People say TLJ was poorly written, I disagree. I think if you took the same movie and made it a standalone with different characters we didn't know, it would have been a lot more accepted.
You know, I used to 100% agree with this. Probably for the solid year after it came out I held this position in defense. But I now disagree. At first I only disagreed with small micro examples but now I hold that
and a big picture view as well. Here's a few riffs:
• The opening bombing scene is total nonsense. First of all, the design of those ships and the function of those bombs dropping in space is at best illogical and unexplained, and at worst completely nonsensical and retarded. It's got to be the most poorly conceived space 'battle' in a movie franchise with 10 total feature films FULL of space battles. Also, we're just supposed to accept and shrug off that Poe's SUPER MACHO BRAVE HERO strategy to stall with jokes was noble or justifiable when TONS of people and nearly their entire fleet were destroyed I guess.
• There are
really important plot and progress details that happen off screen which is a great (bad) sign of poor/lazy writing. Like Rey escapes the throne room and Kylo, runs around an enemy ship unarmed, escapes in Snoke's private escape craft and then somehow joins up with Chewey in the Falcon to show up just in time on Krait or whatever, and we don't see
any of it happen.
• The chase scene is hilariously boring, dull and slow and also more importantly doesn't make a lick of sense. The dreadnaught can't catch their cruisers because the cruisers are faster and.... lighter? Things don't weigh anything in space. The First Order also had...idk, at least 100 TIE fighters in there and they sent like three lol. Also, some resistance ships lose fuel and.....
fall....
backwards? Also, some resistance pilots sacrifice themselves in ships that get blown up. Why? It's space, the ship will keep moving in a straight line stop piloting it and go to the other ship! The final light speed jump through the super destroyer was cool, but idk there's like 8,000 other times either side could have done that any time but i guess no one ever thought of it, and there were also a million other possible ways to help themselves. All of that is even just on a pure reality based logical argument. That's not even getting into contextual arguments in universe, where the movie long scene only works if you ignore everything we've seen over the last 40 years.
• In the final battle 99% of the resistance is
outside (individual people) firing blasters at massive AT-ATs and TIE fighter spaceships, when there is a humongous blast proof door right behind them?? Then, they flight straight at the first order, don't fire a single shot, and even have all the TIE fighters distracted by the millenium falcon. Then they decide to turn around. Except for Finn, who's going to sacrifice himself and the front of his metal ship starts melting though his exposed body (the speeder is a convertible) does not melt. But before he can sacrifice himself Rose insanely defies the laws of physics to jump through a film editing wormhole to knock him out of the way and save him. Then Finn drags her back literally several miles to the bunker.
• Big picture, the movie doesn't commit to it's concepts. It talks a big game but eventually pulls its punches. Luke wants to end the jedi and Yoda even encourages it, yet Rey still sneaks off with all the ancient texts. It flirts with blurring the lines between the light and dark sides, even going so far as to have Kylo kill Snoke, then turns around and he just used it as a power grab pulling Rey to his side instead of them both living somewhere in the middle. Like literally the whole movie is trying to paint this moral ambiguity ahead of a binary black and white sort of spirit (Benecio Del Toro mentioning the same people sell ships to the resistance that do to the first order, Poe committing mutiny, the reveal that Luke the good guy is the one that pushed Kylo to the dark side, and so on) but then by the end we've got an entirely familiar good vs evil showdown. It tries to give a message of embracing failure and learning from mistakes, yet nobody's mistakes in the film ever really result in any huge consequences to the story or to themselves. It tells us we should forget the past, but then the end is just a new generation being inspired by the legendary story of the hero with the name Skywalker.
Okay I spent way too much time on that.
And the crazy thing about this is, Disney spent four billion dollars on a franchise beloved the world over, and then allowed that to happen. It makes no sense to me that they would spend all that money and be such poor stewards of the story.
I almost wanted to disagree with this, or at least say, "Hey I respect them for being ballsy enough to try something bold and different." But I've convinced myself out of my own argument. I'd call this Disney behavior/product something like.... neo-commodity. Disney is overall pretty damn smart. They know how to make money. More importantly maybe they know how others fail to make money. They know, very clearly, that if they make something that is so obviously safe and conservative and formulaic as a cash grab that people will sniff it out miles away and they'll get crucified for it. So they make what
should be an incredibly crafty and sly move to really sell the idea that they're taking a big risk. But maybe they didn't realize the actual risk they took, that they failed at, was trying to pull a fast one on everyone.
