I have a question. How does everyone think the action-adventure aspects on "The Last Jedi" were? If the movie doesn't work on that level for people then doesn't that negate any of the more character oriented stuff? Does anything in the movie rival the attack on the first Death Star or the Walking Machine things that I don't know what they are called on Hoth? I think people underestimate the movie's failure at 2 of it's 3 big action set pieces. The Casino Raid and the Space Chase seem to not be liked by many. Luke standing up to the whole army basically by himself is the one action moment that does land and compares favorably to the old movies.
Honestly, I think the prequels were the best in terms of pure action. The original trilogy had a few good sequences but
Return of the Jedi is really the only one that still holds up by today's action standards.
The Last Jedi did a good job of taking advantage of modern FX but I think the only action sequence that really stands out is Rey & Kylo Ren vs. Snoke's guards in the throne room. The rest is kinda meh.
What in Star Wars doesn’t ‘match up?’ And I don’t mean ‘resolved in a way I don’t like,’ I mean ‘goes the way of Luke’s explicitly unfinished Jedi training lessons in ROTJ.’
For the record, I'm actually perfectly fine with how the stuff with Rey's parents and with Snoke turned out in
The Last Jedi. I actually prefer Rey being nobody and I place the blame primarily on Abrams for creating a mystery where none needed to exist. But it doesn't match up with how it was built up in
The Force Awakens and I think that shows poor planning on the part of the person in charge of this franchise, Kathleen Kennedy.
But then, unnecessary mysteries aren't unheard of these days. J.J. Abrams spent years obfuscating Khan's identity in
Star Trek Into Darkness for no good reason. Disney played coy for a long time about Henry Turner's identity in
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales despite the fact that it's not a spoiler at all. He's established as being Will & Elizabeth's son in the very first scene of the movie.
What thing "happened" to Iron Man 3, other than people getting the wrong idea like it was their job? Anyone who thought there wouldn't be an Iron Man armor in Avengers 2 was seriously misguided.
In fairness, Robert Downey Jr.'s contract ran out after
Iron Man 3. He's basically been on a film-by-film deal since then, thus why they wrote perfectly acceptable send-offs for him in both
Iron Man 3 and
The Avengers: Age of Ultron, yet he keeps coming back.
The Infinity Gauntlet injoke becomes a error, as was Loki working on his own and mind controlling Selvig already
Yeah, the one about Selvig does still bug me. But I would say that continuity errors in post-credit teasers don't hold quite as much weight as major-character-points-in-the-main-body-of-the-films.
I see what the logic was over at Disney. they knew the original trilogy was mostly written by the seat of the pants, and they were trying to avoid over planning, and sucking all the life out of the movies. So they had the great idea to be hands off and trust the vision of some talented young directors. Unfortunately the resulting movies don't feel like a cohesive story. There clearly needs to be a guiding hand with a vision above the directors to keep things together. that was Lucas for 1-6. Should have been J.J. but he wasn't involved with 8. we will see if he can tie everything together.
If they didn't have a plan, I think they shouldn't have established from the get-go that they were doing a "trilogy." I think they just should have said, "Here's a bunch of new characters that we're introducing to take over the franchise and we're looking forward to seeing where the story goes from there." If you announce that you're doing a trilogy, you imply that you know the basics of what this 3-act structure will be. Even if Lucas was making up a lot of the original trilogy as he went along, it still works as a general structure-- Part 1, Introduce the characters; Part 2, Have our heroes get their asses kicked and introduce some big twist; Part 3, Good guys win, bad guys lose, everybody happy.
BTW, while everyone was blown away by the revelation that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father and wants to recapture that magic, what they forget is that the reason why no one saw that twist coming was because no one knew that ANY twist was coming. Prior to that revelation, there was no reason to believe that Obi-Wan had given us incomplete or inaccurate information about who Darth Vader was or what happened to Anakin Skywalker. But if you keep dropping "hints" about your "surprise twist," no one is going to actually be surprised.
And oh boy. Isn’t the formation of SHIELD a bit of a continuity minefield in these movies. They had to do some EU heavy lifting to fix that one.
How so? All I recall from the movies was:
1. Nick Fury said that Howard Stark was one of the founding members of SHIELD (
Iron Man 2).
2. Howard Stark was working for OSI during WWII, which was presumably a precursor to SHIELD much in the same way that the OSS became the CIA in real life (
Captain America: The First Avenger).
3. Unbeknownst to everyone, Hydra didn't end with the death/disappearance of the Red Skull and they proceeded to infiltrate SHIELD, the KGB, the U.S. Senate, and everywhere else, culminating with their attempt to assassinate thousands of people en masse using automated SHIELD Helicarriers (
Captain America: The Winter Soldier).
That's a matter of opinion I suppose, but Luke Skywalker was always at least as implausible as Rey is, and Luke was arguably even more implausible..
I really like Rey. She is, by far, my favorite character of the new movies. But, on a recent re-watch of
The Force Awakens, I did notice some Mary Sue qualities creep into her. She has super-strong, unexplained Force abilities AND she's better at piloting & repairing the Falcon than Han is AND she can speak difficult alien languages that allow her to understand BB8 & Chewie AND she's able to fend for herself without any support network as an orphan on Jakku. Individually, all of these abilities make sense but they are an awful lot to cram into a single character in her first appearance.
Compare that to Luke Skywalker, whose only real skills in
A New Hope are being a good pilot and having a very vague latent Force sensitivity, neither of which even really come into play until the final Death Star battle. The rest of the time, all he brings to the table is a plucky attitude and a couple of plot-convenient droids that his uncle bought. He probably wouldn't have even made it out of the cantina alive had it not been for Obi-Wan. And then he kept getting in the way while Han was trying to evade the Imperial ships. "What's that flashing?" Even in
The Empire Strikes Back, he's still a good pilot but other than that all he does is lift a few small objects and get his ass kicked by Darth Vader. He didn't become some kind of uber-badass until
Return of the Jedi. (How that happened, I have no idea.)
Kathleen Kennedy has become the "other" and non-human, faceless enemy figure for a portion of fan opinion that cannot accept that the things they spent years memorizing and reading are suddenly being changed. No matter the facts of the case, as you point out, Kennedy is the Darth Vader of the story.
Kathleen Kennedy is Darth Vader? Does that mean that she had to destroy the EU in order to become powerful enough with the Dark Side to save her loved ones from dying?
Were there a lot of Trekkies calling for Berman to be fired? I really don't remember but I think there were some but not a lot because a lot of his detractors thought it was just something that would happen inevitably (and many admitted they didn't know if someone else would do better).
People weren't too hard on Berman on his own, IIRC. But Berman & Braga were often derided as "the killer Bs."
But I hope Disney doesn't decide that these side stories aren't profitable enough, and therefore stop making them.
