It was truly something.

  • DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Babe, time for your bi-weekly struggle session over TLJ! :yes-honey-left:

    It's a bad movie. All the sequel trilogy are bad movies, and I will admit that TLJ is the best one out of the lot, but that's kind of like saying I'd prefer catching syphilis over ebola. The only points in its favor are that it's not written/directed by JJ 'Magic Box' Abrams and that it didn't just blatantly copy+paste an existing Star Wars movie. Neither of those points are high praise.

    The plot is driven entirely by Every. Single. Character. grabbing a hold of the Idiot Ball at the very beginning and holding on for dear life for the full runtime of the film, and not in a fun "look at how incompetent all these characters are, haha!" way but rather a "this movie should be 5 minutes long and end with the First Order using their BFG to blow up the lone enemy ship instead of the entirely stationary planetary base because literally anyone in their command structure had two braincells to rub together" way.

    The plot boils down to a nonsensical and extremely contrived low-speed car chase with multiple B-plots that plod along and accomplish nothing. Like, literally nothing. At no point should you be engaged with it, because it goes out of its way to waste an hour of your time on the world's most hamfisted "war profiteers are bad, actually" side plot that just ends with absolutely nothing being accomplished other than some racehorse stand-ins getting released into the wild (which, given they're racehorses, will end about an hour later with all of them having been eaten by something or starving because they've never had to fend for themselves before. Good job, space PETA!)

    I am also one of those nerds who will forever ignore that the film introduced the concept that you can just ram your spaceship into a fleet at lightspeed in a kamikaze attack, because the worldbuilder in my head goes into a frothing rage thinking about how that completely invalidates all warfare forever if any random nation-state can just fling automated asteroids-with-engines-attached at their enemies from afar and nuke their navies/planets/moon-sized superweapons into oblivion at a fraction of the cost of an actual military. The worldbuilding of the sequel trilogy is absolute fucking dogshit in general, but at least the nonsensicality of the First Order going from random terrorist cult to galaxy-spanning empire in the span of a few days between the first and second films doesn't invalidate shit in literally every other era of Star Wars.

    Rogue One had a one dimensional cast and pacing issues, and it still manages to be an infinitely better film because at least the plot actually makes sense and goes somewhere.

    • InsideOutsideCatside [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I am also one of those nerds who will forever ignore that the film introduced the concept that you can just ram your spaceship into a fleet at lightspeed in a kamikaze attack, because the worldbuilder in my head goes into a frothing rage thinking about how that completely invalidates all warfare forever if any random nation-state can just fling automated asteroids-with-engines-attached at their enemies from afar and nuke their navies/planets/moon-sized superweapons into oblivion at a fraction of the cost of an actual military.

      hahah yeah I just posted the same, like, it always bothered me that they never did that. Death star? uhhh okay, put an engine on a big rock and lightspeed into it, done deal, good bye. If it's not possible, like hyperspace is separate from realspace and you just go through things (which wouldn't make sense in other ways i.e. Han's Kessel Run would be super easy just hyperspacin' through black holes (or nebula or whatever the fuck they retconned it into)) then it's forgivable, but by demonstrating that it is possible... it's just so stupid.

      especially when literally any of the support cruisers that just "run out of gas" could have made a similar attack, saving everyone else, instead of just dying for no fucking reason

    • evilgritty [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I think the part where they got took to a jailcell with a hacker that broke them out and had the skills they needed was point I gave up on the movie. Like, its full of dumb moment, but that one takes the cake.