Luke Skywalker's Character Problem in Star Wars The Last Jedi

Except, Star Wars has done that before. It's not new with the cinematic language or whatever other complaint. Star Wars has had flying, and bombing runs in space before.

That TLJ is somehow more egregious is something I cannot wrap my mind around.

 

True. How quickly we forget the ESB asteroid chase with the TIE, what are they called? Oh yeah! TIE Bombers!

 

[Complainer] That was EMPIRE, we're complaining about the atrocity known as The Last Jedi, the worst movie ever. Everybody knows that and agrees with that. [/Compainer]

 

Seriously, so fucking what? The majority of the audience also knows that you float in space and that she was pulling herself towards the ship via the force.

Call it flying, it makes no difference. There is nothing REMOTELY inconsistent with that and what we've seen Jedi do before in numerous films. The Jedi can (practically) fly. They can plummet massive heights and land dainty as a feather, they can leap two stories above them. They can move objects with telekinesis, big and small.

Pulling yourself through the vacuum of space (where there is no resistance!) would be easy.

How the heck is this even an argument?

 

Because they simply can't just not like a movie and be done with it. They need to squueeeeeeze every bit of a film to find something... just one more thing.

 

That's not the real problem with that scene. Somehow the Resistance found the slowest damn ships ever seen in Star Wars for their bombing run. Add to that, they're either unshielded or their shielding is absurdly poor and they get destroyed really easily. Also, Johnson apparently forgot that the X-wings were used in a bombing run in the previous film.

 

Are you saying we should've had a third movie in a row where X-Wings ineffectually pelt a large flat object with torpedos?

 

The only way to do something different with a franchise is to do exactly the same thing again. That's just logic.

 

I can’t wait until Poe gets frozen in carbonite!

 

None of these are remotely insightful, interesting or valid critiques, but, hey, thanks for jumping in to a comment that had nothing to do with them.

Star Wars has NEVER been about scientific accuracy. It has always takes its cues in terms of mechanics and sensibility from World War II or took the "if it's cool, let's go with it" approach.

You could find a dozen or more similarly meaningless nitpicks about the OT.

But, hey, I'll bite. Bombers move more slowly than fighters! Taking the WW2 analogy, all the bombers have fighter escorts. In TLJ, same thing, but the fighters get picked off pretty quickly, leaving the slow-moving bomber on its own.

And, hey, when you hit something that's, you know, full of bombs, it's gonna blow up much easier than something without bombs in it. And WTF are you talking about anyway, since most (admittedly not all) non-capital ships we see destroyed in SW combat are blown up with just one direct hit. Shields have always worked at the strength of plot. Strong enough to keep the Falcon going, not so much for 90% of Red Squadron.

And just because X-Wings have bombs doesn't mean you won't sometimes need an actual dedicated bomber - with a lot MORE bombs in it - to get the job done.

The only difference between these insanely stupid nitpicks and the OT's similarly insignificant logical problems is that you saw the latter when you were a child and didn't care. Now you're just a humorless adult who is looking for shit to complain about.

So, you know....have fun with that.

 

Hey, I wasn't even remotely talking to you, but whatever. I'm officially heartbroken that you didn't find my comment to someone else sufficiently interesting or valid. Just completely destroyed over here.

Rian Johnson doesn't appear to know how SW tech is supposed to work. Though it might have felt good at the time, it turns out that getting rid of George Lucas wasn't as great an idea as it seemed. Who knew?

You just can't find them in your post.

Sorry to burst your little "everything is just like World War 2" bubble, but... IT'S SPACE!

And again, so why are the slowest possible ships being used to do the bombing?

The point was the shields, as you're well aware. Maybe when you have something that's, you know, full of bombs, you might wanna, you know, shield it?

It's weird how they didn't think of that in TFA. "Dammit, man, we're not getting the job done! Where the hell are our absurdly slow-moving dedicated bombers?"

That's the thing... with this film, you don't have to go "looking" for problems. You're immediately confronted with them, even if you're not looking.

 

Absurd on its face. Lucas chose to retire. But, you know, let's pretend like LFL made him quietly go away. Odd, to say the least.

 

Again, Star Wars is not science fiction. It is space fantasy. There are no hard and fast rules about how the tech works.

 

I don't know, those two-dozen Mon Calamari cruisers that were half-again the size of a Star Destroyer would've probably been pretty handy at Hoth, so, probably the same reason as that.

Or maybe they remembered the last time they used absurdly slow-moving dedicated bombers on a planet-killer, they were all shot down before they even made it to the target. "It came from... behind—!"

Or...

Oh, goody, it's time for my theory of nitpicking!

Art is subjective and deeply personal, and causes the audience to react in primal, emotional ways that are not readily apparent. A story is a magic trick, a delicate machine made of foundation, misdirection, anticipation, and resolution, whose true mechanics are obscured by surface mechanics that exist for embellishment. Because of that, if something doesn't work, if the emotional core of a story fails to land with an audience member, for whatever reason, they are primed to look to those surface mechanics to explain why it doesn't work (because those are the obvious things, and since the audience member isn't engaging with the story, all they're taking in are the most superficial elements; characterization, subtext, theme, they all aren't connecting), and since they're probably unhappy, they'll lash out whenever they see anything remotely provocative. Thus, nitpicking.

A lot of nitpicking is stupid and self-contradictory. A formative example from my youth would be stumbling on a website explicating all the reasons the movie Independence Day sucked and was dumb. One of the listed nitpicks was that there was a mention of "the Belgian contingent in the Sinai," but Belgium is nowhere near the Sinai, completely missing the use of the word "contingent" or that the scene was between multiple characters from different countries (none of them being the one they were in), at a makeshift international airfield flying dozens of visible flags, so that while they were talking about soldiers from Belgium, there was no reason to think they should be expected to be anywhere near Belgium in that context. That person wasn't enjoying the movie, and was looking for excuses to call it stupid, and saw "English people in Iraq are talking about something Belgium-related like it's next door" and thought "Ah, they're idiots! I'm smarter and could make a better movie than this, because I've read a book."

(Speaking of "reading a book," the newer, hipster version of nitpicking is to superficially analyze the plot based on some story-structure-for-dummies book they read, and talk about the movie is bad because the hero didn't save a cat, or there weren't enough reversals, or some other damn thing, which are usually fundamental-enough structural decisions that they can't influence whether a story "works" nearly as much as what's built around them; for movies where that sort of thing really is the problem, you don't have to argue that it's bad, everyone already knows that part. Those are analyses for post-mortems, not trials.)

So, why is it you think slow, plodding space-bombers in a WWII-inflected setting dropping bombs despite the absence of gravity in ESB or Rogue One is fine, but here it "confronts" you with its idiocy? I don't know, while I'd love to strap an eyetracker and an FMRI to a nitpicker who hates a love-it-or-hate-it movie to figure out what moments are actually ticking them off, no one will let me do it. Since it's pretty early in the movie for it to have burned off your goodwill, and there are only so many things that could've ticked you off (though, admittedly, you could always be retrospectively nitpicking, looking back at the parts of the movie you initially enjoyed colored by how much you disliked the later parts), I'd say it was probably the telephone gag. A mundane, real-world-inflected pratfall in a world you associate with a world of self-serious adventure, where even the old dopey jokes have been polished up with nostalgia to become grand mythic acts, which has been literalized in those little cartoon scenes they've started doing.

 

Fair. Your comment came right after mine, so I misinterpreted it as responding to me, not seeing you were quoting someone else.

 

But... the large asteroid in ESB would have had gravity no?

 

It had a thin atmosphere, life, and gravity. Probably also a gift shop, now it is owned by Disney.

 

George Lucas leaving was the best thing to happen to Star Wars in a long time. Like with Star Trek and Rodenberry, the stuff I've liked best has always been the stuff he was the least hands on with on a daily basis.

 

You don’t have to go looking for problems in any Star Wars movie. They are very much out in front and numerous.

 

Imagine my surprise when I use to frequent the website "Movie Mistakes" and discovered that "Star Wars" was easily the top film with the most mistakes. And I thought it was perfect...