Star Wars: The Last Jedi release thread (spoilers)

[Gandalf]

Families cannot enjoy art together?

[Effie]

Why should we care about the franchise, or about it being appealing to anyone? Why not care about Star Wars as art?

Also, again, scholarship on Star Wars disputes the "simple good vs. evil set-up" that most people use to praise or condemn the movies.

Because that makes it a shared experience with the whole family? Like Pixar films, these are movies that young and old can equally enjoy.

A film does not need to have deep messages or complex storytelling to be good. It can simply be fun and simple to make it enjoyable.

It's not like ANH needed complex and deep themes to make it a good film. It's just really fun.

I don't really care, as a reader and viewer, whether art is manufactured to the proper content standards determined by marketing.

[Vendetta]

Rotten Tomatoes has actually said there's considerable evidence of disruptive reviews in its user reviews from TLJ (identified by people who register just to review that one thing and never review anything else ever, it has a much higher incidence of that behaviour than other films.

Then there was that guy on facebook claiming credit for organising it and trying to organise doing the same to Black Panther (Facebook closed the user group).

So there's considerable evidence of a concerted effort to tank its user score.

Link? Not that I doubt what you're saying, but it might be good to have a source to cite for future reference.

Also, if it is the same people targeting both Black Panther and TLJ, that by itself pretty much eliminates the possibility that its just Star Wars fans pissed over TLJ. The choice of targets (a film with a black lead, and one with black and female leads, in film franchises that have until recently had only white male leads) strongly suggests a political campaign motivated by bigotry.

It's taken me a little while to come back to this one, but here's an article talking about it: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmqn ... toes-vgtrn

Actual viewer polls from comScore and CinemaScore, who do exit polls at cinemas, were overwhelmingly positive for TLJ, with only a very small proportion of the audience having negative responses.

However, RT and Metacritic user reviews are self selecting and open to abuse which they don't do too much to filter because the "controversy" drives business to their site (they used the different scores in a twitter campaign to promote themselves, like they held off revealing Justice League's critic freshness rating to drive their new podcast).

(Noticably, Black Panther, the next movie the person claiming to have botted TLJ's score down, is developing a similar trend.)

[ray245]

I don't really care, as a reader and viewer, whether art is manufactured to the proper content standards determined by marketing.

Marketing won't automatically make a movie more accessible to younger audiences.

[Straha]

I don't really care, as a reader and viewer, whether art is manufactured to the proper content standards determined by marketing.

Marketing won't automatically make a movie more accessible to younger audiences.

I'm really curious about this artificial divide you have between accessibility and intelligence. Intelligent stories can be accessible to children and even let children grow into the story as they discover its layers over time.

The original trilogy is like that. It starts off as escapism but overtime children can recognize how it has something to say about family and finding your own identity (Luke originally yearns for a family that he belongs to as an orphan, finds out that his lost father still exists and is evil, rejects the father, and then goes out once more to redeem him. It's complicated and a pretty decent deconstruction of how we imagine the father/child relationship should look).
Good Disney movies have this too. There's a reason kids responded so well to Frozen and it's not just because it has a catchy song, it's all about teasing out the meaning behind Disney myths and narratives. It's got problems, sure, but there's an accessible depth to it.
Hell, great TV shows have it too. The early Simpsons isn't just hilariously funny for kids but really smart as well.

I don't get why you think those stories can be smart and kid friendly but TLJ can't be.

EDIT:

And, yeah, to echo Gandalf can kids not be taken to enjoy art by their family? I was at the opera recently and there were four and five year olds who sat through five and a half hours of Parsifal and walked out smiling. The fact that they probably didn't "get" it doesn't mean that they didn't enjoy it. One of my fonder memories of my childhood is watching 2001: A Space Odyssey with my father when I must have been five or six. I will tell you most certainly that I didn't understand the deeper meaning being conveyed but I fucking loved the movie. There's plenty in TLJ that can bring children into it while leaving them a story that can be shown to them as artistic and that they can learn to enjoy overtime. That's not a bad thing.

[ray245]

I'm really curious about this artificial divide you have between accessibility and intelligence. Intelligent stories can be accessible to children and even let children grow into the story as they discover its layers over time.

I never said there was a divide between accessibility and intelligence. You can have a simple but intelligent film. Intelligence is not the same as complexity. TLJ has fairly complex ( by family movie standards) themes that don't gel well with a franchise like Star Wars. The Canto bright subplot is just one example, trying to explore rather complex themes in a setting ill-suited for it.

The original trilogy is like that. It starts off as escapism but overtime children can recognize how it has something to say about family and finding your own identity (Luke originally yearns for a family that he belongs to as an orphan, finds out that his lost father still exists and is evil, rejects the father, and then goes out once more to redeem him. It's complicated and a pretty decent deconstruction of how we imagine the father/child relationship should look).
Good Disney movies have this too. There's a reason kids responded so well to Frozen and it's not just because it has a catchy song, it's all about teasing out the meaning behind Disney myths and narratives. It's got problems, sure, but there's an accessible depth to it.
Hell, great TV shows have it too. The early Simpsons isn't just hilariously funny for kids but really smart as well.

I don't get why you think those stories can be smart and kid friendly but TLJ can't be.

Those are grounded in very simple themes that is accessible to children. By revolving around a family drama, it allows a younger audience to understand the emotional stakes rather than something like discussing the meaning of war, war-profiteering and the failure of heroes.

I'm saying TLJ can be smart and kid-friendly, but that smartness is different from being complex. The relative complexity of TLJ has made it difficult for a new audience to get into the franchise, judging by the poor performance in China.

EDIT:
And, yeah, to echo Gandalf can kids not be taken to enjoy art by their family? I was at the opera recently and there were four and five year olds who sat through five and a half hours of Parsifal and walked out smiling. The fact that they probably didn't "get" it doesn't mean that they didn't enjoy it. One of my fonder memories of my childhood is watching 2001: A Space Odyssey with my father when I must have been five or six. I will tell you most certainly that I didn't understand the deeper meaning being conveyed but I fucking loved the movie. There's plenty in TLJ that can bring children into it while leaving them a story that can be shown to them as artistic and that they can learn to enjoy overtime. That's not a bad thing.

Should your personal experience be taken as the norm for most kids? For every kid that might enjoy 2001, there is likely to be 5 more kids who got bored by it. Sure, they can discover it later as adults, but SW as a franchise is built upon the shoulders of kids. What made SW fun for me when I was younger was the ability to share my interest with other kids my age.

TLJ might be a complex and arguably intelligent film, but it's not a fun movie to watch. There are many in the audience that were not able to immerse themselves in the story, and this affected their overall enjoyment of the movie. If I want some deeper and more complex films to enjoy, SW is the last thing on my mind. I watch SW because it is fun and relatively simple, and it allows me to be immersed in a fantasy world for 2 hours.

TLJ isn't a fun film.

[The Romulan Republic]

TLJ is not grimdark. Not at fucking all.

I wouldn't call TLJ grimdark, but it is definitely one of the most pessimistic Star Wars movies I've ever seen. Attack of the Clones and maybe Revenge of the Sith are the only ones I'd rate as being in the same ballpark as The Last Jedi in terms of its pessimism.

It tries to put up a rosy front with its talk of hope and all the "we are the spark that lights the fire" stuff. But you dig beneath that, and this is a world where you cannot depend on heroes or legends because they will inevitably disappoint (even Luke's final sacrifice is for the sake of an illusion, constructed to inspire listeners with events that did not actually happen as depicted), where the system breeds never-ending injustice because the same people are profiting by selling weapons to both the good guys and the bad guys, and where Gondor calls for aid, only to find that Rohan will not answer because they've already written the east off as a lost cause.

"We are the spark that lights the fire" sounds pretty, but they never had to say anything like that in The Empire Strikes Back, because there, despite all of the setbacks, the fire never stopped burning. You can only be the spark that lights the fire when the last fire has been extinguished, which we see in the case of TLJ because the Republic's gone, the entirety of the Resistance can fit fairly comfortably within the Millennium Falcon, none of the Resistance's allies were willing to respond to its call for help, and the Last Jedi is completely alone in a way that even Luke wasn't during the OT.

RotS is way, way more cynical. As is AotC, really.

In Revenge of the Sith, the bad guys win, unambiguously and almost completely. In The Last Jedi, the good guys escape after the bad guys win a pyric victory, after Luke makes an utter fool out of Kylo Ren and dies giving hope to inspiring the next generation. That's the point of the last fifteen minutes or so of the film- that there are still heroes, and they can still make a difference, even if the situation seems hopeless.

In Attack of the Clones, the good guys appear to win... until you realize that the biggest bad guy already controls both sides, and the whole war is just an empty charade to consolidate his power.

[The Romulan Republic]

Rotten Tomatoes has actually said there's considerable evidence of disruptive reviews in its user reviews from TLJ (identified by people who register just to review that one thing and never review anything else ever, it has a much higher incidence of that behaviour than other films.

Then there was that guy on facebook claiming credit for organising it and trying to organise doing the same to Black Panther (Facebook closed the user group).

So there's considerable evidence of a concerted effort to tank its user score.

Link? Not that I doubt what you're saying, but it might be good to have a source to cite for future reference.

Also, if it is the same people targeting both Black Panther and TLJ, that by itself pretty much eliminates the possibility that its just Star Wars fans pissed over TLJ. The choice of targets (a film with a black lead, and one with black and female leads, in film franchises that have until recently had only white male leads) strongly suggests a political campaign motivated by bigotry.

It's taken me a little while to come back to this one, but here's an article talking about it: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmqn ... toes-vgtrn

Actual viewer polls from comScore and CinemaScore, who do exit polls at cinemas, were overwhelmingly positive for TLJ, with only a very small proportion of the audience having negative responses.

However, RT and Metacritic user reviews are self selecting and open to abuse which they don't do too much to filter because the "controversy" drives business to their site (they used the different scores in a twitter campaign to promote themselves, like they held off revealing Justice League's critic freshness rating to drive their new podcast).

(Noticably, Black Panther, the next movie the person claiming to have botted TLJ's score down, is developing a similar trend.)

The internet is an excellent platform for manipulative bullshitting. Who knew?

[Vendetta]

Also self selection bias renders polls completely useless.

[Formless]

It's taken me a little while to come back to this one, but here's an article talking about it: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmqn ... toes-vgtrn

Actual viewer polls from comScore and CinemaScore, who do exit polls at cinemas, were overwhelmingly positive for TLJ, with only a very small proportion of the audience having negative responses.

However, RT and Metacritic user reviews are self selecting and open to abuse which they don't do too much to filter because the "controversy" drives business to their site (they used the different scores in a twitter campaign to promote themselves, like they held off revealing Justice League's critic freshness rating to drive their new podcast).

(Noticably, Black Panther, the next movie the person claiming to have botted TLJ's score down, is developing a similar trend.)

Counterpoint: while Metacritic may suffer selection bias, exit polls suffer both that bias (people still have to decide to take the poll) and a bias from people having high emotions directly after watching a film. They want to like the film, and in the moment that they are asked whether they like the movie they are primed to answer "yes" because they have to interpret what emotion they are feeling right at that moment. However, on further reflection they may decided that something was bugging them and actually, they don't like it at all, or they only like it on its own terms but not as a Star Wars film. Case in point. Complex opinions take time to form and percolate, and exit polls simply cannot capture that data as a matter of fact. Metcritic and Rotten Tomatoes actually can do that.

[The Romulan Republic]

That can work both ways, though. I probably would have been more negatively disposed toward the film when I first left the theatre than I would be now, because there are a lot of details I only picked up on later, or on second viewing, and the ways in which the film diverged from my expectations were fresh in my mind.

[Formless]

Yes, in theory. But cultural psychologists (yes, that is a thing) have noted that Americans have a positivity bias. We are predisposed to express positive emotions like happiness and find negative emotions like anger and sadness to be uncomfortable when other people express them in our presence, especially in public. Its the reason that Americans always respond to the question of "how are you?" with "fine" or "good" or some other positive indicator regardless of how we are actually feeling. This is a problem for exit poll takers because it means that the poll taker and the setting will influence the opinions they receive. Several things can happen: people with negative opinions of the film will decline to participate because its a public setting and they don't want to embarrass themselves, they will word negative opinions in conditional or weasel terms and otherwise downplay how negative their reaction really is (confounding the poll taker's data collection), or people will still be digesting the film and how they think of it when asked the question and default to a positive answer because of that cultural bias. A few people will have such a visceral negative reaction that they will flatly tell the poll taker that they hated the film, but it won't be as many people as you expect. Other countries may have different tendencies of course, as Brits are noticeably more comfortable expressing negativity, but in Canada for instance the same positivity bias exists simply because of proximity.

[Kojiro]

On the other hand, Kanan Jarrus and Asajj Ventress both seemed to have a greater command of the Force than Luke did even though neither one of them actually completed their Jedi training.

They also likely had more training. But it's meaningless to say 'incomplete training'- the younglings Anakin murdered would also fall into that category.

Leia, therefore, needn't be a Jedi herself in order to use the Force either.

Well duh. There are obviously non Jedi force users. You were talking about her training, as foreshadowed by Luke in RotJ. I'm just pointing out that according to RJ, Leia certainly *did not* do the same training (and acquire the same title of Jedi) as Luke. Which is fine, but given how limited Luke's training was, what training she did receive must be extremely limited. It 'feels' like what she did in TLJ though would exceed 'sub Luke' training.

[ray245]

I thought that training doesn't really matter in TLJ?

[Gandalf]

Did it ever really matter if the individual was powerful enough and God was on their side?

[ray245]

Did it ever really matter if the individual was powerful enough and God was on their side?

Then it undermines any dramatic tension left in the story. The story at the least needs to pretend the good guys may not win.

[Gandalf]

Isn't that pretty much every one of these films since ANH, since the heroes tend to be firm believers in a god who comes through for them a lot?

[ray245]

Isn't that pretty much every one of these films since ANH, since the heroes tend to be firm believers in a god who comes through for them a lot?

Their belief is constantly tested in the OT. Their ability to fully give themselves to the force is also tested.

[NeoGoomba]

And there's Revenge of the Sith where, basically, the good guys lose on all fronts.

[The Romulan Republic]

The real threat/challenge to Force using protagonists in Star Wars is not "Will I be physically capable of performing these feats?" Its "Will I be able to do so without succumbing to my own dark side?"

[Patroklos]

The problem with that in comparison to a movie on the back end of the timeline is that we already know RotJ happens. So while it was a downer ending, in reality it’s setting the scene for a triumph we know is inevitable. And not nebuloudly inevitsvle like “I know it’s a movie franchise, the good guys will win eventually somehow, but concretely as in “I already saw them win and know how.”

[ray245]

The real threat/challenge to Force using protagonists in Star Wars is not "Will I be physically capable of performing these feats?" Its "Will I be able to do so without succumbing to my own dark side?"

The ability to perform such feats is intertwined with their emotional journey. Luke's lifting of rocks is directly connected to his emotional state and his journey to fully believe in the force.

They can accomplish great feats because they gave themselves fully to the force.

[The Romulan Republic]

The problem with that in comparison to a movie on the back end of the timeline is that we already know RotJ happens. So while it was a downer ending, in reality it’s setting the scene for a triumph we know is inevitable. And not nebuloudly inevitsvle like “I know it’s a movie franchise, the good guys will win eventually somehow, but concretely as in “I already saw them win and know how.”

This is largely correct.

Taken in isolation, the Prequels are way darker and more cynical than TLJ. They just don't come off that way, because we've already seen the OT and know that it all works out in the end (well, until Kylo Ren comes along).

The real threat/challenge to Force using protagonists in Star Wars is not "Will I be physically capable of performing these feats?" Its "Will I be able to do so without succumbing to my own dark side?"

The ability to perform such feats is intertwined with their emotional journey. Luke's lifting of rocks is directly connected to his emotional state and his journey to fully believe in the force.

They can accomplish great feats because they gave themselves fully to the force.

Yeah, though that kind of confirms the point that training to perform specific techniques is less important for Force users than attaining the correct state of mind.

[ray245]

Yeah, though that kind of confirms the point that training to perform specific techniques is less important for Force users than attaining the correct state of mind.

The training of the mind was the primary journey of Luke. The journey he was undergoing was a spiritual journey throughout the movies, with him being shown that he needs to achieve a Zen-like state to become a proper Jedi.

The struggle is trying to avoid going down the dark and easy path because that will have consequences in the long run. Rey never struggled with that in TFA or TLJ.

In the OT and the PT, learning to master the force is about letting go of their physical attachment to the world. Jedi learn to be less reliant on their physical senses and be more emotionally connected to the force.

[Galvatron]

Has anyone else asked why one of the smaller Resistance capital ships didn't hyperspace-ram the Supremacy instead of just running out of gas and getting blasted? If the Raddus could do it, why couldn't one of the others have done it first and crippled the Supremacy so the rest of the fleet could get away?