You know what's funny, I really had wished JJ had used Tatooine. There's something poetic about that desolate place, while "the planet farthest from" the bright center of the universe, is also the bright center of the clash between the light and dark sides of the Force.

The rumored Kenobi movie can have Tatooine.

The planet Batuu seems to have a big role in future Star Wars media. I'd assume that's Thrawn's home base or something.

And so what? Lucas didn’t have a real plan either for his saga. He never knew Leai was Luke’s sister when he wrote the original. No matter how many times he says it, it doesn’t make it any more true.



And I’m mostly kidding. Well, mostly anyway.

I honestly never understood the defense of mocking fans who didn't like the movies, as we all love and hate movies and that is why we come on these types of forums. If you read my post, I actually said the new Trilogy were well made movies (I actually like Rian Johnson's style for TLJ), but the story was redundent as we've been there done that with pretty much everything that has happened. But thanks for the half of page of memes as I'm sure it was worth taking time out of your nice Saturday to do that.

Yes, The Last Jedi completely original and isn't derivitive of The Empire Strikes Back at all.

It sorta feels like Star Wars fans hate something until there's something they deem worse. For years online there's been detractors of Return of the Jedi. Then the prequels came along and those were hated (rightfully so for the most part) and most put aside their dislike of Return of the Jedi. Now we've gotten two sequels and at least some of the fans are seemingly putting aside their hatred of the prequels and are trying to paint the sequels as missing the Lucas magic or some crap even though most acknowledged before recently that the prequels were garbage.

I quoted you to add a level of fluidity in the conversation, not so much directed at you per se but whatever. Let’s say I was though. You admit they are well made films, on what, a simply technical level? They achieve more than that. And the story of The Last Jedi was never done before in a Star Wars film, enhance the outcry. No? Do tell.

When is anything “completely original”?

And lastly, I work a 12 hour shift in almost an hour, and do it again tomorrow, so my Saturday is not so nice!



I still might be able to watch a couple to movies that I haven’t gotten around to watching yet. Woe is me.

Yes I was commenting about the film in terms of acting, directing, cinematography, etc. I think Rian Johnson gets alot of shit from fans saying he is a hack, and I don't think he is because all of these parts are done fine (I think Rian Johnson is a better director then JJ Abrams). I think Luke gives a great performance, and the chemistry between the characters are very good. I like Rian's touch with Rey vs Ren and the force communication. I also like the look of the movie (I like the look of TFA, R1 and Solo too as I am just not a CGI guy and the PT is loaded with that.)

All I was saying is the new films just take the same beats from the previous films in terms of turning someone bad from the dark, the resistance vs first order, etc. Now I think more of the blame goes to JJ because he wrote this Trilogy into a corner, and I don't know how much Rian Johnson could have done differently?

I'm not really arguing about the Snoke Backstory stuff, or Flying Leia, Rey's backstory, or Luke's arc not fullfilling my wants and needs (as that seems to be the main arguments about this film). I enjoyed the film just like I enjoyed Terminator 3 in 2003, but that doesn't mean they aren't still taking the same beats from the previous movies, and at some point it just starts to get stale.

It does seem like a fanbase that's highly motivated by negativity.

I’ll grant you that I was negative about the prequels and George Lucas for years. No hiding that at all from me. I’ve liked all the Disney films to a degree at least and feel like they’re all better than any of the prequels. It just seems very much like the fans of this series will bitch and moan about how something isn’t their Star Wars or about their childhoods being ruined until the next thing triggers them and suddenly whatever they previously hated isn’t so bad and whatever is new is the worst thing ever.

Yeah, they took ownership of the series and hate when things don't match their vision.

Similar beats for TFA, yes, but that was to get people to get back into thinking this was the “real” Star War, but the TLJ comes back with zigs and zags that were never done in a Star Wars movie before, and a lot of people didn’t appreciate that. Stale? Well I’m just not seeing it. The OT trilogy is almost all a thing of the past, and some fans aren’t dealing well with this.

In fairness I don’t one hundred percent like how everything has played out either (mainly I’d have liked to have seen Luke’s arc go a different direction), but I do accept how it is and am not overly angry that it didn’t go my way.

Couldn't the same thing be said for all of the people who loathed Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Or Alien Covenant or Terminator: Salvation? Why is Star Wars suddenly above criticism when it puts out a shitty movie?

Is expecting "Episode VIII" of the Star Wars saga to be consistent with the films that came before it and not abandon plot points that were set up in previous films fan entitlement or fans claiming ownership? Or are we supposed to sit down, shut up, watch the movie twenty times, and go out and buy a bunch of General Hux and Rose Tico action figures?

The Last Jedi is miles better than the films you listed. Most critics and most of the internet agree that it's a good movie. There's a small but vocal minority who keep bashing it, and it seems that they're unable to look at the film objectively.

I think it’s just that fanboy-ism is a lot stronger with Star Wars than any of the other franchises you mentioned. I don’t think it’s above criticism but like I said it seems like fans are always ready to hate whatever is new. It’s been happening for years.

Do I think The Last Jedi is a perfect film? Not at all, but I think the fans who are so vocally against it exaggerate how bad of a film it actually is. I think a lot of the problem is that people have their own head canon of where they think the story and characters should have gone and since they didn’t get that they hate it.

RJ definitely deserves criticism. (not outright hatred that's just ridiculous) All the things that were so different in TLJ he was doing solely because they were different. A lot of people appreciate different but not just different for different's sake. He made dumb decisions and purposely chose not to continue any plot threads just to be different which is just plain ridiculous. But that is why I blame KK and the Lucasfilm story group more because they were in charge of JJ and RJ. They should have hashed a basic plot before they were even hired and then laid it out for them. They basically said okay JJ you make a movie and then told RJ you make a movie, and no there aren't any answers and we don't have a road map for you to follow you just make it up as you go along.


I'm not saying he's a hack but is it really impossible to imagine that he could have actually continued the stories from the previous movie(s) instead of throwing everything, including Ackbar, out of the nearest airlock? He made a technically great movie but he could have made an equally technically great movie while still not crapping all over everything that came before him.

Lumping all Star Wars fans together is just as stupid as the vocal minority that are harassing the actors personally. That is a small subset of the angry Star Wars base and yes there will be a small vocal minority that will hate everything. However, you have to admit that TLJ was clearly divisive and much more so than any other Star Wars film before it. More so than TFA, Rogue One or even the PT. There are many fans like me who actually liked TFA and Rogue One but did not appreciate the left turn RJ made with TLJ. This is much more than a vocal minority.

You guys made me spit out my soup at work.

It's one thing to not like a movie. Happens all the time. And even a movies I love often have things I'd just as soon never see again. What "mocking" fanboys does is address the ridiculously overblown hand wringing over literally every aspect of these films, not to mention all of this childish, racist whining over SJW's "ruining" the entire franchise. There's plenty to criticize about the new Star Wars films, especially when compared to the well-integrated, well thought-out Marvel cinematic universe, but we're not talking about Shakespeare here. I haven't seen anything in either TFA or TLJ as cloying and obviously done to sell toys as Ewoks, or anything as annoying as Jar Jar Binks. I recently re-watched TLJ, and it is not as bad as I initially felt. I actually kinda liked it. Maybe I'm just reacting myself to the criticisms I subjected myself to after my first viewing. Hell, I even piled on myself at the time. But the more i heard, the less it held sway. Would I change things? Sure! But as it is it feels like a natural continuation of the world established in TFA.

There's a fine difference, and certainly there may be people who hate TLJ for good reasons. However, a lot of the people criticizing TLJ seem be doing so because it's not what they think it "should've" been, instead of criticizing it based on what it actually was.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for the most part, aimed for the story beats and tone of the first three films. It was just horribly executed.

For Alien Covenant, surely few think it's the worst in the franchise. That must go to AVP2. And Terminator: Salvation, it came off the heals of maligned Terminator 3, in a franchise that has increasingly failed to make an argument that any stories past Terminator 2 needed to be told.

But again, a lot of the criticisms are about the merits of those individual films, not whether they "fit" into the overall franchise. Prometheus, for one, was a film I was excited about specifically because it looked to be breaking the formula. I didn't hate it for that. I ended up hating it because it was poorly written and thought out, especially for something so pretentious.

Name a plot point that was actually abandoned. TLJ addressed a lot of plot points brought up in TFA, it just did so in unexpected ways. That's not "abandoning" them, unless you thought there was only one correct way they "should" be addressed.

I don't think this is true. Yes, he went a different direction than many expected for a number of plot points, but I feel that there were solid character and story reasons behind his decisions. You can read interviews with him to get his personal reasoning for these decisions, but I understood them as I was watching the film.

Rey's parentage is both the least expected answer for that question, and the most devastating answer possible to Rey in that moment. It was precisely the answer the story needed. The fact that it trashed a lot of fanboy theories that they subsequently got all butthurt about is almost incidental.

Killing off Ackbar, and putting Leia in a coma, was essential to set up Poe's conflict with the new leader. The new leader had to be someone the audience wouldn't implicitly trust, like Ackbar. So someone new and unknown, so the audience would instead implicitly trust Poe's viewpoint and judgement up to the point it's revealed that Poe was wrong, and he admits so. It shows a deep understanding of story conventions and how to exploit them for surprise and insight.

It's certainly a divisive film among a certain portion of the fanbase, although it's extremely hard to gauge the scale of that, especially in comparison to other films.

I feel like the PT films were very divisive, possibly on a bigger scale. There was the overall public reaction, which was overall positive, and then the critical reaction, which was a lot more mixed than the ST films.

And then there are the fans. I feel the PT was the first time there was a split among the fanbase. Before that, some may have quibbled about part of ROTJ and relative rankings of the first three movies, but post PT you had a section of the fanbase that hated half the films in the series.

I can't find a thread for Ep1 reviews at the time of release, but DVD talk discussions of those films have been highly contentious.
https://forum.dvdtalk.com/movie-talk...s-crushed.html
https://forum.dvdtalk.com/movie-talk...ck-clones.html
https://forum.dvdtalk.com/movie-talk...enge-sith.html
https://forum.dvdtalk.com/movie-talk...enge-sith.html

Once they decided to deconstruct Luke Skywalker and make him a much different person from ROTJ, you were going to naturally get a divided fanbase as some would love the new direction and others would despise the change. I could go through the people I know as my brother loved it, my best friend hated it, etc.

Now I'm not even debating the quality of TLJ when I make that statement above. I'm just saying that Disney HAD to know that this was not going to sit well with all of the fans? The same thing happened with Rocky 5, as Stallone made him a much different character then Rocky 2,3,4 as he lost all of his money and was essentially back to Rocky 1 character arc. The fans hated that movie as it was a HUGE backlash in 1990. The only difference is there wasn't an internet for fans to keep bitching about it, but trust me I remember there was a huge split among my friends with that movie when I was in High School.

That's why I think the media and some fans overreact to the SW fandom who snipes at the movies. Does everyone remember the fan reception of the Matrix Sequels? People fucking hated those movies (I actually liked them, but my friends absolutely disdained them). And the Wackowski's never touched that franchise again.

And as for the 'Not My Luke' comments, I heard the same shit in 1988 when they announced Michael Keaton to play Batman. The shitstorm I heard in high school from friends, "They are getting fucking Mr Mom to play the Dark Knight?????"

So the fan obsession has always been there, but the internet just gives people a voice to bitch 24/7 to anonoymus people now, and obviously SW has the largest fanbase, so naturally it will be ramped up more then a Jurassic World Sequel.

The Last Jedi has sold less than half the total of DVD/Blu-ray/Digital downloads that The Force Awakens did. If that's not a clear indication that it's not just a "vocal minority" that disliked TLJ, I don't know what is.