Movies 2: Electric Boogaloo

It's an awful convoluted mess of a film.  Very very pretty, but it doesn't make a drop of actual sense.  

From the very opening of the film we're told "the First Order reigns".  How?  This movie starts at most a day after the conclusion of TFA, where the First Order lost Starkiller base.  How did they go from losing such a structure and all of the losses of personnel and manpower that entailed (remember that Starkiller was basically a planet.  Hell its got the word "base" in its name.  They lost a planet-sized base.) to "reigning" in a matter of hours?  I could believe that they'd sought immediate retrbution and had the resistance on the ropes in such a time, but reigning?  No.  That would imply they'd basically taken over the entire galaxy in the short time between the two movies, which they absolutely did not.  

But okay, fine, the First order is in control.  Fine.  There's far more wrong in the opening five minutes than that one sentence (however said sentence is important to note, because it highlights the movie's big underlying flaw, that of inconsistency both with itself and with the franchise as a whole).  

The movie kicks off with the FO coming out of lightspeed with several Star Destroyers and a particularly nasty one designed to be able to clear entire fleets and decimate ground bases.  From the very way the scene is shot we see the First Order is in control of this little skirmish and the Resistance is at risk of being snuffed out.  

So, they're fleeing the base.  So far everything seems fine.  Until you realise that the FO isn't doing anything.  They're charging their big canons to fire at the ground.  Why?  The Resistance is trying to escape, why are you prioritising the ground base over the capital ship that could flee into Lightspeed at any second?  Any vaguely competent startegist would be saying to prioritise the target that can flee first.  

That's not the only problem.  The Resistance is known for engaging with close-range fighters.  And yet despite bringing several Destroyers and many platoons of TIE Fighters not a single bit of anti-fighter strategy is employed.  Why did they bring all of these forces and then not launch anything when, as Hux says, they are these to snuff out the Resistance?  These are not the strategies and tactics a force would employ when their goal is to snuff something out.  They have all of these resources that could achieve this and they're using none of them.  

So then we get a lone X-Wing approaching the ship Hux is on, Poe enters the fray.  This scene doesn't make a lick of sense, and it sets a very bad tone for the rest of the movie to boot.  Poe contacts Hux and essentially trolls him (ending in a "your mother" joke of all things).  Now, here's why this scene doesn't work.  As soon as Hux is on with poe he lets fly with a tirade about how they will destroy the resistance, how they have no intention or desire to parlay, accept surrender, or do anything besides wipe the lot of them out with extreme prejudice.  

Okay, fine.  If that is the plan why are you even talking to Poe, Hux?  Why are you not shooting him down while he is in range of basically the entire Star Destroyers arsenol?  Why do you even care about the insults Poe is slinging at you when you can and should have opened fire the moment he was in range?  

Like I said, inconsistent.  This is not how a competent enemy commander would behave.  Hell we even have a juniour officer see through Poe's stunt, so why is Hux even in charge?  He's portrayed as Kylo Ren's equal and the trilogies young Tarkin in TFA, and in this opening scene he has been portrayed as a extremely immature incompetent bufoon.  

This is a very important thing to remember because it ties into why TLJ has set episode 9 up for failure, which I'll get to when I make my closing points.

Poe's plan is then revealed as he destroys the Destroyers anti-ship weaponry so they can call in a fleet of bombers for a bombrun to take the thing out. And this is where I have to ask a very obvious question. Where are the Y-Wings? You know, those fighters designed to bomb things?

Remember we're still in the opening five minutes and already this is a dogs breakfast of inconsistency and style-without-substance.

So in come this fleet of extremely large, extremely slow, extremely weak bombers. Now Hux sorties the Tie Fighters. Not when they were supposed to be blockading the planet, not when a fighter blew up a Destroyers anti-fighter weaponry, no, only when a bunch of extremely slow bombers are closing in on them. How is Hux in command of this attack? He's been incompetent the entire time.

So the fighters engage the bombers, which turn out to be so rubbish that a Tie fighter crashing into one of them proceeds to take out three of them in a domino effect. Why have we gone from bombers capable of dog-fiighting enemy fighters to these pieces of trash? Why has technology decreased to the point even the Rebellion at their lowest outclassed them? Were the Resistance or were they not funded by the New Republic for years? Why are their forces so garbage now?

One bomber survives long enough to release its payload and destroy the Destroyer, and the resistance flees into Lightspeed. Hux gets humiliated by Snoke in front of everyone, in a scene that is stupid for the very simple fact that Snoke, a Force User known for mind-reading, put such an incompetent idiot in charge of the entire fleet. He only has himself to blame for this failure.

So, that's the end of the opening of the movie, and already we have inconsistencies and bad writing all over the place. Now, to the movie's credit I didn't think about any of this when I was actually watching the movie. It managed to put enough glitz and glamour that I wasn't even really using my brain while watching the movie. But now that I am applying my brain and powers of observation to it it completely falls apart. And the saddest part of this is that this was the best written part of the movie.

So, onwards we go! Finn awakens from his medical coma after a spinal injury in the climax of the last film. And he . . . immediately gets up and walks around as if everything is fine...

Okay, lets get this clear. I would not find this scene unbelievable in the right context. This is a highly advanced universe and their medical abilities far exceed what we can imagine, hell we've had people lose hands and get robotic replacements as good as the real thing multiple times. I could easily buy that, with time, Finn would recover without an issue from his fight with Kylo.

Problem is it's been at best a day. remember that in Empire we start the movie off with Luke almost dying from cold related problems, and even he takes a lot of time in special tanks to heal. That was simply from the cold. Finn would need dramatic operations to his spine to recover from what Kylo did to him. And yet here he is, at best a day later (at worst a few hours) up and about as if nothing happened. Inconsistent, again.

So next we finally visit Rey, who last we saw was meeting Luke Skywalker for the first time, and proferred him his old Lightsaber. Now, remember what this Lightsaber represents. It was Anakin's, found its way to Luke via Kenobi, and lost in a life-changing duel with Darth Vader. It is steeped in the history of the entire Star Wars saga. And what happens to this artefact that holds so much history? It is tossed aside as a very cheap joke. "Oh, but the movie is about throwing away the past, that's the theme, so it's okay!" No, it definitely is not, and I'll get to why later. I have a lot to say about this, but it deserves its own section to attend to properly. And, again, at the time I didn't really think much on this, because I'd turned my brain off.

Now this might come as a shock, but I really don't have many issues with the montage of Luke getting on with his life with Rey lamely stalking him in a stubborn refusal to leave without training. There were some questionable choices in what happens (the infamous breast feeding milk scene.), but the purpose of the sequence is fine.

Meanwhile back at the resistance we get the first of many frustrating scenes involving Poe. And hoo boy was this a badly writen piece of crap right here. So, Poe gets dressed down by Leia for losing their fleet of bombers (given how trash they are compared to Y-Wings I honestly don't see them as a loss, but whatever). Poe did this because he felt that taking out one of the First Orders best ships was a fair trade, I'm inclined to align my views with him, but I can also understand Leia's point that everyone lost their lives doing it.

The issue with this is that Poe is lambasted over the course of the film for this. This is a very big issue. Why? Because moments later the First Order appears behind them with Snoke's own ship the Supremacy. We learn that the First Order can now track ships through hyperspace and essentially there is no way for them to flee them now.

So, remember that ship Poe destroyed? Yeah, see, here's why spending the entire film acting as if what he did was a bad thing is very very bad writing. If Poe hadn't destroyed that ship when he had the Resistance would be dead. It is established that the ship is a fleet killer, and so it is very clear that had Poe not destroyed it when he had the Destroyer would have proceeded to simply snipe the entire Resistance fleet after following them. In other words this movie would have ended twenty minutes in.

So, Poe saved the entire resistance and gets treated like crap for that for the entire movie. I get what they were trying to do. They were trying to make a parable about men being unable to accept women with authority and also trying to deconstruct the tropes of Star Wars and its penchant for heroics that see a lot of people die. However this has fallen flat on its face due to the fact that, had Poe not done what he did, nobody would be alive to lambaste him for it. And so we, the viewer, are treated to a cast so dumb they are completely unaware of this despite having all the facts. Meanwhile Poe becomes a beta to the point he doesn't even attempt to justify his actions.

It's just inconsistent and frustrating writing. Now, everything I've mentioned up to now isn't hard to fix, it isn't hard to catch, and it isn't irreparable by someone who knows what they're doing. So it speaks volumes that these issues were shot, put to film, and released to the public. The movie so far is illogical, irrational, and inconsistent. And we're only half an hour in and yet to see the worst of all of this.

Okay, from here I'm going to stop doing blow-by-blows and just go through the big parts of the film piece by piece in vaguely-sequential order. Otherwise I'd be here all day and the giant posts I've made already would soon inflate to the size of a novella.

So, next up we have the infamous casina planet arc, and everyones favourite Star Wars character Rose! I'm not going to go into too much detail here, because even people that actually like TLJ acknowledge that this is the weakest part of the film and not very good. But hoo boy is this section bad. Lets ignore the ironic self-congratulatory self-indulgance of the entire setting, which is honestly hilarious because of how blind and lacking in self-awareness this film is. Let us instead focus on the fact that the entire sequence exists because of stupidity on the protagonists part.

They arrive on the planet and park their ship on the beach. Why? This is, last I checked, supposed to be a secret mission. And they just park on the beach? Come on, there had to be better and more logical ways to get Rose and Finn into jail to meet the hacker than this complete ineptitude of the pair of them.

This entire section is as on-the-nose as things can get. Rose is the definite highlight, with dialogue worthy of one Anakin Skywalker's course sand speech in Attack of the Clones. As is also the fact that the entire sequence is basically "rich people are bad and exploit the lower classes". Probably not the best thing to be trying to put in a Disney movie.

Next we have Leia's "death", and holy crap this entire sequence angers me. I'm not going to go over the fact that Leia would, factually, not have even survived being blown into space, much less reawakened after falling unconcious, and how stupid the cinematography was of her flying back to the ship.

No, what I'm going to criticise is that this is the scene Leia should have died. Carry Fisher is, unfortunately, no longer with us. So this was an obvious way to conclude her character and make a shocking point while doing so. This was the movies first chance to be genuinely subvertive of expectations, and it could have led to a plethora of genuinely satisfying things. But no, she survives, only to spend the movie in a coma and have a scene at the end with Luke, which as far as I can tell was the only reason she did in fact survive.

This leads to one "Admiral Holdo" taking over, and holy crap if the issues regarding Poe weren't bad enough before this character sends things into overdrive. Take notes people, because Holdo, along with Rey, should be examples of how not to write your female characters.

So, back to Rey and Luke. This entire section was a pisspoor thing that missed so much opportunity. This was supposed to be the part of the trilogy where Rey was finally developed as a character, where she was challenged both as a person and as a being of the Force, and she has neither. But the biggest thing is how unaware the movie is that it constantly teased Rey having an affinity to the Dark Side constantly.

Meanwhile Luke, we learn, has closed himself off from the Force (and yet he was still using it earlier, so... Yeah. Whoops. Maybe not have your character doing impossible things that require the Force?). And this is where my earlier statement about Leia dying being good comes in. Leia could have appeared before Luke as a ghost for an incredibly emotional scene, and that could have both prompted Luke to train Rey and reconnect with the Force. But no, nothing that clever or satisfying. Hell we're even denyed the chance of mournign Han with him because subversions! Who cares about paying proper tribute to the franchise when you can subvert expectations!

And now we get to the infamous part of the movie where people say Luke was character assasinated. A view I have to agree with.

Now, I'm going to start this off by saying Luke's arc in this movie could have worked. I'm not one of the people that says because Luke was extremely different from the OT and here that this arc was a basterdisation of the character purely because it changed him.

No, it was a basterdisation of Luke because it couldn't be arsed to give us a proper backstory. At the end of TFA we were left with some big questions, such as why he'd vanished from the galactic stage at a time when he was needed most. And this movie doesn't answer them. In fact it makes even more questions with its attempt at an explanation.

Yes, his attempting to kill Child Kylo Ren in his sleep was dreadful writing. Why? Because we are never shown how Luke from RotJ could commit this heinous betrayal. This is the same character who, the last time we saw him, put himself at the mercy of one of the biggest mass murderers in the galaxy because he believed that light would overcome the dark. And you expect me and everyone else to buy that on a dime he would kill his own nephew in his sleep? That character would do that? Yeah, NO.

There are ways this could have worked, which makes how the movie handled it all the more problematic. Anakin when he turned to the Dark Side murdered a bunch of children. Hell the Prequel Trilogy even has the whole "fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the Dark Side" speech, which as awful as it was could have tied into Luke's arc in this movie. Luke has flirted with the Dark Side in the past (remember tapping into it is how he beat Vader in combat), and Yoda outright warned in that same trilogy that once someone has touched the dark side it will forever haunt them.

They could have spent an extra two or so minutes on Luke's backstory and made it work by incorporating all of this (Luke plagued by nightmares of Kylo for months unknowingly goes to the Dark Side, tries to kill him, then yet again rejects it and removes himself from the galaxy because of it. See how much better this works than the crap bedtime-child-murder scene in the movie?). They tried to take Luke in an unexpected direction for the sake of subverting expectations, and yet they had neither the talent nor the desire to make it work because Rian was so obsessed with shitting on the legacy of the franchise.

People had spent decades wanting to know what Luke did after Return of the Jedi. And now we've got a movie that says he spontaneously decided to murder his nephew in his sleep. Like I've been saying this entire time, this writing was illogical and inconsistent with itself and the franchise. Instead of answering a mystery from TFA this movie opened up another mystery (how did Luke go from reasoning with a mass murderer fuelled by hatred to attempting child murder himself), and this new mystery clashes on every level possible with who and what the character was. It's hardly any surprise so many people despise what this movie did to the character. This sort of twist needed a lot of time and effort to work, and they didn't give it any.

We're getting near the end now. I'm going to take a break before I deal with the rest of this mess of a film.

And we're back after a several hour intermission to wrap up this overly long write-up that nobody is going to read anyway! Last we left off we dealt with the character assassination of Luke Skywalker, and now we're going to pick up on a surprising note that I doubt anybody reading this expected from me, the character assassination of Rey!

Yep, you read that right, Rey got character assassinated in TLJ, almost as badly as Luke did.

When we left TFA we were given various hints that Rey's affinity with the Force and her unnatural talents might actually have a reason for existing, and we still had some big challenges for her to overcome. She'd bested a wounded Kylo Ren after tapping into the RAGE part of the Force, and she was off to find Luke and bring him into the fray, while perhaps getting some training from a trusted source in the process.

Instead what we get in this movie is her falling for a person she literally wanted to murder not two days ago for killing her daddy replacement, and the revelation that, no, her powers don't come from anywhere in particular. She simply is a super special gifted person.

I wasn't on board the "MaRey Sue" train after the TFA, in fact I even defended her in several discussions on other forums. But after this movie there truly is no defending her. She is never tested as a person, she is always portrayed as right, she never earns her gifts, she just has them. And she never pays for any errors, nor are any of her flaws more than superficial. This was the part of the trilogy where Luke was getting metaphorical and literal stuffing kicked out of him, he was at his lowest as a person physically and mentally after his immense mistakes.

Rey on the other hand is basically ascending to godhood at the end of the movie, and for no discernable reason beyond "the force is strong in her". In other words because she's a Mary Sue. Even freaking Anakin "the chosen one" had to spend the better part of a decade training, and yet Rey literally picks up things and does them better than highly trained people in mere seconds. The fact the movie deliberately went out of its way to say there is no reason for this makes her a Mary Sue.

Rey was very clearly being set up for things at the end of The Force Awakens. And so Rian threw all of that out the window as he did everything else, because "hey having someone have an actual reason for unnatural talents is so cliche, let's subvert the trope! Oh, what's that, those reasons exist so the narrative functions believably? Oh who cares, people will lap it up if we just throw around the term subverting expectations enough!"

And to this day I have no idea what the hell that scene with the mirror was even supposed to be. Honestly it was so ver the top and obtuse I doubt even Rian knows. Given how much of a hack the first part of this movie has been I have no doubt his logic was "eh, who cares, people will read anything into this acid-trip of a scene, let them do the work for me".

I will however give one compliment to this movie, the detail regarding the rain on Kylo's hand after a chat with Rey. This is important for later in the movie, and a lot of people because they missed this crap on Luke's ending. Honestly I'm tempted to say Rian was being too subtle with this foreshadowing, because it's clear nobody picked up on it. But, be that as it may, this is the one time I will agree he was genuinely clever. If only the rest of the movie had been on this quality we might've had a good movie despite his throwing out the blueprint JJ Abrams left for them.

Now back to being not-very-nice! I'll skip ahead to what should have been the climax of the movie, the showdown on Snoke's ship the Supremacy. Rey has pulled a Luke and rushed off to redeem Kylo Ren, and Finn and Rose are arriving at about the same time. Meanwhile Poe is leading a mutiny against the utterly incompetent Admiral Holdo.

A lot is going down at once, and a lot of stupid is about to take place. Lets start with the elephant in the room, Snoke himself. He was killed to "subvert expectations", but this move, while initially seeming clever, actually fucks over the rest of the trilogy. He is the big bad. You cannot kill off the big bad unless you have a suitable replacement for him. This trilogy does not have a replacement for him. And, like everything else, he was set up for a lot and was instead thrown in the can because I can guess Rian simply couldn't figure out what to do with Snoke.

After his appearance in TFA viewers were left with all sorts of questions, where did he come from? What were his motivations? He seems old, where was he during Palpatines reign and did he have any relation to him?

All these questions will now go unanswered. And, see, here's the thing. We needed those answers. Because so far the sequel trilogy has done its damndest to basically make the victory in the OT completely redundant. We needed a good reason for that. But instead Snoke is simply killed off because "SUBVERSION!"

That's not even touching on how he was killed off. I'm sorry, but I do not buy that the guy whose big power is literally reading minds didn't read that Kylo was trying to kill him instead of Rey. He even says Kylo is about to strike down his biggest enemy, which he'd know full well isn't Rey because he'd deliberately mind-linked the two so they'd bond.

Oh, and lets not forget that TFA implied he wanted Rey captured, not killed. And the reason they give in TLJ doesn't work because Rey at the time didn't have the location of Luke Skywalker. So it's pretty clear he wanted Rey to turn her. Another subplot thrown in the bin.

Meanwhile we have Finn and Rose facing off with Phasma. No explanations as to how Phasma survived Starkiller going boom or anything when she was left in a trash compactor. Nope, here she is. And she's back to do just as much as she did in the first movie, oh goodie! And oh look, she's killed off after doing nothing again. Brilliant writting here folks. Like come on, a trooper with another anti-Jedi weapon would've had as much of a fight with Finn as Phasma put up.

Meanwhilemeanwhile Poe's mutiny is put down by Leia regaining concousness and we're told that Holdo was a good person all along and Poe was in the wrong! The fact that Holdo did everything you shouldn't do as a commanding officer the entire movie, and that the entire subplot involving Finn wouldn't have happened if she'd just told Poe the bloody plan, or possibly even at least said there was a plan, such a badly writen character and arc.

So, the plan. Strap yourselves in, because it's time for more never-before-seen tech in Star Wars to appear because the plot wants it to! The plan was to get to a planet with a old Resistance hideout, send everyone out on escape pods while using a scanner cloaker to hide the fact that everyone is evacuating the ships, and then let the First Order think they've won!

Okay, to be fair, that very very last part is actually a clever idea. They've drawn too much heat, it makes sense to play dead. But how they go about it is the stupidest nonesense ever. For starters the entire plan requires nobody to look out the windows of the Star Destroyers to see the escape pods launching, which consdering every Star Destroyer has a giant window at the bridge... Yeah, not buying that happening. Secondly it requires the First Order to not run a decloaking scan (which any competent military would run at set intervals for this exact reason). And third it requires them to actually make it to the planet.

There's another problem here, and it's with the worldbuilding. Why oh why do these escape pods not have some form of lightspeed travel? Seriously think about it for a second. This is space. It's bloody massive. An escape pod without lightspeed travel is basically as useful as just putting on a spacesuit and abadoning ship.

If your ship is being destroyed the odds are extremely high you're on your own. Escape pods without some form of lightspeed travel (even if it's just enough to get to a planet with civilisation) is about as useful at preserving life as a floating piece of wood in the ocean.

Why do I bring this up? Because there is a far smarter plan that doesn't work because these escape pods cannot go lightspeed. Instead of evacuating to Crait they could have simply sent everyone out and scattered across space without the First Order knowing.

So because of this Rian had to create a reason why they couldn't do that. His answer? Escape pods that cannot enter hyperspace.

You might think this is nitpicking, but this is the crux of the movie. Whenever you create a fictional world it needs to be believable within itself. Worldbuilding needs to make sense, to put it very simply. This right here is an example of worldbuilding that doesn't make sense. Instead of the world being a place the story takes place in the world is literally only being created to explain away bad writing. It completely kills suspension of disbelief (ah who am I kidding, mine was dead from the opening scene).

The long and short of this plan is that it can be summed up thus: go near a planet and hope to god the First Order doesn't have someone look out a window while they evacuate their entire forces into unarmed defenceless escape craft. SMART!

Know what would have been smarter? As soon as they realised they were being tracked they should have split their forces into groups. The First Order could not track all of them, as only one of their ships had this technology. At least two thirds of the Resistance would have survived, and the remaining third would have at least had a chance at figuring something else. There's a saying that sums up the point of this strategy. "don't put all your eggs in one basket". And yet that's exactly what they did. AARRGH.

Back to the confrontation with Snoke. This movies big thing was subverting expectations, right? And yet every time it had the chance to do so in a meaningful way it chickens out. Why do I say that? I refer to my earlier post about how the movie was hinting Rey had an affinity for the Dark Side.

To put it very simply if the movie had truly wanted to subvert expectations they would have had a twist like, oh, I don't know, Rey turning to the Dark Side while Kylo turns back to the Light and the roles gt reversed for the final trilogy leading to an epic cliffhanger! This is another reason Rey is a Mary Sue by the way, she's able to flirt with the Dark Side without any sort of repercussions or personal growth.

And so we're finally at the end of this trainwreck of a film. The final battle begins, and to be honest everything goes fine until the Finn sacrifice scene, where Rose yet again shows why she is the most pointless, stupidest, unwanted character in the franchise. Yes, even worse than Jar-Jar. It's bad enough that she rams Finn in such a way that in any other work of fiction would have killed the pair of them. But the fact she turns around to Finn, and actually unironically says "that's how we'll win. Not by fighting what we hate, but with love". All this is said while the gate stopping the resistance being slaughtered is literally blown apart in the background. The same resistance Rose's sister DIED FOR IN THE OPENING OF THE MOVIE.

Now, lets take a look at what she actually said. Does love stop bullets? No. Does love stop a lightsaber? No. Does love stop an army genociding multiple planets at once? No.

Know what does stop those things though? Taking up arms and fighting back.

This is probably the single worst sentence uttered by anyone in a war film ever. A ten year old wouldn't write this sort of tripe. It's an attempt to sound profound without even a fraction of wisdom behind it. It's pseudo-philosophy at best, flat out insulting to everyone who died in a war in real life at worst. I hate to break it to these bleeding heart pacifists that grew up well past the times of war, but this sentimental crap is complete nonsense. If people actually lived by this ideal we'd be ruled by the fucking Nazi's right now.

Phew, need to take a deep breath. And to be clear this theme can work, and it has worked. Harry Potter made this work. But it cannot just be thrown in as a piece of sanctimonious dialogue and work. It needs to actually have the story structured around it. It worked in Harry Potter because love had actual power. In Star Wars love is just an emotion, and emotions on their own will do absolutely nothing.

So, Rey turns up in the Falcon to save the day by drawing Tie Fighters away from them because... Kylo Ren has a mental breakdown and tells the entire fleet to chase the Falcon rather than have a small squadron harry it while the rest wipe out the pitiful dwindling ground forces. Yay, more of the heroes surviving because the villains are too stupid to do anything.

So then Luke walks out, and we all know how the scene goes. Now, this is where I, instead of attacking the movie, actually compliment it again! A lot of people seem to think Luke died because of the projection, forgetting the small detail from Rey and Ren's projections earlier that there is in fact some feedback to both ends.
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So, Luke didn't die because he overloaded himself. He likely died because of the barrage of AT-AT fire followed by Kylo Ren sticking his sabre where Luke's heart would have been. This is where Rian was actually too subtle, too many people missed the very small details that explain this. And so while for many Luke's death was a spit in the face I actually feel it is one of the only good parts of this movie. It's clever, it's sad, and it's touching. It would have been even better if the movie hadn't spent its entire runtme assassinating Luke beforehand though.

So, I'm done with the individual parts of the movie. All except for one, and I deliberately left this for last because this is honest to god the worst thing in this movie. The biggest inconsistency in both it and the entire franchise. I, of course, refer to the "Holdo manoeuvre". Where she rams a ship into the Supremacy at lightspeed, shattering not just it but the entire fleet behind it.

The problems with this should be extremely obvious, and yet this one scene destroys everything in Star Wars, from its combat scenes to its very worldbuilding.

What this scene establishes is that you can ram a far smaller thing into a bigger thing at lightspeed to create massive damage. Why wasn't this used against either Death Star, why wasn't it used in any previous battle, why were blockades and planetary sieges ever a thing? And, most of all, if they could do this why was the Resistance for most of the movie letting their ships run out of fuel to be harmlessly blown up by the First Order instead of having each of them rammed into them?

Oh, but the problems go far deeper. Why, in a universe where you can take a small thing and easily destroy a big thing with it, are things like Star Destroyers around? The entire way weapons have developed in Star Wars is now completely contrary to what can be done. If this was a move that could be done weapons would get ever-smaller, not bigger! Why do they even use fighters, why haven't they moved past them into drone rams?

There's one other part of the movie I forgot to mention earlier (because there is so much I could criticise that these posts could easily be double the length they are right now). Why did the First Order simply sit back and let the fuel of the Resistance run out? Why did they not try other tactics such as, I don't know, sending a Star Destroyer ahead of them at Lightspeed and catching them in a pincer attack, a very basic strategy that would have ended the movie?

Of course that's the reason right there. Because it would have ended the movie.

So, one final post going over some general things, and then I can close this book of a critique of the farce that is The Last Jedi.

I know a lot of the typical retorts to all of the above. "It's just a kids movie, you're overthinking it!" "But the themes are really truly great and excuse the inconsistencies!" And a few more that aren't even worth addressing because they diverge from arguments into strawman territory.

-It's just a kids movie

That doesn't stop it being a convoluted mess that had many a child actively asking their parents what was happening because of how disjointed it was. What a great kids movie! Besides all of that I would also ask something. Why are we excusing mediocrity just because it is designed for children? Do children not deserve good well-made entertainment?

In fact I would argue the quality of what we show our children is incredibly important. Taste is formed at youth, and the more a child is challenged as a youth the more likely they are to grow up with a greater capacity for thought and talent. We also need to be careful with what role models we expose our children to. Rey is a horrible role model. She gets everything handed to her, never has to earn anything, and never faces any true hardships. She isn't inspiring as a person, and she doesn't teach a child strong values such as perseverance.

Point is Star Wars being a franchise with a big childrens market doesn't excuse TLJ of its issues, in fact it makes them more problematic.

-But the themes!

Okay, let's get something straight. You can have a good story without any strong themes. You cannot have a good story when it's nothing but themes. This movie is the latter. It is so absolutely obsessed with the two themes of subverting expectations and "killing the past" that it forgets that it has to work as a story as well. It is riddled with inconsistencies, characters making illogical choices because the plot needs them to, and subpar storytelling.

Oh, and speaking of "killing the past", I'd like to say something about that. It can amount to "fepk you movie", but I'll elaborate why it inspires that reaction from me.

Killing the past. Forgetting the past. That is one of the worst things we as a species can do. "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." Now, I probably don't need to explain why that would be an issue for us in real life. You know, world wars born from isolationism and nationalism, ect ect ect. And yet here we have a movie practically preaching to ignore the past, when anybody and everybody knows that the past is best remembered, mistakes especially so you can learn from them and avoid repeating them.

It's also the biggest middle-finger the movie could give to the entire old franchise. Say what you will about the prequels (and I could say many many rude things about them), but they never once crapped on the thing that allowed them to come into existence. And yet this movie all but tells the viewer "old Star Wars sucked, old things suck".

That's really the problem here. Rian had no respect for the franchise that came before (nor did Kennedy or she'd have reigned him in a little), and openly mocked it in the movie. That moment Kylo tells Rey to kill the past was basically as on-the-nose as Rian could get about giving the franchise the middle-finger. The fact it was insulting both to Star Wars and basically every big war we've had in our past is almost an achievement.

one final point. This movie has all but killed any chance for episode 9 to be remotely good. Snoke's demise means there is no credible villain, Rey hasn't evolved as a person and so we know there is nothing that can test her at this point, and the First Order is run by actual incompetents. Hux is a military idiot and Kylo is mentally unstable. The pair of them make awful big bads, and yet that is the role they must now play because SUBVERSION'S.

Or worse, they might backtrack on Snoke's death and come up with some excuse that it wasn't really him that Kylo killed. At this point it feels like the only route they can go and have an even half-passable climax (especially since Snoke is the only thing in the trilogy to be shown as stronger than and a danger to Rey), but it's really amateurish writing. Either way the climax is bound to be a very limp one now. Rian has saddled Abrams with a mess I doubt anybody envies. As for me, I'll possibly rent it on home release, but Disney certainly aren't getting another dime from me after the insult that was TLJ.

Far as I'm concerned the only canon sequel to the original trilogy is the Thrawn trilogy, and Star Wars ended with the Hand of Thrawn duoligy with Mara and Luke's vision of the future.