TychoCelchuuu

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Posts posted by TychoCelchuuu

  1. Posted

    No, I'm not making fun of you. I just think you have actual more interesting reasons you didn't like the movie, and I'm trying to draw those out because I'm interested in what they are. Just like you realized you misstated things when you said unsuspensful = the reason this movie is bad, I think you're misstating things (unconsciously) when you say the movie isn't believable, because I think that people believe in movies they like and disbelieve in movies they don't like. We had a similar conversation back in the Blade Runner 2049 thread - I pointed out all the stuff in the original that makes zero sense and you claimed that your brain evolved such that you don't notice this sort of thing. That's false because you noticed it in this movie, and I think that shows that I'm right about how people only notice this stuff when they dislike the movie for other reasons and they start searching around for something to justify their dislike and they settle on plot holes. Guess what? Every movie has enough plot holes to drive a Star Destroyer through. People only notice them when they start nitpicking in order to justify their dislike of a movie. They're not the reason people dislike the movie in the first place, though, and that's what I'm interested in here.

     

    As for none of the characters having personalities, I thought this movie was pretty gung-ho about giving them personalities, especially compared to The Force Awakens:

     

     

    Poe's personality in The Force Awakens was "sardonic once." Poe's personality in this movie is sardonic, headstrong, obsessed with winning a battle even if it loses the war, has to be in charge of things, etc., and he's got a character arc where all of that plays out in interesting ways when he clashes with another strong personality, Admiral Halitosis or whatever her name is. Rey's got this whole arc about finding Luke, wanting stuff from Luke, wanting to find out about her parents, deciding to try to turn Ren, her brushes with the dark side hole, etc. Finn goes from just caring about saving Rey and escaping from the whole thing to being ready to sacrifice himself, and on the way there's a whole arc about cynicism and what makes the people on the casino planet bad and whether both sides are equally crummy and so on. Luke's got so much character stuff going on it would take a book to go through it. Kylo Ren... I mean wow he's maybe got almost as much as Luke.

     

    That's not to say you're wrong, I'm just interested in why you think the characters here have no personality, especially if we stack it up against other Star Wars movies, for instance (especially TFA).

  2. Posted

    I definitely agree that the story is not very believable. I mean I'm off the boat as soon as they go faster than light, frankly. I find that super tough to swallow. I don't know if the movie is any less believable than any of the other Star Wars films, though. Where did the movie lose you in terms of believing in it?

     

    I guess I'm also not sure that the movie was set up to give every main character a chance to shine any more than literally any other movie ever made in the history of movies. Can you give me examples of movies you like where some of the main characters don't get a chance to shine, like they just sort of mope around and never do anything? I think my confusion is a bit that it seems like the way you even find out who a main character is in the first place is by looking at who gets a chance to shine. I'm struggling to think of movies, especially Star Wars movies, where any of the main characters don't get any chances to shine.

  3. Posted

    I still have a lot of thinking to do about the movie, and I for sure have to rewatch it before committing to much of anything, but I feel like Star Wars has always had twisty stuff like that. They can't open the door! Oh, but they can, R2-D2 is coming! Oh no, a stormtrooper shot him! He's dead? No, he's not. Anyways Han can rewire the door! He's got it! Wait no he doesn't, that made it close. Oh no Leia's been shot! And now they've been captured by a stormtrooper! But no, Leia has a blaster! They got him! Oh no, it's an AT-ST! They're captured again! Wait, no, it's Chewbacca. He's going to come down to help Leia! Wait no, Han's got an idea! He's going to climb up into the AT-ST and impersonate an Imperial Officer and tell the people inside the bunker that the Rebels have been defeated and they're on the run and now the people inside the bunker are going to run out to help with the chase! But then it turns out the Rebels and the Ewoks ambush them!

     

    That's not to say this movie isn't super twisty. It definitely feels like you've got about seven times the number of things that happen compared to something like The Force Awakens or A New Hope, both of which pared their twists down to however many it takes to run through the hero's journey plus a few extra (oh look, Han's back and he's saved Luke from Darth Vader!). I just mean that twists don't turn a story into bollocks. They just turn it into a twisty thing! And come to think of it, Rian Johnson's other three movies are equally twisty. He doesn't like straight lines in his plots, I guess!

     

    My own preference with respect to twistiness is that I don't really care. A plot where nothing happens, a plot where a trillion things happen, whatever. As long as the emotional throughline makes sense, the plot can do whatever it wants. If the movie wasn't very suspenseful then I'm inclined to simply view it as a movie without suspense, rather than as something that ought to be castigated. I did feel a fair amount of suspense at various points in the film - basically anything involving Luke, the very first scene with the bombers, basically anything involving Ren and Rey - but if I were in your position and I felt like the movie didn't have suspense, I don't think I'd dislike it for that reason.

     

    I certainly didn't feel like the movie was just cheaply trying to blow my mind or something. It didn't feel like a gimmicky kind of "it's the Sixth Sense and Luke was dead all along" sort of thing. At least for me, I never got that impression.

  5. Posted

    The Canto Bight music was pretty stretchy, I think.

     

    edit: I just listened to it on the soundtrack and uh yes this is stretchy as fuck. It gets into Catch Me If You Can territory, and that's just one of like, five separate equally crazy things it's up to. And it's less than 3 minutes long.

  6. Posted

    There's like... so much stuff in this movie. I saw it last night and I think it's going to be a while, and take a few rewatches, before I can say anything detailed and coherent about it. All I know right now is that I loved it. It's crazy that this year we got The Last Jedi and Blade Runner 2049, two movies that take beloved decades old movies and do some really radical stuff with them and knock it out of the park. I think BR2049 and TLJ are both excellent films that depart quite a bit from the originals in a lot of ways, TLJ much more so. I would kind of have liked films that recaptured the magic of the originals rather than doing new stuff, since I loved the originals so much, but I'm equally happy with movies that do their own thing and do it well. I'm not sure BR2049 and TLJ needed to be Blade Runner or Star Wars films, but they're excellent films.

     

    And I'll say the same thing about TLJ that can be said about The Force Awakens, and Rogue One for that matter: boy howdy do they hire some really good actors for these things. Like holy shit, everyone's so good. The amazing performances from Boyega, Ridley, and Driver were the only good things about The Force Awakens, and we've got them here in spades plus Isaac and Gleeson finally getting something to do, Hamill being tremendous, Laura Dern and Benicio del Toro!!!!, etc. 

  8. Posted

    Oh right, I should have mentioned that too. Yeah, in general philosophers argue that there are some rights that only persons should have, like for instance a right to vote or whatever, but there's plenty of disagreement about whether only persons have rights. Plenty of philosophers think non-persons, like dogs and babies, have some rights, like the right not to be tortured for no good reason or the right to get a really dope scratching machine installed in the barn.

  9. Posted

    Chris is right to quail a bit at the claim that smartphones are sentient. This is a very controversial topic - there are plenty of philosophers who argue that smartphones and other machines are not at all sentient, including some philosophers who think no machine could ever be sentient. The reader is also overstating the idea that there is a clear-cut distinction between sentience and sapience. Sapience, unlike sentience, is not a particularly well-regimented academic term. Philosophers tend to refer to what the reader talks about as sapience by instead using the term "personhood" - an animal with a degree of self-understanding akin to ours is a "person." Some argue that some non-human animals, like dolphins or octopuses, are persons.

  12. Posted

    I couldn't tell this podcast was recorded with a Remote Nick! Pretty impressive.

     

    I've only listened to some of the philosophy episodes of In Our Time, but I've enjoyed all of them. It's a pretty good show. I can definitely second Chris's recommendation.

     

    The story about going on your own to the Ben Franklin House is amazing. One of the top tier Important if True incidents, I'd argue.

  14. Posted

    Did you play the first one, Erkki? Basically everything Wolfenstein II does, the original does, and people are pretty evenly split on whether the first is better, the second is better, or they're equal. In any case, most of what people enjoy is the tone/plot/character of the game, and the shooting. I for one know I've never enjoyed shooting with anything other than a mouse and keyboard, and you might not really be getting the tone/plot/character from the thin Spanish slice you got served. So chances are you're missing out on the good stuff because it wasn't in the demo.