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  1. #46
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    In what universe those movies are "well directed"?

    Just a mess of scenes awkwardly connected one to other and people rushing to a place to the other. RoS looks it has been edited by a squirrel on crack. (faster!! faster!! faster!!)

  2. #47
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    Quote Originally Posted by godisawesome View Post
    To me, Rey being overpowered and seemingly unchallenged was never the cause of the ST’s problems. It was a symptom of lack of vision.
    I think it is in sofar a problem, that the other "main characters" (Finn, Poe) are all kind of unnecessary because she can do everything better her self.

    I think there would have been a better balance between the leads if she had been more reliant on Poe's Piloting skills and Fin's training as Stormtrooper.

  3. #48
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    Quote Originally Posted by Aahz View Post
    I think it is in sofar a problem, that the other "main characters" (Finn, Poe) are all kind of unnecessary because she can do everything better her self.

    I think there would have been a better balance between the leads if she had been more reliant on Poe's Piloting skills and Fin's training as Stormtrooper.
    I seem to be the only person that enjoys the ST around here but I think that is pretty fair.

    The dynamic of the 3 would've been outgoing naive Jedi, brash Resistance pilot, and endearing former Stormtrooper.

    That would've been great and probably silenced a fair amount of critics as well as help raise Finn up in the story.
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  4. #49
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    Quote Originally Posted by Aahz View Post
    I think it is in sofar a problem, that the other "main characters" (Finn, Poe) are all kind of unnecessary because she can do everything better her self.

    I think there would have been a better balance between the leads if she had been more reliant on Poe's Piloting skills and Fin's training as Stormtrooper.
    Again though... that wasn’t an actual issue in TFA.

    There, Rey actually has minimal impact on the external conflict compared to Finn and Poe. She’s mostly got her won story of eventually claiming the saber and answering the call of the Force. The biggest contribution she makes directly to the destruction of Starkiller Base is temporarily flying the Falcone to escape Jakku, and she still needs Finn shooting the TIEs down. She doesn’t actually have any other major connection to SKB blowing up. She doesn’t even beat Kylo one on one, but requires multiple extenuating factors, handicaps, and help to beat him.

    In contrast, Poe tracked down the lead to Luke and made the trench run to blow up SKB, while Finn is the one who freed Poe, kickstarted the delivery of BB-8 to the Resistance, guided Han and Chewie to lower the shields, and his help is still extremely necessary for Rey to fight Kylo.

    Rey being a good pilot is no different from Anakin and Luke being great pilots, and in fact I think the escape from Jakku with Finn’s help is the only dogfight she has in the films with either of the other two present, so the piloting skill she has isn’t a liability. Poe clearly has that preeminence among the three, with a dogfight victory in each film.

    She also doesn’t actually impact the military plotline nearly as much as Finn does. Again, her flying from Jakku is the biggest indirect impact she has on the military plot in TFA, while in TLJ she’s reduced to mostly the same Uber service as Chewie, since Kylo replacing Snoke doesn’t help at all, and while her lifting the rocks is a crappy Deus Ex Machina moment, it’s also being overshadowed by Luke’s dog and pony show at the front of the cave.

    TROS does have her find the route to Exogol and defeat Force Storm Palpatine while Finn’s military storyline was clearly butchered in editing (possibly at LFL’s insistence so he wouldn’t overshadow Ben) so I’ll give you that... but she’s far from the biggest cause of the problem...

    ...and I think it says something very important that some last-minute plot contrivance and exposition occurs so she has to wait for Ben Solo to show,up, get fed the Knights of Ren, and then have the crappy romance forced on her power-up Palpatine, who’s also their mostly so Ben can be part of the money shot of opposing him, even if he quickly gets blasted away to give Rey back the spotlight that he just stole from her.

    I’d say in TROS, the amount of “victory responsibilities” they give her is a problem, but that’s not the case in TLJ even though the story there still sucks, and it wasn’t the case in TFA, which while derivative, was also much more successful.

    And thatks because I think the main problem was never Rey’s power-level or the idea of making her a Skywalker-level hero, but rather that they started out derivative for the overall conflicts in TFA, which then got blown up by Rian Johnson screwing up ALL the conflicts, and then TROS wound up being a mess because it didn’t have anything worthwhile to work with and barely any time for preproduction because LFL wanted to coddle Kylo.

    I mean, just look at TLJ’s military plot - what trashed it there more: Rey power level and skills, [I]which never impact that story until she becomes a taxi driver and construction crew... or Johnson reducing Hux to buffoonish idiot, and writing a bufoonishly stupid plotline where everyone else is also an idiot on both sides?

    And it’s not like she’s interfering with Finn’s story there either - he gets screwed by being stuck in the “Lecture the Child Slave About The Film’s Themes” storyline away from her.

    And TROS, as much as she does become too impactful there, had to deal with her losing her main antagonist half-way through production and the film because they didn’t want it to be Kylo.

    She ain’t the problem.

    Heck, Kylo ain’t the problem, because the villain part of him got screwed over as well.

    It’s Ben Solo who’s the problem, because you can tell LFL and Johnson would rather tell a story about him being a precious snowflake instead of exploiting him as a fairly prescient villain in the age of Trump.
    Like action, adventure, rogues, and outlaws? Like anti-heroes, femme fatales, mysteries and thrillers?

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  5. #50
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    Quote Originally Posted by Aahz View Post
    I think there is big differnce.

    The overall plot of the prequels is solid, the scripts and the characters would have needed more work and Lukas should have probably hired someone else to direct (as he did with the original trilogy). But I think they could have been good movies without changing the story drastically.

    The overall plot of the sequels is a mess, if their even is one. I think they had to make completely different movies to end up with something good.
    Yeah, PT also got very amazing setting, the biggest problem is that there were too much to cover and Lucas was bad at writing romance.

  6. #51
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    Quote Originally Posted by Slowpokeking View Post
    Yeah, PT also got very amazing setting, the biggest problem is that there were too much to cover and Lucas was bad at writing romance.
    You can tell that’s got at least some kernel of truth based off the sheer amount of quality products produced after AOTC set on the Clone Wars.

    It’s like the exact opposite of the ST, where no one seems to be interested in ancillary material outside of the films unless it focuses on a character they like; Poe was pretty successful up until TLJ retconned him to serve a deconstructive arc that betrayed how very little investment anyone at LFL had in maintaining consistency from film to film, and Kylo fans still picked up his pity party comic book.
    Like action, adventure, rogues, and outlaws? Like anti-heroes, femme fatales, mysteries and thrillers?

    I wrote a book with them. Outlaw’s Shadow: A Sherwood Noir. Robin Hood’s evil counterpart, Guy of Gisbourne, is the main character. Feel free to give it a look: https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asi...E2PKBNJFH76GQP

  7. #52
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    Quote Originally Posted by godisawesome View Post
    You can tell that’s got at least some kernel of truth based off the sheer amount of quality products produced after AOTC set on the Clone Wars.

    It’s like the exact opposite of the ST, where no one seems to be interested in ancillary material outside of the films unless it focuses on a character they like; Poe was pretty successful up until TLJ retconned him to serve a deconstructive arc that betrayed how very little investment anyone at LFL had in maintaining consistency from film to film, and Kylo fans still picked up his pity party comic book.
    ST simply tried to ripoff OT and some EU instead of creating a big new setting and theme.

  8. #53

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    Quote Originally Posted by godisawesome View Post
    Rey actually has minimal impact on the external conflict compared to Finn and Poe.... The biggest contribution she makes directly to the destruction of Starkiller Base is temporarily flying the Falcone to escape Jakku, and she still needs Finn shooting the TIEs down. She doesn’t actually have any other major connection to SKB blowing up.
    You forgot that the amazing Wonderrey SAVED THE MILLENIUM FALCON FROM BLOWING UP - thus saving Finn, BB-8, Han, Chewie and herself. Without this Marey Sue act, SKB would not have been destroyed, the map leading to Luke would have been lost, the first order would have won and there would have been no TFA and no trilogy. So much for "minimal impact".

    But the whining pitiful Emo Boy that fails at everything is the "Creators Pet" - yeah sure.....

    Can you imagine Luke beating a wounded Vader at the end of ANH with the amount of "training" he got in ANH? I cant. It would have been a WTF moment, ruining an otherwise good movie. This is Rey beating Kylo. His wounds heal within 24 hours, so his armour probably absorbed most of the blasts energy. The guy is still around 1/3 or perhaps even 2/3 of his max, yet Rey defeats him.....One movie later he does worse against the Praetorian guards than a little girl who discovered the force was real 5 days ago....
    So I simply cannot understand how everyone can claim that Rey is not OP, a marey Sue and the "Creators Pet" in the ST.

    Take Darth Bane for example. Allthough the most powerful Sith of his era, all he could do before receiving training is:

    - Stopping the hearth of an old and heavily drunk and unhealthy man after receiving the worst beating of his life
    - Some precognition in card playing
    - One 5 second force flash of good shooting

    Thats it. He couldnt move objects, perform mind tricks and he sure as hell would have lost to any Sith Lord he would have dared to challange. Wounded or not.
    Last edited by Celestialbeyonder; 12-24-2020 at 03:30 AM.

  9. #54
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    Quote Originally Posted by Celestialbeyonder View Post
    You forgot that the amazing Wonderrey SAVED THE MILLENIUM FALCON FROM BLOWING UP - thus saving Finn, BB-8, Han, Chewie and herself. Without this Marey Sue act, SKB would not have been destroyed, the map leading to Luke would have been lost, the first order would have won and there would have been no TFA and no trilogy. So much for "minimal impact".

    But the whining pitiful Emo Boy that fails at everything is the "Creators Pet" - yeah sure.....
    ...How is mechanically fixing the Millenium Falcon something worth using in this debate? The Force powers are where you need to focus. And keeping the MF flying doesn’t make the military story hinge on her at all, and is arguably the single most reasonable thing she does in the film.

    Rey’s introduced as a scavenger, so she has a background that works with that.

    And this is Star Wars; we had Anakin Skywalker building his own podracer and a protocol droid at 9 before winning a race humans aren’t naturally equipped to compete in against a whole slew of veterans, including one who sabotaged his vehicle beforehand and was still very much cheating during the race. Anakin sets a standard for technical prowess well above Rey’s without any training either; now if you want to declare that portrayal as too far as well, then we’re on an area of equilibrium as an argument involving mechanical stuff.

    But mechanical stuff isn’t where this argument gets tricky for me; that’s with the Force, and in oppositon to Kylo, who, yeah, I’ still argue is totally a Creator’ Pet in TLJ and (via LFL’s investment) in TROS.

    I mean... when was the last time you saw a Neo-Nazi School Shooter gets a shirtless scene that is supposed to help convince a young woman he tried to Mind Rape and who’s friends he mutilated and murdered that he could totally be saved and worth submitting to further torture and violation for?

    When was the last time you saw a film throw a legendary hero under the bus to try and argue that Neo-Nazi School Shooter’s feelings getting hurt mattered more than murdering kids at his school?

    When was the last time you saw a character fail so badly at being intimidating, sympathetic or deep... but still get promoted to male lead, romantic lead, and then to overall badguy and then co-hero against a badguy resurrected to let him share the main hero’s spot light?

    In TFA, Kylo actually faced setbacks (like Rey did there as well, but after that film, all he does is fail upwards to ever-increasing levels of ludicrousness.

    The real argument is always going to remain in Force and lightsaber feats, like here:
    Quote Originally Posted by Celestialbeyonder View Post
    Can you imagine Luke beating a wounded Vader at the end of ANH with the amount of "training" he got in ANH? I cant. It would have been a WTF moment, ruining an otherwise good movie. This is Rey beating Kylo. His wounds heal within 24 hours, so his armour probably absorbed most of the blasts energy. The guy is still around 1/3 or perhaps even 2/3 of his max, yet Rey defeats him.....One movie later he does worse against the Praetorian guards than a little girl who discovered the force was real 5 days ago....
    So I simply cannot understand how everyone can claim that Rey is not OP, a marey Sue and the "Creators Pet" in the ST.

    Take Darth Bane for example. Allthough the most powerful Sith of his era, all he could do before receiving training is:

    - Stopping the hearth of an old and heavily drunk and unhealthy man after receiving the worst beating of his life
    - Some precognition in card playing
    - One 5 second force flash of good shooting

    Thats it. He couldnt move objects, perform mind tricks and he sure as hell would have lost to any Sith Lord he would have dared to challange. Wounded or not.
    First... I’ve actually heard some Kylo fanboys and fangirls claim he did better against the Praetorian Guards because he supposedly fights more of them at the same time or soemthing, but to be honestly I actually share your complaint about the scene having them depicted as too close to equal. But to me, the scene isn’t the fault of her being overpowered, but the story having shoved her into unnatural situations to serve Kylo’s story, and doing so sloppily and apathetically on her end, as part of the “Kylo fails upwards” strategy the film takes. So while I’d agree she’s overpowered in TLJ compared to where she should be... but that’s because she’s out of focus as the film fawns on Kylo.

    With TFA’s fight scene...

    1. Yup, the fight is totally portraying her well above the precedent previously established in the films in terms of skill and power for where she should be. But Star Wars has never been one to honor previous precedent if it gets in the way of a director’s hope for an awesome fight scene. Obi-Wan and Vader barely touch blades in ANH and use no Force powers; didn’t stop Lucas from quickly ramping up the epic nature of each consecutive fight scene in the films he was in charge of, nor did it stop Rogue One from having Vader display far more awe-inspiring power mere days before the events of ANH. Her gaining the knowledge through Force Download is dubious, but has storytelling behind it in the film, and she still actually struggles in its application.

    2. Here’s the meat of my argument; being “overpowered” doesn’t mean anything if the conflict still retains valuable dramatic tension, strong storytelling, and is, well, successful with the audience. The line between “Overpowered Creative’s Pet” and “Main Hero of Escapist Fanatsy” can be very thin... but Rey’s got a lot more argumentative points in her favor than, say Captain Marvel fighting a team of comparative scrubs in her film for the finale, Wonder Woman uncovering her power as Zeus’s daughter and pimp-slapping Ares to death, Thanos in Infinity War, Doctor Strange with the Eye in his movie, or Superman beating Zod’s trained and empowered military forces in Man of Steel... and I like all of those, as did most poeple.

    3.... So, the fact that TFA did a hell of a lot of storytelling to explain her win and was hugely successful even with Rey learning skills from Force Download and beating the main villain means I just don’t consider complaints about her power level there worth respecting. Kylo’s wounded, tired, freaking out after killing Han, still one-shots Rey at the start of the fight, duels Finn, and still explicitly takes it easy on her and has to remind her of the Force before he loses... and the film made more money than every MCU, DC Movies, movie up to that point, every LOTR and Hobbit movie, and all Star Wars movies except the original.

    So, clearly, even if you want to argue that Rey is overpowered or a Mary Sue even when there’s some strong arguments to make that isn’t the case... that clearly didn’t mean a damn thing to TFA’s box office take, popularity or goodwill, so it’s not the reason the Sequels are bad.

    Meanwhile... og, would you look at that?

    Treating the Neo-Nazi School Shooter like he’s a heartthrob Woobie we should all care about even when he fails at anything that isn’t being a mass-murdering bully does coincide with the ST losing half its take and pretty much all its goodwill.

    Kylo’s the issue, not Rey, because Kylo is everyone’s issue in the film; he’s the character demanding the OT3 be thrown under the bus for his sake, heks the one supplanting Finn as male lead, and he’s the one Rey is forced into a romance with that is clearly worse than most bad Twilight fan fiction.
    Like action, adventure, rogues, and outlaws? Like anti-heroes, femme fatales, mysteries and thrillers?

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  10. #55
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    The original had a good story, Luke was a very likable character with other likable characters in Han n Leia n Chewbacca.....Vader was a very menacing villain and a bad ass. Luke did beat him in a short time but he did still lose to Vader their first battle and lost his hand, the fact that Luke is related to Vader can also attribute to his talent. It can be argued that if Vader had used the force in their last battle he could have won n he likely didn’t want to kill his son while Luke did want to beat Vader. Also he was still no match for Sidious at that point

    The new films lack all that...no likable main characters, Rey has zero training yet she bests Luke SkyWalker, Kylo Ren who was training for years under Luke and Snoke. They just threw in that she was Sidious grand kid...ok sure. She later beats Sidious who is the most powerful dark side user...in a very rushed half ass movie

    Kylo was an emo kid throwing tantrums...Rose...the other guys like Finn...ehhh

    Snoke was actually an interesting character but they made him into just a clone.

  11. #56
    Astonishing Member dkrook's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Starter Set View Post
    Yeah, that whole Rey's family thing plain annoyed me i must confess.

    The girl waits for her parents her whole life, she finally learns that her parents did have good reasons for leaving her behind, beside booze which is cool i guess, and that they died like dogs trying to protect her but nope, she doesn't even give the slightest of **** about it and goes on calling herself a freaking Skywalker. Am i the only one who was bothered by that?

    That would have been quite a good moment for her to shed a little tear for them. Wasn't her quest for truth about her parents her main drive, her goal?
    You know? In that orgy of craptitude it didn't even dawn on me that she really didn't even pause to contemplate the gravity of her parents sacrifice. That's all kinds of disrespectful. I fully believe that the touch of corporate Hollywood masquerading as political correctness really is what destroyed the sequels. The insistence that the movie fall back on so many progressive, but yet still typical tropes. Uber chick, the white guy failing upward, lol! That all sounds familiar. Black dude that had the potential to be bad ass, but made into Jar jar binks 2.0. Finn suffered also from the 180 of making him romantic opposite and co-lead to male Rey groupie (creators aren't as progressive as they pretend to be) America is used to seeing interracial love, who cares at this point? The sequels sucked because of KK, overpowering Rey was her doing, and was trash writing and dissing the heart of the franchise.

  12. #57
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    Quote Originally Posted by godisawesome View Post
    Again though... Rey does struggle, does get her ass kicked, and does need help - but all in The Force Awakens, the film that always has to deal with TLJ crapping it’s pants and shoving some towards it.

    Yeah, I’ll concede she learns the Jedi Mind Trick too fast; even the idea of her getting rough ideas from Kylo doesn’t excuse pulling off a more complex maneuver like that.

    But Kylo captured her without any effort when they first meet, violates her mind in a painful and humiliating torture session, and rag dolls her when she tries escaping, and she needs him gut-shot by a scripted-to-be-stronger bowcaster, wounded in the shoulder by Finn, going through a mental breakdown, and being held off by Finn while she’s unconscious before Kylo deliberately takes it easier on her before she can defeat him.

    She ain’t a Mary Sue in TFA; aside from the Mind Trick, the story is set-up about where Luke would be if he got captured by Vader, if Vader were more unstable and Luke leeched some minimal information from his mind.

    And while she may be a Mary Sue in TLJ, that’s far more because she’d be the kind of weakly written character-shilling type of Mary Sue used to worship the Draco In Leather Pants that is Kylo, instead of the Blackhole Sue the entire story revolves around...

    ...And frankly, that’s because *Kylo* becomes the Blackhole Sue in TLJ. And Blackhole Sues are worse, because they demand damaging other characters to serve their story. And that’s exactly what TLJ does with Kylo.
    Nah. Rey was overpowered since TFA. Everyone called it out then and knew. And those who didn’t mostly thought they’d get an explanation in the sequels that she was a former paramedic with amnesia, with doesn’t make sense either.

    TFA is at fault for lack of planning.

  13. #58

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    Quote Originally Posted by Will Evans View Post
    Nah. Rey was overpowered since TFA. Everyone called it out then and knew. And those who didn’t mostly thought they’d get an explanation in the sequels that she was a former paramedic with amnesia, with doesn’t make sense either.TFA is at fault for lack of planning.
    Well if rumours are true, than JJ had a rough outline of the trilogy (the supposed scripts can be read online). In these Reys powers in TFA would have been explained by beeing basically controlled by Luke/Luke channeling his powers to her. This would have been an acceptable explanation. What we got was: nothing. Without any training or experience we are expected to accept that she can perform the mind trick, pull objects from the grip of other force users and defeat a far more experienced force user who had medium level injuries that healed within 24 hours....

    Between 3 and 4 days later - in which she "trained" for perhaps 2-3 hours, she does equally well against the Praetorian Guard as Kylo who had 20 years of training, her force pull is equal to his and she lifts some 50 tons of rocks like it was nothing. This is a complete mockery of everyone that came before her. All Darth Bane could do before receiving any training were occasional and uncontrolled flashes of precognition/clear vision and after receiving the worst beating of his life and concentrating for hours, he was able to stop the hearth of a old/unhealthy/drunk man. He then needed between 1 and 2 years of learning/training to become the strongest Sith, yet he still could have been defeated by one of his former masters who was weaker in the force, but far more experienced in sword fighting.

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    Quote Originally Posted by godisawesome View Post
    There, Rey actually has minimal impact on the external conflict compared to Finn and Poe. She’s mostly got her won story of eventually claiming the saber and answering the call of the Force. The biggest contribution she makes directly to the destruction of Starkiller Base is temporarily flying the Falcone to escape Jakku, and she still needs Finn shooting the TIEs down.
    She only needs Finn since the canonns of the Falcon can only be manually operated, and when the cannon is locked in place we see that she basically needs him only to pull the trigger.


    Quote Originally Posted by godisawesome View Post
    In contrast, Poe tracked down the lead to Luke and made the trench run to blow up SKB,
    Poe taking down the lead to Luke happened mostly before the start of the movie, he has far less screen time in TFA than Finn and Rey. And his trench run is not nearly as spectacular as Rey's escape from Jakuu.
    Thinking about it, it is kind of wired that in all 3 movies Poe gets his big sceene at the start if the film, and than is kind of shoved aside for the rest of the runtime...

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    Quote Originally Posted by LordMikel View Post
    I think there are a number of reasons the movies are not good. I don't think we can point to any one thing and say, "If this were different the movies would have been great."
    I agree there are far more factors at work. I think there are several things though I do think some are bigger factors then others.

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