InfraHaz is so stupid but this is legit one of the funniest posts ever
I'm going to be trembling with chagrin when Star Wars gasps his last breath after they shoot him.
Please, anyone else, just not that guy!
My man has periodic psychological disorders I never even knew about
please let's get Star Wars some help or some therapy or something, he's my favorite celebrity, i loved him in that one movie
Ehhhhh....
-Leia getting killed off but oh wait, not dead
-Reveal of big bad and dead within like 5 minutes
-Leaving to go search for some dude on another planet and not finding him
-Ships fleeing the empire getting blown up until they remember oh yeah, we can kamikaze people now with one person and one ship instead of doing that like, 3 ships ago
-Luke shows up out of nowhere on salt planet and nobody asks questions until it turns out its his force ghost
-Bringing back shiny imperial captain for her to die in kind of an anti climax
Don't get me wrong, it had good set piece moments like the duo fighting the imperial guard, Kylo confronting Luke and such, but it had more plot holes and continuity issues then the prequels
It is the best out of the sequel trilogy tho
I show people the duel from The Deluge from time to time and people sometimes react by saying it looks like "fake fighting" because we've been trained by media to see fighting as this thing where everyone gives up their intentions via body language. The evil king raises his sword above his head in dramatic fashion etc. Telegraphing your plans to your opponent rarely helps you out.
Yeah but I think it's more 'saber fighting' then happens in the entire rest of the trilogy sadly, which is why it was noteworthy to me
haaaaard disagree, the mechanics of martial arts are secondary to the mechanics of putting together a scene---the one in question effectively conveying character development, foreshadowing , excellent costume design and motif.
also its literally 2 minutes and just rewatching it to make my point i only noticed 1 blatant mistake by ridley (but like, she shown to be a not great fighter the whole series so idk)
i don't get your point about weapon-on-weapon contact, they do hit weapons, just less than in the prequel fights. the sparks that come off from it are part of the 'fight confetti' (something that unbelieveably doesn't have a tvtropes page). and the guards specifically don't have lightsabers so they'd use a variety of techniques and raise fewer nitpicks from people who'd say 'why don't they hit them' everytime a protagonist parries one guy's sword.
the scene was not there to subvert anyone's expectations (except the merking of big head at the beginning), its just a group fight and, as the nitpick video points out, choreographed by a guy whose done a lot of hand to hand, less sword duelling. and they were a good choice, because its communicated in the story that Kylo is a crude fighter & Rey is woefully underprepared. the scene therefore takes more from brawling than prequel lightstick dancing and is better for it.
i don't know how much of that video you endorse but holy shit, a child made that. why wasn't it like the prequels--idk maybe they didn't want to waste 20 minutes doing bright twirls with unsufferable and undeveloped characters? maybe you can communicate more in a fight than 'this is how this guy lost this limb', 'this is why this guy isn't in another movie', 'we can sell a bunch of toys from this shit'? the best duels in Star Wars are the first three, and they are a) 90% about the mental states of the fighters b) advance character arcs c) more visually compelling than impressively choreographed.
prequel shit was filler spectacle and just as ridiculous from a martial arts perspective. MF actually praised prequel fights and turned around to criticise useless spinning in the TLJ fight.
It felt like it was giving a middle finger to hardcore fans at several points. As a recovered hardcore fan, this pleased me.
-Reveal of big bad and dead within like 5 minutes
This was the best part of the movie. We've already seen Palpatine in the last two trilogies, we don't need a clone of his character in this one too.
Your other points are all valid. The central plot was bad, the casino planet plot was bad, but the Rey/Kylo/Luke stuff was great.
Kylo Ren is one of the greatest movie villains of all time. Monolithic evil is one thing, but a petulant, wangsty teen with unchecked power is a threat to which we can all relate.
I think your critiques are valid (except for the whole "Snoke dies immediately" thing, I loved that). The hyperspace kamikaze thing especially bothered me- there are such huge world building implications of that which the writers didn't seem to realize. Like, if this is possible, it should be the dominant military tactic. Like they should have missiles that are basically just hyperdrives and not bother with turbolasers at all.
But really, most of those critiques didn't bother me enough to really impact my enjoyment of the movie. I'm so starved for Star Wars media that is willing to critique the Jedi even just a little bit that when I get a work where that's a main theme, I jump on it- KOTOR2 is my favorite piece of Star Wars media, which you could probably guess. Otherwise, I have to settle for, at best, extremely heavy implications that, half the time, I'm not sure the writer even intended to be present, like in Clone Wars (and I love some parts of Clone Wars, don't get me wrong). Star Wars as a universe is so stale when the Jedi are just heros and so much more interesting when in the hands of people who realize how fucked they are.
That's also why I find the awful, awful, extremely terrible execution of the prequels so frustrating, because I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be a big part of the point, like the Jedi were sowing the seeds of their own destruction. But those movies were so bad that even I can't overlook it.
That's fair, I do know a lot of people liked it.
I think a big part of my personal lack of enjoyment of the sequels is that, during the prequels, I just decided to appreciate the spectacle, which was fantastic (since as you note and I agree the prequels' execution was really slipshod). And it was one of the things they did decently, the ludicrous set piece moments
The sequels tried to be more about world building and narrative experience rather than over the top fight sequences, which was and still is a bit jarring to me; it doesn't help that each movie felt like it was trying to be something completely different from the others due to different directors and production staff wanting to do their own things
Personally, I would reboot Star Wars with the Rebel Alliance as an explicitly ML group based on the North Vietnamese.
The whole post WWII era but in space and from an explicitly leftist perspective would be rad as fuck.
"You know what would be really interesting to do? Don’t denounce me as a Stalinist but, for example – it’s my old temptation – to rewrote Star Wars… presenting Palpatine and Darth Vader as good progressive egalitarian centralist fighting reactionary feudalist, all the Jedi bullshit. It would tell a completely different story, from the others point. What do [Jedi] stand for? All that, ‘Republic’, what strange of Republic is when you have a Princess Leila, knights, kings and so on? No, Palpatine the Emperor and Darth Vader, they are my good progressive Bonapartist revolutionaries trying to get rid of the old world."
"Mr. Zizek, this is a Wendy's."
this is my headcanon anyway, the EU is so wildly inconsistent you can just say they're commies who made wartime compromises against the fascists
include droid liberation, if you pay any close attention youll notice the majority of the proletariat in star wars are droids, who are ALL sentient beings if allowed to age just as a human must grow out of infancy to show its sentience, they frequently mindwipe droids to keep them highly tectnically skilled baby slaves forever.
No, this moron is obsessed with the vapid consumerist culture of neoliberalism in the exact same way as the reactionary right
Does anyone but performative haters even give a shit about Marvel anymore? It's old hat now. They had their big climax years ago.
There's the occasional thing that gets buzz, like the multiverse Spider-Man movie, but eh.
in this case "we" = terminally online american conservatives larping as communists
still a good idea though I would pay to watch that movie
I want to see Micky mouse piss himself when a gun is pointed at his head
Yo not everyone is into piss play.
cant go 2 seconds without someone trying to tell me piss is good. if piss is so good then why do they pay guys to mop it up?? go read Theory
Yeah but Socialist children's movies probably shouldn't be individualist propaganda about people who are just inherently more powerful than everyone else.
Hbomber did a great analysis of Transformers: the Movie. It may not have resonated exactly as intended (it was only intended to sell toys), but seeing visceral, graphic death in what had been a relatively light-hearted universe was like the shock of adulthood coming at you. Unicron does not represent malevolent evil so much as a cold and indifferent force of nature (he's just gotta eat). What ultimately beats him isn't military force, but the Matrix, which is a textbook macguffin but represents hope itself in how the characters think and talk about it. I think the movie ultimately gives as much as it takes, although I honestly can't remember how much it traumatized me as a child.
HBomb recontextializing the universal greeting from a terrible contrived plot point to a genuinely revolutionary message of optimism is one of my favorite takes of his. Quality vid, quality movie.
The idea of "let's be friends" being a universal concept that transcends species and worlds is a pretty fuckin' beautiful thought.
My father watched it as a child and showed it to me on VHS when I was like 6-7, I distinctly remember how gloomy and doomy that movie was, especially for a childrens toy movie
Fully agreed. I especially love the backgrounds, which are absolutely trippy, like they gave the artists free reign to imagine the most alien, bizarre vistas imaginable. And the robot fights have a feeling of mass and force that not even the CGI Bayformers could match.
Let people have their fun. Most of this media is the product of capitalism, and will go away with its extinction.
Let people enjoy chiding people who criticize the flippant approval of consuming capitalist culture which reinforces the capitalist base.
Though I read this as more of a "I'm tired of seeing the same meme over and over again" thing than some retraction of the message of the original.
