This guy says a number of insightful things. I don’t agree with everything he says, and I think he’s much too kind to “Star Wars 8: Rogue One”, but no one’s perfect.
My opinion of the Star Wars movies so far, ranked from best to worst. The ranking is not exact: any two adjacent movies could be swapped, depending on my mood.
Everything Wrong With Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Everything Wrong With Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
Top 10 Worst Reasons You Liked Rogue One
Everything Wrong With Rogue One
My own review of “The Last Jedi”
What Went Wrong At The Last Jedi Pitch Meeting
Everything That Went Wrong With The Last Jedi
Half in the Bag: The Last Last Jedi Review
So… “Star Wars 9: Episode 8 The Last Jedi” (2017). I thought it was slow and dull and pointless. More than anything, it’s disappointing. “Star Wars 7: Episode 7 The Force Awakens” (2015) was so much fun, with great pacing and appealing characters, and then to follow it with this long, dull, pointless… thing.
To save myself the effort of having to type this up more than once, I will list here the various things I disliked about “Star Wars 9: Episode 8 The Last Jedi” (2017):
That final criticism is the most damning one. Rey’s trip to find Luke Skywalker? Pointless. The Slowest Spaceship Chase In The UniverseTM? Pointless. The entire side trip to Planet Vegas? Pointless. The entire “take out the sensor” caper? Pointless. The fight against the Imperial walkers on Red Salt Planet? Pointless. It’s a three hour movie in which nothing happens, and we have no reason to care about any of it or anyone in it.
There is actually one character I care about: Rey. You can feel her frustration as she goes from scene to scene, trying to find a story arc or any purpose to this exercise, but never finding it. By the end of the movie, I felt great sympathy for her.
I suppose I should point out three things that I did not dislike.
Incidentally, I think I may be the only person who doesn’t like Phasma (the chrome storm trooper). It irks me that we are supposed to think she’s interesting even though she does nothing interesting. She’s like the Boba Fett of this, dropped into scenes for no apparent reason. The difference, of course, is that Boba Fett was used because he had developed a fan following, while Phasma is just a “collectable chrome variant” storm trooper. Just having a name and a different outfit doesn’t make her interesting. There are at least a dozen nameless characters throughout the Star Wars films who say and do more interesting things than what Phasma has said and done. I also think there’s something wrong with Phasma’s armor itself. I’m not sure if it doesn’t fit right, or if the actor has weird posture, or what, but it just looks …. weirdly “off”, like a jacket that has been buttoned up wrong. As far as I can tell, the only reason the character exists is to sell an action figure.
P.S. Do you like that gif? I made it. 🙂
P.P.S. I think people are trying way too hard to reinterpret this terrible movie in a way that makes it laudable. Yes, it’s lovely that the cast is a mixture of ethnicities and men and women: it’s still a long, dull movie in which nothing happens, no one matters, and all the good will and story potential generated by “The Force Awakens” is wasted.
This won’t make a huge amount of sense to you unless you have seen the “The Last Jedi” video Jenny Nicholson made, but I spent a long time writing it, so I want to preserve it. (Also, if you aren’t her patron, you should be: she’s brilliant and funny.)
10) Snoke was wasted. That he died is not the problem: the problem is that the audience’s time and investment in the character was thrown away. It wasn’t a clever misdirection — it was bad filmmaking.
9) I don’t care much about Kylo Ren one way or the other. He’s underwhelming as an antagonist, but he’s got some depth as a character, so it balances out.
8) The movie was pointless because nothing was accomplished. Everything the protagonists attempted failed, utterly. In fact, the protagonists would be better off if Poe Dameron and Finn had slept through the movie.
7) Again, that Rey’s parents are no one special is not the problem: the problem is that the audience’s time and investment in the character’s backstory was thrown away. There are probably dozens of ways a competent filmmaker could have revealed that and made the revelation mean something to the audience — this was not one of them. It was bad filmmaking.
6) I have no problem with Luke making a catastrophic mistake that winds up creating the next Dark Lord. That was probably one of the more interesting things in the movie. The execution was handled badly (Luke standing over Ben Solo with a lit lightsaber is just stupid), but in comparison with the rest of the movie, it almost looks competent in comparison.
5) Super Leia was laughable. I literally laughed in the theater. Let’s ignore the fact that it made Carrie Fisher’s final appearance (as a living person — I wouldn’t be surprised if she shows up later as a grotesque CGI mannequin) into a joke (the filmmakers didn’t know she had months left to live, after all). It makes what should have been a tragic, character-building moment for the protagonists into a pointless digression. She should have been given the hero’s death that her character has earned over the past 40 years. Instead, that was given to the utterly superfluous Laura Dern character. Again, this is just bad filmmaking.
4) As for Holdo, the Laura Dern character … her existence and everything she does undermines the arc of the movie and the importance of the protagonists: that character shouldn’t have even been in the movie. Again, this is just bad filmmaking.
3) Broom kid is irrelevant. The entire pointless trip to Planet Vegas accomplished nothing for the story arc or the characters. Again, this is just bad filmmaking.
2) “The theme of ‘The Last Jedi’ was failure”. The theme of failure is part of a good movie if the characters return from that failure and then succeed. (There is a literary term for this, but it slips my mind at the moment.) The problem (again) is not that characters failed. The problem is that those failures were meaningless — there was no follow-up where the characters come back and succeed. They don’t even learn anything. What did Finn learn: to never take risks to help anyone else, because it’s doomed to failure and will, at best, get a lot of people killed who wouldn’t have otherwise been killed? What did Poe learn: to follow orders without question? What did Rey learn: that nothing matters, no one can be trusted, and even the people who ought to know better will just disappoint you, so why even try? They all just fail, the end. Whether that was intentional or not (I rather think it was), this is just bad filmmaking. I will direct you to Jenny Nicholson’s brilliant criticism of Rogue One, where she says that intentionally making a movie bad does not make it a good movie: it’s still bad.
1) The movie didn’t “challenge” me. It bored me. I started looking at my watch during the pod race — I mean space horse race.
P.P.P.S. The Last Jedi is a Star Wars movie for people who don’t like Star Wars. Handful of individuals strike a decisive blow against a massive organization? Nope: the characters fail, utterly. Lightsaber fight? Nope: no lightsaber touches another lightsaber in the whole movie. Likeable characters? Nope: the movie goes out of its way to make the protagonists we loved in The Force Awakens into losers and incompetents. Dramatic death of a beloved character that ignites the resolve of the protagonists? Nope: Leia becomes a joke, a flying clown, an absurdity that will always be remembered as Carrie Fisher’s embarrassing final role. A character who made a tragic choice gets redemption? Nope: Luke betrays his student, does nothing useful, and then fades away.
Thinking about characters and games, and how my favourite long-term characters are mainly superheroes. Why is that? I have had fantasy characters I’ve loved, but they don’t have the longevity that superheroes do. I think there are a couple of reasons for that.
First, fantasy characters are almost always tied to a specific fantasy world. More than that, even: a specific fantasy world being GMd by a specific person. You can make up the same character more than once for different settings or different GMs, but they really aren’t the same character.
For superheroes, it’s not like that. If the game system is the same (and in my experience, most people stick with one superhero game system for years and very rarely change it), you can drop a superhero from one game into another with minimal fuss. The genre makes that a trivial exercise: the hero moves from their old campaign city to a new one, or gets recruited by a new team, or at worst, gets sucked into a vortex and arrives in a new version of Earth. For a superhero, that’s just a typical Tuesday.
Second, fantasy characters almost always exist on a “level” spectrum. A typical fantasy character changes a LOT from Day 1 to Day 100, with new powers, more potent abilities, better equipment, and so on. There are fantasy game systems that don’t have this continual power inflation, but in most cases, a fantasy character that’s been played for a year is virtually unrecognizable from how they started out.
For superheroes, it’s not like that. In most game systems, a superhero starts out more or less fully-formed. A speedster, a vigilante detective, a flying armored alcoholic… they don’t change that much, even after a decade of play. Sure, they get a bigger base, they fly a little faster, maybe pick up a new power or two, but the core of the character doesn’t really change.
That’s why I have superhero characters that I have played for *decades*, and could easily play again. Could I do that with any of my most beloved fantasy characters? No, not really. They are tied to a specific time and place in a way that superhero characters really aren’t.
I’ve always loved this song. I always imagined that the protagonist of the song was the same age as, or at most a couple of years older than, the girl he’s singing to/about (because that’s how old I was when I first heard it). The lyrics perfectly encapsulate that feeling of being hopelessly in love with someone for the first time, when you are young and inexperienced, and everything seems like the Most Important Thing That Has Ever Happened In The History Of The World.
Of course, nowadays, everyone wants to imagine the worst, the most despicable thing they can. Oh, well. As for the video… as someone wiser than I am once said, “Why ruin a great song by having to look at the person who sings it?”
She’s just sixteen years old
Leave her alone, they say
Separated by fools
Who don’t know what love is yet
But I want you to know
If I could fly, I’d pick you up
I’d take you into the night
And show you a love
Like you’ve never seen, ever seen
It’s like having a dream
Where nobody has a heart
It’s like having it all
And watching it fall apart
And I would wait till the end of time for you
And do it again, it’s true
I can’t measure my love
There’s nothing to compare it to
But I want you to know
If I could fly, I’d pick you up
I’d take you into the night
And show you a love
Oh, if I could fly, I’d pick you up
I’d take you into the night
And show you a love
Like you’ve never seen, ever seen
Yeah, ooh
If I could fly, I’d pick you up
I’d take you into the night
And show you a love
Oh, if I could fly, I’d pick you up
And take you into the night
(Into the night, fly) if I could fly
I’d pick you up
Oh into the night
I’d pick you up
Humanity’s love for authority figures is annoying. “Alien” (1979) gave us a perfect, self-sufficient, self-propagating alien species. “The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” So naturally a sequel introduced a superfluous “queen”. “Star Trek The Next Generation” gave us the Borg, a hive mind with no leaders, no individual thought: a society of perfect, remorseless unity. So naturally “Star Trek: First Contact” (1996) introduced another superfluous “queen”.
It’s like we can’t even conceive of a society without authority figures, even an alien one.
Three years ago today, the cat finally escaped the bag: my “halfling” rogue character got outed as a human! I got to use every dodge and half-truth I had thought of before the whole truth finally came out. I had a lot of fun, and the other PCs were gobsmacked that Shadow the fifty-ish male halfling had been a tween-age female human the whole time I had been playing “him” (about a year and a half)….
We were in the very first town in the entire history of the campaign that had even a single halfling in residence. The dwarf barbarian, Elifonsah, who had been suspicious of my character for a while for reasons he could not quite articulate (other than Shadow (my character) “seemed to be hiding something” — which is true), could not help but notice that Shadow (at 4′ 6″) was a good foot and a half taller than any halflings we see.
Shadow: “I’m tall. So? Focus on the mission.”
Elifonsah: “You’re a giant. You’re practically as tall as I am.”
Shadow: “It was that boon that the celestial gave us. I told you it made me taller.” (In fact, the boon did increase Shadow’s Strength by 2, to 12. Each of the party members got a +2 to a random stat. Elifonsah got +2 Intelligence.)
Elifonsah: “Uh huh.”
Later, when we split up to gather information about the mystery that brought us to this town, Elifonsah took this as an opportunity to find and question the local halflings on how one could tell a halfling from a non-halfling, other than by height. He learned that halflings (in this game) have somewhat elongated heads (when compared to humans), and slightly pointed ears. Shadow, of course, wears a hood almost 24 hours a day.
When the group met up again, Elifonsah grabbed Shadow’s hood and pulled it back, revealing a ponytail of hair on a human-shaped head that had round, human-like ears.
Elifonsah: “Ah, ha!” he shouted triumphantly. “YOU ARE NO HALFLING!”
Shadow: (shrug) “Yeah, and? I never said I was a halfling. What are you even talking about?”
Elifonsah: (blinks) “… Wait. What? No! You said… I am sure we… ”
Elifonsah: (to Coenrad, the human sorcerer) “We knew he was a halfling, right? He TOLD us he was a halfling, right?”
Coenred: (puzzled) “Well, I thought he was a halfling… I.. thought he said that. Didn’t he say that?”
Elifonsah: (to Shadow) “You said you were a halfling!”
Shadow: (calmly ) “No, I didn’t. Why would I say that? Have you been drinking?” (It is well known that Elifonsah is a drunk.)
Elifonsah: “No! Yes! That doesn’t matter! You’re not a halfling!”
Shadow: “Let’s say I’m not a halfling. So what? What difference does it make?”
Elifonsah: “Then what are you!”
Shadow: (indignant) “What am I? What are you?”
Elifonsah: “What am I? I’m a dwarf!”
Shadow: (satisfied) “Well okay then.”
Elifonsah: “What? No! What are you!”
Shadow: (indignant) “What am I? What are you?”
Elifonsah: “What am I? I’m a dwarf!”
Shadow: (satisfied) “Well okay then.”
Elifonsah: “STOP THAT!”
Shadow: “Stop what?”
Elifonsah: “You’re messing with my head!”
Shadow: “I really don’t think so.”
Elifonsah: (to Coenred) “He’s trying to confuse us!”
Coenred: “I think it’s working.”
Elifonsah: (to Shadow) “You’re no halfling. I want to know what you are.”
Shadow: (exasperated sigh) “What if I was a half-halfling? A — what would that be? Quarterling? — What if I was a quarterling? Would it matter?”
Elifonsah: “I’ve never heard of a half-halfling!”
Shadow: “Delgoro is a half-orc. Leannan is a half-elf. Why not a half-halfling?”
Elifonsah: (to Coenred) “Are there half-halflings? Is that a thing?”
Coenred: “I, uh… I really don’t know. I’ve never met one.”
Shadow: “You never met a halfling before you met me, either.”
Elifonsah: “YOU ARE NO HALFLING!”
Shadow: “I never said I was. I just said you hadn’t met one.”
Elifonsah: (to Shadow’s best friend Nigel, the human cleric in his fifties, who joined the group with Shadow a year and a half ago) “Did he say he was a halfling, or not?”
Nigel: “I’m… not… sure.”
Elifonsah: (to Shadow) “I want to know what you are. How can we trust you? You’re keeping secrets!”
Shadow: “Oh, you don’t have secrets? Really?”
Elifonsah: “That’s not the point! You’ve been lying to us!”
Shadow: (offended) “I have never lied to you.” (This is a lie.)
Elifonsah: “I want to know what you are, right now.”
Shadow: (pulls down face mask, which normally covers Shadow’s face from the nose on down) “Fine: I’m a human, okay? But I am the same person I was yesterday. I am just as good at stabbing people now as I was before.”
Elifonsah: “You’ve been lying to us! How can we trust you!”
Shadow: “Pfft. I could have killed you a dozen times over if I wanted to.”
Elifonsah: “Aha!”
Shadow: “‘Aha’ what? I didn’t!”
Elifonsah: “You are sneaky!”
Shadow: “That’s my job! I go into danger first and then come back and tell you about it! I keep you safe!”
Coenred: “That is his job. He’s the scout.”
Elifonsah: “Nigel, did you know about this?”
Nigel: “Well, yeah.”
Elifonsah: “For how long?”
Nigel: “Always, ever since I met her.”
Elifonsah: (indignant) “Always!”
Elifonsah: (shocked) “WAIT, WHAT!?!”
Elifonsah: (to Shadow) “WHAT ARE YOU!?!?!?!”
Shadow: “I already said I was human.”
Elifonsah: “And female?”
Shadow: “Yeah, duh. (pulls sword) Do you have a problem with that? Because if you do, I will cut you into tiny pieces.”
Elifonsah: (to Coenred) “SEE? SEE? He… she…. she’s threatening me!”
Shadow: “Why do you even care? I do my job. I am just as good at stabbing people now as I was this morning. What difference does it make??”
Elifonsah: “You’ve been keeping secrets! How do we know you don’t have other secrets? How do we know we can trust you?”
Shadow: “I saved Coenred. I helped save Leannan. I’ve fought with you since I was this tall.” (holding up hand to her chin) “What else do you want?”
Elifonsah: (still skeptical) “I guess that makes sense.”
Shadow: “Good. Now can we get on with the mission?”
Elifonsah: “Wait. If you’re human, how old are you? You’re really small for a human.”
Shadow: (shrugs) “I dunno. Why does that matter?” (Shadow is 12, but she does not know that, or even what her birthday is. And she’s small even for a 12-year-old.)
Elifonsah: “Huh.”
Shadow: “Are we good now? Can we get on with the mission?”
Elifonsah: (sullen) “Yeah. I guess. (pause) I need a drink.”
I am leaving out some stuff where Efilonsah was asking Nigel about how he and Shadow met. Short version: Shadow was an 8 year old street orphan, Nigel was bleeding to death, and Shadow dragged Nigel to a temple. They’d been together ever since.
Recent movie viewing…
“Ghost In The Shell” is pretty famous, but I’d never seen it. The first half hour is really good. I really liked the story, the characters (if not the English-speaking voice actors), and the animation. It starts to bog down at around 30 minutes, when two characters woodenly recite some Philosophy 101 blather for a few minutes. After that, every ten minutes or so the movie grinds to a screeching halt for more “what does it mean to be alive” blah blah blah. It’s the sort of tedious philosophical crap that seems deep when you’re 16; after you take a couple of philosophy courses, or read a few books, or get some life experience… not so much. Aside from that, and the English voice actors in the dubbed version being really just terrible (don’t judge me for watching the dubbed version), I thought it was okay, but I expected it to be a lot better.
In “The Sand”, a half-dozen attractive young people in bathing suits wake up after a beach party to find that they are stranded in the middle of a stretch of beach that eats anything living that touches it. The premise sounds horrendous, but the performances and the variety of ways the characters die really raise the quality of this. The cast is surprisingly good, and the movie held my interest the entire time. The special effects are very good at the beginning (both the gore and the monster), but get more cheesy and less convincing as the film goes on. But at the beginning, they really are quite good. Overall, this movie exceeded my expectations, and even surprised me a couple of times.
“Nudist Colony Of The Dead” sounds like it will be awful, and it is. However, it’s not what I expected, and it’s actually somewhat amusing. For one thing, it’s a musical. The songs are terrible, but the tunes are kind of catchy. Second, it’s a satire of late-1980s Americanized Christianity, along the lines of “Saved” (2004). It’s not as funny as “Saved”, but they do try, and it’s definitely a step above painfully unfunny “comedies” like “Bridesmaids” (2011), “Jack And Jill” (2011), and “Hot Pursuit” (2015). Finally, I was surprised at just how little nudity there is. I was expecting a cringe-inducing, wooden parade of naked bodies, but there’s more nudity on an episode of Game Of Thrones (the first season, anyway: I stopped watching shortly after Sean Bean died). Heck, “Ghost In The Shell” probably had as much nudity (although those were robots, so I’m not sure that counts). So while I wouldn’t call this a good movie, if your expectations are as low as mine were, you might find it okay, or even mildly amusing. But it’s no “Zombie Strippers” (which is fantastic, aside from the tedious framing scenes at the beginning and the end).
Powered by WordPress
![[x]](/images/sigil_md.jpg)
Blackmoor Vituperative
