I honestly was half expecting, had there been a traitor in the rebel fleet, for it to actually be Poe. I thought the First Order might have swooped him up again and brainwashed him during TFA. Would have made for an interesting arc for the character.
@Christopher Except Poe never "charged in like a brash hothead" in The Force Awakens. - His mission to Jakku to retrieve the map to find Luke was sanctioned by Leia. It just didn't work out as intended because Kylo Ren attacked. - His escape from First Order custody with Finn was just doing what it takes to stay alive, and he was successful. - His raid on Takodana was sanctioned by Leia and she immediately followed in an assault craft. - His mission to destroy Starkiller Base was planned and sanctioned by the Resistance leadership, and when the plan was falling apart, he improvised and accomplished his mission. At no point is he shown disobeying orders, going off-mission, being a glory hound or lone wolf type, being a sexist jerk, or being careless and callous with the lives of the people under his command in TFA. Yet the very first scene with him in The Last Jedi, mere hours or days after the first film, involves him: - Commandeering a bomber squadron without permission, a court martial offense. - Disobeying a direct order from Leia to return to the ship and call off the attack, another court martial offense and his first of two mutinies (both against female superiors, which he's suddenly got a problem with) of the film. - Pulling off a disorganized plan with no fighter support (because he didn't get permission and thought he could do it all himself, which he didn't do in the first film) leaving the slow ass stupid bombers to get picked off one-by-one by TIE Fighters and Dreadnought fire, leaving only one surviving bomber to reach the target. - Having his entire plan depend on him alone taking out all the deck guns on the dreadnought, which was delayed when his ship was hit, which IIRC cost more lives, because he didn't have redundancies built into the plan and didn't expect the unexpected. But he finally got lucky that BB-8 BB-BS'd a solution by jamming a robo-fork in the socket, and he took out the last deck gun. - Then his whole plan depended on him getting lucky again that the bombardier kicked loose a remote from five stories above her and then apparently used the Force to catch it after it had fallen well past her hand. He completely changed behavior and modus operandi in the span of hours or days with no logical reason, since he had just won a major victory and was joking around mocking Hux. Maybe if they had given some indication that his family was killed on one of the planets destroyed in TFA or something such a drastic change would be understandable, but they didn't. Then he judges Admiral Holdo negatively strictly based on her appearance (dress, elaborate hairstyle) even though he knows her exceptional combat record and recites it by memory, Leia clearly considers Holdo an equal, and she has done absolutely nothing to earn his distrust at this point.This is before the compartmentalized information about the escape plan, which she is not required to share with a subordinate, but at least it's some motivation for his shitty berhavior other than just suddenly being a sexist asshole out of nowhere, despite serving with Leia for years, who I've heard on good authority is not opposed to occasionally wearing long flowing dresses and elaborate hairstyles on duty as well. He went from being a competent, egalitarian team player to an incompetent, lone wolf, misogynist mutineer overnight. And he didn't learn a damn thing from his failures. His plan of attack with the speeder thingies on the Crystal Hoth planet at the end was exactly the same direct frontal attack as the bomber attack at the beginning, with almost the same result. Only this time everyone but the name characters died, and they accomplished nothing. Fortunaterly Luke the Friendly Ghost showed up and Rey arrived to save the twelve people Poe hadn't gotten killed yet so he can get another chance to kill them in the next film. Hopefully he'll switch personalities from the BEAST back to Poe and go back to being a friendly and trustworthy team player who's good at his job.
So what? How is it realistic or interesting for a character to behave exactly the same way in every situation? Whence this bizarre notion that a character having multiple facets is bad writing?
Well, it is bad writing when a completely competent and trustworthy character is suddenly an ignorant mutineer who enacts a plan which results in his organization suffering deaths of 90% of its membership. TFA Poe would not have done that, and TLJ takes place over the span of a day or so afterwards.
Ex Machina was a great movie. It still amazes that a movie which is mostly 4 people sitting alone in a house talking, can be so compelling.
It's called hubris. The idea of overconfidence due to a past success and exposes a weakness. It is a common trope that has existed in fiction since ancient Greece, at least. It's been visited in Star Wars in some ways before: Poe is overconfident after victory over Starkiller. He is convinced he is right to continue the attack even at extreme cost. He is so overconfident that he continues on his path despite clear warnings. That is hurbis:
It's not having multiple facets, it's the storytelling equivalent of dissociative identity disorder. He became a completely different persona, and in a purely negative and destructive way, in the span of a few hours. It's not like he just decided "I'm not feeling it today" and stayed home from work. That would be understandable. Nowhere did I say he had to behave in "exactly the same way" between films. But he behaved in such a drastically different and destructive way that in-universe he would have been relieved of command and up on charges, and out-of-universe it was a complete reversal of everything established about the character in the previous film, and in a way to make him a completely unlikable character. And you keep glossing over the details of what I'm saying. Are you okay with his character becoming a rampant misogynist out of nowhere? How is that a beneficial character development?
Did you guys watch a different TFA where Poe actually had a personality worth speaking of? He was generic as could be there, a role more than a character. They could have done pretty much anything with him in TLJ and it wouldn't have contradicted his prior characterization because there wasn't any
When does he make issue with Holdo’s look? I’ve only seen the movie twice so I need a refresher there. I don’t see how disobeying them makes him a misogynist, he would have done the same thing if they were male.
It sounds like he could be talking about this cringeworthy comment. From https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=star-wars-episode-viii-the-last-jedi That's Admiral Holdo? Battle of Chyron Belt, Admiral Holdo? Not what I expected.
To clarify my meaning, the dialog is cringeworthy because its writing is ham-fisted. The dialog seems crafted to lampshade issues that members of the audience might have with the character. Ninety-nine times out 100, that form of lampshading is executed in a ham-fisted manner. The other shoe drops when you ask yourself what issues are being lampshaded. Granted, neither prejudice nor failure to have expectations met necessarily translate into misogyny, but why is Poe even making the comment? He's met Leia, right? Those questions only reinforce reading it as lampshading and not really having anything to do with Poe as a character.
Hamfisted dialogue? Almost like we're watching a Star Wars movie. You are absolutely correct there. Thanks for the clarification.
Touche. Perhaps I should have said especially ham-fisted. But not these: 1. "But I was going into Tosche station to pick up some power converters!" 2. "Yippee!" 3. "Oops!" Shakespeare would have killed to write like that, killed!
I can think of a few Shakespeare plays that would be vastly improved by references to Tosche Station.