Washington Post really liked The Last Jedi And wants you to know it.

[Anthony W]

Yikes. https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...tart-trolling/

TROS invites the perception that it is made with conservative, white and male audiences in mind. After suggesting that there would be a same-sex relationship in TROS, filmmakers included two women kissing in the background of a scene — a moment easily censored for overseas markets. TROS nearly eliminates the character Rose Tico, played by Asian American actress Kelly Marie Tran, who was the focal point for right-wing hate after her large role in TLJ.

So much to unpack in this article.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

So this is how film criticism dies, with hollow platitudes

[Moon Ronin]

So this is how film criticism dies, with hollow platitudes

I think its funny that if you didn't like TLJ you are a "right-wing troll". I know many people that are far from right wing and did not like that movie.

[Anthony W]

I think its funny that if you didn't like TLJ you are a "right-wing troll". I know many people that are far from right wing and did not like that movie.

I guess many critics feel betrayed because they spent so much time defending TLJ only for JJ to do a complete reversal. I could have sworn I saw the movies in this trilogy getting into a fist fight at a Waffle House

[Immortal Weapon]

I guess many critics feel betrayed because they spent so much time defending TLJ only for JJ to do a complete reversal. I could have sworn I saw the movies in this trilogy getting into a fist fight at a Waffle House

Now they know how it feels to b on the other side. They celebrate when TLJ wiped it's ass with everything that came before it. Now that it's happened to the movie they liked they crying foul. Can't help but point and laugh at the hypocrisy.

[WebLurker]

Leia was already in danger the Emperor told him as much when he said that every thing up to that point was a planed trap. This was Vader and Palpatine trying to push Luke to the edge to create fear,anger, and hate with in him and turn him to the dark side and it almost worked but Luke was able to push the emotions back and not kill Vader. The mark of the end of the Hero's Journey is that the hero is the master of 2 worlds, this overcoming of his emotion of fear, hate, and, anger was the final step to his mastery of the supernatural world. To have him revert back to his fear and reacting to it even in an instant takes away from his victory over his emotions in ROTJ.

Did Luke spending most of ESB making mistake after mistake take away from his victory in ANH? Look, the one constant in the original trilogy is that Luke was not the perfect hero. Why would we expect things to be different later down the line? Also, ROTJ isn't the end of the story, no more then any of us are finished with character development and backsliding and reclaiming until our own lives are done. (Besides, we saw what the Luke you're talking about looked like in the Legends tie-ins, and it was a stagnant, flat character. TLJ did the right thing in giving him a character arc instead of having him just come in like Superman and get the job done.)

Luke's action held the entire future galaxy in the balance in ROTJ so the consequences were as scale tipping as a whole school vs. one person. Luke acting the same way takes away from his growth as a character. That and you would figure that his focus would be toward Snoke and not Ben. If Vader did get to Leia and started her toward the dark side would Luke think "well I got to kill her too I guess ".

It was all done in the heat of battle and a flood of emotions at one time, with been it over a long period of time to the point that one night Luke thought "might as well go kill the kid in his sleep before this goes to far".

Eh, not so much:

I saw darkness. I'd sensed it building in him. I'd see it at moments during his training. But then I looked inside... and it was beyond what I ever imagined. Snoke had already turned his heart. He would bring destruction, and pain, and death... and the end of everything I love because of what he will become. And for the briefest moment of pure instinct... I thought I could stop it. It passed like a fleeting shadow. And I was left with shame... and with consequence. And the last thing I saw... were the eyes of a frightened boy whose master had failed him."

Because it is the most memorable line in the movie, and is seemed to be a sentiment shared by both Kilo Ren and Luke Skywalker shared through most of the movie. So it wasn't just the main villain that had this view but also the hero, with the plot trying to have so many twist and turns Luke's revelation was lost in the mix to some so they came away with "let the past die" as the theme to the movie. Johnson seemed to push Ren's fixation with Vader to the back burner or completely off the stove in TLJ. As there was none of it what so ever really in the movie and even had him smash his helmet which I was kind of led to believe it was his homage to Vader in TFA from what Han said about it. I was under the impression that he sort of left that behind him after Snoke shamed him about it. His smashing the helmet seem to be symbolism of the idea of killing the past if you have to.

Luke's whole story arc is refuting the "let the past die" idea and that is pretty explicitly telegraphed; from his starting the movie saying the Jedi need to end to ending the movie stating that the line will continue after him.

Bloodlines really were not a big deal in the Star Wars movies until JJ created Rey. TLJ was writhen and filmed so soon after it couldn't be a reacting to that. I think that Johnson was in a since trying to capture the "No, I am your father" of ESB. The only thing is that the character of Rey seemed to have no expectations of who her family was just that they were out there somewhere and she didn't know who they were. And in the previous movie she was already told that they were not coming back for her by Maz Kanata. Oddly Maz saying what Rey sought was not behind her, but ahead sort of give Rey a redundant lesson in TLJ (same with what Max told Finn and his arc in TLJ was redundant too). It was not such a great revelation at all given the scope of the character given what she has already been told so it seem the "nobody" premise was put there more for audience reaction than story driven.

I think TROS did a pretty darn good job showing that bloodlines weren't that big a deal period. That's kinda the main message of the film.

[Moon Ronin]

Now they know how it feels to b on the other side. They celebrate when TLJ wiped it's ass with everything that came before it. Now that it's happened to the movie they liked they crying foul. Can't help but point and laugh at the hypocrisy.

It really ironic that the same people who said that the idea that TLJ had no political agenda are now mad that "TROS moments that undermine TLJ’s commitment to diversity". The WP added a link to back this claim up but no where in the Forbes article that they linked said anything about diversity(the guy who actual wrote the Forbes article says that TROS may be the best one of the new trilogy which doesn't really back up the WP view here). All of this despite the fact the three mains are a woman, a black man, and a Hispanic man but ''TROS invites the perception that it is made with conservative, white and male audiences in mind." according to this WP article. And it really has noting to do with an actual criticism of the story it's self but that "TROS’s politics will not have a comparable platform as TLJ did". This whole thing is just the other side of the coin of what the Morons at “The Fandom Menace” that hate all of the Disney Star Wars movies and who cry about the social politics in every single one of the movies. Just like those ass hats this whole article is crying about the politics of the movie and not the content. Hell it is even under the Politics heading of the web site and not "arts & entertainment".

Can we just enjoy or dislike a movie please?

[motherofpearl1]

I think its funny that if you didn't like TLJ you are a "right-wing troll". I know many people that are far from right wing and did not like that movie.

I think they're referring to a group of bigots who hounded Kelly Marie Tran so horribly she closed her Instagram account.

[sunofdarkchild]

There were also plenty of people who are right-wing and also liked Last Jedi. Heck, I lean right and I like Last Jedi best of the trilogy and consider Rise of Skywalker to be a terrible movie.

[Moon Ronin]

I guess many critics feel betrayed because they spent so much time defending TLJ only for JJ to do a complete reversal. I could have sworn I saw the movies in this trilogy getting into a fist fight at a Waffle House

It's like it never crossed their mind in the whole article that maybe Abrams and Johnson had different ideas of where the trilogy was going. Its odd when Johnson was asked when he did add things like the Knights of Ren or a shot of R2-D2 and C3PO together (all of the others movies have this one) and so on. He just says there was not room in them for "his" movie. He even had to back track because there was no "I have a bad feeling about this" in his movie as something BB-8 said. But when Abrams puts Rose to a minor roll because there is not enough room in "his" movie it is an outrage. I don't think that JJ wrote TROS in the way he did to quell the "conservative fans"

I think they're referring to a group of bigots who hounded Kelly Marie Tran so horribly she closed her Instagram account.

I don't think a bunch of tweets and 5 guys on YouTube made Lucas Film course change on what was going to be in the next film. This whole thing for the Washington Post is saying that "right wing" hate ruined Star Wars by steering the course of TROS away from where TLJ was going which is laughable. The TLJ was going nowhere anyway, it was on huge circle of misdirection.

[motherofpearl1]

It's like it never crossed their mind in the whole article that maybe Abrams and Johnson had different ideas of where the trilogy was going. Its odd when Johnson was asked when he did add things like the Knights of Ren or a shot of R2-D2 and C3PO together (all of the others movies have this one) and so on. He just says there was not room in them for "his" movie. He even had to back track because there was no "I have a bad feeling about this" in his movie as something BB-8 said. But when Abrams puts Rose to a minor roll because there is not enough room in "his" movie it is an outrage. I don't think that JJ wrote TROS in the way he did to quell the "conservative fans"



I don't think a bunch of tweets and 5 guys on YouTube made Lucas Film course change on what was going to be in the next film. This whole thing for the Washington Post is saying that "right wing" hate ruined Star Wars by steering the course of TROS away from where TLJ was going which is laughable. The TLJ was going nowhere anyway, it was on huge circle of misdirection.

I think it was more than five guys on YouTube.
And whether you love or hate TROS, the way Kelly Marie Tran was treated was diabolical. She went from a major character into a bit part.

[Powerboy]

I think its funny that if you didn't like TLJ you are a "right-wing troll". I know many people that are far from right wing and did not like that movie.

Unfortunately, the accusation of sexism/ racism/ right-wing troll has become an easy way to take control of the narrative and not have to respond to the actual criticisms. In these situations, there will be genuine right-wing trolls so it makes it easy to focus only on them and ignore that there is plenty of criticism not based on that.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Unfortunately, the accusation of sexism/ racism/ right-wing troll has become an easy way to take control of the narrative and not have to respond to the actual criticisms. In these situations, there will be genuine right-wing trolls so it makes it easy to focus only on them and ignore that there is plenty of criticism not based on that.

Which is weird because this isn't some new thing. When Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises came out, right-wing pundits made a big deal about the villain Bane having a similar name to Bain Capital, the firm that Mitt Romney worked for (The third Nolan movie came out the same year as the 2012 Election). Then the actual movie came out and people realized that politically it was more of a right-of-center movie with Anti-Occupy fears and so on. Fact is that a political controversy doesn't necessarily cohere or fit with the actual content of the movie, or serve as a validation of it. And Star Wars especially has always been weird about its political iconography. Like you know the medal scene in ANH quotes from Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will but that scene is about the good guys when usually the attitude is to use Nazi imagery for the bad guys (as done elsewhere in the series).

As it is, I think TLJ is quite dodgy about representation and not as woke as people think it is.
-- The movie has two Latino male actors playing characters, one is Oscar Isaac's Poe Dameron, and the other is Benicio del Toro's DJ. The former is a kind of "loose-canon", independent, and scheming guy who plots a mutiny and gets dressed down by white women. The other character, DJ, is shown as a duplicitous, sleazy, and nihilistic creep.
-- John Boyega's Finn who was a co-lead in TFA ends up being demoted to a side-character in the story of an OC and forced into an inorganic romance arc. TFA is imperfect in that the major black character is introduced as a Storm Trooper and former child soldier (which has a lot of unfortunate coding), and then after being hyped and set up as the Force-sensitive "Luke" the finale has it being Rey. This movie reduces Finn even more than before.
-- From a perspective of masculinity, the movie does seem to play Kylo Ren far more straight than the previous film. Ben Solo and Kylo Ren is played very seriously and very straight in TLJ. So whatever flaws and issues he has, him ending the movie more or less on the up and up does validate his particular toxic masculinity far more than Darth Vader was in the OT (since after all the dude totally fails his plans in ESB). So the movie emasculates so-to-speak the POC actors in the resistance, while giving Ben Solo and Kylo Ren his biggest moments in the entire ST. And again the guy playing Kylo is white.
-- This is also the case with Luke. In the OT, Luke was a softer guy, emotional, and fairly vulnerable and sensitive. Him becoming a grizzled, sad, old cranky man ends up making a more unconventional original take on masculinity into a more conventional one.
-- As for the whole exploitation theme at Canto Bight, which many say was introducing politics into the story. It mostly centers on a bunch of white orphans and child workers which is essentially classically Victorian (i.e. Oliver Twist) and has basically been normalized in fantasy to the extent of removing any bite that such a strand once had.
-- As for the female characters, Rey is undermined in favor of Kylo in terms of being the actual protagonist of the series. At the end of TLJ, you have a sense that this is Kylo's story more than hers. Kylo tells her, "You have no place in the story" and the film's final shot (which historically in the OT always had Luke and main cast at the center in a tableau) features some random broom boy on Canto Bight rather than Rey, the general idea is that he's as important as she is, which rather than any case of equality, always means that a female protagonist can't actually be the true center of her story. For all its flaws, TROS actually does make Rey the protagonist of the ST and does make her central to the story.
-- Admiral Holdo's entire plan and ideas doesn't pass muster in terms of believable military structure so the execution of her story rather than letting the female character command her own via her demonstrated intelligence ends up basically twisting in and out for a series of fake outs and so on.

On the whole, I think TLJ is pretty dodgy on almost anything you can credit for. And to be honest the overall point of TLJ doesn't really make sense out of insular inter-fandom thing.

At its heart, the Lucas SW movies are about real stuff more than fan stuff. The OT was about resistance, about the fact that there's always more to people than you would know (Han Solo being more than a scoundrel, Yoda saying "size matters not", Vader being Anakin and also redeemable). The PT was about the downfall of democracy, the fear of death, and paranoia. Whereas the ST doesn't really speak to anything real and tangible, and certainly not TLJ.

[abulafia]

i dislike almost all of TLJ, but i don´t get the milk hate.
he has been a farm boy! how is milking an alien being out of character?
glad we were not shown him milking the evaporators(*sarcasm*).

are modern persons just disgusted by the most basic mechanisms of life?

[Agent Z]

And Star Wars especially has always been weird about its political iconography. Like you know the medal scene in ANH quotes from Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will but that scene is about the good guys when usually the attitude is to use Nazi imagery for the bad guys (as done elsewhere in the series).

This is from the same trilogy where the bad guys are Nazi stand-ins yet Leia and Lando are the only characters who aren’t white men. It isnÂ’t surprising that this franchise ended up with a right-wing contingent among its fanbase. When you add in the racial stereotypes Lucas introduced into series with the prequels it makes the defense of those films all the more laughable and makes it look like its defenders only want to spite the sequels.

-- The movie has two Latino male actors playing characters, one is Oscar Isaac's Poe Dameron, and the other is Benicio del Toro's DJ. The former is a kind of "loose-canon", independent, and scheming guy who plots a mutiny and gets dressed down by white women. The other character, DJ, is shown as a duplicitous, sleazy, and nihilistic creep.

Poe is a deconstruction of the cocky ace pilot archetype that Star Wars and other stories have pushed so strongly. And DJ is a foil to Lando by showing that not all smugglers have hidden hearts of gold. These characters have a lot more complexity to them

-- John Boyega's Finn who was a co-lead in TFA ends up being demoted to a side-character in the story of an OC and forced into an inorganic romance arc.

I honestly wonder if people who say this actually know what the word “side character” actually means.

-- From a perspective of masculinity, the movie does seem to play Kylo Ren far more straight than the previous film. Ben Solo and Kylo Ren is played very seriously and very straight in TLJ. So whatever flaws and issues he has, him ending the movie more or less on the up and up does validate his particular toxic masculinity far more than Darth Vader was in the OT (since after all the dude totally fails his plans in ESB). So the movie emasculates so-to-speak the POC actors in the resistance, while giving Ben Solo and Kylo Ren his biggest moments in the entire ST. And again the guy playing Kylo is white.

So Finn and Poe are emasculated because the former was criticized by women and the latter is a “side character” in a female character’s arc (he isn’t) but the movie is the one propping up toxic masculinity by having the villain do villainous things and still failing?

-- This is also the case with Luke. In the OT, Luke was a softer guy, emotional, and fairly vulnerable and sensitive. Him becoming a grizzled, sad, old cranky man ends up making a more unconventional original take on masculinity into a more conventional one.

So you missed the part where Luke being like this was a bad thing?

-- As for the whole exploitation theme at Canto Bight, which many say was introducing politics into the story. It mostly centers on a bunch of white orphans and child workers which is essentially classically Victorian (i.e. Oliver Twist) and has basically been normalized in fantasy to the extent of removing any bite that such a strand once had.

So now we're accusing the movie of not being political enough?

As for the female characters, Rey is undermined in favor of Kylo in terms of being the actual protagonist of the series.

You can keep saying this, it’s never going to be true.

At the end of TLJ, you have a sense that this is Kylo's story more than hers. Kylo tells her, "You have no place in the story" and the film's final shot (which historically in the OT always had Luke and main cast at the center in a tableau) features some random broom boy on Canto Bight rather than Rey, the general idea is that he's as important as she is, which rather than any case of equality, always means that a female protagonist can't actually be the true center of her story.

You are giving Ren way too much credit.

For all its flaws, TROS actually does make Rey the protagonist of the ST and does make her central to the story.

TROS turns Rey into a pawn of Palpatine and a prize to be won by Kylo Ren. TLJ ended with Rey restoring Luke’s faith, planning to continue the Jedi and rejecting Kylo Ren’s temptation.

Admiral Holdo's entire plan and ideas doesn't pass muster in terms of believable military structure so the execution of her story rather than letting the female character command her own via her demonstrated intelligence ends up basically twisting in and out for a series of fake outs and so on.

She’s smart enough to understand that a hothead who got several of her people killed should not be blindly trusted.

In defense of the bigot argument, I saw multiple youtube videos referring to the "Fat Asian b***h" which makes it really hard to pretend there isn't racism, sexism and even fat shaming involved in these criticisms for some people. It's very much like when I saw a Facebook post about "Captain Marvel" and the first fifty posts were about Larson's butt and how she apparently shouldn't be the star of an MCU movie because her butt isn't shapely enough.

Granted that Rose was a symbol for a lot of stuff that set people off like the Animal Rights diversion (and I agree with what she was saying but it seemed forced into the movie like a whole lot of other stuff) and the interference with Finn's sacrifice.

I don't believe everyone who hates TLJ or the sequels as a whole are racist. I do think that people are all too quick to dismiss the very real issue of bigotry within the SW fan base.