Lords. The New Republic is just there to be blown away, and never seen again, such that the Resistance can become the rebels, and the FO the Empire, whilst Kylo Ren and Snoke are completely indistuinguishable from their Sith counterparts. Lucas spent an entire trilogy exploring how a democracy got turned into an Empire, whilst setting up the rivalry between the Jedi and the Sith, and showing how a young Jedi turns into a Sith Lord. The ST gives us very little context, and makes very little effort to show us how and why we’re right back at square one after two trilogies of seeing an Empire rise and fall. Meanwhile Kylo Ren is just evil, because he’s a bad egg, I guess. He’s given zero motivation for turning to the dark side. Snoke had won his heart is all we get, and Luke apparently pushed him over the edge, because that’s what Jedi do, when you need another Darth Vader.

While the story works fairly well seen on its own terms, in my view it simply doesn’t flow very well from the first six films, and clearly isn’t very original, in that it recycles an awful lot from the OT both visually and narratively. The fact that so many things are left unexplained, and unexplored only reinforces this. Snoke is thus just another Emperor redux like so many other things the ST “borrowed” from the OT. This is the real issue here. By giving Snoke an original backstory, and by making him distuinguishable from the Sith Lords that proceeded him the entire events of the ST are elevated, because it adds history and context, thus allowing the Star Wars universe and mythology to grow beyond simply rehashing what Lucas and his contemporaries did better some four decades earlier.

After six films of stories and events just plunging us into another OT inspired conflict with little context to connect the dots is not going to work for many people, because they are already too invested in the universe, and the characters. Saying Snoke is used not very differently from the Emperor in the OT, is not a defense, but an admission of guilt, because it ignores the fact, that we have had fourty years of story developments, and world building since that time. If the OT’s resolution is important, then how that happy ending got unraveled is as well. To say, that it doesn’t really matter how Snoke and the FO got to undermine the New Republic, and why the New Republic allowed itself to be overrun, is to say that the OT’s resolutions aren’t very important, because another Sith Lord can be pulled from behind the curtain to undo it anyway to extend the conflict ad nauseam. By extension this also undermines the resolution of the ST, because of the precedent it creates. The next writer can just create another Sith Lord from whole cloth, create the Second Order from the ashes of its predecessors, and have Rey moping on another island, such that the next false prophet can repeat the cycle, no explanation required. The Star Wars saga has thus become the movie equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.

I was pointing out that in the pre-PT world we had virtually nothing on Palpatine. The two characters are not very similar other than a lack of background the first time they are seen. And a lot of the ST is based on what they did in the old EU/Legends. Building a new Republic was not easy and they had to content with remnants of the Empire, like Thrawn. The Disney era Star Wars movies have been getting a lot of inspiration from the Legends books, though they are not really repeating anything. Knowing what happened in Legends, though I didn’t read most of them, really puts the sequels in perspective. Where you are seeing as parallels to the original, I see more parallels to Legends. Snoke has more in common with Trawn in many respects. And Snoke and his New Order have advanced things and created new technology where Trawn was fighting with left overs. But then that is a difference between 10 and 30 years after ROTJ. But the ST was always going to be about the next generation of the Skywalker family and I suspect that Ben/Kylo is going to end up with a very unique journey. If JJ and Rian have both been working off the same arc for the characters, which seems likely, then the third act is going to make this a very different trilogy from the last two. The OT was about taking down the bad guys, the PT was about the rise of the bad guys. The ST seems to be about finding the balance again. And that feels like a GL plot line. His prophesy of the chosen one bringing balance to the force seems like the core idea of what we are aiming for now. GL always denied that the force should be like ying/yang, but what Rian did in TLJ was very much ying/yang in nature, down to the image on the floor of the cave. It seems to be the answer to Luke’s unanswered quest of how to keep students from falling to the dark side.

And as for parallels, the PT very much paralleled the OT so I don’t see the ST following suit as much of an issue.

How does Snoke have more in common with Thrawn? The only commonality is, that Snoke took control of Imperial remnants. Other than that Snoke is a dark side user like Palpatine, with a former Jedi apprentice, that he seduced to the darkside, like Palpatine. He physically resembles Palpatine with a deformed body, and even gets to repeat many of Palpatine’s lines from ROTJ, after which he gets killed by his apprentice like Palpatine, because of his arrogance, and his belief that he cannot be betrayed like Palpatine.

The PT had a number of parallels with the OT, but that’s nothing compared to the ST. The PT was aesthetically and narratively totally different from the OT. The ST tells the same basic story as the OT with the same aesthetics (albeit a bit modernized), where a small band of rebels have to defeat an overwhelming Force oppressing the galaxy, and a Jedi prodigy has to seek out the help of a Jedi master to defeat a former Jedi student, who has fallen to the dark side, and is now under the influence of a dark lord.

Collipso said:

i have no problem with the holdo plot at all, in fact it might be the one i like the most. i really liked her character, and how she interacted with poe. i do wish she was given more reason to say “i like him” when he’s unconscious, but it’s fine. the canto bight plot is not as interesting or as well executed to me, and while the jedi plot is by far the best, rey is just so annoying to me, to a point where i lost interest in that particular part of the story halfway through.

and when we got to that fourth act i really started to feel the 2 and a half hours.

but it’s a good movie. i think i’m going to get my blu ray this week, and finally rewatch it on the weekend.

Haha, I got the bluray and the 4K bluray myself. I enjoy it for the most part on its own terms. It’s beautiful to look at, and I especially enjoy Mark Hamill’s performance. I personally feel the most clever part of the film is the skype sessions between Rey and Ben, which allowed Rey to stay on Ach-To, whilst she and Ben had some interesting character development. I personally would have had a lot of respect for RJ, if he had let Rey, and Ben join forces, whilst leaving it in the middle, whether Ben joined Rey’s side, or Rey joined Ben’s side. That would have been some unique plot twist, that would have kept people guessing for the next two years.

TV’s Frink said:

SilverWook said:

I don’t recall much of the media hype around the movie anymore.

Really? I seem to remember it getting a ton of hate. Mostly well deserved.

It has been a long time now I guess.

I don’t remember it getting a lot of hate from the media. The movie got mixed reviews with most reviewers agreeing, that Lucas had become too enamoured with digital effects, whilst not spending enough time on story and character. The general consensus seemed to be, that most felt Lucas was a bit rusty not having directed for over a decade. As with TLJ the hate came from a section of the fanbase with sites like “Jar Jar must die” and such being created. Certain media outlets were reporting on the perceived racial stereotypes, but I don’t remember it being that big to be honest.

NeverarGreat said:

TV’s Frink said:

SilverWook said:

We have a forum for such things.
https://originaltrilogy.com/discussion/Feedback-Forum/id/5

I’m pretty sure, based on past responses, it would be a waste of time.

They have top men working on it.

Who?

I personally would be very interested in discovering what defines the film like look. Between the early home video releases, and the current digital restorations created directly from the negative, I have struggled a lot trying to get contrast and saturation at the right levels. In the case of Star Wars what makes that film 1970s in terms of its look, and feel, and how do you avoid the pitfall of essentially turning a restoration or color grading into something that is mostly driven by modern tastes?

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

Palpatine wasn’t someone of influence until the prequels, and we got to witness him dismantle the Republic throughout the PT in great detail. With Snoke it’s sort of an afterthought. The guy undid everything our heroes fought for somehow, but that’s not considered to be of importance, apparently. It appears to me, that what mattered most is giving us a redux of the OT conflict, and the OT aesthetic with different characters.

That isn’t an accurate assessment of the galactic situation. It is clear from the setup in TFA that the Republic is not very strong and that the great Republic of old has not been recreated. So what our heroes were fighting for in the OT has never been finished. If you look at history this is what often happens. The first government formed after a revolution doesn’t last. Usually it falls and is replaced with something else until that falls and something stronger rises in its place. All we have on the First Order is they rose from the ashes of the Empire. Clearly the production is an indication that Snoke ended up in control of an old Imperial shipyard. Who Snoke is makes little difference to the overall story. That he was there at the right time and place to create the First Order is all that matters. The rest is just filler.

That he was there “at the right time” is contrived, and diminishes the entire story arc of the OT imo. The writers just pushed the reset button and pulled another “Sith Lord” out of thin air to get us right back at the start of ANH. The New Republic is a token effort, just like stating that Kylo Ren and Snoke are not Sith Lords. The New Republic is just there to be blown away, and never seen again, such that the Resistance can become the rebels, and the FO the Empire, whilst Kylo Ren and Snoke are completely indistuinguishable from their Sith counterparts. Lucas spent an entire trilogy exploring how a democracy got turned into an Empire, whilst setting up the rivalry between the Jedi and the Sith, and showing how a young Jedi turns into a Sith Lord. The ST gives us very little context, and makes very little effort to show us how and why we’re right back at square one after two trilogies of seeing an Empire rise and fall. Meanwhile Kylo Ren is just evil, because he’s a bad egg, I guess. He’s given zero motivation for turning to the dark side. Snoke had won his heart is all we get, and Luke apparently pushed him over the edge, because that’s what Jedi do, when you need another Darth Vader.

While the story works fairly well seen on its own terms, in my view it simply doesn’t flow very well from the first six films, and clearly isn’t very original, in that it recycles an awful lot from the OT both visually and narratively. The fact that so many things are left unexplained, and unexplored only reinforces this. Snoke is thus just another Emperor redux like so many other things the ST “borrowed” from the OT. This is the real issue here. By giving Snoke an original backstory, and by making him distuinguishable from the Sith Lords that proceeded him the entire events of the ST are elevated, because it adds history and context, thus allowing the Star Wars universe and mythology to grow beyond simply rehashing what Lucas and his contemporaries did better some four decades earlier.

After six films of stories and events just plunging us into another OT inspired conflict with little context to connect the dots is not going to work for many people, because they are already too invested in the universe, and the characters. Saying Snoke is used not very differently from the Emperor in the OT, is not a defense, but an admission of guilt, because it ignores the fact, that we have had fourty years of story developments, and world building since that time. If the OT’s resolution is important, then how that happy ending got unraveled is as well. To say, that it doesn’t really matter how Snoke and the FO got to undermine the New Republic, and why the New Republic allowed itself to be overrun, is to say that the OT’s resolutions aren’t very important, because another Sith Lord can be pulled from behind the curtain to undo it anyway to extend the conflict ad nauseam. By extension this also undermines the resolution of the ST, because of the precedent it creates. The next writer can just create another Sith Lord from whole cloth, create the Second Order from the ashes of its predecessors, and have Rey moping on another island, such that the next false prophet can repeat the cycle, no explanation required. The Star Wars saga has thus become the movie equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.

The funny thing is, that despite all my misgivings about TLJ, I still enjoy it on some level, and it has several really great moments, that rank with some of Star Wars best for me.

Collipso said:

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

but it is. in Star Wars, it’s simply said that there’s an empire and there’s an emperor and that they’re evil. we have no reason to question such setting, it’s simply the setting the story is set on.

the problem with the ST in that regard imo is that the empire is defeated at the end of RotJ. the next time we see the galaxy (in TFA and TLJ), the empire’s back, the rebels are the underdogs again for some reason (even though they were victorious the last time we saw them)… so all of this begs some questions. how did we get here from the point we were on in RotJ?

it’d be like going from the ending of TPM straight into SW. it’d make no sense and we’d need some sort of backstory, which in this hypothetical case would be AotC and RotS.

Well put!

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Well, I disagree entirely. First off, it is obvious we are supposed to side with Poe. Holdo is expecting Poe to follow orders. That he doesn’t is not surprising because she doesn’t share what she is doing. And ultimately it is Poe who turns Holdo’s cunning plan into a disaster. Poe sends Finn and Rose off to solve the problem his way. A daring venture full of risks with a possible payoff. But because they do not find the hacker that Maz recommends (probably because he can be trusted) and they end up with DJ and DJ learns of Holdo’s plan, when the mission goes sour he uses that to get himself out of trouble. As a result most of the resistance is destroyed, rather than losing the one ship and hiding out on Crait until someone came to get them. Poe is a hotshot pilot but that is not what makes a leader. Knowing when to not be the hotshot and play it safe is the lesson he needed and he got it the hard way. However the movie makes it very clear that if he hadn’t gone ahead and destroyed the dreadnaught at the beginning, it would have wiped them out later. So his first reckless act that he got demoted for turned out to be the right thing to do at the time, but after the fallout, Poe is making wiser decisions. Not bad for a character Abrams almost killed off.

That story line is full of old war movie tropes. How Holdo treats Poe, how Poe reacts, and how he learns. That may not be your real world experience, but it is many people’s. And Holdo doesn’t seem like she is much of a people person. One of those who rose to command through brilliant tactics. She obviously is a friend of Leia’s. So her tough treatment of Poe makes a lot of sense. Military methods of leadership are not the same as private sector methods. The military needs people who will follow orders without question plus brilliant strategists. So using civilian leadership techniques to critique a military interaction doesn’t work well. The same rules don’t apply. There is a reason why the traditional drill sergeant is tough and gruff. Dressing down a subordinate in a military setting isn’t about their well being, it is about their discipline and willingness to follow orders. In a military setting you need someone who will not panic and will act on their training no matter the price. In a civilian setting an employee’s life is rarely on the line and you rarely need blind obedience. So it is comparing apples to oranges.

So both on the writing side and on the realism side, this part of the story reflects some brilliant writing. I find the entire movie to be brilliant. I love it more the more I watch it. And it is definitely very Star Wars. War movies and samurai movies were very much a part of the original trilogy and Rian Johnson captured that part far better than Abrams did in TFA. I watched Twelve O’Clock High and Three Outlaw Samurai after I heard they, plus To Catch A Thief, were classics Rian Johnson was watching to prepare for this movie. Three brilliant films that definitely had an influence.

Maybe you should read the link I posted from someone with actual military experience, who makes it very clear, that in his military experience Holdo is not a good leader, both from the perspective of how she deals with Poe, and from the perspective of her strategy with regards to the FO. Being in the military is about more than following orders, and being a military leader is about more than forcing your will onto someone, or expecting people to blindly follow orders. The fact is that her leadership resulted in a mutiny, because she didn’t communicate her strategy in a highly tense, and life threatening situation. She has final responsibility, and she failed to communicate her plans even when Poe relieved her of her command at gun point.

Have you seen Twelve O’Clock High? If not then we are coming from different places. I have no personal military experience, only historical research related to WWII, the Indian Wars and the Civil War. Plus a crapload of war and military movies. First off, a superior officer does not have to tell those under them the plans or the reasons for the plans. That isn’t how chain of command works. I did briefly work under a police chief who was a stickler for chain of command and while the police and military do things somewhat differently, certain concepts are identical. One is the chain of command. Twelve O’clock High is directly about a superior officer who must earn the trust of the men under him when he assumes command after a beloved but inept commander has been removed. It has a lot of other things in it. Plus many of the other things are echoes in Three Outlaw Samurai and many other WWII and Saumurai movies. Twelve O’Clock High in particular was made with the full cooperation of the US Military.

And while I know that not everyone still abide by the old strict chain of command structure, that is one thing that drives Twelve O’Clock High. The removed commander doesn’t follow the book and has a horrible unit while the replacement is by the book, makes some enemies, and turns the unit into one of the best - increasing efficiency and reducing casualties. So I think that movie in itself and the wisdom of our military training programs it represents, whether they are currently adhered to or not, is more relevant than what a single person who has served in the modern military has to say. There is a reason why drill sergeant are so hard on people and there is a reason why they are so effective. And there is a reason why movies portray people like that the way they do. So Holdo isn’t doing anything out of typical military practice by not telling Poe what the plan is. Commanders don’t generally do that without good reason. And Poe, because he related that plan to Finn and Rose, is directly responsible for all the ships that are destroyed. So she had good reason not to tell him that is born out by the events in the film. Poe didn’t need to know and had no business telling Finn and Rose. He was acting on his own initiative outside the chain of command. He didn’t trust Holdo. That concept comes directly from Twelve O’Clock High.

And from everything I’ve heard, read, studied, researched about our military training, the reason for the harsh training is to instill in soldiers that they follow orders without question. When their commander says charge, they charge. If a commander can’t trust that those under him follow his orders, then he can’t reasonably hope for any plan go as planned and have a chance at success. It has been the core of our military training since Valley Forge.

Here’s a relevant link:

https://warontherocks.com/2017/07/when-can-a-soldier-disobey-an-order/

I disagree with your assertion, that our military are trained to blindly follow orders, in fact they are specifically instructed to also think for themselves to determine for example, if an order is lawfull. Poe is not only there to follow orders, he’s also responsible for the men and women who serve under him. If he believes his commander has lost her mind, is in some way incapacitated, or is unfit for command as set out in regulations (in this case to the point, that he believes, she’s about to get everyone killed), it’s his duty to intervene. A chain of command is maintained through communication, if a person at the top or any other level does not communicate, that chain is broken.

Then there’s also the fact, that she still refuses to communicate, when a mutiny breaks out. At that point it is clearly in her and the Resistance’s best interest, that she diffuses the situation as quickly as possible, before things spiral even further out of control. Informing Poe of her plan may achieve this. She cannot pass all the blame to Poe for the fallout, if she doesn’t do this, because as the person in charge she is ultimately responsible for the safety of her crew. If there’s an option, that results in the least casualties, she should take it, and deal with Poe appropriately at a more convenient time in a court martial, where his and her actions can be examined.

The movie Crimson Tide comes to mind, where the nuclear submarine’s second in command refuses to follow the captain’s orders, because he feels the captain is not following proper procedure, and is thus endangering the crew, and the United States. He subsequently starts a mutiny. At the end of the movie both the captain and his subordinate are held responsible in a tribunal for the sequence of events, because they failed to communicate, and to resolve their issues, which resulted in an extremely dangerous life threatening situation.

You are ignoring the necessity of keeping some plans secret. Holdo doesn’t know all these people very well but what she does know is that Poe was just demoted by Leia. He is a fighter pilot and squad commander, not a capital ship command crew. She really has no reason to tell him her plans. There is no credible story reason for General Holdo to tell Poe the plan. He is not needed to execute it and would just be loaded on the shuttles with the rest of the crew when the time came. You are giving him a far more important role in the resistance than he actually has. And by that time he is a fighter pilot with no command and no ship. Why in the world would she tell him anything? She acts like a general should, leading and expecting those under her to follow. Those who needed to know the plan knew it (the navigator plotting the course, the crew supervising the fuel transfer, etc). Poe has no patience and thinks he knows what is best and he doesn’t. That is his character development in this film. He goes from a brash, hotshot pilot, to a real leader who now realizes that just because he isn’t in on the plan does not mean it is not a good plan. Good grief. If ever person of his rank in the US Army in WWII had acted that way, we would have lost the war. Do you know how many times they had to operate under sealed orders? How many times they didn’t know until the last minutes what their mission was? Missions were kept top secret for a reason. Poe seems blissfully unaware of that fact of military planning. And in this film HE is the leak that sinks the ship. Because of him the First Order finds out about Holdo’s plan and most of the ships are destroyed. It was an expensive lesson for Poe. But Poe blabs what is going on over the comm and DJ uses what he heard to buy his freedom when they are caught. Secrecy in combat situations is not unusual and is necessary. So this entire argument that Holdo should have told Poe is nonsense. It shows a complete lack of understanding of basic information security during a war.

Since when does security imply you should pretend like there’s no plan at all? Even if it was necessary to keep the specifics from Poe, she could have told him, that a plan was in motion, but that it’s on a need to know basis, and he doesn’t need to know for security reasons. However, she does none of this. She leaves Poe with the impression, that there is no plan, setting up a conflict in an already tense and life threatening situation. Poe doesn’t act this way, because he wants to be insubordinate. He acts this way, because Holdo’s response leads him to believe, that she’s putting everyone’s lifes in danger. In any case the movie presents no compelling motivation why Holdo should keep the plan from Poe, other than pulling rank, and the movie’s events make a very strong case why she should have told him, because it would have prevented the FO from finding out about her plan. Even if we accept the idea, that Poe is a complete loose cannon (which I do not agree with), Holdo did nothing to improve that situation, and in fact added fuel to the flames. The ridiculous thing in my view is, that she still says she likes him, after he from your perspective inadvertedly leaks the plan to the FO, effectively dooming the Resistance, and starts a mutiny, where he forces her out of her position at gun point. Taking your point of view the movie’s lesson apparently is, that everyone dying, such that Poe can learn a lesson on leadership is perfectly acceptable to the point, that he’s fit to be Leia’s successor.

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

Palpatine wasn’t someone of influence until the prequels, and we got to witness him dismantle the Republic throughout the PT in great detail. With Snoke it’s sort of an afterthought. The guy undid everything our heroes fought for somehow, but that’s not considered to be of importance, apparently. It appears to me, that what mattered most is giving us a redux of the OT conflict, and the OT aesthetic with different characters.

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

The interesting thing for me is, that for all the talk about the group of toxic fans, and their hate campaigns, there’s a suprising amount of intolerance, and generalizations among the TLJ fanbase. Apparently insinuating that most critics are sexists, misogynists, man babies, and what not, is perfectly acceptable behaviour for these fans.

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Well, I disagree entirely. First off, it is obvious we are supposed to side with Poe. Holdo is expecting Poe to follow orders. That he doesn’t is not surprising because she doesn’t share what she is doing. And ultimately it is Poe who turns Holdo’s cunning plan into a disaster. Poe sends Finn and Rose off to solve the problem his way. A daring venture full of risks with a possible payoff. But because they do not find the hacker that Maz recommends (probably because he can be trusted) and they end up with DJ and DJ learns of Holdo’s plan, when the mission goes sour he uses that to get himself out of trouble. As a result most of the resistance is destroyed, rather than losing the one ship and hiding out on Crait until someone came to get them. Poe is a hotshot pilot but that is not what makes a leader. Knowing when to not be the hotshot and play it safe is the lesson he needed and he got it the hard way. However the movie makes it very clear that if he hadn’t gone ahead and destroyed the dreadnaught at the beginning, it would have wiped them out later. So his first reckless act that he got demoted for turned out to be the right thing to do at the time, but after the fallout, Poe is making wiser decisions. Not bad for a character Abrams almost killed off.

That story line is full of old war movie tropes. How Holdo treats Poe, how Poe reacts, and how he learns. That may not be your real world experience, but it is many people’s. And Holdo doesn’t seem like she is much of a people person. One of those who rose to command through brilliant tactics. She obviously is a friend of Leia’s. So her tough treatment of Poe makes a lot of sense. Military methods of leadership are not the same as private sector methods. The military needs people who will follow orders without question plus brilliant strategists. So using civilian leadership techniques to critique a military interaction doesn’t work well. The same rules don’t apply. There is a reason why the traditional drill sergeant is tough and gruff. Dressing down a subordinate in a military setting isn’t about their well being, it is about their discipline and willingness to follow orders. In a military setting you need someone who will not panic and will act on their training no matter the price. In a civilian setting an employee’s life is rarely on the line and you rarely need blind obedience. So it is comparing apples to oranges.

So both on the writing side and on the realism side, this part of the story reflects some brilliant writing. I find the entire movie to be brilliant. I love it more the more I watch it. And it is definitely very Star Wars. War movies and samurai movies were very much a part of the original trilogy and Rian Johnson captured that part far better than Abrams did in TFA. I watched Twelve O’Clock High and Three Outlaw Samurai after I heard they, plus To Catch A Thief, were classics Rian Johnson was watching to prepare for this movie. Three brilliant films that definitely had an influence.

Maybe you should read the link I posted from someone with actual military experience, who makes it very clear, that in his military experience Holdo is not a good leader, both from the perspective of how she deals with Poe, and from the perspective of her strategy with regards to the FO. Being in the military is about more than following orders, and being a military leader is about more than forcing your will onto someone, or expecting people to blindly follow orders. The fact is that her leadership resulted in a mutiny, because she didn’t communicate her strategy in a highly tense, and life threatening situation. She has final responsibility, and she failed to communicate her plans even when Poe relieved her of her command at gun point.

Have you seen Twelve O’Clock High? If not then we are coming from different places. I have no personal military experience, only historical research related to WWII, the Indian Wars and the Civil War. Plus a crapload of war and military movies. First off, a superior officer does not have to tell those under them the plans or the reasons for the plans. That isn’t how chain of command works. I did briefly work under a police chief who was a stickler for chain of command and while the police and military do things somewhat differently, certain concepts are identical. One is the chain of command. Twelve O’clock High is directly about a superior officer who must earn the trust of the men under him when he assumes command after a beloved but inept commander has been removed. It has a lot of other things in it. Plus many of the other things are echoes in Three Outlaw Samurai and many other WWII and Saumurai movies. Twelve O’Clock High in particular was made with the full cooperation of the US Military.

And while I know that not everyone still abide by the old strict chain of command structure, that is one thing that drives Twelve O’Clock High. The removed commander doesn’t follow the book and has a horrible unit while the replacement is by the book, makes some enemies, and turns the unit into one of the best - increasing efficiency and reducing casualties. So I think that movie in itself and the wisdom of our military training programs it represents, whether they are currently adhered to or not, is more relevant than what a single person who has served in the modern military has to say. There is a reason why drill sergeant are so hard on people and there is a reason why they are so effective. And there is a reason why movies portray people like that the way they do. So Holdo isn’t doing anything out of typical military practice by not telling Poe what the plan is. Commanders don’t generally do that without good reason. And Poe, because he related that plan to Finn and Rose, is directly responsible for all the ships that are destroyed. So she had good reason not to tell him that is born out by the events in the film. Poe didn’t need to know and had no business telling Finn and Rose. He was acting on his own initiative outside the chain of command. He didn’t trust Holdo. That concept comes directly from Twelve O’Clock High.

And from everything I’ve heard, read, studied, researched about our military training, the reason for the harsh training is to instill in soldiers that they follow orders without question. When their commander says charge, they charge. If a commander can’t trust that those under him follow his orders, then he can’t reasonably hope for any plan go as planned and have a chance at success. It has been the core of our military training since Valley Forge.

Here’s a relevant link:

https://warontherocks.com/2017/07/when-can-a-soldier-disobey-an-order/

I disagree with your assertion, that our military are trained to blindly follow orders, in fact they are specifically instructed to also think for themselves to determine for example, if an order is lawfull. Poe is not only there to follow orders, he’s also responsible for the men and women who serve under him. If he believes his commander has lost her mind, is in some way incapacitated, or is unfit for command as set out in regulations (in this case to the point, that he believes, she’s about to get everyone killed), it’s his duty to intervene. A chain of command is maintained through communication, if a person at the top or any other level does not communicate, that chain is broken.

Then there’s also the fact, that she still refuses to communicate, when a mutiny breaks out. At that point it is clearly in her and the Resistance’s best interest, that she diffuses the situation as quickly as possible, before things spiral even further out of control. Informing Poe of her plan may achieve this. She cannot pass all the blame to Poe for the fallout, if she doesn’t do this, because as the person in charge she is ultimately responsible for the safety of her crew. If there’s an option, that results in the least casualties, she should take it, and deal with Poe appropriately at a more convenient time in a court martial, where his and her actions can be examined.

The movie Crimson Tide comes to mind, where the nuclear submarine’s second in command refuses to follow the captain’s orders, because he feels the captain is not following proper procedure, and is thus endangering the crew, and the United States. He subsequently starts a mutiny. At the end of the movie both the captain and his subordinate are held responsible in a tribunal for the sequence of events, because they failed to communicate, and to resolve their issues, which resulted in an extremely dangerous life threatening situation.

Nandi said:

Yes, its funny but more so pathetic that he takes random words from random people that seriously.

I think depression is a little more complicated, and far-reaching than this. You should never make light of someone else’s pain and suffering. I suspect you don’t know what it’s like to be continually stalked, and harrassed, especially for something as trivial as playing a character in a movie.

Poita, have you ever considered giving some sort of online workshop on film restoration?

NeverarGreat said:

TV’s Frink said:

I still just see some people trying really hard to dislike certain things about TLJ.

I see Dre view the world of Star Wars as if it were a real, physical place, and TLJ holding up well with this filter.
I see Dom view TLJ as a movie separate from the other movies, with messages and characters, and it holding up well with this filter.

That’s the great thing about opinions, they come in all varieties, that cannot simply be divided into SJW’s and misogynists.

TV’s Frink said:

I still just see some people trying really hard to dislike certain things about TLJ.

You either like something, or you don’t. There is no try.

DominicCobb said:

DrDre said:

DominicCobb said:

From Holdo’s perspective, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that Poe will lie over like a lap dog and accept her plan. I don’t know why you think she should be able to assume this just because we as an audience see he does later, but that she shouldn’t have confidence that she can take back control. It makes a whole lot more sense to me that she’d trust her and her compatriots’ skills more than she’d trust Poe’s judgment, especially considering the whole reason she hasn’t told Poe in the first place is she doesn’t trust his judgment. She’s completely consistent here, staying steadfast to her plan and her judgment of Poe all the way (like I said, Poe attempting mutiny only serves to make her trust him less).

Not to mention, we can’t even really know for sure that Poe would’ve taken it well. There’s an argument to be made that having Leia tell the plan to him after his plan and mutiny was dead and buried and this was the only option left made him more open to Holdo’s plan. Who knows if in the moment, while Poe was trying to get everything to work, that he would’ve just given up and rolled over.

Sorry this doesn’t make any sense to me. There’s no guarantee Poe will accept her plan, but since it is a possibility, and it involves the least risk to everyone on board, she should consider this, even if she believes it’s unlikely, which we later find out it is not. There’s no downside to her telling Poe, and if he does reject her plan, she can still enact her take over plan, as she did in the film. If he does accept her plan, they can proceed with no additional risk to the lifes on board.

It’s one thing to say “it would potentially make sense for her to do this thing” and to say “it makes no sense whatsoever for her to do this other thing.” Just because I can see why she might tell him doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing she would reasonably do in that situation, especially when, as I’ve pointed out, it is completely consistent with her character and their dynamic to not. Of course there’s a downside. Holdo’s plan is on a need to know basis. Poe attempting a mutiny doesn’t suddenly reward him access to that information. Like I said, it probably makes her more resolute in her decision to not give it to him.

It’s not about rewarding Poe, it’s about not putting the entire plan, and the Resistance at risk by letting Poe incapacitate her, and allowing him to keep his false belief, that she has no plan. A mutiny is a no-win situation, and things can easily spin further out of control. She has a chance to restore order, and control, but she doesn’t take it, because of reasons of plot convenience.

DominicCobb said:

From Holdo’s perspective, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that Poe will lie over like a lap dog and accept her plan. I don’t know why you think she should be able to assume this just because we as an audience see he does later, but that she shouldn’t have confidence that she can take back control. It makes a whole lot more sense to me that she’d trust her and her compatriots’ skills more than she’d trust Poe’s judgment, especially considering the whole reason she hasn’t told Poe in the first place is she doesn’t trust his judgment. She’s completely consistent here, staying steadfast to her plan and her judgment of Poe all the way (like I said, Poe attempting mutiny only serves to make her trust him less).

Not to mention, we can’t even really know for sure that Poe would’ve taken it well. There’s an argument to be made that having Leia tell the plan to him after his plan and mutiny was dead and buried and this was the only option left made him more open to Holdo’s plan. Who knows if in the moment, while Poe was trying to get everything to work, that he would’ve just given up and rolled over.

Sorry this doesn’t make any sense to me. There’s no guarantee Poe will accept her plan, but since it is a possibility, and it involves the least risk to everyone on board, she should consider this, even if she believes it’s unlikely, which we later find out it is not. There’s no downside to her telling Poe, and if he does reject her plan, she can still enact her take over plan, as she did in the film. If he does accept her plan, they can proceed with no additional risk to the lifes on board.

DominicCobb said:

DrDre said:

DominicCobb said:

DrDre said:

DominicCobb said:

No one hated Anakin taking about sand or turning to the dark side because of the logic of them.

Really? Padme saying she loved Anakin wasn’t believable, because it didn’t make much logical sense considering Anakin’s creepy behaviour and his other actions the story. The lack of logic obviously stems from the fact, that such a course of events would not make sense in a romance in the real world. This has been stated over, and over again in critical arguments about the romance in the PT, so your argument, that no one disliked the PT, because of lack of logic and consistency seems faulty to me. The same goes for Anakin, who almost instanteneously goes from conflicted Jedi to murdering psychopath. This also doesn’t make logical sense to many people, and has also been analyzed and discussed endlessly.

You’re attributing the logic to other issues. The problem with Anakin and Padme’s romance isn’t real world logic. The problem is a lot of other things. Cringey dialogue. Wooden acting. Inconsistent character motivations. Complete lack of chemistry. Anakin’s total lack of charm and altogether creepyness. Poorly structured sequences. Unearned emotional moments.

Anakin turning on a dime isn’t bad real world logic. It’s a problem of believability of the profession of his character arc. The film paints a poor and contradictory portrait of his head space throughout, and takes a narrative short cut in terms of his motivations (which is especially problematic as he is the main character). None of this has anything to do with real world logic, just pure storytelling mechanics.

Storytelling mechanics and real world logic are intimately connected, as we use our real world experience as the benchmark for what does, and doesn’t make sense in a story. Stories can take liberties for dramatic purposes, but in a general sense, a story should make sense internally and usually to a large extend externally as well. If a character witholds vital information from another character, and the audience, this should make sense in the story. The character should have the proper motivations throughout the story arc. In TLJ Holdo’s initial motivation appears to be teaching Poe a lesson, and putting him in his place. However, this lesson also results in a mutiny, and ends up putting the Resistance in even greater danger. Holdo keeps witholding information even when it is obviously no longer in her best interests, and those of the people she is responsible for. She keeps silent when Poe forces her out of her position, apparently for no other reason than to have a story twist later in the story involving Leia. In your words Holdo’s character motivations are inconsistent. As a leader she should protect the interests of the Resistance (and herself), but she doesn’t, because apparently RJ already told her how the mutiny would play out. From an in-story perspective Holdo shouldn’t know this, and Poe’s mutiny could result in the destruction of the entire Resistance. The fact that she passively accepts this without informing Poe of the reality of the situation just doesn’t make logical and story sense.

I see no inconsistency in her motivations and in the story logic. It all makes perfect, easily understood sense. If she wasn’t going to tell him her plan before, she’s definitely not going to when he has a gun pointed at her. Especially considering she seems pretty confident she can take back control (which she, of course, does).

She cannot know she will be able to take back control, and the fallout if her attempts fail could be enormous. Telling him her plan is clearly the easiest and least risky way to diffuse the situation, and if Poe still rejects her plan, she could easily go for her plan B, which is to take back control. However, the outcome of Poe simply accepting her plan, and then working together to enact it is a real possibility, as is evident when Poe immediately accepts her plan later, when he is told after all the unnecessary drama has unfolded. This outcome is clearly the best for all involved, as it involves the least risk to the survival of the Resistance. A good leader would know this, so either RJ wants her to come off as incompetent, or his writing is (imo).

DominicCobb said:

DrDre said:

DominicCobb said:

No one hated Anakin taking about sand or turning to the dark side because of the logic of them.

Really? Padme saying she loved Anakin wasn’t believable, because it didn’t make much logical sense considering Anakin’s creepy behaviour and his other actions the story. The lack of logic obviously stems from the fact, that such a course of events would not make sense in a romance in the real world. This has been stated over, and over again in critical arguments about the romance in the PT, so your argument, that no one disliked the PT, because of lack of logic and consistency seems faulty to me. The same goes for Anakin, who almost instanteneously goes from conflicted Jedi to murdering psychopath. This also doesn’t make logical sense to many people, and has also been analyzed and discussed endlessly.

You’re attributing the logic to other issues. The problem with Anakin and Padme’s romance isn’t real world logic. The problem is a lot of other things. Cringey dialogue. Wooden acting. Inconsistent character motivations. Complete lack of chemistry. Anakin’s total lack of charm and altogether creepyness. Poorly structured sequences. Unearned emotional moments.

Anakin turning on a dime isn’t bad real world logic. It’s a problem of believability of the profession of his character arc. The film paints a poor and contradictory portrait of his head space throughout, and takes a narrative short cut in terms of his motivations (which is especially problematic as he is the main character). None of this has anything to do with real world logic, just pure storytelling mechanics.

Storytelling mechanics and real world logic are intimately connected, as we use our real world experience as the benchmark for what does, and doesn’t make sense in a story. Stories can take liberties for dramatic purposes, but in a general sense, a story should make sense internally and usually to a large extend externally as well. If a character witholds vital information from another character, and the audience, this should make sense in the story. The character should have the proper motivations throughout the story arc. In TLJ Holdo’s initial motivation appears to be teaching Poe a lesson, and putting him in his place. However, this lesson also results in a mutiny, and ends up putting the Resistance in even greater danger. Holdo keeps witholding information even when it is obviously no longer in her best interests, and those of the people she is responsible for. She keeps silent when Poe forces her out of her position, apparently for no other reason than to have a story twist later in the story involving Leia. In your words Holdo’s character motivations are inconsistent. As a leader she should protect the interests of the Resistance (and herself), but she doesn’t, because apparently RJ already told her how the mutiny would play out. From an in-story perspective Holdo shouldn’t know this, and Poe’s mutiny could result in the destruction of the entire Resistance. The fact that she passively accepts this without informing Poe of the reality of the situation just doesn’t make logical and story sense.

DominicCobb said:

No one hated Anakin taking about sand or turning to the dark side because of the logic of them.

Really? Padme saying she loved Anakin wasn’t believable, because it didn’t make much logical sense considering Anakin’s creepy behaviour and his other actions the story. The lack of logic obviously stems from the fact, that such a course of events would not make sense in a romance in the real world. This has been stated over, and over again in critical arguments about the romance in the PT, so your argument, that no one disliked the PT, because of lack of logic and consistency seems faulty to me. The same goes for Anakin, who almost instanteneously goes from conflicted Jedi to murdering psychopath. This also doesn’t make logical sense to many people, and has also been analyzed and discussed endlessly.

I guess you guys were also this lenient in the case of the PT. O wait, many of you were not. I mean talking about sand is just how people get into a committed relationship in this universe. Of course a guy like Anakin can suddenly hate the Jedi, and Leia can remember the mother she saw for a few seconds as a baby. Logic, and real world human interactions shouldn’t matter, because you know, it’s a space fantasy!

Jay said:

DrDre said:

oojason said:

DrDre said:

oojason said:

DrDre said:

oojason said:

TV’s Frink said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Well, I disagree entirely. First off, it is obvious we are supposed to side with Poe. Holdo is expecting Poe to follow orders. That he doesn’t is not surprising because she doesn’t share what she is doing. And ultimately it is Poe who turns Holdo’s cunning plan into a disaster. Poe sends Finn and Rose off to solve the problem his way. A daring venture full of risks with a possible payoff. But because they do not find the hacker that Maz recommends (probably because he can be trusted) and they end up with DJ and DJ learns of Holdo’s plan, when the mission goes sour he uses that to get himself out of trouble. As a result most of the resistance is destroyed, rather than losing the one ship and hiding out on Crait until someone came to get them. Poe is a hotshot pilot but that is not what makes a leader. Knowing when to not be the hotshot and play it safe is the lesson he needed and he got it the hard way. However the movie makes it very clear that if he hadn’t gone ahead and destroyed the dreadnaught at the beginning, it would have wiped them out later. So his first reckless act that he got demoted for turned out to be the right thing to do at the time, but after the fallout, Poe is making wiser decisions. Not bad for a character Abrams almost killed off.

That story line is full of old war movie tropes. How Holdo treats Poe, how Poe reacts, and how he learns. That may not be your real world experience, but it is many people’s. And Holdo doesn’t seem like she is much of a people person. One of those who rose to command through brilliant tactics. She obviously is a friend of Leia’s. So her tough treatment of Poe makes a lot of sense. Military methods of leadership are not the same as private sector methods. The military needs people who will follow orders without question plus brilliant strategists. So using civilian leadership techniques to critique a military interaction doesn’t work well. The same rules don’t apply. There is a reason why the traditional drill sergeant is tough and gruff. Dressing down a subordinate in a military setting isn’t about their well being, it is about their discipline and willingness to follow orders. In a military setting you need someone who will not panic and will act on their training no matter the price. In a civilian setting an employee’s life is rarely on the line and you rarely need blind obedience. So it is comparing apples to oranges.

So both on the writing side and on the realism side, this part of the story reflects some brilliant writing. I find the entire movie to be brilliant. I love it more the more I watch it. And it is definitely very Star Wars. War movies and samurai movies were very much a part of the original trilogy and Rian Johnson captured that part far better than Abrams did in TFA. I watched Twelve O’Clock High and Three Outlaw Samurai after I heard they, plus To Catch A Thief, were classics Rian Johnson was watching to prepare for this movie. Three brilliant films that definitely had an influence.

Maybe you should read the link I posted from someone with actual military experience

Still leaning on this I see.

C’mon Frink, no-one in the military has ever got it wrong! We should read everything anyone who has fought says - or else we may not think as Dre wishes, as our lives may depend on it some day, otherwise an ER tv doctor will not save us - or something…

All for a link to article about Holdo not being a feminist (going on the url) - according to someone with actual military experience - who is giving their opinion - not fact - opinion.

My uncle has military experience - served in Northern Ireland. I wouldn’t listen to his opinion on Star Wars - he doesn’t like it. That’s okay. If he wrote an article on SW - or feminism - I wouldn’t read it. Still love him to bits like. If he does write an articles on Star Wars feel free not to read it - or read it, if you want - your call.

C’mon Jason, you wouldn’t know, because you didn’t read the guy’s opinion. Could he be wrong? Sure, but it’s less likely than let’s say the opinion of a mod on a Star Wars forum. If you can present another opinion, that’s actually based on relevant experience or expertise, rather than being a fan of a movie, that refutes this guy’s argument, I will gladly read it. He can even call me a man baby, since expertise and personality are generally not correlated (for example, I would gladly be operated by a brilliant churgin, who’s also an *******). However, until that day comes, I choose to trust a veteran’s opinion over a Star Wars fan when it comes to military situations.

My uncle’s opinion? Not interested - it’s not an ‘expert opinion’ in the context of is Holdo a feminist or not, and comparing real life military to a sci-fi film. I think I’ve already said that - though you seem to ignore many points and questions I’ve previously made/asked on the subject. Please feel free to read them back again - or seemingly not.

My opinion on Holdo being a feminist or not has less value because of someone who fought? Okay…

To be honest - you shouldn’t listen to my opinion - mod or not (What on earth? It doesn’t mean a thing - and am quite surprised you allude it does) - go form your own opinions. You’re free to do that - some have fought for that, so we can make up own own minds and then state them.

I don’t have to refute a man’s opinion or article, nor do I have to read every link put in front of me. Yet I can still state my opinion - and I will do. You want to give it a measure of value? Okay.

You seem very hung up on the feminist angle. Even if that were relevant to judgement of the whole military situation, you don’t know the context of the word, since you didn’t read the article.

Hung up on the feminist angle? No, it is in the url link to the article we are discussing though, isn’t it? A military veteran’s ‘expert opinion’ on Holdo not being a feminist… I’ve stated that a few times - pretty consistent, yes?

You are also not being very consistent. You claim real life military experience is not relevant to a sci-fi film, yet you were happy to link to an article a while ago, where another “expert” believed Holdo’s lightspeed kamikaze was physically possible. Apparently expert opinions are only relevant if they support your narrative.

Nah mate, I post articles for info and that they may be of interest to some - whether people actually read them, believe them, dismiss them, or ignore them is completely up to them. I also don’t repeatedly post about why people should read them - or claim they contain ‘expert opinions’ - so they should.

LOL, I just added a line in my previous post, where I predicted just this answer. You didn’t post it for your own benefit, but for others. I suppose, it just happened to support your narrative accidentally. Nice one!

Yes, it’s the article where you claimed you didn’t judge a book by it’s cover. Yet, you continue to hammer on the title phrase “not a feminist” like it’s some sort of mantra.

What’s kind of ridiculous about not reading the article is that it doesn’t bash feminism in any way. It takes apart both the idea that Holdo should be held up as some feminist ideal (discrediting those who’d promote her as such) and that she’s some attempt by Lucasfilm to promote feminism (discrediting the “toxic fans”). The author points out her flaws in a fairly well-reasoned manner.

People get all tweaked over certain words and deliberately keep themselves ignorant to what benefit? I don’t get it.

Yeah, a critic uses the words “not a feminist”, and it immediately gets a red flag. Who knows what kind of misogynist might be hiding behind that title, or phrase.