The LAF star wars discussion thread. SPOILERS!

[dinohunterpoa]

Absolutely.

One of the points I've made about Star Wars is that, no matter their flaws, the original Star Wars stories stand on their own, both as individual films, and as a trilogy.

The underlying structure is a rock solid modern interpretation of the traditional Hero's Journey - in fact it's often used as THE example of that trope. The story is tight, the characters work well and are well-acted and cast, events go where they go for good reasons not "just because". Maybe there's a loose shingle or an ill-fitting window, but the foundations and overall structure of the original trilogy are rock solid, founded on quality storytelling drawn from very long tradition.

However, neither the prequels nor the sequels stand on their own - neither as individual movies or as ongoing series. Without the original trilogy no one would be raving about how great these bodge jobs are.

In any case, the sequels are, in my mind, mere fanfiction. For good or bad, they weren't written or touched by Lucas in any way (Also, Mark Hamill reportedly had grave disagreements about the fate of Luke and his treatment in this film, but is a true professional, so he spoke his peace once and then left it at that).

In fact this is really why the sequels don't bother me all that much - they can never disappoint me as profoundly as the prequels did. There's a lot of things which are absolutely terrible about the prequels, but unlike these mishmash corporate rerun sequels, the underlying story (stories) was, conceptually at least, something which COULD have stood on its own. Lucas at least had worked out a true story to tell even if the execution was abysmal. All the ingredients were there for a tragedy of a sort which has a long and illustrious history.

A great and talented man rises to prominence, becoming a great hero and leader. Talented man is tempted by evil or succumbs to hubris (or both, in this case and others). Talented man falls, destroying everything he built or taking many with him.

It's one of the oldest story structures in history. Where the OT was the Hero's Journey, the PT could have been a Greek tragedy. Perfect bookends - a fall, then a rise.

The single biggest mistake they ever made in the prequels isn't Jar Jar, or podracing, or the amount of time wasted pandering to Boba Fett fans, or endless dull doddering bureaucracy, or even those stupid, stupid, stupid midchlorians; it's that Anakin never really gets to be a great hero. The audience is never given a chance or reason to actually LIKE him (with a frankly atrocious performance in the bargain), so the entire story doesn't matter - who cares about this whinging shithead? You cheer when he gets his ass beat by Obi Wan and fricasseed, because Anakin fails completely at being the great hero that the prequel is all about.

This is why in my imagination the prequel should have roughly gone:

1st film: Eps 1&2 combined, mostly 2, ending with Anakin being knighted. Like Ep 1 should be condensed to at most a third of the film.
2nd film: The Clone Wars
3rd film: Ep 3 more or less as it was only not terrible

This solves two big problems. 1) The romance between Anakin and Padme becomes vastly less bizarre and creepy, because you can have Anakin meet Padme as a teenager or 20-year old and she's of a similar or at least somewhat close age, and 2) Anakin can still be an annoying little shit in Ep 1, but you use the Clone Wars to make a man of him, to tell the story of Anakin as a hero. Essentially, you reverse the structure of the OT - the middle movie is the bright point, the one full of hope and promise and great victories and the last one is the disaster where everything falls apart.

I'd love to see that story be told. Properly. By a writer who can write, starring actors who can act, and a director who actually knows what they're doing. But now that will probably never happen.

If the story of Star Wars ends at RotJ, or the sequels are all awful disaster, I can live with that - wouldn't be the first time. It's a great note for a story to go out on. But missing the tragic story of how things came to be the way they were in Star Wars really hurts. Like Eli Wallach missing the starring role in Duck You Sucker!, we'll never see the great story which might have been.

Great points on Anakin!

[Supercollider]

Saw it a couple of days ago, it had some good moments/scenes but on the whole I didn't enjoy it.

It felt like someone had a drunken conversation with an AI about SW, and then asked it to write a film script.  Some of it was just odd.

[Ninefingers]

Well I liked it.

[Quendil]

Just come back from the cinema with my daughter and we loved the film 

[Dr. Zombie]

I saw it today with my 9 year old son and we both loved it.

Reading the criticism in this thread makes me think some people are perhaps overthinking this movie. Star Wars is not Shakespeare. It is sci-if pulp action full technicolor adventure. And that was definitely what I got.

[Redmao]

I liked it, but there's a few things that bothered me.
• The Han Solo golden dice. They kept focusing on them as if they were super important, but we've never ever seen them before! Even in VII there were not hanging from the Falcon's rear view mirror. Maybe they'll shove them back in our face in the Han Solo movie next year. Remember those dice? Here they are!
• The new heroes are just bumbling around, messing things up and somehow everything works out for them. Not to sound like an old fan, but man, do these new characters look dull compared to the original cast.
• Once again, Phasma shows up, does nothing except looking shiny and falls down. I really hope she'll be back as a running gag.
• I was sad to see Luke die. Come on Disney, I know you want to let the pass die, but you don't have to kill all our heroes.
• I actually liked Kylo's Force trickery. Snoke was just a cheap Emperor imitation that deserved to be sliced like that.

[Manchu]

Maybe they'll shove them back in our face in the Han Solo movie next year. Remember those dice? Here they are!

This is a virtual certainty.

[AzSteven]

I think if you look at the famous photo of Luke, Ben, Han and Chewie at the helm of the Falcon from Episode IV, you can (barely) see the dice hanging above and behind Han.

I actually rather liked the film.  It had some good surprises and twists, and managed to move the storyline from the original heroes to a new set of upcoming heroes.  I very much appreciated that the writer tried very hard to direct things away from established heroes and back to a quest for hope.  In the end, everything about the story was pointed to trying to establish hope for the rebellion, or to quash hope before it formed.  It was even stated pretty much straight out in a couple of parts of this movie.

It is not without problems - the side quest to the Casino was not well-done; actually I should say the side-quest was OK but the Casino itself was as bad as some of the prequel film excesses.  Poe's mutiny was honestly a dumb waste of time that could have been handled far better without removing the conflict/fears of betrayal related to Admiral Holdo.  But by far, the worst of the worst in this was Flying Space Leia.  It was not just bad, it was laughably embarrassing.

The Snoke thing was maybe a little disappointing, but was clearly a device to build up Kylo, not overawe us with Big Bad Snoke.  General Hux got transformed from a vicisou Nazi to a bumbling Nazi, which was a little disappointing.  The destruction of the Dreadnaught by hyperspace collision seems to have angered many, but I seem to recall there is some canonical support for that with the Interdictor-class Star Destroyers generating a gravity wave to force a ship out of hyperspace or cause it to explode.  This seemed like the other side of that equation.

Problems aside, the film was good.  In my personal ranking, it comes behind Empire and Rogue One, perhaps tying or falling just slightly behind A New Hope.  Definitely better than The Force Awakens or Return of the Jedi, and several orders of magnitude better than the prequels.

[AzSteven]

One last comment - Porgs.  I was in terror that the Porgs were going to be the Ewoks or Gungans of this movie.  Thankfully, they were a very minimal sight-gag, and contributed to possibly the funniest 10 seconds in all of the Star Wars films in the Chewbacca dinner scene.

[Captain Blood]

Reading the criticism in this thread makes me think some people are perhaps overthinking this movie. Star Wars is not Shakespeare.

I think you’re right Frede.
As George Lucas freely admitted, Star Wars was just a cowboy movie transplanted to space with a bit of hokey mythos added into it. The fact that it grew to become an all-consuming pop culture phenomenon doesn’t mean it needs to be taken seriously. It’s just flash bang wallop space battles, comic robots, imaginary planets, good looking actors, and weird aliens. It’s comic book trash - brilliantly realised, and super-influential in many ways. But at the end if the day, just pulp sci-fi.
Certainly there are times when its internal logic goes a bit astray, but then it’s just entertaining escapist nonsense. So should we really expect it to be something dreadfully profound, serious and comsistent?

[Dr. The Viking]

I saw it today with my 9 year old son and we both loved it.

Reading the criticism in this thread makes me think some people are perhaps overthinking this movie. Star Wars is not Shakespeare. It is sci-if pulp action full technicolor adventure. And that was definitely what I got.

I certainly don't feel that I am overthinking anything.

I merely regard it as a very poorly executed film, with a half boring long winded story. I am confident that it would have received the same grade by me no matter the "texture" on the set.

In short - I don't think it should 'get away with it' just because it is Star Wars.

[Hobgoblin]

As George Lucas freely admitted, Star Wars was just a cowboy movie transplanted to space with a bit of hokey mythos added into it.

...

Certainly there are times when its internal logic goes a bit astray, but then it’s just entertaining escapist nonsense. So should we really expect it to be something dreadfully profound, serious and comsistent?

No - but shouldn't we appraise it just as we would a cowboy film (or a samurai film)? The original began as a sci-fi take on Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, so that seems the sort of standard of plotting and pacing we should be looking for. The first three films do work on that level; they're simple stories, told effectively - with hokey mythos as set-dressing. All the subsequent films, to some extent, get bogged down in ponderousness and portentousness in exactly the way that the best cowboy and samurai films don't.

So no, it certainly shouldn't be dreadfully profound or serous (we could do without the heavy-handed politics of the casino subplot). But a bit of internal consistency wouldn't go amiss. And nor would a bit of simplicity, because that's exactly what makes the best westerns and samurai films work. They're set in lawless, vaguely defined times that allow simple - even primal stories - to be told.

To put it another way, Lucas's original take on Kurosawa works at least as well as Sergio Leone's. And Kurosawa was channeling John Ford. But when the Star Wars films abandon their roots, they become messy and convoluted and overwrought.

So let's have much more of the cowboy movie transplanted to space - and much less of all the other stuff! 
 

[FramFramson]

Exactly. Is the Good the Bad and The Ugly a cheap or crappy film? No.

Don't mistake "elegant" or "simple" for "juvenile".

[Dr. The Viking]

So let's have much more of the cowboy movie transplanted to space - and much less of all the other stuff! 
 

Amen!

[Captain Blood]

Hmm. Well, I am not anxious to get into that most pointless activity - an argument on the internet 

All I'd say is that if the thrust of the criticism is that the movie is overlong and unnecessarily complex, then I guess that's a matter of taste, but I understand the point of view. I thought the same. Didn't spoil my enjoyment too much though.

But in support of Dr Zombie's 'I think some of you may be over-thinking this' line, a lot of the criticism seems to just be a dislike of where the storyteller has chosen to take particular characters, with a lot of 'so-and-so would never have done this' or 'that shouldn't have happened like that'. Again, it's a fair enough point of view I'm sure, but doesn't, in my book, justify damning the whole movie as a pile of poo because some things didn't happen the way you thought they were going to, or weren't entirely logical based on your knowledge of the whole backstory... I come back to the point that it's not a serious work. It's just thrilling pap. I guess my expectations of its seriousness and internal logic are not very high in the first place. I just take it at face value and enjoy it for what it is