Bit late to the party but I finally got around to seeing TLJ the other day and...
What a steaming pile of a waste of 2.5 hours. It's a mess that jettisons, other than the characters, everything interesting from the previous movie and introduces nothing of its own. I'm no Star Wars fanboi - I like the movies but that's about the extent of my involvement with them - but that wasn't a bad Star Wars movie, it's was a bad movie period. I was watching it on my phone, the missus watching the telly, and after an hour I took the earphones out and said to her "this is just shite". I then endured the remaining hour and a half just wishing it would hurry up and be over.
Spoiler:
Since when has fuel been a thing in Star Wars?
Why kill the interesting bad guy (Snoke) and elevate that whiny brat - who makes Anakin Skywalker look like a well-rounded character - as basically the only not-completely-inept bad guy? And even then his "tortured soul" just doesn't work - with Vader it was nuanced - this time round they beat you in the face with it.
Rey manages to beat Luke Skywalker (who beat Vader!) with about two days of training. Hell she even beats Ren (well, call it a draw), and let's remind ourselves that even the bad guys are shlt-scared of him, in the previous film with ZERO training.
Who in the hell thought that retarded female engineer would make a good character? Every bit of her screen time I wanted to smash my phone off the wall.
And don't get me started on the Leia Superman bit. FFS. That was the precise moment it jumped the shark.
Laura Dern's character (can't be bothered looking up her characters name). Holy fecking feck, that was some of the shittest writing I've ever seen.
Luke Skywalker - that was just a character assassination. If he didn't want to be found and left in peace then why in the hell did he create a map to locate him???
It was a terrible movie and nothing anyone says is going to convince me otherwise. On the plus side, aurally and visually it was magnificent. Come back George, all is forgiven.
Yes, I did enjoy Rogue One and I've heard the Solo movie's decent too. I really liked TFA the first time I saw it but it doesn't stand up repeat viewing.
Come to think of it, out of all the SW movies that have been made only two could be classed as great (New Hope and Empire), two decent (Return of the Jedi and Rogue 1) the rest are average to terrible.
Oh man Vampyre, I think you've just woken some realisation in me. I might be a bit of a Star Wars fanboithing.
I totally agree with your 'spoiler' comments, but was in complete denial. I wanted it to be a really good movie, but now after what you have said makes too much sense. Oh well! :)
I quite like Solo, its not really Star Wars (it loses a lot of the old Star Wars taste and flavours), but is a good solid scifi. I watched it for a second time over Christmas and enjoyed it just as much, even with though they squeezed in far too much Solo continuity into one movie. They could have spread the stories out across several movies, which seems a bit odd. Maybe they thought they we giving the fans everything. (A bit like putting the droids in eps 1 to 3).
I haven't watched any of the new ones, not out of bitter I refuse to watch them-ness, but cos' I can't be arsed. I loved the originals, the pre-trilogy was shite, or average at best, which at the time was an opinion I carried and was mercilessly torn into, by all my friends, in real life. and online.
But the the new ones seem like Woke, SJW, PC bullshit, and the sad thing is the strong female protagonist, and pandering to the "Let's try to not offend people" crowd seems to have failed, all the namby pamby "This is offensive because 'reasons' lot" still aren't f*cking happy with it. Production companies should really listen to the fans, and ignore the rantings of a few pink, and blue haired angry loud mouthed she-vegans, and make what is actually required, a good Star Wars movie, not a passive aggressive dumbing down of past characters, or an unnecessary battle of the sexes.
Basically trying to keep 6 and a half ranty people happy has ruined it for everyone else, good job Disney keep it up, maybe in the next episode you can have a cameo by a new female version of the Genie from Aladdin? Or is that too racist for an undisclosed reason, that nobody cares to explain?
I thought I'd put the movie through its paces again last night and on the second viewing it wasn't as bad as the first now the shock of some of the decisions have worn off, but it's still pretty awful and almost certainly the worst SW movie.
Boozey raises some good points with the PC brigade stuff. Now don't get me wrong, I have zero problems with a female lead - Ripley is one the best sci-fi leads of all time - but what gets my goat with TLJ is that all the male leads are made out to be incompetent gung-ho dimwits unless there's a woman reining them back or telling them that they're being an incompetent gung-ho dimwit. And these women make some really stupid decisions, which when taken in context outside of dramatic licence, are really,really stupid. Major spoilers ahead:
Spoiler:
Laura Dern's character basically gives Po absolutely no choice but to mount a mutiny and try and save the remaining rebels. Her actions all seem to be leading to the destruction of the remaining fleet without putting up any fight. But her plan is actually quite clever - draw all the fire on the main remaining vessel whilst they fill lifeboats (that are undetectable to the First Order) that slip away quietly to an unused former Rebel planet, that is close by, where they can send out help messages. That's fine, and not an entirely awful plan given the circumstances. The drawback is that she makes the dumb decision to tell NO ONE about this, let alone their star pilot who has a history of disobeying orders to get the job done. No reason is given why she wouldn't tell anyone.
When Finn and Rose escape prison from the casino planet it's implied that their escape plan is to sneak around, get a ship, hopefully get the lock-breaker and get the hell out of there. During their escape they come across some caged, mistreated animals that earlier in the movie Rose feels sorry for. So this dumb-arse decides to release them, and then all hell breaks loose. Rather than using this stampede as a diversion, they then jump onto one on of these animals and the herd then proceeds to demolish half the casinos and city meaning that the police force are now on their trail. They nearly die near the end of the chase, but hey, it's a happy ending because the herd is now free (and presumably rounded up and caged again within a couple of days).
Towards the end of the film where the First Order are about to blast the crap out of the rebels and basically end them with a huge cannon, Finn goes on a suicide run in a vehicle to smash into the cannon and, you know, basically save them and give a chance to get away. But he's thwarted in the attempt by dumb-ass Rose deliberately smashing into him to save him in her vehicle. The reason? Love... So screw everyone else, they can all die. Her and Finn can sit in the wreckage and get slaughtered by the First Order after they've dealt with the rest of the rebels.
..... But he's thwarted in the attempt by dumb-ass Rose deliberately smashing into him to save him in her vehicle. The reason? Love... So screw everyone else, they can all die. Her and Finn can sit in the wreckage and get slaughtered by the First Order after they've dealt with the rest of the rebels.
Spoiler:
This is what upset me most about the film. Purple haired lady just blew herself up to destroy the enemy fleet (Which tactic opens up a new new bag of fish, but anyways..) and SW has previous experience about self-sacrifice/suicide-bombing being a good thing. But then a few moments later when Finn goes to do the same thing, hes stopped in his tracks by Rose, and all his friends die because of that. Yet theres no comeback from it. Just a snog in the crashed fighter.
To be honest, I don't think any Star Wars movie has scored very high in the believability stakes - but that goes with the territory, really. You have to suspend belief for most SciFi or action movies. People with no real interest in the genres have no problem pulling apart all the typical plot holes and contrivances. We were all kids when the original trilogy came out, so we were blinded by the eye-candy and hero-worship.
But let's face it - we've been on a downward spiral since the then. First the prequel trilogy and now the latest sequels all promised so much and we all wanted them to be as good as we remember the originals, but ultimately got disappointed.
The prequels suffered from the fact that Lucas never really was a very good director and he was too much of a control-freak at by that time, stifling creativity. The latest sequels suffer from the opposite - too much creative input from different, trendy, young writers and directors who want to stamp their own mark them, which has led to bad continuity of poorly-chosen story themes, at the expense of some of our most beloved characters.
Rogue 1 and Solo were much better because they are stand-alone stories and better conceived.
I still enjoy all the new ones, but I'm less picky than most. They could definitely have been better...
Some of the problems with Star Wars, is the lack of any definitive structure to the technology (what it can and cannot do). So in different movies or even in the same movie, but in different scenes the plot skips over any inconvenient established ‘facts’.
Also the laws of physics are often ignored. I get that most of the time gravity ‘just works’ like if you were on Earth. But they also play fast and loose with many other principles... Then later, contradict themselves...
Then there is the ‘human’ factors. Again, I know they need as many fighters and volunteers as they can get, but where is the chain of command. Any plan will fail if some of the team go off and do their own thing.
Star Trek also suffers from some of this as well, but nowhere near as bad.
So you have to sit back and ignore (or try to) all the silly non-logical bits and try to enjoy them as adventures in space :)
! Standby alert !
“There are four lights!”
Step up to red alert. Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb!
Looking forward to summer in Somerset later in the year :)
I would never get through any Star Trek if I analyzed the physics. Star Trek is all about sitting back, not thinking too hard and enjoying the action. Although after watching this weeks Discovery, I'm still waiting for the action. Oh hang on there is a short Klingon on Klingon action.. Over its over, back to the soap. Sigh US scifi is so limited these days.
If only one of the major uk production companies would do more scifi!
What you need is real man scifi stuff. Blade Runner and Altered Carbon. ;)
Altered carbons on my list. Nightflyers next though
Altered Carbon is brilliant, you need to concentrate on it though, don't be doing something else with it on in the background otherwise you'll lose the thread of the plot. It can get a little confusing at times.
The production of Altered Carbon is way above many films I've seen lately. The books are even 'more brilliant-er.' They second book, Fallen Angels is my favourite. Managed to meet the author at a signing and had a quick chat. It seems they are not converting anymore books, which is a shame, but he is working on a new story specifically for the series.
The production of Altered Carbon is way above many films I've seen lately. The books are even 'more brilliant-er.' They second book, Fallen Angels is my favourite. Managed to meet the author at a signing and had a quick chat. It seems they are not converting anymore books, which is a shame, but he is working on a new story specifically for the series.
I would never get through any Star Trek if I analyzed the physics. Star Trek is all about sitting back, not thinking too hard and enjoying the action.
Exactly its crazy when people take it that seriously. 'But you wouldnt hear lasers in space....'. Its a frickin film ! Dont take it so seriously !! Same for Star Wars, just a bit of escapism
Might give Altered Carbon a go next then. Currently watching Tin Star, want to get into Night Flyers but cant, might give it another chance
Unless someone has invented noisy light, you can't hear lasers in an atmosphere either ;) I'm happy to have audio fr dramatic effect though.
Altered Carbon was ok, but it tries to cram too much into one season, as if they thought they only had one shot at telling the whole story. It would have been a lot better if they'd taken their time over it and spun it over 2 or 3 seasons, or edited the story down. A lot of the sidequest stuff isn't that important to be told in the main plot, it could have been glossed over and had prequel series or the like. It goes all over the place in such a short time it seems very unfocused, which detracted for me.
Hopefully this new stuff being written for TV will suit a one season plotline better and not try to be confusing and edgy for the sake of it, or we might just have one of those things that runs for ages without getting to a meaningful conclusion..
Exactly its crazy when people take it that seriously. 'But you wouldnt hear lasers in space....'. Its a frickin film ! Dont take it so seriously !! Same for Star Wars, just a bit of escapism
Hehe - shall we tell the viewers why you didn't speak to me for 2yrs? Good to see you back btw!
Exactly its crazy when people take it that seriously. 'But you wouldnt hear lasers in space....'. Its a frickin film ! Dont take it so seriously !! Same for Star Wars, just a bit of escapism
Hehe - shall we tell the viewers why you didn't speak to me for 2yrs? Good to see you back btw!
Does anyone talk to you Lee? ;)
There was some odd plot changes for the TV series of Altered Carbon. I wont spoil it for the others.
The Expanse was another great series that seems to be getting better and better. As a scifi effects fan, I invested in a 4K and have so far been blown away by the available shows. Dc & Marvel I can leave, they have just perfected the US formulated TV. And I'm a big fan of the comics. But that is it, nothing else to watch (although I will give that new series on Netflix a little go). Back to the old reruns. Been awhile since I've watch Blake 7.
Talking of which, I work on some trading software, which one of its lesser features is that companies can co-brand the login and splash screens when supplying third parties. Being the one who developed and overseers this feature I have several 'brandings' available for developers. My favourite being the Blake 7 splash screen. Small simple fun in a boring 9 till 5 life.
Comments
That bit is pretty good. It's all CGI. She was wearing nothing but green paint and dots when they filmed it.
What a steaming pile of a waste of 2.5 hours. It's a mess that jettisons, other than the characters, everything interesting from the previous movie and introduces nothing of its own. I'm no Star Wars fanboi - I like the movies but that's about the extent of my involvement with them - but that wasn't a bad Star Wars movie, it's was a bad movie period. I was watching it on my phone, the missus watching the telly, and after an hour I took the earphones out and said to her "this is just shite". I then endured the remaining hour and a half just wishing it would hurry up and be over.
Since when has fuel been a thing in Star Wars?
Why kill the interesting bad guy (Snoke) and elevate that whiny brat - who makes Anakin Skywalker look like a well-rounded character - as basically the only not-completely-inept bad guy? And even then his "tortured soul" just doesn't work - with Vader it was nuanced - this time round they beat you in the face with it.
Rey manages to beat Luke Skywalker (who beat Vader!) with about two days of training. Hell she even beats Ren (well, call it a draw), and let's remind ourselves that even the bad guys are shlt-scared of him, in the previous film with ZERO training.
Who in the hell thought that retarded female engineer would make a good character? Every bit of her screen time I wanted to smash my phone off the wall.
And don't get me started on the Leia Superman bit. FFS. That was the precise moment it jumped the shark.
Laura Dern's character (can't be bothered looking up her characters name). Holy fecking feck, that was some of the shittest writing I've ever seen.
Luke Skywalker - that was just a character assassination. If he didn't want to be found and left in peace then why in the hell did he create a map to locate him???
It was a terrible movie and nothing anyone says is going to convince me otherwise. On the plus side, aurally and visually it was magnificent. Come back George, all is forgiven.
At least Rogue 1 was proper Star Wars.
- IONIAN-GAMES.com -
Come to think of it, out of all the SW movies that have been made only two could be classed as great (New Hope and Empire), two decent (Return of the Jedi and Rogue 1) the rest are average to terrible.
I totally agree with your 'spoiler' comments, but was in complete denial. I wanted it to be a really good movie, but now after what you have said makes too much sense. Oh well! :)
I quite like Solo, its not really Star Wars (it loses a lot of the old Star Wars taste and flavours), but is a good solid scifi. I watched it for a second time over Christmas and enjoyed it just as much, even with though they squeezed in far too much Solo continuity into one movie. They could have spread the stories out across several movies, which seems a bit odd. Maybe they thought they we giving the fans everything. (A bit like putting the droids in eps 1 to 3).
@luny@mstdn.games
https://www.luny.co.uk
But the the new ones seem like Woke, SJW, PC bullshit, and the sad thing is the strong female protagonist, and pandering to the "Let's try to not offend people" crowd seems to have failed, all the namby pamby "This is offensive because 'reasons' lot" still aren't f*cking happy with it. Production companies should really listen to the fans, and ignore the rantings of a few pink, and blue haired angry loud mouthed she-vegans, and make what is actually required, a good Star Wars movie, not a passive aggressive dumbing down of past characters, or an unnecessary battle of the sexes.
Basically trying to keep 6 and a half ranty people happy has ruined it for everyone else, good job Disney keep it up, maybe in the next episode you can have a cameo by a new female version of the Genie from Aladdin? Or is that too racist for an undisclosed reason, that nobody cares to explain?
Boozey raises some good points with the PC brigade stuff. Now don't get me wrong, I have zero problems with a female lead - Ripley is one the best sci-fi leads of all time - but what gets my goat with TLJ is that all the male leads are made out to be incompetent gung-ho dimwits unless there's a woman reining them back or telling them that they're being an incompetent gung-ho dimwit. And these women make some really stupid decisions, which when taken in context outside of dramatic licence, are really,really stupid. Major spoilers ahead:
When Finn and Rose escape prison from the casino planet it's implied that their escape plan is to sneak around, get a ship, hopefully get the lock-breaker and get the hell out of there. During their escape they come across some caged, mistreated animals that earlier in the movie Rose feels sorry for. So this dumb-arse decides to release them, and then all hell breaks loose. Rather than using this stampede as a diversion, they then jump onto one on of these animals and the herd then proceeds to demolish half the casinos and city meaning that the police force are now on their trail. They nearly die near the end of the chase, but hey, it's a happy ending because the herd is now free (and presumably rounded up and caged again within a couple of days).
Towards the end of the film where the First Order are about to blast the crap out of the rebels and basically end them with a huge cannon, Finn goes on a suicide run in a vehicle to smash into the cannon and, you know, basically save them and give a chance to get away. But he's thwarted in the attempt by dumb-ass Rose deliberately smashing into him to save him in her vehicle. The reason? Love... So screw everyone else, they can all die. Her and Finn can sit in the wreckage and get slaughtered by the First Order after they've dealt with the rest of the rebels.
This is what upset me most about the film. Purple haired lady just blew herself up to destroy the enemy fleet (Which tactic opens up a new new bag of fish, but anyways..) and SW has previous experience about self-sacrifice/suicide-bombing being a good thing. But then a few moments later when Finn goes to do the same thing, hes stopped in his tracks by Rose, and all his friends die because of that. Yet theres no comeback from it. Just a snog in the crashed fighter.
But let's face it - we've been on a downward spiral since the then. First the prequel trilogy and now the latest sequels all promised so much and we all wanted them to be as good as we remember the originals, but ultimately got disappointed.
The prequels suffered from the fact that Lucas never really was a very good director and he was too much of a control-freak at by that time, stifling creativity. The latest sequels suffer from the opposite - too much creative input from different, trendy, young writers and directors who want to stamp their own mark them, which has led to bad continuity of poorly-chosen story themes, at the expense of some of our most beloved characters.
Rogue 1 and Solo were much better because they are stand-alone stories and better conceived.
I still enjoy all the new ones, but I'm less picky than most. They could definitely have been better...
Rogue One I thought was excellent. Let down with the last Jedi but that still had some good moments. Roll on December !
@luny@mstdn.games
https://www.luny.co.uk
Maybe, but I'm stingey, so it needs to be Android, and Runaway, Trancers at a push ;)
Altered carbons on my list. Nightflyers next though
Also the laws of physics are often ignored. I get that most of the time gravity ‘just works’ like if you were on Earth. But they also play fast and loose with many other principles... Then later, contradict themselves...
Then there is the ‘human’ factors. Again, I know they need as many fighters and volunteers as they can get, but where is the chain of command. Any plan will fail if some of the team go off and do their own thing.
Star Trek also suffers from some of this as well, but nowhere near as bad.
So you have to sit back and ignore (or try to) all the silly non-logical bits and try to enjoy them as adventures in space :)
Mark
Repair Guides. Spanish Hardware site.
WoS - can't download? Info here...
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Spectranet: the TNFS directory thread
! Standby alert !
“There are four lights!”
Step up to red alert. Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb!
Looking forward to summer in Somerset later in the year :)
If only one of the major uk production companies would do more scifi!
"You cannae change the laws of physics"
@luny@mstdn.games
https://www.luny.co.uk
@luny@mstdn.games
https://www.luny.co.uk
Exactly its crazy when people take it that seriously. 'But you wouldnt hear lasers in space....'. Its a frickin film ! Dont take it so seriously !! Same for Star Wars, just a bit of escapism
Might give Altered Carbon a go next then. Currently watching Tin Star, want to get into Night Flyers but cant, might give it another chance
Altered Carbon was ok, but it tries to cram too much into one season, as if they thought they only had one shot at telling the whole story. It would have been a lot better if they'd taken their time over it and spun it over 2 or 3 seasons, or edited the story down. A lot of the sidequest stuff isn't that important to be told in the main plot, it could have been glossed over and had prequel series or the like. It goes all over the place in such a short time it seems very unfocused, which detracted for me.
Hopefully this new stuff being written for TV will suit a one season plotline better and not try to be confusing and edgy for the sake of it, or we might just have one of those things that runs for ages without getting to a meaningful conclusion..
Hehe - shall we tell the viewers why you didn't speak to me for 2yrs? Good to see you back btw!
Does anyone talk to you Lee? ;)
There was some odd plot changes for the TV series of Altered Carbon. I wont spoil it for the others.
The Expanse was another great series that seems to be getting better and better. As a scifi effects fan, I invested in a 4K and have so far been blown away by the available shows. Dc & Marvel I can leave, they have just perfected the US formulated TV. And I'm a big fan of the comics. But that is it, nothing else to watch (although I will give that new series on Netflix a little go). Back to the old reruns. Been awhile since I've watch Blake 7.
Talking of which, I work on some trading software, which one of its lesser features is that companies can co-brand the login and splash screens when supplying third parties. Being the one who developed and overseers this feature I have several 'brandings' available for developers. My favourite being the Blake 7 splash screen. Small simple fun in a boring 9 till 5 life.
@luny@mstdn.games
https://www.luny.co.uk