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Star Wars Episode 8

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27 minutes ago, clyde said:

This makes me want to look through fan-edits and mashups of the Star Wars films (that hopefully include material from other stuff) until I find something that continues to use the characters, aesthetics, and political fantasies of the series, but doesn't feel like Star Wars anymore. It would be interesting to find the limit in order to see what I think the essence of Star Wars is.

 

This, to me, was definitely the appeal of TV shows like Battlestar, Red Dwarf, Firefly, or to a weirder and lesser extent, Lexx. Maybe those are a stretch but they all carried the character based feeling of rag tag crew in space jalopy.

 

 

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25 minutes ago, plasticflesh said:
This, to me, was definitely the appeal of TV shows like Battlestar, Red Dwarf, Firefly, or to a weirder and lesser extent, Lexx. Maybe those are a stretch but they all carried the character based feeling of rag tag crew in space jalopy.

 

 

 

A big part of Star Wars for me is the aspect that feels like serfs fantasizing about being royalty (with an element of ancestry to it) and that meaning something in the context of religion, morality, and power. I don't get that from something like Space Balls or those series you mentioned.

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That's a very interesting a cool read because it makes a clear delineation between Star Wars and almost all other popular sci fi. Perhaps it becomes a sort of hard sci fi versus fantasy sci fi dispute. Star Trek, Farscape, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, The Expanse, all continue to speculate on 'hard sci fi' concepts of technology and politics.

 

But Star Wars is indeed unique in its focus on dynastic space magic. Perhaps one analog is Dune. Perhaps another is... Game of Thrones?

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Dune (I've only seen the movie) would pass as Star Wars for me. Good example.

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15 hours ago, clyde said:

Dune (I've only seen the movie) would pass as Star Wars for me. Good example.

It’s crazy that in the rarest drop you can get from the alternate universe blind box machine, David Lynch directed Return of the Jedi. 

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Except it was called Revenge Of The Jedi and Harrison Ford decided not to come back so Han Solo stayed frozen in carbonite.

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I watched this movie for the second time last night. I liked it the first time, but I enjoyed it more the second.

Kylo Ren is easily my favorite Star Wars character ever. He is so interesting as a villian. 

To be honest, I watched the movie the second time in order to pay attention to

 

Reylo

and it did not disappoint. 

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I think Kylo Ren is my favorite too. The new movies have a great crop of amazing people - I love Finn, Rey, and Poe, and Hux and DJ and so on... - but Ren is a step above. In a lot of ways he's everything Anakin could've been. Anyways, I don't love this article, but I don't hate it, and it's maybe worth reading because it's short, so check this out.

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Fucking misogynists making it difficult for me to publicly dislike shit films >:(

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Just now, Ben X said:

Fucking misogynists making it difficult for me to publicly dislike shit films >:(

 

ah yes, the real victim here

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I'm going to quibble with the premise of the article: there's a pretty clear consensus that people didn't think the casino planet plot was properly connected to the rest of the film, and I can see that if that's how you feel, the film is going to be fatally flawed for you.

 

It's difficult these days to really say that people are attacking a strawman - for every stupid-ass opinion out there, you can probably find someone who has it - but it's not really addressing any of the complaints about the film other than the ones it can use to support its argument. I'd suggest the people making those particular complaints are probably open misogynists, so it's not that insightful to demonstrate that an complaint they're making is rooted in misogyny.

 

 

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6 hours ago, jennegatron said:

 

ah yes, the real victim here

 

ah yes, the joke here

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I finally saw this movie. I liked it a lot, far more than I was expecting to.

 

Spoiler

My expectations of Star Wars are fairly low at this stage. I loved the original films when I was a kid, of course, but it is not something I think about very often at this stage. I thought The Force Awakens was a good effort -- sprawling, but with some fantastically penetrating imagery -- but I thought Rogue One was mostly lacklustre. I think The Last Jedi easily surpasses both.

 

It is, I suppose, too long. But I never felt the length; I was totally engrossed throughout, and looking back on it now, I can't think of anything I wish they'd cut. I think the weakest moments are where it finds itself having to clean up after the excesses of The Force Awakens (Finn's fight with Phasma in particular). When I compare it to the annoyance I've felt with the length and pace of, say, Stranger Things s2, The Last Jedi seems like a masterpiece of concision by comparison.

 

The casino stuff brushes over a tremendous amount of detail but the sequence as a whole is a neat exemplar of the film's dream of freeing itself from old paradigms, politics, traditions, moral categories. Of course it's also faintly hypocritical in that classic Disney way: ensnaring the audience with a dream of freedom that only exists within their branded omniverse. We are ourselves the sad-eyed dog-horse-beasts, attended to by the Dickensian waifs in our stalls -- they've been doing this stuff since Dumbo, and they're very good at it.

 

I've seen a couple of people compare it to Master and Commander and the work of Patrick O'Brian generally. This is not a comparison I ever expected to make, but since I'm reading through those books at the moment, I'm happy to confirm it is entirely accurate. It's the long, slow chase, combined with the actual conflict endlessly deferred, plus the agonising lack of correct options and the ultimate toss-up between heroic individualism and hard-nosed managerialism. I really liked all that stuff.

 

None of the plot holes bothered me in the slightest, though I did wonder about how Rey got to the Falcon near the end of the film. I guess I don't come to Star Wars with the expectation of hard sf internal coherence nor sensitive character development. But I will admit that Leia getting sucked out into space was extremely silly.

 

I do wonder how any future films are going to measure up to this. Rian Johnson seems to have taken the questions of moral ambiguity about as far as they can go, and it could be tedious to have all that stuff raked over again. Given that neither Rey nor Ren 'flipped' here, I'll be curious to see if the next film settles back into an old-fashioned good vs evil showdown. And I wonder if Johnson's own separate trilogy will become his way of exploring the 'third way' outside of the rebel/imperial dichotomy that this film teases.

 

I'm still kind of astonished that The Last Jedi ended with a scene of a child playing with a Luke Skywalker action figure. It pushes the big Spielberg button but sometimes I think with Star Wars this is the only button worth pushing. Capturing the imaginations of children is the reason this franchise still exists.

 

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On 15/1/2018 at 10:50 AM, marginalgloss said:

I finally saw this movie. I liked it a lot, far more than I was expecting to.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

My expectations of Star Wars are fairly low at this stage. I loved the original films when I was a kid, of course, but it is not something I think about very often at this stage. I thought The Force Awakens was a good effort -- sprawling, but with some fantastically penetrating imagery -- but I thought Rogue One was mostly lacklustre. I think The Last Jedi easily surpasses both.

 

It is, I suppose, too long. But I never felt the length; I was totally engrossed throughout, and looking back on it now, I can't think of anything I wish they'd cut. I think the weakest moments are where it finds itself having to clean up after the excesses of The Force Awakens (Finn's fight with Phasma in particular). When I compare it to the annoyance I've felt with the length and pace of, say, Stranger Things s2, The Last Jedi seems like a masterpiece of concision by comparison.

 

The casino stuff brushes over a tremendous amount of detail but the sequence as a whole is a neat exemplar of the film's dream of freeing itself from old paradigms, politics, traditions, moral categories. Of course it's also faintly hypocritical in that classic Disney way: ensnaring the audience with a dream of freedom that only exists within their branded omniverse. We are ourselves the sad-eyed dog-horse-beasts, attended to by the Dickensian waifs in our stalls -- they've been doing this stuff since Dumbo, and they're very good at it.

 

I've seen a couple of people compare it to Master and Commander and the work of Patrick O'Brian generally. This is not a comparison I ever expected to make, but since I'm reading through those books at the moment, I'm happy to confirm it is entirely accurate. It's the long, slow chase, combined with the actual conflict endlessly deferred, plus the agonising lack of correct options and the ultimate toss-up between heroic individualism and hard-nosed managerialism. I really liked all that stuff.

 

None of the plot holes bothered me in the slightest, though I did wonder about how Rey got to the Falcon near the end of the film. I guess I don't come to Star Wars with the expectation of hard sf internal coherence nor sensitive character development. But I will admit that Leia getting sucked out into space was extremely silly.

 

I do wonder how any future films are going to measure up to this. Rian Johnson seems to have taken the questions of moral ambiguity about as far as they can go, and it could be tedious to have all that stuff raked over again. Given that neither Rey nor Ren 'flipped' here, I'll be curious to see if the next film settles back into an old-fashioned good vs evil showdown. And I wonder if Johnson's own separate trilogy will become his way of exploring the 'third way' outside of the rebel/imperial dichotomy that this film teases.

 

I'm still kind of astonished that The Last Jedi ended with a scene of a child playing with a Luke Skywalker action figure. It pushes the big Spielberg button but sometimes I think with Star Wars this is the only button worth pushing. Capturing the imaginations of children is the reason this franchise still exists.

 

 

I really like your take on this and agree with all of it. Very excited for this to be out on Blu-ray so I can finally watch it again. :tup:

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3 hours ago, BigJKO said:

 

I've seen a couple of people compare it to Master and Commander and the work of Patrick O'Brian generally. This is not a comparison I ever expected to make, but since I'm reading through those books at the moment, I'm happy to confirm it is entirely accurate. It's the long, slow chase, combined with the actual conflict endlessly deferred, plus the agonising lack of correct options and the ultimate toss-up between heroic individualism and hard-nosed managerialism. I really liked all that stuff.

 

 

Wow that is a really cool analogy that never occurred to me. It is totally on point and I dig it

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Saw it, liked it. I kept getting destroyed by the score/sound so visually it could have been an extended video of Mark Hamill eating soup and I’d have liked it. 

 

Random thoughts:

- Out of the 3 new SW films I'd rate this highest with rogue one waayy at the bottom.

 

- I felt a fair bit of meta emotion which muddied things. Hamil and Fishers careers, the arc of the starwars in pop culture, its role in my own memory.. The film almost acted as a backdrop for broader feelings of both personal nostalgia and larger cultural changes, I suppose that's the intention.. I don't generally care about star wars either so this made things a bit more confusing. 

 

- I agree about the length/spread being a bit much, however i'd already heard this criticism going in and it may have colored my experience. I don't mind long films. 

 

- Oh and I loved Rey and Kylo. Great jobs by the actors, they can have a tup. 

 

 

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The MRAs have outdone themselves this time. I didn't think they'd be able to freak out in a more hilarious fashion than the "Cuck Ball" rant from TFA, but they've really stepped their game up. Amazing.

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13 hours ago, Ben X said:

 

Beat you to it by 5 posts (no one seemed interested).

Doh, I guess it is probably a good thing that no one is interested.

 

I mean fuck those guys.

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Yep. Although I realised later the title we both quoted is a little misleading, as it was just one MRA rather than a concerted group effort (which may be a reason no one was interested).

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We get it, Ben, you worked really hard on your Star Wars fan-edit. None of us said anything because we really thought it was better suited for the Plug Your Shit thread.

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I would never do something like this, it goes against all my principles. I mean, a camrip? Yuck!

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