Star Wars: The Last Jedi release thread (spoilers)

[The Romulan Republic]

Base Delta Zero is mentioned by name in the canon show Rebels, but what exactly it entails is not elaborated on.

Not sure if there are any other post-Disney canon references, off the top of my head.

[MKSheppard]

What I liked:

Kylo Ren actually got some backstory. He's no longer just some git who fell to the Dark Side, but he fell because he thought Luke was gonna freaking kill him.

Snoke's death, and the masterful twisting of force precog was great, as was the battle with the Crimson Guardsmen and the whole:

JOIN ME REY AND WE CAN RULE THE GALAXY TOGETHER, plus Kylo's "FUCK ALL THIS JEDI AND SITH SHIT" thing he had going on.

Plus the moment when General Hux actually thought about going for his gun for a brief moment in the ruins of the throne room

[Galvatron]

I'm still processing what I just saw, but my first impression was that this movie was way too long and had even more moments of Abrams/Whedon-style humor that was tonally inconsistent with the OT and the PT.

[NecronLord]

The problem is the First Order has a lot of older guys who are just as stupid.

Does this guy look like he's callow and inexperienced? The actor playing him is 52~.

That means he was in his 20s during the events of ROTJ, and had some of the last combat experience in the Galactic Civil War.

Hang on, why are we hating poor Captain Canady?

He was the guy who kept on wanting a fighter screen launched and knew that bombers were coming.

Even his visual dictionary page has him described as... "The commander of the Fulminatrix, Captain Moden Canady served aboard the Star Destroyer Solicitude during the time of the Galactic Empire. Now in his 50s, he is surrounded by First Order personnel half his age and is dismayed by their youth. While he can appreciate and empathise with their zeal, their untested nature and failure to work effectively as a team chafes against his operational discipline. He is proud of his starship's power but wishes it had a crew worthy of its destructive potential."

I mean yeah, he joined a genocidal regime, but he's surrounded by idiots and under the command of a cur who got the job by nepotism. That's cruel and unusual.

If Canady had been in command of the D'qar operation instead of a 33 year old general (lol), then the Resistance would be dead.

[Terralthra]

It's behind them in that shot, but they appear to have leveled out by the time they're making their run over the dreadnought. Worth noting that as the bombers get destroyed, each starts trailing debris and falling screen-down, confirming that they a) had not achieved orbital velocity and b) were being affected by a gravitational force roughly screen-down.

(snipped visuals)
The Dreadnought doesn't move relative to the rings behind it, therefore not relative to the planet either.

If you desperately want to give the film a hand-job to justify this you can always say they fall 'down' toward the top of the Dredanought because of the artificial gravity of the dreadnought. Hell, you can even say that's what the bomber's designed to do if it makes you happy, though I question the practicality of a bomber that relies on the artificial gravity of the target. But it's aestetically jarring and doesn't make much sense given the position of the planet without assuming invisible gravity (be it repulsors in the bombs or generators in the dreadnought) somewhere.

Things falling in inexplicable ways during battle is practically Star Wars tradition but this scene is just as much of a headscratcher that calls attention to the strangeness of 'gravity' in the films.

Err...what? Your evidence that the dreadnought is facing head-on toward the planet is that it has a planetary ring behind it, and it "doesn't move relative to the ring"? There's literally no way for you to know that. Rings go...all the way around the planet, in a...ring. The dreadnought could be facing anywhere within a nearly 180 degree arc and have the ring hanging in space behind it with the planet anywhere from almost directly below it to directly above it. We also know that the dreadnought isn't facing directly toward the planet, because the cannons with which it shoots the rebel base on the planet surface are declined significantly to fire.

What's amazing to me is that the visuals of the bombers and the bombs all combine to form a fairly coherent picture that the battle is in planetary space, with gravity in a consistent direction, but people are too busy being wrong about gravitational mechanics and what being in orbit means to just take it at face value. It's like some sort of weird counter-reaction to BSG/The Expanse, where for a while we accepted "airplanes in space", and then we got deep-space zero-g reaction drives, so now everything has to be that, even when it doesn't match the physics of the situation.

My preferred explanation is that the bombers are ground attack craft pressed into service on a mission for which they're ill-suited. I mean, only one of them actually dies to enemy fire. One gets tagged by debris, and that one explodes and kills two more through fratricide. This is pretty obviously not the sort of mission they're meant to be on.

----

C) Kylo Ren and 3 Escort Tie Fighters is apparently the ENTIRE fighter force sent out to engage the rebel fleet when they initially jump on top of them. Later, we see multiple fighters running patrols around the FO fleet even as it is still chasing the Rebels. Additionally, the dozen that engage on the Hoth Rip off.
Those 3 fighters manage to hammer the cruiser before being called away because "they cannot be covered"
This is the same film that has Poe maul a Dreadnaught on his own so with all of this it is more than reasonable to conclude the FO could have obliterated the entire Rebel fleet with fighters alone within the first 10 minutes of jumping in.

As the cruisers pull away from the FO fleet's covering fire, all but Kylo's TIE get shot the hell down in short order.

G) Ray pulls the location of this chase out of nowhere and somehow the Millennium Falcon piloted by Chewie is able to jump across the galaxy straight at the FO fleet to drop off Ray.

Dude, she is the only person in the galaxy with a beacon leading her directly to the battle, wherever it happens to go. That Leia (later Finn) and Rey have a pair of beacons that will lead one to the other is emphasized like 20 times in the film. How did you miss it?

[Ender]

Because a big part of the theme of this new trilogy is that the FO is a bunch of entitled idiot posers, insecure and reckless as hell who make dumb decisions.

And this is why I can't really enjoy the new trilogy's bad guys. Adam Driver got a lot of new backstory and lines to work with, but he can only do so much with the pile of shit he's been handed so far.

General Hux...is not credible.

Having dealt extensively with the new crew of Nazis our generation has spit up, I can unfortunately confirm that Hux is extremely credible. The Dems too, in fact - it's just a choice of if they jack it to video games or Sorkin dramas. This people are fans of what Hollywood tells them reality is like, so they cosplay it and piss themselves the second they are challenged. They are basically only held together by raw emotion and lash out constantly.

Look at the dipshits in Charlottesville and compare them to Hux and the FO. The Venn diagram of behavioral tics is damn near a circle. Everything is melodramatic, everything is a crisis that they are at the center of because they are important dammit, and they are entitled to your respect and obedience and body and if you dare deny them any of those they will scream and threaten and try to destroy everyone and everything around you.

[Ender]

Oh come on, Luke's character was absolutely assassinated here, and Hamill is completely right to be pissed about Johnson's choices for the character.

Hamill's not 'pissed' at anything - people have been spreading this bullshit neo-mythology that Hamill is somehow unhappy with Johnson's choices - complete with weird Kremlinology-eseque "look at his face in this interview", for a few days now, and its truly bizarre. Hamill has been very clear on what he felt about Johnson's choices. He completely disagreed until he didn't. He's not 'pissed' at all.

It is a complete break from the OT and throws not only Luke's growth out the window, but also annihilates the entire point of the series and it's theme of the lamb's victory.

IMO Luke's growth in the OT had absolutely nothing to do with precluding him from being damaged by a failure. Why does Luke's character, in order to have value, need to be one where he doesn't make any major mistakes?

No one is saying he can't make major mistakes.

That the major mistake he makes is going to kill someone in cold blood who might potentially turn to the dark when the culmination of the other six movies is Luke realizing that murder is not the solution, and allowing his vulnerability and love to bring someone back from a life time of darkness and atrocities; that is what people object to.

You could have a great number of major mistakes that could cause this without having Luke forget the lesson he learned over three movies, that Anakin learns over six - that true power lies not in domination but in surrender. The film has him behave contrary to this,and that is what rankles.

If you treat the new trilogy as sort of Galaxy Quest generational difference meta-commentary, I think it can work. But as a steady flowing narrative with characters growing, the new trilogy fails both Han and Luke.

[PREDATOR490]

C) Kylo Ren and 3 Escort Tie Fighters is apparently the ENTIRE fighter force sent out to engage the rebel fleet when they initially jump on top of them. Later, we see multiple fighters running patrols around the FO fleet even as it is still chasing the Rebels. Additionally, the dozen that engage on the Hoth Rip off.
Those 3 fighters manage to hammer the cruiser before being called away because "they cannot be covered"
This is the same film that has Poe maul a Dreadnaught on his own so with all of this it is more than reasonable to conclude the FO could have obliterated the entire Rebel fleet with fighters alone within the first 10 minutes of jumping in.

As the cruisers pull away from the FO fleet's covering fire, all but Kylo's TIE get shot the hell down in short order.

The FO has no issue throwing around massive amounts of hardware and is fully invested in wanting to kill the last of the Rebellion. On the cusp of fulfilling that mission, they suddenly have reservations about throwing away the lives of their pilots by swamping the Rebels in fighters ?

It is bad enough that the 'cover' being provided is hardly impressive after the FO has an entire fleet drop on top of the Rebels. The FO just decided to jump without having an preparation to take advantage of the surprise ambush by as many fighter sorties as possible or just launching a gigantic barrage.

Fighter performance vs. capital ships in this film is so out of whack that 'cover' fire was an insanely stupid act of plot from a character that has been repeatedly shown as incompetent. Suddenly, he is concerned about cover fire and Kylo's life even after being fairly obvious about his attitude to Ren.

G) Ray pulls the location of this chase out of nowhere and somehow the Millennium Falcon piloted by Chewie is able to jump across the galaxy straight at the FO fleet to drop off Ray.

Dude, she is the only person in the galaxy with a beacon leading her directly to the battle, wherever it happens to go. That Leia (later Finn) and Rey have a pair of beacons that will lead one to the other is emphasized like 20 times in the film. How did you miss it?

She is the only person with a beacon leading her directly to LEIA. Ray has had no contact with the Resistance since TFA.
Fin even makes this a direct point that if Ray comes back she will be jumping into a mess she has no knowledge of.

Ray was not going to Leia, she was going to Ren.
How the fuck did she know where Kylo Ren was ?
The connection was not giving away location information because Ren did not know where she was and straight up said this.

Chewie somehow flew across the galaxy straight at the Supremacy because he knew the location... how ?
Further, the MF manages to jump out on top of the FO fleet rather than coming out on top of the Rebel cruiser which the beacon would lead them to.

Incidentally, the MF manages to exit, drop Ray and jump back to Hyperspace within minutes at most. So far, Star Wars has been fairly consistent that jumping to hyperspace requires more time than this simply based on doing the calculations.
It is kinda silly the MF was able to jump so quickly from a position they should have no idea they were heading to and thus unable to pre calculate the jump back to hyperspace.
Ray then somehow 'escapes' to meet up with Chewie in a MF that is god knows where only to come BACK to the fight later in the MF.

I guess Chewie decided to jump off elsewhere rather than provide any kind of assistance to the rebels because... why ?

[Galvatron]

That the major mistake he makes is going to kill someone in cold blood who might potentially turn to the dark when the culmination of the other six movies is Luke realizing that murder is not the solution, and allowing his vulnerability and love to bring someone back from a life time of darkness and atrocities; that is what people object to.

I like to think that Luke's struggle with fear and anger was a lifelong conflict, and it was only exacerbated by his ominous premonitions. His fleeting temptation to spare the galaxy yet another period of strife and darkness by preemptively killing Space Antichrist is something that made perfect sense to me once he had a chance to explain it.

[Nephtys]

That the major mistake he makes is going to kill someone in cold blood who might potentially turn to the dark when the culmination of the other six movies is Luke realizing that murder is not the solution, and allowing his vulnerability and love to bring someone back from a life time of darkness and atrocities; that is what people object to.

I like to think that Luke's struggle with fear and anger was a lifelong conflict, and it was only exacerbated by his ominous premonitions. His fleeting temptation to spare the galaxy yet another period of strife and darkness by preemptively killing Space Antichrist is something that made perfect sense to me once he had a chance to explain it.

It really makes sense. He wants to stop this cycle of evil force users from constantly rising, so he was going to train better, purer jedis than before! After all, the Sith were dead, right? And so then this shit happens, and he gets a horrible flashback to his own experiences with the Dark Side, plus the fact that dark side temptation seems to live in his Y chromosome.

So after seeing dark visions of the future (which are by the way, true), he has a momentary bit of weakness and thinks of killing Ben. Probably also sparing his best friend and sister the pain of knowing their kid became a monster. And then that weakness leads him to defeat. He's crushed and broken knowing that his weakness basically doomed any chance that a new jedi order could do anything but lead to the same mistakes, and so he exiles himself.

It takes Rey's intervention for him to get out of that, as she has hope that he's since lost. It's a great parallel to basically him repeating the exact same mistakes as Kenobi and Yoda before him.

[Galvatron]

In fact, Luke essentially made the same mistake that Anakin did: he caused the very thing he was trying to prevent by taking action based on a limited understanding of his own visions. That's the real dark side of the Force, IMO.

[ray245]

It feels like Disney is bascially making Rey to be the better version of Luke. She basically did everything Luke did in the OT, but better than him in almost everyway.

And people were wondering why some people feel like she is a mary sue. If people can complain about 10 year old Anakin being a mary sue, they sure can do the same about Rey.

[Ace Pace]

It feels like Disney is bascially making Rey to be the better version of Luke. She basically did everything Luke did in the OT, but better than him in almost everyway.

And people were wondering why some people feel like she is a mary sue. If people can complain about 10 year old Anakin being a mary sue, they sure can do the same about Rey.

How is it better than him? She's making the same cardinal mistake of rushing off to help Kylo Ren. So she's doing bigger force tricks, so what? Character wise, she's no better.

[ray245]

It feels like Disney is bascially making Rey to be the better version of Luke. She basically did everything Luke did in the OT, but better than him in almost everyway.

And people were wondering why some people feel like she is a mary sue. If people can complain about 10 year old Anakin being a mary sue, they sure can do the same about Rey.

How is it better than him? She's making the same cardinal mistake of rushing off to help Kylo Ren. So she's doing bigger force tricks, so what? Character wise, she's no better.

She did a better job than Luke did in ESB? Her actions resulted in Snoke being killed off, the First Order in disarray?

And she'll be the one building the new jedi order successfully, not Luke.

[Abacus]

Also, I think hubris is a huge theme with the First Order - along with their affluenza superiority complex; because let's face it, the Supremacy should have had shields up. This is not the first time ships have been rammed via hyperspace into other ships -- except that the last time it happened, there was a different outcome.



Three, that is THREE, Imperial-class Star Destroyers jumped via hyperspace into the Executor, and the SSD's shields laughed it off.

[AniThyng]

Also, I think hubris is a huge theme with the First Order - along with their affluenza superiority complex; because let's face it, the Supremacy should have had shields up. This is not the first time ships have been rammed via hyperspace into other ships -- except that the last time it happened, there was a different outcome.



Three, that is THREE, Imperial-class Star Destroyers jumped via hyperspace into the Executor, and the SSD's shields laughed it off.

Well yeah but TFA already established you can technobabble your way past shields...

At least Rogue One did a better job though, Vader's ISD truly looked like a behemoth when it tanked the escaping fleet.

[eMeM]

Supermacy had its shields up, 69_HaxXxor_69 disables a part of the shield for a moment so that's they can board it.

Which I guess means shields do stop fighters?

[Steve]

Also, I think hubris is a huge theme with the First Order - along with their affluenza superiority complex; because let's face it, the Supremacy should have had shields up. This is not the first time ships have been rammed via hyperspace into other ships -- except that the last time it happened, there was a different outcome.



Three, that is THREE, Imperial-class Star Destroyers jumped via hyperspace into the Executor, and the SSD's shields laughed it off.

IIRC haven't the comic books basically been stripped of all canonical status?

[Q99]

Older comics are Legends, newer comics are canon.

She did a better job than Luke did in ESB? Her actions resulted in Snoke being killed off, the First Order in disarray?

And she'll be the one building the new jedi order successfully, not Luke.

I like Rey and all, but that was about 80% Kylo. Her presence gave him the opportunity, and the backup to survive, but what happened in TLJ is "Vader kills the Emperor and is annoyed Luke doesn't join up," as opposed to ESB's "Vader beats Luke who escapes."

Compare to Luke's throne room scene- when Luke walked into a throne room, an hour later, there were no more living Sith. When Rey does, the old boss is gone but the new boss remains.

[NecronLord]

Err...what? Your evidence that the dreadnought is facing head-on toward the planet is that it has a planetary ring behind it, and it "doesn't move relative to the ring"? There's literally no way for you to know that. Rings go...all the way around the planet, in a...ring. The dreadnought could be facing anywhere within a nearly 180 degree arc and have the ring hanging in space behind it with the planet anywhere from almost directly below it to directly above it. We also know that the dreadnought isn't facing directly toward the planet, because the cannons with which it shoots the rebel base on the planet surface are declined significantly to fire.

You can see the curvature of the ring.

So I broke out some (crude) 3d models and did a bit of experimenting to confirm this.


The left image is the Mandator is on to the horizon of D'qar (a tangent from the surface five planetary radii long) with its prow positioned ot intersect the surface in line with that tangent. The right one is two planetary radii above sea level. The rings on this model are a little greater than the planetary diameter and I think is relatively accurate. The models are for disclaimer purpouses, too big to be completely to scale.

But in any case I think it demonstrates that yes, the rings prove little; I certainly 'feel' the leftmost image is more accurate, but without knowing how wide the planetary rings of D'qar actually are in universe that demonstrates nothing.

So tl;dr you're right on that.

And I've got a better image of the actual fight.



So the attack ships are presumably still going to be ascending relative to D'qar, which means if they release unguided objects, those objects in motion will continue in uniform motion until acted on by an external force. So, again, there's no reason for the bombs to fall away from the ships that release them.

Yes, an unattended object placed over a planet will fall down toward it; but objects in motion have momentum.

[Galvatron]

IIRC haven't the comic books basically been stripped of all canonical status?

Yes.

[Reyvan]

Supermacy had its shields up, 69_HaxXxor_69 disables a part of the shield for a moment so that's they can board it.

Which I guess means shields do stop fighters?

I think Finn said that they'd have to get past the security shields, Rose says they captured some access codes, but Finn says they rotate every hour, so the codes are useless, which is when they decide to get the hacker.

I interpret that to mean that the Supremacy had a shield that basically detects if something without the access codes passes within them, but doesn't actually stop anything, and that's what the hacker hacked.

I think they really should have included a line earlier though with Hux saying "Transfer power from the shields to the engines, they're no threat to us" and then when it becomes apparent that the cruiser is going to jump into them, instead of telling the crew to blast the cruiser, tell them to raise the shields.

Normally I think I'd give that hyperspace ram a pass in a movie, but considering my friend who doesn't care about technical aspects at all turned to me and said "why don't they always do that", its definitely a problem that needed to be addressed in the movie.

[Guardsman Bass]

IIRC haven't the comic books basically been stripped of all canonical status?

Yes.

I think the entire EU continuity - everything aside from the films, the Clone Wars TV series, and whatever tie-in books were published after The Force Awakens - has been kicked into the non-canonical "Legends" category. Or has some of the Old Republic stuff been kept?

[Reyvan]

IIRC haven't the comic books basically been stripped of all canonical status?

Yes.

I think the entire EU continuity - everything aside from the films, the Clone Wars TV series, and whatever tie-in books were published after The Force Awakens - has been kicked into the non-canonical "Legends" category. Or has some of the Old Republic stuff been kept?

Everything except the movies, Clone Wars, and a single Clone Wars tie in comic were moved to legends. None of the Old Republic stuff remained.
That one comic survived because it was a comic version of several episodes that were cancelled with the clone wars.

There was a certain date they specified, I think sometime in April 2014, where everything published before that day, except for these exceptions, were now legends, and everything afterwards was the new continuity.

[Galvatron]

Other random observations:

Snoke's throne room looked like an unfinished effects shot. What was with that plain red wall? What a missed opportunity to show us something interesting.

The entire Canto Bight side quest was a complete bore and the cinematography during the night scenes was way too dark.

The pursuit of the Resistance fleet by the First Order was as devoid of excitement as something like that could possibly be. They could have shown a debris or asteroid field in the background to give us some idea of the relative motion of the ships.

Did anyone else notice the blatant ripoffs of nBSG?