Is Solo actually worth watching? Background on how I've judge the most recent films: TFA - was passably Star Wars, not on the level of the first 6 films but it was good enough. Rogue One - a change in atmosphere was a bit out of my taste but left the theater loving this film. (Battle of Scariff!!!) TLJ - felt more like a Star Wars parody than an actual Star Wars film. It was more fun than TFA (lol).
On May 28 2018 11:32 Sermokala wrote: But what I mean is that Midiclorians effectively means that there are people who are genetically superior to being force users and those that are genetically inferior to being force users. I can understand that it was intended as a slight explanation to why skywalkers are op at the force but it has DEEPLY disturbing connotations to the properties core. This is on top of the cloning facilities also promoting the same ideology of having a singular genetic line being declared superior for the role of a foot solider.
Midiclorians were basically the janky version of hereditary powers via bloodline, which was a common notion in the genres Lucas was inspired by (medieval Japanese stories and 40's-50's pulp sci-fi). Lucas skirted around the issue by never explaining how midiclorian counts could be manipulated in the first place. Theoretically, anyone could be born with a high count since the mechanics - besides clear allusions to passing it down to future generations - was never spoken of. The movies afterwards quietly swept it under the rag without incident.
That was the entire point of the Kamino commission using a bounty hunter as a genetic template. The clone army was supposed to be composed of soldiers highly amenable to killing while skipping the standard training protocols that would rationalize and unleash such aggression (it would take too damn long under the timeline originally requested). It was a Sith-controlled operation after all. By the time Fett got involved, Dooku had taken over from Sifo-Dyas.
On May 28 2018 11:32 Sermokala wrote: Not to mention the prequels make jedi into General/priests leading to the subconscious image of genetically chosen generals leading genetically chosen soldiers being the good guys.
The latter role was directly inspired by Buddhism's impact on Japanese history. However, the Jedi stayed out of galactic politics and military scuffles until the Clone Wars. That was supposed to be the tragic aspect of the second movie. The suspect setup of the Jedi Order was deliberately set up in the first.
On May 28 2018 11:32 Sermokala wrote: I get the East indian company example but its a bizzare escalation that no one doesn't just call their bluff. This is a universe that has decided that military might and wars are a thing to be banned and not to be pursued. Suddenly the trade interests protesting taxation decide to create a military from scratch and no one has any idea what to do about it for the time between one and two. Its a jarring concept that creates a core of political talky bits that the prequels continue on and on. Why doesn't Padmea, the one coming from the planet who got invaded and could really use a federation defense force, see the obvious and shown reason to support the federation defense force?
They never created a military from scratch. They already had one. Remember, it was a trade conglomerate so powerful that it literally had representatives in the Senate. And they had already wielded it to intimidate other planets to sign exclusive contracts.
Precisely. It was a dumb concept for what the prequels were expected to be and nobody wanted to snooze through reams of political jargon.
The Federation had infiltrated the Senate and become a persuasive lobbying force. Which was why the Senate was waffling so hard they could guest-star in an Eggos commercial. Besides that, Palpatine convinced her to throw out a Vote of No Confidence since he engineered the whole shebang to get himself installed as Chancellor.
On May 28 2018 11:32 Sermokala wrote: In TLJ the actors are better but the sets are better as they're more often then not real sets with people and not much CGI in them. Grevious had potential but that potential will go nowhere if hes strictly a CGI creation that other actors have to imagine him being instead of interacting with in any way.
I will admit that the prequels do show that Lucas had the ambition and love for the content that is critical for a quality movie that TLJ severely lacks. I'll give TFA a break every day of the week for being the movie it needed to be but TLJ was the most golden opportunity Disney will ever have and they've ruined it.
Lucas was never going to seriously use his backstory for character development, regardless of what technology he used to portray Grievous. That was left up to other properties like the Clone Wars cartoon.
I think Disney was too confident that it could slowly detach itself from the hardcore fans while retaining its appeal to mass audiences. TLJ should've been the true cash cow of the franchise once TFA established sufficient hype.
TLJ was the most offending excuse for a Star Wars movie ever. All the Jar Jar moments combined plus ninja-Yoda in episode 2 plus Obi-Wan and Anakin landing a friggin star destroyer on Coruscant by themselves pale in comparison to the utter disappointment that TLJ was. Even the midichlorian concept at least served SOMETHING in the greater scheme of the universe. And in TLJ:
We get a bunch of incompetent men with complete disregard for discipline on both sides, who somehow get away with it.
We get a bunch of incompetent women bitch-slapping the incompetent men on the side of the good guys. Then they call one of them (arguably the most useless one) "cute".
The most revered military (naval) leader of the Alliance dies almost anonymously. I cannot recall (so for all intents and purposes he's been made anonymous - I was looking for him) a scene where we actually get to SEE Ackbar and we just hear about him dying.
Leia floating through space and bringing herself back to the ship.
Chewbacca refusing to eat meat.
The casino sideplot that basically led nowhere and wasted precious viewer time - and you NEVER want to waste the viewer's time. It served the sole purpose of bringing up animal cruelty and the 1%.
Del Toro was the only saving grace to the movie. It was literally somewhere between 1,5 and 2/10.
Solo: A Star Wars Story was pretty good. It felt coherent; Solo himself wasn't very convincing and his lines were somewhere between facepalm bad and decent. Lando was another matter entirely, he felt so real and organic. Beckett was a gem. Qi'Ra was cool also, although her lines were a bit hollow too. But the whole atmosphere was very real, a 60/40 western/film noir movie in the Star Wars universe (the same way Rogue one was a D-Day/Vietnam war movie that happened in the SW universe), fairly convincing and touching most of the basic stories around Han from the Lucas canon. + Show Spoiler +
I would've loved to see Han actually being an Imperial pilot, he used to be an officer and he got in trouble for his big mouth, but I don't think he ever was an insolent kid without any sense of duty.
Possily 7.5/10 and that .5 is because of Glover and Harrelson.
I thought TLJ was mostly bad, and Rogue One was mostly entertaining. This was OK... Not bad, but not much memorable either that would have me excited to watch it again.
I thought it was alright. I don't if there was permanent damage done for me from TLJ because I thought this one was a decent movie, but not an event. Now it's more, another day, another Star Wars film, which wasn't what I was feeling, coming out of Rogue One and before.
The dots they needed to connect: Lando background, 12 parsecs, winning the Falcon, meeting Chewie etc, were competently done, but perfunctory. The film lacks some pizazz in that it is so self-contained, that it hardly expands out the mythology of Star Wars beyond adding two new gangster syndicates. Again, it's serviceable, but not overly aw inspiring. And then, I think it lacks pathos- Beckett's wife dies, but this is promptly forgotten. John Wick shows more introspection for Wick's dog, then Beckett for his wife. (Of course the John Wick film cheated by killing the dog.)
But more importantly, because we never really understand why Qi'ra made a Face-Heel turn, the tragedy of that loss is muted because it is hard to mourn what we do not understand. Again, competently told with as many double and triple crossing as could rival Pirates 3, but somehow lacking heart, if that makes any sense.
But I liked it, and I certainly didn't hate it, which is more than I can say for TLJ.
Generally agree regarding Solo. The actor and his performance didn't really remind me much of Han, but Lando was pretty great and combined with Chewbacca and the Falcon it was serviceable, if fairly predictable.
The most compelling thing in the movie for me was the throw away reappearance of Darth Maul at the end. I know he is alive in Clone Wars/Rebels lore, but still kind of surprised they decided to bring him back in a film that almost demands featuring him in a sequel to have a pay off.
Solo is a decent movie, I liked it. It feels more like TFA (safe choices) than say TLJ (trying something new).
For what it's worth, I really liked TLJ. You're free to disagree I suppose, and well if you really TRULY think that the misplaced romance in TLJ is worse than "i don't like sand", then alright. I just hope that before you reached that conclusion you took a long step back and questioned whether you really think TLJ is that bad, or whether you are just jumping on to the hate train.
The prequels romance may have been more cringe-inducing than even the Finn/Rose one but even that in mind they were far better movies. I did go back and revisit them to support making such a claim and each of the three is easily better than TLJ.
Just went and watched Solo. This is kind of a really hard one to give a rating for, because there's a 5/10 first half to the movie, and then a much better, 8/10 second half. The first half suffered from highly derivative scenes that looked as if they were copy-pasted from other movies, e.g. + Show Spoiler +
the Chewbacca pit was a pretty bad copy-paste of the Rancor and didn't impress in the slightest
. The real turning point of the movie that I consider to be the "halfway point" in my viewing is + Show Spoiler +
after they land after escaping from Kessel, which corresponds to both when all the mediocre characters are all dead and when the terrible and wholly unbelievable "daring escape" scenes are no longer present
at which point the quality of the movie went WAY up. In particular I really liked one brief moment in the movie, + Show Spoiler +
when instead of waiting to see what Beckett would do when cornered, Han just shoots him
. The writing also seemed to be much improved at that point, as if a more competent director/writer suddenly took over right in the middle.
Overall, I left satisfied, especially since the last half was enjoyable. Worth a watch if you like Star Wars.
On June 01 2018 00:36 LegalLord wrote: The prequels romance may have been more cringe-inducing than even the Finn/Rose one but even that in mind they were far better movies. I did go back and revisit them to support making such a claim and each of the three is easily better than TLJ.
I'm curious really. Why?
If you can agree that the romance is more cringe worthy, then I think you might also get behind the idea that the dialogue and lines from the prequels are also worse than TLJ.
I don't think it's also very controversial to say that TLJ was a better looking movie as well.
Which leaves, I suppose, the plot and characters? For the prequels to be far better at.
(I'd understand if this is something you've discussed before and it's too tiresome to revisit, so feel free to give this a pass if so)
On June 01 2018 00:36 LegalLord wrote: The prequels romance may have been more cringe-inducing than even the Finn/Rose one but even that in mind they were far better movies. I did go back and revisit them to support making such a claim and each of the three is easily better than TLJ.
I'm curious really. Why?
If you can agree that the romance is more cringe worthy, then I think you might also get behind the idea that the dialogue and lines from the prequels are also worse than TLJ.
No. Because while the romance in TLJ was less bad than the one in the prequels, the romance of TLJ was in fact the least cringeworthy of the bad dialogue - whereas the "I hate sand" hoopla was easily the worst of the prequel series. Indeed, the Finn/Rose romance barely bothered me, because it was really trading one questionable setup (Finn/Rey) for another, which was no better but also hardly worse. Beyond that, my only complain about dialogue and lines from the prequels is one-off stupidities like "nooooo" and "from my point of view the Jedi are evil." Most of the other things people complain about from the prequels have none of these lines.
TLJ, on the other hand, takes it to a new level. The Poe/Hux exchange, the entire saga with how Poe's decisions, all of which looked perfectly reasonable and logical in the context of the events that transpired, were somehow bad because he didn't trust some fairly shady leadership, the entire convoluted logic for why Rose stopped Finn from protecting the fortress. Some of Luke's dialogue was interesting, but was a bit hit and miss (also the best seemed to be highly inspired by Kung Fu Panda). Benicio Del Toro's dude was mostly good. Phasma was not. The prequels, all three as a whole in fact, give me less to complain about in this regard.
On June 01 2018 10:55 levelping wrote: I don't think it's also very controversial to say that TLJ was a better looking movie as well.
Nah. Visually the prequels were phenomenal and TLJ seemed more gimmicky than anything. I loved all of the droid designs in the prequels and they made very nice looking weaponry and decent cityscapes (Naboo, admittedly, looked a little too CGI). By comparison the weapons look quite gimmicky in TLJ and the worlds fairly nondescript. This is one field in which the prequels beat even the OT, so they blow TLJ out of the water here as well.
On June 01 2018 10:55 levelping wrote: Which leaves, I suppose, the plot and characters? For the prequels to be far better at.
Plot, yes. The prequels had a very good plot. Botched by mediocre execution, but the overall story is very good.
Characters? Well they both were pretty dry. Kid Anakin is IMO the worst of the bunch, a small and not very convincing Mary Sue of a wonderchild. Jar Jar is #2, a kind of pointless fart joke character that doesn't really inspire the kind of sentiment they were going with. The rest are largely fine; Palpatine is played very well, Maul is pretty cool, Obi-Wan is very well done. Their development can be fairly bland, but there's a pretty interesting bunch to work with that was well-developed in the other works in the series. TLJ adds mostly just Rose and Del Toro - Rose is kind of meh, Del Toro is alright - while performing a hardcore character assassination on just about everyone from TFA. I'd say prequels win here again.
On June 01 2018 10:55 levelping wrote: (I'd understand if this is something you've discussed before and it's too tiresome to revisit, so feel free to give this a pass if so)
1-2 pages back we talked about the same. I think there's a lot of good points there as well.
While the prequels didn't exactly come together and "work" as well as hoped, the truth is that they're still far better than what TLJ gave us. That movie was honestly a disgrace to the franchise, one that murders an excellent start as provided by Abrams. At this point it honestly deserves its place at the very bottom of all main episodes released to date.
I actually liked it and so did my gf who is not too nerdy. Our expectations were kinda low tho. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes star wars movies in general.
In my oppinion Han Solo > TFA=TLJ > Rogue One.
This Han is just more likeable than any of the other main characters for me, and some of the secondaries are also good. Story is nothing too special, which is expected.
Ok movie worked for me because it did the one thing i wanted it to do. Give me Chewbacca back story and make the film just as much about him as Han, which it does.
Chewwie is a great character, watching that film and then watching TFA after would get me many emotional now haha!
Good film though, better than TLJ and TFA but that isn't really hard is it
Not sure if i should credit this to Ron Howard or the original directors as they did most of the work right? If they didn't then well done Ron Howard, good film.
On May 29 2018 07:53 Vindicare605 wrote: Been actively boycotting this movie because of TLJ but I've been hearing some promising things about it.
On June 01 2018 00:36 LegalLord wrote: The prequels romance may have been more cringe-inducing than even the Finn/Rose one but even that in mind they were far better movies. I did go back and revisit them to support making such a claim and each of the three is easily better than TLJ.