The Last jedi

[mraynrand]

Star Wars has been such a clusterfuck after the first 3. The stupidity is strong with all who have written, directed, and casted these movies. I'll agree on the exception of Rogue One, that was quality. But the others, I regret spending money on them. I'm fully expecting Episode 9 to be as dumb as when Capt Kirk had to go back in time to save the whales to save Earth in the Trek movies.

Was talking with a Star Wars nut last night. I think I convinced him that the problem was storytelling and characters (including poor acting). There were some interesting themes available, and some of it should have been salvageable, but the art is poor quality. For example, Emo Vader is interesting. He has one parent strong with the force and into politics, and another parent who is force-less, and is anti-government, anti-joiner by nature. If that conflict had played out better in Emo Vader over the course of episodes 7-9, it would have been very intriguing, but it required some decent exposition. All we get is a uniformly whining, tantrum throwing kid, not a kid who has to balance the disparate wishes of his parents to follow the path of one or the other. His story has no arc, his character has no journey and no destination.

Much of this results probably from what I call a 'serialization defect.' If you've watched any long-running show, that lasted longer than the original story, it's usually easy to detect when new, thin story lines are invented to draw the thing out. Too often these story lines are murky tangents which corrupt characters, rather than expanding them or challenging them in new ways. So instead of telling a cohesive story, and complete story that is the product of the creative mind of - usually - a single individual with a vision, the story becomes a slave to the necessity of having multiple episodes for commercial purposes, even if the ideas to sustain several episodes are not there.

[red]

Was talking with a Star Wars nut last night. I think I convinced him that the problem was storytelling and characters (including poor acting). There were some interesting themes available, and some of it should have been salvageable, but the art is poor quality. For example, Emo Vader is interesting. He has one parent strong with the force and into politics, and another parent who is force-less, and is anti-government, anti-joiner by nature. If that conflict had played out better in Emo Vader over the course of episodes 7-9, it would have been very intriguing, but it required some decent exposition. All we get is a uniformly whining, tantrum throwing kid, not a kid who has to balance the disparate wishes of his parents to follow the path of one or the other. His story has no arc, his character has no journey and no destination.

Much of this results probably from what I call a 'serialization defect.' If you've watched any long-running show, that lasted longer than the original story, it's usually easy to detect when new, thin story lines are invented to draw the thing out. Too often these story lines are murky tangents which corrupt characters, rather than expanding them or challenging them in new ways. So instead of telling a cohesive story, and complete story that is the product of the creative mind of - usually - a single individual with a vision, the story becomes a slave to the necessity of having multiple episodes for commercial purposes, even if the ideas to sustain several episodes are not there.

Yeah, so, they knew it was gonna be a trilogy, but instead of writing a 3 movie story. They decided to take one movie at a time and let each different director make up his own story

Which is very dumb