Arvis wrote:- Your "fish bowl" complaint is, I feel, valid. There is a devastating lack context for any of this. But all the context in the world could not redeem Phantom Menace. Let's not rose-tint our view of that one.
- The Rose/Finn escapade should have payoff in Episode IX, but we'll see. I don't want to lean too heavily on "Middle Of A Three-Part Story" excuse, especially considering what came in the middle of the OT.
- Considering how the New Order fleet was able to find them, Vice Admiral Holdo had to assume there was a traitor/spy on board, so secrecy was paramount to executing her plan. I feel like this was addressed in the plot, but maybe not?
- Luke did not go to any "extreme" with Kylo. It was a momentary consideration that unfortunately came at the wrong time. He explained that pretty adequately. Plus, with Vader, he had the luxury of already having tried to kill him before he put his trust in the Light left inside him.
- Kylo's inner conflict will be a major theme of this whole trilogy, so it's actually a GOOD thing that he still has it. Han's death still has meaning, because we still need to understand what Kylo is capable of, making his future hesitations that much more impactful. Killing Han was a Kylo without Rey, but the more contact with Rey he gets, the more it affects him (and you know all the Kylo/Rey stuff in Ep VIII was awesome). Luke's entire spiel about the Force and it always needing "balance" could start to have a double-meaning about being balanced within each individual person, as well as over the galaxy.
- What did Mark Hamill warn us about?
- And finally, I think people can safely assume that a topic entitled "Let's talk about Star Wars" will be full of spoilers. 
There will be ******SPOILERS****** here for anyone who hasn't seen it, so you have been warned.
I'm not rose-tinting anything Phantom Menace related. Everything involving Jar-Jar Binks and Anakin is complete garbage. There are moments that are good, though. Darth Maul is a more intriguing character than Kylo Ren to me, and I don't think he spoke a single word. It also introduces Palpatine and throughout the next two movies, his character is beautifully setup.
The Rose-Finn escape can't pay off. Their sole purpose was to find a code breaker to get into the First Order ship to break some codes to let the rebel fleet warp out. Didn't happen. Sure, there was some very forced building of the Finn-Rose relationship, and maybe they'll kill Benicio del Toro (again, I can't actually remember his character's name) in the next movie or something, but they failed with their mission, period.
By the way, Rose's character literally doesn't work. She "saves" Finn at the end (absolutely remarkable that she didn't kill both of them in the process, and how they made it back to the base when they were right in front of about seven AT-AT's, but I digress) and says, "You don't win by destroying evil, you win by saving those you love" or something. Sounds good, right? Maybe, but it doesn't apply here. Her sister died destroying the super dreadnought, a symbol of evil. She saved countless lives with her sacrifice. Finn was about to do the same by crashing into the doorbuster thing. Remember, at the point where Rose "saved" Finn, everybody in the rebel base was thought to be trapped. Nobody knew of a secondary exit, and nobody knew Luke was going to show up (well, sort of). So, instead of Finn destroying that machine, she stopped him and doomed everyone in that base. Now, of course through a series of incredibly lucky events, the five rebels left make it out. However, at that moment, since she knew none of that, she actually condemned everyone to die.
That's fine to assume there was a traitor on board. However, Poe had several one on one conversations with her, and she still wouldn't tell him her plan, which is why he setup the Finn-Rose subplot and mutinied later. If you're going to try and say Poe was a potential spy......no, just no. He blew up Starkiller Base, like yesterday in the timeline. A few hours prior to Holdo taking command, he helped blow up the super dreadnought. If you're going to say he was a potential traitor, then Leia was a more likely candidate. I honestly thought it was Holdo who was a spy, and then it turned out she was just unbelievably incompetent.
Murreeee went a little more in-depth on Luke. There really isn't more to say. You can't expect me to believe Luke would risk his life and the lives of the entire galaxy on a dude who chopped off his arm lat time they met and then tell me he would be willing to kill his teenage nephew, who was still on the Jedi path at the time. It's not like Ben murdered the rest of Luke's students before Luke tried to kill him. Complete destruction of Luke's character.
Go back and watch some Mark Hamill interviews pre-release. I think the most telling think he said was something along the lines of, "I love everyone's role in this film except mine," when talking to Rian Johnson. He also said he told Rian, "A Jedi wouldn't just give up and seclude himself on an island for 30 years. He might leave temporarily, but he would regroup and do the right thing." Something like that.
I actually didn't care for any of the Rey/Kylo stuff in this movie. There is no real tension between them, no sense of good versus evil. Contrast that with Luke versus Vader, or Obi-Wan versus Anakin. There was tension there, a clear sense of one side fighting for good and one side fighting for evil. Kylo isn't evil. He killed his father in cold blood, watching the light extinguish from his soul, but then he couldn't kill his mother with a long range laser shot. He's a petulant child. Did I enjoy the fight scene with Rey and Kylo. Yea, of course, as a spectacle it is quite good. Rey shouldn't have been able to dispatch a single praetorian guard seeing as how she's only a couple days removed from touching a lightsaber for the first time, but I digress.
A massive problem with this movie that nobody wants to acknowledge is the lack of time that has gone by from the previous movie. This movie picks up as soon as TFA ends. There is no perceived character development over a period of time we can't see. To put it in perspective, Han Solo died like a few days ago, yet Leia doesn't acknowledge it in this film, not one bit. It's like it happened years ago. Rey was a nobody junker on a desert planet a few days ago. Not only that, she's been trained for maybe 30 minutes, yet she seems to have complete mastery of her Force powers and a saber. That's not the way the Force works, LOL. It's been established by previous movies. The only way the third movie can be salvaged IMO is if the crawl says 10 or 20 years have passed since the events of TLJ, basically starting fresh and making it a one-off.
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