Star Wars: The Last Jedi hate amplified by Russian Trolls

[The Negative Zone]

This Russian bot claim seems like fake news from what I see.

I think it needs more research to really claim there's a significant impact.

[WebLurker]

A lot of the hype of this came from things like Abrams building up Snoke calling him the most dangerous villain ever in Star Wars fueling interest and theories from fans.... Johnson showed how dangerous by killing him off with a blind sided sucker punch, soooo dangerous.

In the movie proper, Kylo Ren was always the main villain, Snoke was a supporting character. That makes sense that in TLJ, Snoke's role would be to advance Kylo's story (and heck, Kylo being Supreme Leader opens up a lot of interesting story ideas we never had before). As I was saying before, the fans got too attached to their theories and wild guessing and didn't take it turned out that they'd overinflated the importance of something.

Luke is hiding from his mistakes with the excuse is that he must do nothing and his problems will go away even Mark Hamill was upset by the direction, that Luke would never do that... and may fans agreed, it was also so anticlimactic ( is a word to explain the all of TLJ) and the hype started with the Search for Skywalker ended in the ?redemption? of Skywalker which never really needed to happen in the first place to be honest.

Speaking for myself, Luke's return and standoff on Crait was anything but anticlimactic. I will also maintain that, love or hate the story, Mark Hamill delivered his best performance in a Star Wars movie to date. In regards to Mark Hamill's reservations regarding new story, what almost always gets left out is that he did come around to the premise as the film was being made.

As far as Luke not needing the redemption story, maybe not, but I honestly think it was a far more interesting tale then we would've gotten had he not made the mistake of going into exile. Case in point, we got hero Luke in the Legends material and he's honestly really boring. From a story-telling standpoint, I'd take the one who made mistakes (which is much in line with what we get in the original movies), screwed up badly with the last one, and ultimately became the legend that had been built around him after he'd accepted his faults.

Abrams built Rey up the part where she is a little girl and is being taking away by Unkar Plutt as a ship flies off in the distance as she is looking up to the sky..

Since it was a Force vision, I think we can chalk it up to being metaphorical. The basic truth (Rey was abandoned by her parents) still holds. Heck, the original Force vision (Luke fighting Vader on Degobah) was a mix of real (that Luke would duel Vader) and figurative (Vader having Luke's face). (If anything, the movie screws up the TFA junior novelization more then anything else, but that's how the Force works).

...the Light Saber Anakin Skywalker actually calling out to her and Maz's reacting to it.. the same light saber bypassing that actual Skywalker lineage and come to her...

The saber (or its crystal?) calling to Rey still works irregardless of what her family tree was.

...Abrams kept her own lineage close to the vest feeding the hype Simon Pegg said in an interview that JJ had a completely different lineage for her. On that note Daisy Ridley said in an interview "and I do believe Rian didn’t keep anything from the first draft [by JJ] of the Episode VIII script.”

So Abrams had a different idea. I'm sure he did. However, that was never put onscreen and TLJ contradicts nothing in the original movie on that point. As pointed out before, TFA tells us that Rey's parents aren't coming back and that her moving on from that dream is what she should be doing. Heck, throughout the whole Takodana scenes, Rey turns down a job offer from Han, going to the Outer Rim with Finn, and persuing the call of the Force so she can go back to Jakku. Any one of those options would be a better life for her then going back to the lie she was living for years.

All that said, if Abrams wants to establish a different lineage for Rey in Episode 9, he can do that pretty easily with the retcon that Kylo was wrong or lying about her parents. Rian Johnson himself pointed out that could happen and wasn't worried about his movie being affected by that. So, I think it's a non-issue either way.

Finn.. he went from a guy that was running away to a guy that in running into the middle of a fight against his former comrades and almost sacrificing his life after telling off Phasma in TFA tooooo a guy that was running way that turned in to a guy running into the middle of a fight against his former comrades and almost sacrificing his life after telling of Phasma in TLJ ???

Not quite. In TFA, his primary concern is just escaping the First Order. It's when Rey is captured that he gets the nerve to fight back. His story arc is going from someone who's just trying to escape to someone willing to stand up for people they care about. In TLJ, he evolves beyond that to be willing to fight for a just cause. First part of the movie, everything he does (trying to jump ship, getting the tracking disabled) is to help Rey. It's his experiences at Canto Bight and seeing the end results of a "look out for number one" mindset DJ has, that helps him expand from fighting for people he personally cares about to a higher cause.

So, maybe parallel arcs, but they do pick up where the other one left, make sense in context of the first movie, and leave Finn in a different place as well.

Rian also did wonders with Phasma that through Comics and Books seem to maybe becoming the first female baddie from the movies... nope she is dead so Finn can deliver an unneeded one liner because he was only repeating his story arch from the last movie... RIP Phasma you died for nothing.

Phasma came back largely because people liked working with the actress. Also, TFA established that she wasn't a major villian, so it makes sense that she'd get expanded on in the tie-ins but remain a minor character in the movies. (Incidentally, some of the characterization we see in the novel and comic was present in a deleted sequence from the battle scene). So, her use in TLJ makes sense in context. She literally was the Boba Fett of the series; a minor cool-looking character that became a fan favorite due to the coolness and so was the subject of some tie-ins.

And Poe, poor Poe who displayed a personality of a win at any cost flyboy that will disobey and allow all his people to get killed so that he can win a battle and forget about the war to hell with strategy and plaining in TLJ... A personality that is not in TFA or any of the comics or book that have been published. His actual personality prior to TLA was more in line with the original trilogy Luke, not so much now.

We didn't get enough of him in TFA for the TLJ stuff to contradict. As far as the tie-ins go, while I haven't read everything, he does have a "fly by the seat of his pants" approach that would fuel the kind of recklessness we see in TLJ if not checked. (Heck, in the comics, he leads a spy who almost reports the Resistance base location just because she was an old friend and is only saved because she had a change of heart and defected at the last minute.) Also, Poe making mistakes with the best of intentions is very much in line with Luke; ESB is basically Luke failing time after time in trying to find the way forward.

[WebLurker]

Hux... The young, confident, passionate, and driven face of the First Order almost seeming to be bred leader for them. Is now a incompetent fool that is distracted by yo momma jokes and is disgraced in front of his men that look at him with disrespect.

Most of Hux's suffering is caused by others, not himself, if you look closely. Granted, his falling for Poe's delay tactics do depend on him not realizing that Poe is just dissing him the whole way, but bear in mind that he starts giving the same kind of speech that he did when they first used Starkiller Base in TFA; just this time the listener is someone who doesn't care and came to insult and give him crap anyways. So, is Hux more comics relief then he was in TFA? Sure, but it's not really because he's suddenly become a moron or something.

Johnson literally threw JJ's outline for episode 8 in the trash and then said in an interview when asked if JJ shared his ideas on who Rey's parents are:

I don't think anyone's arguing that Johnson came up with his own answer, but whether it fits with what TFA created as a foundation. I, for one, feel it does.

He wrote a draft for both 8 and 9 and per Daisy Ridley Jonson saw at least the one for 8 and they had to have talked and it seems off that Pegg would know that JJ had an idea of who they were but not Johnson... This just does not ad up.

Yeah?

So yeah I don't see how anyone can say that he didn't ignore what was set up in TFA and that it just didn't live up to the "fan hype"... hype that was stoked and pushed by Abrams, Lucas Arts and Disney. That was set up by them and it was good hype that made people want to go and see the next movie.

I was there. I saw and participated in the speculation. It was massive and out of control. Nothing was going to live up to it.

As far as Johnson ignoring what was set up in TFA, that's plain wrong. He didn't. The questions in TFA were answered in TLJ. Some people just didn't like the answer. Fair enough if you don't, but we need to get off this false idea that the film disregarded what was put onscreen:

People left the movie talking "who the hell is Snoke", "Where is Rey from who are her people", and "What the hell is up with Luke"? We spent 2 excited years going over and over giving thoughts and theories with an awesome Rogue One in the middle.

Snoke was never that important, which TFA showed with Kylo being the main villain. Rey being a nobody fits with TFA telling us that she needed to look forwards, not backwards. Luke going into exile was one of the few logical reasons that he would stay out of it for six years.

Then the anticlimactic TLJ and now we have spent over a year debating on how crappy that movie was with little hype for 9 other than... well lets see where Abrams takes it, is he gonna retcon it?

I agree that TLJ backlash as dominated the conversation. Maybe it's time to let go of the unhappiness of the movie not going the way some of us wanted? It's just a movie, they can't please everyone.

Besides, Episode 9 has to deal with Kylo leading the First Order, Rey having the last of the Jedi artifacts, the Resistance burning down the First Order, it's got possibilities to spare.