Hacker Cinema
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
2017 · Film · 152 min
Part of Star Wars Collection
Directed by Rian Johnson
AdventureActionScience Fiction
Rey develops her newly discovered abilities with the guidance of Luke Skywalker, who is unsettled by the strength of her powers. Meanwhile, the Resistance prepares to do battle with the First Order.
6 positive24 negative8 mixed22 neutralfrom 60 commenters
Where to watch
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67 comments on Hacker News
That was certainly among the most vocal complaints I remember hearing about the movie at the time (other than the moronic "Too woke!" complaints), and Wikipedia supports my memory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Last_Jedi#Audience_reception
> Particularly divisive was the reveal that Rey's parents are insignificant; many fans had expected her to be Luke's daughter or to share a lineage with another character from the original trilogy.
Taste is not subjective. It's intersubjective. Subjective experiences are totally located within a particular subject. For example, "I'm hungry. I'm tired. I'm sad."
Judgements of taste, on the other hand, implicate all other humans when they are made. They implicitly demand consensus in a way that is unlike any other subjective claims. This is the only possible explanation for why people will in one breath say, "it's a matter of taste, it's all subjective" and then argue about whether or not The Last Jedi is a good Star Wars movie for hours, if not days, on end. Because the truth is, we are constantly seeking consensus and we usually resort to "that's just your opinion man" when we give up and disengage. But we don't believe that, not really.
According to Kant, "a judgment of taste involves the consciousness that all interest is kept out of it, it must also involve a claim to being valid for everyone, but without having a universality based on concepts. In other words, a judgment of taste must involve a claim to subjective universality." Unfortunately, it's Kant we're talking about, so trying to understand what he meant by subjective universality is a huge headache. Still, his reasoning reflects the way people actually talk about taste better than anybody else I've read.
I would like to see the movies with the largest discrepancy between critic and audience score.
Edit: An example is Star Wars - The Last Jedi. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_last_jedi
Critic score: 91%
Audience score: 41%
Curious what you make of the The Last Jedi then: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_last_jedi
A terribly lazy movie that even the popcorn-guzzling public could see through, but which mysteriously received rave reviews from the “culturally elite” critics.
The reaction here has been interesting. As someone with a heavier social-science and politics background than most HNers, I started reading the introduction before there were any comments here and went “oh my god, of course this is a thing, why did it never occur to me both that this would/is happen/happening, and to put it in these terms“, and my mind started chasing down the mechanisms by which it must work. Bombshell is a word that came to mind as soon as it dawned on me what the paper’s getting at.
Then I came back to this thread and had a similar experience to when I checked on the Internet’s reaction to The Last Jedi after I got out of the theater, and was surprised to find that my experience of it as the only almost-actually-good SW film since the original trilogy was, um, not what most others had taken away.
No way. The Last Jedi is the second-worst Star Wars movie, only outdone (somehow) by its sequel. It was terrible.
I don't disagree that there is a divide between people who prioritize mechanics and those who prioritize emotions, but I think it's overstated. I think if you're thinking about mechanics, it's because the emotions failed you on some level. For example, I thoroughly enjoyed the JJ Abrams Star Trek, even if I don't think it's a great movie, because it's basically dramatically functional. Halfway through Into Darkness I was squirming in my seat thinking about the plot holes, because the movie doesn't work on any level.
With the Last Jedi, I honestly don't think the central problem is that the creators were trying to appeal to everybody at once. I think that better describes the Force Awakens, which miraculously succeeds at doing so at the cost of being kind of forgettable (see my point about Star Trek 2009 above). I think the issue with the Last Jedi is that it makes a very specific set of choices that don't please everybody.
The thing is, in some ways I'm the kind of old fan you're talking about, though I may be younger than you. I pored over books of EU spaceship schematics, read the Star Wars Legacy comics, played the video games, etc. Maybe my experience was different than yours because I watched the prequels at a similar age to the originals, because they were coming out in theaters when I was a kid.
I am not a casual fan, but I'm also not a superfan. I think it's easy to dismiss people who liked The Last Jedi as casual, but Star Wars is such a dominant cultural phenomenon that there is a massive spectrum of how much people care about it and what it means to them.
This has all been kind of a scattered argument. I'm not sure what my conclusion is. Maybe that the real issue with The Last Jedi for many people isn't that it ignores the lore. The prequel trilogy already directly contradicts loads of aspects of the original trilogy that EU creators and fans had to no-prize away. I think it's more to do with how The Last Jedi conceives of Star Wars as a story, and what it considers important and what it does not.
I think it's different for different kinds of stories. To borrow your example, one possible interpretation of The Wizard of Oz is that it's a political and economic allegory around the gold and silver standards. Allegories often by their very nature have to stretch and bend reality (even an internally-defined one) to tell the story they want to tell.
I agree with your hesitation to start a debate about The Last Jedi, but I think your point about what rules are ironclad is why reactions to that movie were so mixed. For me (and many others), the mechanics of the Star Wars world are paramount. I have trouble experiencing strong in-universe emotions when those mechanics are broken, because when that happens, I'm pulled out of the story and have trouble immersing myself in what's happening to the characters. But to others, the emotional impact of what happens to the characters, and how they act, is the most important thing, as you suggest, with all other concerns secondary.
The writers of the Star Wars sequel trilogy had a very tall order on their hands: the "original" Star Wars fans are older (some might say much older) now, and they needed to tell a story that could appeal to those people (such as myself), but also appeal to children and young adults. It's very hard (some might even say impossible) to create a narrative that speaks to superfans who have been steeped in the mythology and mechanics of a world for decades, but also attracts a more casual viewer who just wants to watch a cool story with lightsabers and spaceship battles. My opinion is that they sacrificed the first bunch in order to attract a fresher audience, but it doesn't really matter if my opinion is "correct" or not; the fact that the movie (or entire trilogy, even) was so controversial, with so many opposing views, is all we need to know: they tried to appeal to too many different types of people, didn't do a great job of it (if a great job of it is even possible) and in the end a lot of people were unhappy.
I was a giant Star Wars fan as a kid—watched them on vhs so many times I could re-play the trilogy in my head, every line, every cut, every musical cue; games, comics, way too many novels (seriously, in hindsight any is too many, even the “good” ones were bad—yes, even those). Toys. That crappy CCG. All of it.
Lapsed after AOTC, but, still, quite a fan. I definitely don’t hate Star Wars.
I’d rank The Last Jedi as the 3rd best Star Wars movie and my 4th favorite. I was very surprised at the Internet reaction to it—came out of the theater like “oh wow, that was kinda almost good, people will be so happy!” LOL.
The day after watching The Last Jedi in theaters people asked me and my wife how we liked it. There was an awkward pause as both of us simultaneously realized that we barely remembered anything from the movie—the only response we could give was that it was forgettable.
So, if "it's weird that I didn't remember it at all one day later" counts as something that sticks with me and changes me, then yeah, I guess so?
A bunch of Biden voters who just made the mistake of saying out loud that The Last Jedi wasn't a very good movie would like a word with you.
Amazon basically provides that right now. If my mom wants to watch some movie or series she checks if it’s on a streaming service then rents/buys it from Amazon.
D+ for a month is a lot cheaper than paying 20$ for The Last Jedi, but they are happy to take 20$ from you.
> but on a certain level "The Last Jedi" was kind of artsy fartsy
While I agree with your criticisms of The Last Jedi, I don't think you can under any circumstances consider this movie "artsy fartsy".
The Last Jedi is the anti-artsy fartsy movie, otherwise the term loses all meaning. It doesn't mean "bad", and an artsy-fartsy movie can be good. Focusing on just the technical or glossy aspects doesn't make a movie artsy, it just makes it bad.
It's more than two dimensions. For instance, The Last Jedi measure doesn't take into account Disney extorting and/or paying off critics to boost the movie.
The Last Jedi was incredibly successful. According to Wikipedia is "the highest-grossing film of 2017 and the ninth-highest-grossing film of all time." I have a hard time believing an audience score of 41% accurately reflects the opinions of the actual audience.
> is this valuable as a cultural enrichment of movies
The Last Jedi is apparently the cultural enrichment film of the decade.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_last_jedi
I won't defend either nor step on the judgement of the true fans, etc.
However we are both commenting on a sub branch headed by a comment:
Colossal losses of Disney ...
You mentioned Rian Johnson and his work on Part two of trilogy ?? (I honestly don't bother with anything past the original version of the first film) Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Regardless of its trashiness in the eyes of fans it still box officed $1.334 billion after a budget < $320 million (according to wikipedia).
Let's agree that it was slop ... but it was slop that made bank for Disney.
I think it's a deeper phenomenon than taste. I find a lot of modern films (the latest Star Wars trilogy for example) nauseatingly fast-paced. I literally get vertigo and motion sickness from the rapidity and relentlessness of the cuts. Lots of people seem to devour these films, however... Then on the bus ride home I peek over someone's shoulder and see why:
They're swiping Tiktok videos even faster than that!
It's incredibly disturbing to me. I'm reminded of drug addicts clawing at the drywall of their dilapidated apartments, fiending for their next fix. We've used all of this wonderful semiconductor technology to turn millions of people into digital junkies. And our culture is deteriorating right along with it!
We really enjoyed it, loved the twists and turns. Without spoiling it, the seen with Benoit and the iPad and crossbow was amazing on many different levels. Someone else mentioned Star Wars The Last Jedi, and that was my favorite of the sequel trilogy (although not without flaws!), so I think I just really enjoy the director. Some people don't, which is fair, whereas I find JJ Abrams to be dull and uninspired and utterly lacking in depth, the complete opposite of Rian's work.
The film missed a couple of beats for me, so it isn't perfect by any means (neither was Last Jedi!), but it was really entertaining and clever.
The author also "absolutely loathed Star Wars: The Last Jedi" which to me feels like an overreaction to a movie.
I'm not sure if it's because of growing up watching most things online with limited bitrates, but I realized I dislike film grain a lot. I know that to a certain degree, film grain helps humans resolve finer details. Similar to using noise shaped dithering to allow you to hear more than the theoretical dynamic range in audio or see a larger range of color tones in a picture. But I found that on certain 4K uhd blurays, if I am watching on a small screen the film grain looks very obnoxious. The problem doesn't exist when watching on a big TV, so I know it's not related to projecting on a screen. I really dislike when directors go out of their way to add artificial film grain. Will media players eventually allow users to adjust the film grain that is added back in?
This reminds me of Steve Yedlin's, cinematographer on everything from Brick to Star Wars: The Last Jedi to Knives Out and its 2022 sequel, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, who showed through research that film can be completely emulated using digital techniques and mixed digital and film shots during Star Wars.
https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php
https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/6/21125680/film-vs-digital-debate-movies-cinematography
https://www.yedlin.net/NerdyFilmTechStuff/MatchLensBlur.html
https://www.yedlin.net/OnColorScience/index.html
Tarantino's whole thing goes back to Star Wars, which cribbed heavily from films from ~4 genres—sci-fi serials, samurai films, war (mainly WWII) films, and westerns. Its great innovation and enduring legacy in film isn't just its groundbreaking special effects, but the assembly of a film almost entirely from pastiche.
[EDIT] Incidentally, when later Star Wars media gets this fundamental aspect of Star Wars and leans into it, is when it's at its best IMO. You could practically play "spot the rip-off" with The Mandalorian, it borrowed so heavily from other film and TV—and, though perhaps overrated, it's certainly one of the best Star Wars things since the original trilogy. The Last Jedi stood out to me among the Disney-era films for doing a lot more cribbing from sources of the kind that Star Wars used, rather than cribbing just from... Star Wars itself (though it also did that, heavily re-mixing Empire, especially).
And how does that go against any logic?
I have seen this kind of criticism against several other movies (e.g. also much of "The Last Jedi", although I don't like that one for different reasons) and I don't get it. In real life, the things we do aren't part of a great scheme that always leads to some grand goal, sometimes they can be just inconsequential. I don't understand what's wrong with that happening in a movie, in fact I even find it refreshing when a movie forgoes the standard clichés where everything has to "fit" perfectly and if they focused on a seemingly irrelevant object in the initial parts of the movie, you know it has to play a role in the end.
The character did live experiences and learn, and we were entertained along the way.
Don't get me started on the people who listed among their complaints about The Last Jedi that "Rey's parents are nobodies and that's lame and I don't like it".
Setting aside whether or not that being true would be a good move for the franchise: the film didn't say that's true. It had one character say it to another. In a franchise that has a history of having one character lie to another about exactly this kind of thing. In an entry in that franchise that is explicitly playing with point-of-view and subjective experience of events.
But no, that must just be true I guess.
The goal is never to make good cinema because the companies are not owned or run by filmakers, they are owned by MBA types.
It isn't some startling gotcha to point that out. "Good cinema" is subjective and meaningless, money can be quantified and is objectively reported as a number.
Anyone claiming the goal is something other than money is projecting.
I didn't like The Last Jedi but it got good reviews which shows how meaningless it is to argue about what is a "good Star Wars story" from a business perspective. Audience exit polls were also positive.
As far as I can tell the goal was to make Star Wars stuff as quickly as possible, presumably set by the Disney CEO not Kennedy. Presumably because he cared more about showing he was making back the money buying Lucasfilm than quality.
So they hired three writer directors and had them start banging out scripts immediately, instead of hiring a writer to outline movies in advance.
And the movies (except Solo) made a ton of money and 2 out of 3 had good reviews and good exit polls. So they are "good" by any "objective" metric.
I guess they've also been "good" for reactionary youtubers so the money trickles down.
None of us know what Kathleen Kennedy's involvement was in private office meetings or what notes she gave. The Youtubers version of Kathleen Kennedy is a fictional character. People are projecting meaning into PR statements about diversity.
> You seem to have forgotten that it's entirely possible for "fantasy" to have more complex themes than "evil space wizards vs. good space wizards," or that something must be only one or the other. Star Wars is solidly both, and as far as its sci-fi aesthetic goes, it's more grounded than Star Trek, which runs entirely on nonsensoleum sometimes.
Not really. I mean, yes, fantasy as a genre can obviously explore deeper themes and does so all the time. But Star Wars is a morally unambiguous universe. It really, truly, does not fit to try and have a nuanced discussion of morality while other more important characters literally commune with the universe and draw power from the sides of light vs. dark. Whatever themes you draw out are just not supported by the environment around them.
Nobody cares about greedy capitalist when evil space wizard is standing next to him.
> I mean, the actress is American born, of Vietnamese descent, but sure, Chinese is basically the same thing, right?
As a mixed Asian, shrug, whatever. I am willing to bet a substantial amount of money she existed only to appeal to chinese audiences. If she's actually vietnamese, sure, good to know.
> And that was one of the best themes of the Last Jedi. Of course there would be war profiteers - we already know this because the OT gave us Mos Eisley and Jabba the Hutt and bounty hunters. "greedy war profiteers and evil capitalists" aren't at all unknown to the franchise. The problem here is this sudden dump of complexity should have been a throughline with Rose for the entire trilogy. It certainly would have been better than "This time the Empire is even more fascist and the Death Star is huge."
If you're saying it wouldn't have been dumb if it was just an entirely different story, then sure.
> The "faction" doesn't identify itself as the Dark Side. It identifies itself as the Sith.
The leader of the Sith is called "Dark Lord of the Sith". They identify as as ON the dark side all the time if you really think that's an important distinction.
> Also the Sith and the Dark Side weren't known for "destroying planets at a time." The Death Star was built by the Empire, and yes, while Palpatine turned out to be a Sith (as a retcon) they even made a point of having Darth Vader point out how insignificant the "technological terror" of the Death Star was compared to the Force - not the Dark Side specifically, but the Force in its entirety.
I really think you're splitting hairs here. The bad guys are the ones who destroy planets. The good guys are the ones who try to prevent the bad guys from destroying planets.
> But Rose wasn't, she was just badly misused as a character.
Meh. I was happy when her first appearance in the final movie is basically. She seems like a boring character to me.
"Wanna come on the main adventure?"
"Nah too busy"
This is super tangential (to the article, not your comment) but The Last Jedi is a poor film and this opinion is not controversial. See RT audience score of 43%:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_last_jedi
If you've got 45 minutes to spare, RedLetterMedia's review is an in-depth and entertaining criticism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9hwGZFPSmw
Aren't they kinda linked, though?
The last Star Wars movie I saw was the Last Jedi. It had an unbelievably messed up plot and was one of the worst written movies I've seen in a long time. Filled with bizarre plot holes, but more importantly it lost the good vs evil balance that made the original films so enjoyable.
Star Wars has always been about the scrappy underdogs facing off against impossible odds and winning, in the style of classic stories everywhere. In the Last Jedi the writers completely failed to understand that and wrote a story in which the "heros" of the Rebel Alliance are completely wiped out by a vastly superior Imperial force. Not just numerically superior but superior in every way:
- Decision making is better
- Alliances are better (people rat out the rebels pretty frequently)
- They invest in technology R&D and then use it to win, which is practically "Fighting Wars 101".
Literally the movie consists of the rebels all being killed whilst they try pathetically to run away whilst being constantly out-smarted by their opponents. By the end of the movie what's left of them fits into the Millenium Falcon. We're meant to root for the Rebels in Star Wars movies but by the end I found myself somehow rooting for the Empire, for the first time.
I'm ignoring all the impossible physics like spaceships dropping bombs that fall out of their bottoms, the "space race" and many other head scratcher moments.
Why was the movie such a mess? The primary criteria for selecting writers and scripts was how feminist they were, not whether they were competent writers. The writer/director for this film was and still is a nobody. The head of Lucasfilm (a woman) said she selected him because he "writes strong female characters". Not because he had a good track record of making good movies, not because he deeply understood Star Wars. No - he got the job because he's a feminist.
This is exactly the sort of reason so many people get upset at diversity-based appointments. Even when the jobs go to men they go to the men who toe the ideological line even if they're useless at their jobs.
What's amazing is that Rian Johnson sucked as a writer so much he couldn't even make a properly feminist movie. The Empire is the embodiment of the stereotypical patriarchy. It seems to be run almost exclusively by white British men (and one alien). It's all about strength and ruling through fear. It constantly invents new weapons.
Meanwhile the Alliance is run exclusively by women, one of whom is even purple haired. The women in the movie all have amazing superpowers e.g. Rey can learn to use the force way faster than Skywalker could, yet their decision making is consistently awful. They're in a war yet they prioritise avoidance of conflict even when that's obviously hopeless. They run when they should fight, they demote the only actual rebel they seem to have left (Poe), they don't invest in technology so they're hopelessly outgunned by the Empire and they're so bad at being rebels that third party characters constantly either betray or ignore them (nobody in the galaxy comes to their aid when they broadcast a call for assistance at the end).
I left the film feeling like it pretty systematically portrayed white British men as the personification of evil and diversity-driven feminism as the embodiment of moral virtue. But it was so confusingly written it also portrayed evil as systematically more competent than good in every way. Not sure what message they felt the audience would receive, but I'm really not sure it's the one they intended.
I would actually say that the latest one is better than The Force Awakens, and MUCH better than Last Jedi. Then again, I'm in my early 20s so I can't really compare it to the original movies.
I'm not convinced that we need huge proprietary time-wasters to have conversations with each other. There are circumstances in life when long TV shows may be fun and entertaining, but watching them shouldn't be expected. With my family, and random people met in places, I talk about real life that we have in common or wider societal trends. This can be instructive (about what people think) even if very light. I remember a guy complaining before an unrelated class that "computer people hunched over keyboards will take over everything". Little did he know.
You can say that real life stuff can be hot and divisive, but then pop culture can also. See how new Star Wars and recent blockbusters generated controversy and online culture wars. Handling people with opinions, and your own opinions, is a valuable skill nonetheless.
I am into music as well, as in listening to albums and records collecting, and am very happy that I don't have to know or listen to anything "mainstream" in particular. Free exploration is so much more pleasurable. I do share some of my tastes with people around me, but really a different little thing with each person.
$1.333 Billion for the Last Jedi was below expectations and $2.08 billion was “below expectations”?
They made two non trilogy movies. Rogue One was highly rated by both critics and the audience - Solo not so much.
> star wars series
Ouch. Good point. Even The Last Jedi trainwreck (RT 44% audience score, record $150M drop after first weekend) STILL made the top 20 all-time grossing films (ignoring inflation).
But nerdy stuff is cool, remakes are cool, rebels are cool...it's got fundamentally popular qualities. Put that into a good marketing engine, check the boxes and you've got a money maker.
Okay! The most reliable audience score metric -- in that it can't be brigaded by a relatively small number of online fans mobilized to affect the score of a movie because they want to prove a point[1] -- is probably CinemaScore, which has been polling actual moviegoers on opening nights since 1978. The Last Jedi's CinemaScore is A.
[1] While this is usually to drive down a score, you can find the reverse occasionally, such as the Atlas Shrugged movies. It's hard not to notice that the point the brigades are making usually revolves around "stick it to the Hollywood liberals," although I don't think that's true in TLJ's case.
The Last Jedi was clearly a polarizing film, and it's fine if you didn't like it, but I think it's worth keeping in mind that the movie...
* Has an 85/100 on Metacritic ("Universal Acclaim")
* Has a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes
* Made $619M
So it was both a box office success and a critical success. Personally, I think it's far from an atrocious film. I think it's a flawed film, although my complaints have to do with structure and film mechanics, not story choices.
They fixed Star Wars the same way the vet fixed my dog. “The Last Jedi” was an atrocious film. “Solo” was excruciating fan service that ironically pleased none of the fans.
The Last Jedi might have had “mixed reviews”, but it grossed 1.333 Billion.
As far as Pixar movies, it doesn’t matter what you are interested in, look at their box office, home video, video on demand results and related merchandise sells and theme park attractions.
All content everywhere is hit or miss. With Disney, I didn't care for Solo or Star Wars Resistance. I enjoyed Star Wars Rebels and Rogue One. The Last Jedi had mixed reviews at best. I haven't been interested in a Pixar movie in several vears. It's not like Disney content is amazing all the time. It has winners and losers like everyone else.
Netflix has some of the best shows I've seen in a long time. It also has some is the worst. Just like Disney.
Interestingly, the opposite of what happened with Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Casual fans and critics loved the subversion of genre tropes, story roles, character archetypes, and plot points.
"true fans" reviled that the direction align with their vision for the franchise, and it sounds like Episode 9 will be a return to the comfortable and familiar.
Let's face it, reviews are useless. Even when they come from professional product critics. Those critics can be compromised (bribed) by big business just the same. A good example of this were reviews for 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'; most reviews either against and in favor of that movie, by critic or causal viewer, were either fake or compromised.
Well, we tend to review what's new, not something from decades ago. Different process. It's unsurprising that there are more software-countable reviews of contemporary movies.
Black Panther, to use the example some are protesting here, is a perfect storm of recent (max accessible reviews), critically acclaimed, and wildly successful commercially.
I think it's more telling that recent Star Wars movies like The Last Jedi are on the list, but A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back (which are more important imho) are not.
This is one reason I like the standard set by the Cocaine and Rhinestones country music podcast. He won't talk about 21st century music because we don't have enough distance to tell what's truly great from what's merely popular at this point. A couple of decades of reflection really separates the great from the trendy.
> What’s interesting about this particular bunch of smart people, is that they are also what actors call “grounded”. There is little bullshit going around. Tech is not made for tech’s sake. We don’t even have an engine, in a time where even if you really just have a game, one game, one codebase, you would call silly codenames each library and each little bit of tech, and maybe put some big splash screens before your main titles. Made with.. xyz.
This is actually a lesson that originates from the early days of Call of Duty at IW. From what I’m told, IW never named their engine, because any time you name something it becomes a bit more of a thing, and you start working for it. And they were a studio making games, the game is the thing. Nothing else.
This taps into a really interesting idea that I've been thinking about a lot. In high school, when I first started making games, this is exactly what I'd do. I would have Unity open on two monitors, and post to my snapchat story of how excited I was to be an indie developer.
I had a similar thought when I watched the making of documentary for The Last Jedi, everyone was so excited that they were making a Star Wars movie. But in 1977, I'm sure George Lucas was just thrilled to be able to make what he wanted to make.
I think this is what PG meant when he described playing house[1]. I think there's a lower local maximum for imitating what your heroes did or innovating for the sake of innovating than the global maximum of trying to make something really good. There's nothing wrong with getting excited about what you're created, but if you have any way to direct that excitement, direct it towards making something that people will love. (Not something that you'll love making).
[1] http://paulgraham.com/before.html
Most controversial opinion: The thesis behind the Second Amendment, that an armed populace is necessary for a free state, is incorrect, or at best obsolete in the modern era.
Second most controversial opinion: The Last Jedi was a good film. Flawed, yes, but not deserving of the hate it's gotten.
If you look at what the audience does it's not that different from what happens elsewhere in entertainment.
What is unique in gaming is the feedback loop that happens. First the media responds by saying the guy is an asshole. Then the gamers respond with more vitriol. Then there is "Everyone hating the mobile diablo is a misogynist" kind of tweets. Rinse and repeat.
Do note I'm not justifying it. Merely trying to reason about why especially in gaming these outrages escalate into insane heights instead of dying in meh after a day or two.
We have been seeing this kind of vicious circle elsewhere too lately. As an example the latest Star Wars film where it ended up so bad that if you didn't like the film you were a Russian troll.
>People go to a Star Wars movie to see the hero destroy the Death Star!
Speak for yourself... I've seen that three times already (Starkiller Base is just a really big Death Star,) I don't need to see it again.
I'm an adult fan, I do want to see a bit of depth in my space opera. I want heroes who doubt themselves and grey morality and villains I can sympathize with, at least a little, if not agree with. You can have swashbuckling and sturm und drang, that's why it's called "space opera."
It's just a matter of taste whether or not people want the formula. I hate the prequels, but I know fans who like them, and (as much as I don't want to admit it) there are fans who consider them superior to the originals.
I can understand why some people don't like Last Jedi, but I don't think it deserves the degree of hate that it gets, and I suspect that it will be looked on more favorably in hindsight. Although that probably depends on how well Episode IX does.
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> Sorry, we can't show Star Wars: The Last Jedi
And the vast majority of people have stopped reading.
As a matter of fact, they didn't even begin reading. Because they looked up showtimes for what they wanted to see elsewhere and went to a theater that is showing what they want to see.
Here's the deep, dark secret you are ignoring: No one cares. And that's why the studios can pull these tactics. They have the product that people want. If a theater doesn't show it, the customer will just go to a theater that does. They don't want to see "a movie", they want to see "The Last Jedi".
Good content isn't the issue.
"Not only do we have to play it for four weeks straight, we have to play it four times a day," said Roper, adding that with only one screen available, it would be "very difficult" to play a single movie for a month without losing money due to lack of audience.
Sounds to me like the kind of business practices that is getting Google sued by the EU, and despite their necessarily being different rules for monopoly, the above is a case of applying blanket rules for a 50-screen cinema complex as for a single-screen independent cinema because Disney doesn't need to zoom in to that level of detail. Fine lines. The law is an ass.
Similar situation for a Disney-exclusive streaming service. That'd be similar to Disney buying up a chain of cinemas and only showing their <s>films</s> movies in those cinemas.
The flipside is that independent cinema's should make these sorts of anti-competitive behaviours known to their customers: "Sorry, we can't show Star Wars: The Last Jedi because Disney has enforced conditions that we, as a small, independent cinema, can't comply with whilst remaining profitable. We do, however, recommend the following great movies that we have the freedom to screen at our discretion..."
It’s a bit dissapointing. Solo was the only movie I actually really liked so far. It was a fun movie on its own right with good character arcs.
Would have it been better if it was the same movie about some other smuggler don’t know but the movie didn’t really felt like it was trying too much.
The acting was good especially considering the rumors of acting coaches and reshoots we had a good villain everything had a purpose and nothing felt too stretched really.
The main star wars movies are simply non-original and the last Jedi was not as much of a bad Star Wars movie but rather a bad movie.
But them remaking the original trilogy nearly shot for shot to the point where they had to tell the audience it’s salt not snow on that planet because that makes it different and original was just laughable.
> Since 2014 -- when Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger laid out plans for three episodes and “at least three” spinoff movies -- films have needed reshoots, rewrites or changes in director.
Hearing that a movie has had the director replaced, and a sizeable percentage of the movie reshot, has become a red flag to avoid. It would be easy to dismiss this as a Disney-specific issue, if Warner and others weren't also guilty. These become like a Frankenstein's monster of plot, cutting back-and-forth from one mood to another so quickly that the movie feels tone-deaf.
There is a rumor that there was no overarching storyline planned for these 3 last episodes - the "plans" alluded to in the article are merely that 3 movies would be created. This lack of storyline planning has allowed the "creative disagreement" between directors of Episodes 7 and 8.
Controversy has become another red flag - where the movie isn't good enough to stand on its own merits, and has to leverage some cause. Particularly egregious groups even dare leverage the "if you're not with us, you're against us" trope.
> The company is dealing with reports that its next stand-alone “Star Wars” movie may be delayed and an effort by one faction of fans to remake “The Last Jedi,” which came out in December.
There was a "defeminized" cut of The Last Jedi that removed whole characters and the Canto Bite side-quest, but there was only enough story left to make a 45-minute bite-sized Star Wars TV show episode. This group would have to add a lot more content than merely embellishing and tightening the current plot.
> The franchise also hasn’t proven it can connect with Chinese audiences, a key market for the film industry. Moviegoers in that country don’t have the same nostalgia for “Star Wars” and prefer to see Marvel films.
Viewing a back-translated sub/dub of Episode 3[0] may shed some light on this - so much of the movie is driven by character or plot, while Marvel movies are more action-driven. Marvel stories are more generic, so are easier to follow without understanding the words. It's similar to how Ong Bak[1] has a generic "retrieve the MacGuffin" action movie plot, and is quite watchable untranslated.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XziLNeFm1ok
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368909
There is nothing wrong with a space cowboy western, and in fact that's one of the reason people love the original trilogy: plenty of original (for the time) action, good guys on one side and BIG BAD guys on the other, so it is easy to takes sides, add some cheap mysticism (the "force" stuff) and the redemption of the baddest of the bad guys.
Not the most original of the plots [1], but good enough and simple enough that most people can enjoy it. That's not the issue with the current state of Star Wars in my opinion. Also for most people Star Wars is the movies so the issue about what is canon and whats is not is moot [2]: for them it is canon if it appears in one of the trilogies.
I have three other different issues with the current trilogy (and in general Disney's approach to Star Wars).
The first is that the current trilogy is just more of the same. The Force Awakens to me looks more like a reboot of the original movie than a sequel. The Last Jedi is a bit better but only because it looks a reboot of the whole original trilogy: I think that a better name would have been "The Empire strikes the return of the last jedi", and that would even describe the most relevant parts of the movie perfectly. In a way the prequel trilogy is better: while it is not up to par with the original trilogy, I like the contrast between a world where Jedis are available by the dozen (for example see when the jedis come to save the main characters in the arena) versus a world where there are two "bad" force users (Darth Vader and the Emperor) and two "good" force users (Luke and, for a while, Ben Kenobi).
The second issue is more general, and it is related to the fact that regardless of the quality of the content, the more movies you make about a topic or a "universe" the less value the single movie has. Even worse, after a given threshold I won't even watch any movie about the genre because I fear that if I don't see all of them I will miss something. I feel that way about the gazillion of Marvel/DC Comics movies, I feel the same about Star Trek (I only know about the original serie, but I don't have time to see _all_ the episode that I missed) and I fear one day I will feel the same about Star Wars.
[1] Also it seems Star Wars got many idea from other movies. My favorite is the one about getting inspiration for R2D2 and C3PO from the main characters of Kurosawa's "the hidden fortress", though after seeing the movies I would say the resemblance is only in "the character of the characters"
[2] I have to admit that I played to some of the games, and I think that KOTOR has a story that is much better that Star Wars original story. THAT is something I would love to see a movie about.
Eli Schiff wrote a good review of TLJ a while back that similarly describes the dead emptiness/meaninglessness of Star Wars nowadays:
>The sequels, and in particular, Rian Johnson's latest episode, have now fully deconstructed the Star Wars universe, and shown the characters and their motivations to be vacuous. The only character remaining who really grasped the depravity of the situation is Kylo Ren. Now that there is no hope for heroes (even the Resistance doesn't believe in those anymore—after all, heroism reinforces a hierarchy that must die), we await the climactic explosion of an end to this universe that it deserves.
>More likely though, given that we're dealing with Disney, we probably won't get anything of the sort. And for that reason I now realize why fans of all stripes didn't like The Last Jedi. What they saw in the mirror was so horrifically disfigured and alienating that it couldn't be confronted. For though history is far from over, with everyone either too smart to continue living, or too stupid to die, it may be there's no one left with the will to make history anew.
http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2017/12/27/star-wars-death-drive
I wouldn't hate some sort of subversive twist, but at the same I don't think think it's necessary. To me the new trilogy has perfectly recaptured the heart and soul of star wars. I think a lot of the disappointment stems from life long fans who have expectations built up over years and years of being fans and speculating on what could be.
I haven't seen Solo yet, so I can't comment on that, but in my opinion I'd rather have one or two mediocre Star Wars movies a year than nothing at all.
I also think that people are greatly unfair when judging new entries in the franchise. It seems like if it isn't twice as good as Empire, it isn't worth anything.
'Last Jedi' was a lot of fun for me. I enjoyed it a ton. I can understand why people felt underwhelmed, but I also like that it was a typical cliff-hanger middle entry movie and can stand on its own. Maybe its just personal preference but I don't need mystery and open storylines to keep me interested. If anything, it leaves more freedom for the 3rd entry and provides plenty of jumping off points.
Overall I don't think Star Wars has a 'growing emptiness', I think fans are demanding way more than is realistic and are suffering from the hype machine/echo chamber that plagues media these days.
People have short attention spans. Theaters had to post warnings for the last Star Wars film that it had several intentional seconds of silence, because people thought the movie must be broken[0].
https://variety.com/2017/film/news/star-wars-the-last-jedi-amc-warning-silent-scene-1202648766/
I think you're right that averages are not useful when scores are bimodal since that basically means there are two distinct populations being observed, and what is more important is what population you belong to.
I think the existence of this bimodal distribution is at least consistent with the "haters gaming the system" theory, though not conclusive.
The IMDB ratings for the last jedi do not seem to exhibit such a strong bimodal distribution: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2527336/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Which I think leads more credence to the theory that haters are overrepresented in the rotten tomatoes numbers.
The Last Jedi or Black Panther obviously wouldn't win the Palme d'Or and even if they did the audience for such films would not care a whit. So I've always thought that they simply didn't bother because there's no benefit.
Cannes is mostly about having a venue for film makers to find distributors, Netflix films already have a distributor (it's Netflix).
It's equivalent to asking why The Last Jedi or Black Panther aren't allowed to enter the competition.
Rotten Tomatoes claims not to have found any evidence of tampering with the audience score for The Last Jedi[0]. Certainly, an assessment of fan reactions in comment sections and on youtube shows a quite genuinely divided reaction to the movie.
Let's wait for Black Panther to be released publicly before getting hysterical about what some random facebook group might try to do.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/2017/12/20/rotten-tomatoes-confirms-its-55-last-jedi-audience-score-is-100-authentic/
http://archive.is/FMAA5
Be careful, The Last Jedi is definitely part of the "culture wars" effect somebody mentioned elsewhere.
I don't buy it. The Force Awakens is at 88% and culture warriors fought over that one, too. Both films have severe problems from a storytelling perspective, but the problems with The Last Jedi are much deeper, are of the sort more likely to turn off fans of the franchise as well as fans of The Force Awakens. There are plenty of culture-war-neutral analyses of The Last Jedi that absolutely eviscerate the film. For just one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw7pcCj0ORk
While I can't speak to the 49% rating, where I'm seeing the major divide is between Star Wars fans who care about world building, character development, and a coherent story (historically important aspects of Star Wars); and fans who are content just to enjoy the emotional ride from one scene to the next while enjoying the nostalgia.
As from the culture wars perspective, it seems hard to deny that The Last Jedi takes an unnecessarily overt stance on the culture war, daring that sort of criticism. TLJ includes: a postmodern deconstruction of Luke Skywalker and the Jedi mythos, a purple-haired female admiral dominating the only talented white male on their side for displays of what they probably imagine to be toxic masculinity, and all the bad guys are white males with overt Nazi references. I mean, seriously, why can't they just make it Star Wars?
Take another Disney movie as a contrast: Moana. Moana is a hero's journey, just like the original Star Wars. Moana is about a girl character, her mentor is her grandmother, the story is set in the South Pacific and features non-European cultures and sources their mythology for the story. The twist at the end might be considered feminist. But nobody but serious cranks are complaining about it, because none of it gets in the way of the story and for the most part actually enhances it. Moana isn't made some kind of wunderkind. There's no artificially forced interaction between an SJW stand-in and a white male stand-in. There's no postmodern deconstruction of the myths or themes. Disney is just doing their usual thing of mining ancient myths and fairy tales and adapting them for entertaining mass consumption by modern audiences.
I looked at the reviews for The Last Jedi and I'm not seeing a ton of men's rights reviews (but they might be there just buried lower down). In my experience most people either fall into the the categories of thinking the movie was "fine" or "awful" and I think that because people with strong opinions review much more frequently it pulls the ratings down a lot.
There is definitely some sort of messaging going on in the Last Jedi. SPOILER Why else spend half the movie on a pointless and ultimately destructive sidequest? The rebelliousness of the rebellion shoots itself in the foot. The thief seems to have the most insightful line in the move, that the war is essentially a machine making money for the arms trade. I guess the point is meant to be, if Jedi are really trying to bring harmony to the force, their good vs. evil fight is not very effective.
These charts are looking at percentage drop from day one, but that doesn't tell you much since the opening haul could be vastly different from one movie to the next. The Last Jedi had a huge, explosive opening, and now has dropped slightly faster than expected. So what? Is that because the movie sucked? (It didn't IMHO.) It that because other big movies are coming out soon after? It that because this year has had problematic box office returns generally? Who knows!
That's the thing about statistics...they're so easy to spin to make a pitch for almost any viewpoint. Clearly the author of this article wants you to think The Last Jedi is a dud. I'm not sure why. At any rate, I definitely don't see this as an objective news story.
I find it weird how producers still insist on shoe-horning CGI humans into movies even when the technology clearly isn't there yet.
In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Snoke is entirely CGI for no discernible purpose, and it's uncanny valley hell every second he's on screen. It's all in the animation, of course; the rendering itself is great, but there's something really off about his movements and facial expressions. What's odd is that they could easily have produced this character using a real actor in prosthetics, with some subtle CGI augmentations.
Tarkin in Star Wars: The Force Awakens is even worse, like something out of a video-game cutscene. I don't understand why they couldn't just have used an actor.
My girlfriend and I both have MoviePass, I don’t have my phone on me but we’ve seen 8-10 movies already. It’s fun, we just run to the movies now. No more buying tickets a day in advance and then making sure we get there early enough.
We used to see movies exclusively on Saturdays or Wednesdays, when it’s cheaper, and only went to certain theaters. Now when we decide to see a movie we go whenever we feel like it, wherever we feel like it. We usually bring our own snacks/water too..
We decided to see The Last Jedi at 1:05 AM without any forethought and saw it on a massive screen with Dolby sound.
I can’t get a VC to return my cold calls/emails, but hey, at least a VC is paying for our movies.
That is not true. Star wars is an exception and the cut percentage increased by 1%. The real reason is the dropping viewership. Number of tickets sold peaked in 2012. Beyond that the number of movie tickets sold dropped, however number of locations is up and salaries have gone up. To compensate for it, movie ticket prices need to go up.
Most theatres are not at all scared of MoviePass, they're getting paid the full admission price. In fact many chains and independent operators love it, and are looking at implementing their own version.
> because theaters have all decided on a ticket price customers must pay for the premium of that big screen and sound system.
Not really, no. Studios are the ones driving up movie prices since they keep demanding a bigger and bigger cut. The new Star Wars film for example has the highest royalty of any movie ever released.
Becomes more difficult the more social your life becomes. Ordinarily I wouldn't care about the new Star Wars movie, but because everyone else cares, I pretty much have to go see it, if only so I can talk about it.
I don't mind going to see movies in the theater, but TV shows are a different animal. Hollywood refuses to allow me to buy the kind of access I want, digital, unencrypted copies that I can store on a disk drive, or failing that a streaming service that allows access to everything, so pirating is the only way to go.
Yes you do.
According to wired, [0] Disney paid Lucas Arts $4.5B, which half was cash.
In 2016, [1] The Force Awakens made $1.54B globally. Maybe it's more now.
Lets say that the last Jedi manages the same success? Well, they made their money back and the new rumored trilogy. That's profit.
When you can put Spiderman and the X-men in the same universe as the Avengers and do the next 20 or 30 super hero movies where one, two, three, four, etc characters from the universe makes an appearance?
I'm pretty sure fans of whatever franchise will line up to throw money in seeing the movies.
This really sounds like a no brainer to me.
[0]: https://www.wired.com/2015/12/disney-star-wars-return-on-investment/
[1]: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/box-office-star-wars-force-852198