The Last Jedi discussion (not an analysis thread)

#1

Don’t read if you haven’t seen, there may or may not be spoilers and/or opinions that affect your ability to view and judge the movie yourself

So it’s been a couple weeks since I’ve seen The Last Jedi and I’m still really bothered by almost everything in it to the point that I’ve spent at least some time everyday over the last week watching youtube videos both hating on it and defending it just it see if I can’t make some sense of the decisions the creators took. I was just curious who here had seen it and what you might have thought of it?

If there’s anything to speak of about how this thing ties to Dramatica, it would be to point out that Rian Johnsons eagerness to subvert any and all expectations, even ones set up by his own movie, and poor execution of pretty much all ideas completely ruins any shot of a cohesive message this movie wanted to have, let alone the trilogy at large (it will be interesting to see if Abrams can salvage this now mess of a trilogy, but I can’t say that I have interest in seeing how that plays out at this point). I know that Narrative first claims that TLJ presents a “functionable narrative”, but I’ll be darned if I can see how with all of the set ups that have no payoff and the payoffs that have no set up, and the contradictory messages, etc.

Anyway, I don’t mean to start ranting. I’m curious what everyone else thinks about it. Did it work as a Star Wars movie for you? Did the narrative work just within this movie without looking at The Force Awakens? Did you feel it works or still can work when combined with TFA?

And just because I just learned it could be done…

  • I liked The Last Jedi and thought it worked within the Star Wars universe.
  • I liked The Last Jedi, but didn’t think it worked within the Star Wars universe.
  • I didn’t like The Last Jedi, but thought it worked within the Star Wars universe.
  • I didn’t like The Last Jedi and didn’t think it worked within the Star Wars universe.

0 voters

#2

I’m super, super picky about Star Wars*, to the point where the prequels don’t exist for me. But I really liked The Last Jedi. Everything felt pretty much right to me, yet it also managed to surprise me with a lot of twists I didn’t see coming.

I have a couple nit-picks but they were small. I wasn’t in love with some of the backstory, but it wasn’t hard to let that go because most of it had been presented in The Force Awakens, so I’d learned to live with it already.

I think the narrative was pretty darn solid. I haven’t read anything about what other people think about it, but I felt like all its setups worked fine. Some of them, of course, are series-related so not intended to be paid off yet.

The key thing to understand the storyform in this movie is to realize this episode has its own IC, separate from any series IC. I had trouble with that when initially trying to storyform, though I saw the OS pretty clearly (OS problem quad and Issue are really clear).

Jim and I had a really cool email exchange about the Outcome, as I initially disagreed with what he posted, but in the end I saw how his had to be correct. It was a really neat discussion because when I finally “saw the light” it was like a logical proof; I realized that my original position was indefensible based on other Dramatica concepts.

* My last name happens to be Lucas and I basically was Luke Skywalker as a kid – my hair was very blond while my brother’s was brown, so there was never any arguing about who was Luke and who was Han.

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#3

Very interesting take on it, Mike. I know there’s another movie to come, so some of the things that The Force Awakens brought up can still be explored. But for me, there was just so much that didn’t work looking at either both movies together or just looking at this one and there was just too much that was ignored, thrown out, or otherwise completely disrespected. I’m not sure how much of it was related to the storyform and how much was just personal distaste. Heck, maybe if I took a look at Jim’s analysis I could be like “oh, now I get it”, and I would love that.

It’s been confirmed that there was no direction in creating this movie as a sequel to The Force Awakens or to help it transition into the next movie. And to me, it shows hard. There may be a functional narrative within this movie alone, but I’m very skeptical that they’ll pull out a meaningful trilogy.

#4

I think when I heard “Disney” and “Star Wars,” my thoughts raced with excitement at the idea of Pixar-styled storytelling and I think I was mostly wrong. Right now this new trilogy appears to be something of a hot mess of baton tossing with no vision as to where it’s going. Doesn’t help that Disney is insistent on churning these out every two years instead of three, either.

That being said, I enjoyed TLJ more than TFA. TFA was just… unoriginal and left me indifferent and “meh.” TLJ at least surprised me with some of its choices and a certain amount of tension with not knowing what was going to happen next. TFA, in comparison, was totally predictable, unoriginal and way, way too contrived. It didn’t surprise me how well it did, and neither did the more apparent backlash to it over time after reading how JJ & Co pretty much had given themselves all of six months or so to write the story (Mike Arndt unfortunately seemed to get nowhere with it.)

My hope with the third film is that they expand on what was perhaps the most interesting aspect of TLJ: the arms dealers playing both sides. This is obviously a reflection of real-world issues and the “Industrial Military Complex,” but it would provide a bit of moral fodder for theme and where I would have liked to have seen the first film go with regards to regards to a need to balance the force. At any rate, it could provide a true puppet-master, but alas, it was such a small, seemingly throw-away bit in TLJ that I doubt it will be expanded upon.

#5

I think one of the first things I saw when it was announced that Disney had bought Lucasfilm was a picture of George Lucas standing next to Jedi Mickey, and I thought ‘this is not going to be good.’ But I warmed up to the idea hoping, like you, that Disney would handle Star Wars with the same storytelling sensibilities as Pixar. That could have been awesome.

TFA was unoriginal, but I thought it was a fun watch and assumed it was a jumping off point from something comfortable to something different. For me, though, TLJ was just too different. It just ignored too much that had come before to the point of outright disrespect and it completely removed itself from any larger story by doing that. Also, I found it hard to feel tension when the movie starts with a single pilot in a single X-Wing taking on a giant first order ship with comedy that, for me, just felt awkward and flat.

I think your idea for third one could be an interesting watch. Personally I don’t care to have real world politics crammed into my escapist fantasy that’s traditionally been about black and white, good and evil. Not blatantly, anyway. For me, when the movie suggests that both sides are bad because, deep down, they’re both going to war and buying war weapons from the same evil arms dealers, then it’s telling me to stop rooting for the good guys and start rooting for the end of war. That just doesn’t seem like a good idea for a company that just spent 4 billion dollars on a franchise with the word Wars in the title and who has assured me that I will not live to see the last Star Wars film. I’m not against movies telling me war is bad, but I don’t care to hear that the heroes are really bad too.

That said, I think I could put up with a lot of the new directions this film took if this trilogy had any kind of direction to it at all. I mean, everyone brings it up, but no one really holds it against the original trilogy that Luke and Leia switch from potential romantic partners to brother and sister because, despite revealing that trilogy’s lack of a specific plan, it doesn’t take away from that trilogy’s direction. There’s all kinds of talk about how TLJ is telling everyone that Star Wars is now for a new generation, or whatever. And that would be fine if that was the direction. But Rian Johnson seems to be the only one making that statement (and perhaps Kathleen Kennedy). I mean, TFA and Rogue One seemed to be all about nostalgia and sticking to the established universe.

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#6

Okay, so two things.

  1. I don’t mean to disparage anyone else’s taste in movies. I can see why others would like this film. I was mostly entertained, if perplexed, while watching this movie and only really came to dislike it after it was over and I had seen the full thing. If it had not been called Star Wars: The Last Jedi but instead called Galactic Fighters: A New Franchise You’ve Never Heard Of Before, I would have thought it was much better, though still inconsistent.
  2. I realize this thread was started without much direction and wound up complaining about this trilogy’s lack of direction. To correct that, I have a specific (and spoiler-y) question that relates to storytelling and storyform.
    SPOILER ALERT********

Vice Adm Haldo sacrifices herself to save the resistance. The movie plays this like she was doing a right and heroic thing to be admired. Immediately afterward, Finn is about to sacrifice himself and is stopped by Rose who tells him we don’t win by killing those we hate but saving those we love. Never mind that saving those he loved was what Finn was doing and Rose’s actions would have essentially doomed the entirety of the resistance had they not found a way out of the cave it had already been established that there was no way out of. These two scenes are an example of why I felt the movie was inconsistent. Seen from a Dramatica POV, did the rest of you feel this was an inconsistency, or should I maybe view it as more of a thematic conflict? As in maybe the Haldo scene when compared to Rose’s scene should be telling us something about the nature of Self-Interest vs Morality, like sometimes self-sacrifice is good, but sometimes it’s not?

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#7

Pretty sure that was supposed to be the point. I read a review to that effect as well. (The OS Issue is Self-Interest). Maybe it didn’t work, or left too much implied.

I enjoyed the movie, (and felt like it the narrative was solid) but I had trouble answering your poll, mainly because even though I was definitely a first generation Star Wars kid (with the requisite love for the franchise) I can’t say the “Star Wars universe” is coherent enough to answer the question of what fits in or not.

Mike says [quote=“mlucas, post:2, topic:1469”]
I’m super, super picky about Star Wars*, to the point where the prequels don’t exist for me.
[/quote] which is kind of how I feel too, but then if that’s true, isn’t the whole series kind of half-baked and full of poor setups and weak payoffs? I mean, once they failed to deliver (well) on the whole Anakin-becoming-Darth thing, what was left? In other words, doesn’t the poor execution of Episodes I-III kind of ruin IV-VI?

But then even internally, the original trilogy has some pretty inexcusable storytelling holes. I mean, Princess Leia is Luke’s sister, which means she’s Darth Vader’s daughter. Does she have any kind of reaction when finding this out? Did Darth Vader know she was his daughter when he made her watch as he committed genocide by blowing up her home planet? Isn’t that kind of important one way or another?

My wife thinks the entire Star Wars franchise is utterly ridiculous. After we saw The Force Awakens (which I was so excited to see and share with the kids) she went on such a rant about how terrible it was that I told her she wasn’t allowed to see The Last Jedi with us. Meanwhile my 10-year old son absolutely loves everything Star Wars now. (Interestingly though, his favorite movie is Rouge One.)

I pretty much have no expectations for the movies anymore. My original love for the original series lies in the nostalgic past of childhood. Everything else … well, let’s just say the bar is low.

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#8

Good points. Maybe I was expecting too much to begin with. I’d say that the stuff that didn’t fit was every instance where this film saw something in a previous film and essentially decided it wasn’t important, didn’t happen, didn’t need to be addressed, didn’t mean what it had claimed to mean, etc. doing that once or twice the right way is a great way to make a story interesting and unique. But doing it in every single scene just to do it just tells me that everything in the story is pretty much meaningless.

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#9

There are no Episodes I-III. Or perhaps better to say, Episodes I-III only exist in my imagination, where they are awesome. :smiley:

The real problem in this movie is that everyone is doing things their own way and taking matters into their own hands. “My way or the highway” kind of attitude. Holdo is just as guilty of this as Finn and the others – her self-sacrifice is shown as a noble gesture but ultimately futile. (Which I thought was really cool, to have a movie where the self-sacrifice was useless, even costly!)

Rose is the one who seems to know the “truth”. When she says they’ll win “not by fighting what we hate, but saving what we love” she captures the essence of the film. “Fighting what we hate” isn’t just about Empire and Rebels* killing each other, it’s about Finn and Poe struggling against Haldo’s way of doing things, Holdo not telling anyone her plan, Luke hiding away because he hates himself, etc.

Meanwhile, Luke’s sacrifice at the end works thematically because he is patently NOT doing things his own way. (He didn’t even want to get involved.)

I think you’re right that it’s a subtle take on Self Interest vs. Morality … it’s sort of saying, self-sacrifice is noble and all but isn’t a solution that works to further your own way of doing things.

* Yeah, yeah, First Order and Resistance. I’m old school. (First Order just sounds dumb. We know what they are.)

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#10

If you want feedback, Star Wars has been dead to me ever since I heard they killed off Hans Solo. If they have the plotting show he is actually still alive, then I’ll start watching them, again.

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#11

Very thoughtful analysis of TLJ’s story structure (at the end of the page):

#12

Thoughtful, perhaps, but wrong-headed. I think her need to fit the story into her little boxes made it difficult for her to enjoy it. Several of her comments demonstrate an inability to appreciate the story’s meaning holistically. For example this:

Rose learns that Finn was right, in the beginning, when he was willing to run away from the fight in order to save someone he cared about. She says “we have to save what we love.” Arguably, however, this is a horrible lesson, since her choice would have gotten everyone killed, if not for Luke’s serendipitous arrival.

You can’t play “would have” with a story. (If Luke hadn’t come, it would have been a different story anyway.) The whole point of what Rose does there is that it doesn’t seem like the right choice, but it turns out to be.

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#14

Jim says about Solo:A Star Wars Story:
‘The reason this is the first Star Wars flop is this giant hole in the narrative structure of the story’

I haven’t seen it, but I’m thinking Solo was already going to lose around a hundred million dollars before anyone had seen it. There’s several reasons for that, but the relevant one for this thread is the narrative hole not in Solo, but in the Rey and Finn saga. Turns out you can’t spend the second part of your trilogy telling the audience that the first part and everything before it didn’t matter or mean anything and expect the audience to still care about the stories you’re only half heartedly telling them. It’ll be interesting to see if people have regained any of their curiosity or enthusiasm for this franchise when part 3 rolls out in a year and a half.

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#15

I agree. I think TLJ had a big hand in this one bombing, not to mention the production mayhem. It just seems like a really weird decision to have JJ set up elements for a whole new trilogy and then let someone else triumphantly dismiss all of it in part two. Bold, yes. Interesting, definitely. But weird and inconsistent.

I know people that love Star Wars that either didn’t see Solo because of TLJ completely disregarding the first reboot/sequel thing, or they saw it and flat-out hated it because of the myriad of story reasons Jim stated in his article (and the fact that it’s a wholly unnecessary cash grab).

Also I think the fact that it’s distinctly un-Star Wars-y (no force/space battles/lightsabers, etc.) probably didn’t help, although that may explain why it’s the first Star Wars movie of the whole franchise I’ve seen that I also enjoyed. I’ll get my coat before people see that. :grimacing:

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#16

there’s a handful of reasons that I’m not seeing Solo (even though I’m sure I’d think it was at least an okay, probably pretty fun film). The choices made in TLJ are definitely a large part of it. My interest in Disney/Lucasfilm Star Wars is now pretty much relegated to “will they try to fix TLJ, and if so, how?” I can’t think of a way to completely fix it, but I can think of one thing that would fix most of it, and all of the biggest issues. But it would probably anger the part of the audience that did like TLJ. Haha.

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#17

I don’t think they can ‘fix’ it, honestly. It’s an unwinnable situation. If they reverse what happened in TLJ, you have two movies that have basically been pointless. But if they continue with the TLJ threads, the die-hard fans will actively boycott it like Solo. I don’t know that there’s anything they can do to rectify that error now, but I’m morbidly curious to see their attempt (and dreading the inevitably violent blowback from that small, but vocal, minority of social media trolls who seem to think actors write their own scenes).

I just cannot get my head around how they didn’t have a gameplan for this trilogy. I get that Lucas didn’t have one for his, but he’s one man and he created the franchise. Of course he can figure it out. But to get three different filmmakers to create one part each without someone to guide it is baffling to me. It’s like doing a Story Embroidery here, but giving everyone a different storyform to work from. Like… none of that is going to make any sense when you put it together. You need some kind of continuity and structure.

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#18

I think you could fix anywhere from about fifty percent to maybe eighty percent of the stuff people found unforgivable. But certainly not everything. But at this point it’s not even about if they can fix it. It’s about Lucasfilm telling everyone “hey we know we called everyone a bunch of ugly names for not liking TLJ, but we still really want your money, so here’s an attempt to course correct.’ If I get even that much, I’ll give it another shot and probably even see the next movie twice to make up for Solo. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen, though.

#19

I feel like he at least had a direction even if not a clear map. Lucasfilm right now doesn’t have a direction at all. What’s the point of calling something a trilogy in advance if there’s not a story in place that will ultimately connect them together?

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#20

I didn’t hate TLJ, but I went into it a wee bit wary because I’m not a huge Rian fan. Took me three attempts to finish watching “Brick.” I never did finished watching “Looper” and he directed the one episode of Breaking Bad I thought was the absolute worst and would have been the one I almost tapped out on (it was the one with the fly.)

That being said, JJ and Kasdan didn’t do fans any service other than nostalgia with laying the foundation for the new trilogy, essentially putting themselves in a corner after Arndt struggled to come up with a serviceable story. From what I read, JJ and Kasdan had SIX MONTHS to write a final draft before filming which probably explains the carbon-copy feel of the original.

I honestly found TFA to be pretty meh. Never did the universe feel as small as it did in that film with its contrived coincidences.

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#21

I didn’t hate TLJ at first. While watching it, I’d say I was entertained but perplexed by some bizarre storytelling choices. Leaving the theater I knew I didn’t like it but it probably took me a week or two to decide I full on hated it.

Never saw brick, thought Looper was okay until toward the end, and was fine with the fly episode but wanted it to move along to something more exciting. I’m obviously not going to be a Rian Johnson fan going forward.

I was excited about Star Wars so forgave TFA it’s faults knowing that Ford only came back if they killed off Solo (why did he not go out in a blaze of glory?) and assuming they had a good story to tell. Now that I know TFA was just JJ offering up a bunch of mystery boxes and Rian has told us that those mystery boxes were all empty, the only Disney era movie I care for is Rogue One.

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