I’ll go first. Mine is that I can’t stand the Deadpool movies. They are self aware and self referential to an obnoxious degree. It’s like being continually reminded that I am in a movie. I swear the success of that movie has directly lead to every blockbuster having to have a joke every 30 seconds
I like The Last Jedi.
That should be controversial enough.
I think this is more popular than you think. Most serious SW fans appreciate Rian Johnson’s attempt to take the franchise somewhere it had never been before, storytelling-wise, and the shitty retcon-fest that was ROS seems to have made it better by comparison. I’ve seen plenty of people online say it’s the best aged film out of the sequel films.
Love TFA. Love TLJ. Love parts of ROTS but it’s… rough. Not a movie I’ll choose to rewatch without a really strong reason. Most of it is so disjointed. You can tell there were so many ideas that were cut from the movie and things that were put together in ways that weren’t. Then there’s that fucking dagger…
Weird you could replace the phantom menace with rots, dagger with “podracer” and your have another completely true sentence!
Remember when they snuck off on some escape ship to go get help for their crew in imminent danger and then decided to dick around on some horse racing casino planet? It’s like they completely forgot why they were there. I thought TLJ had some neat ideas but I don’t know how anyone can overlook that weird loss of urgency in the middle of the film. It’s like your house is on fire and your family is trapped upstairs, so you run over to a neighbor’s house to call the fire department, but you discover that they got some dog fighting thing going on in the backyard so you decide to go deal with that first, then you call the fire department but it turns out the dispatcher was in cahoots with the arsonist who started it in the first place, and then you return home with your tail between your legs and your mom didn’t even know you had left. The whole second act could have been a dream sequence and it wouldn’t have changed a thing.
If you rip out everyone involved in the casino planet, you have a really cool dark and surprising twist on the franchise. The only really interesting things in the whole trilogy happened in The Last Jedi
Not controversial. You like what you like.
Now, if you had said something like “The Last Jedi is a good movie.” Well, that’s demonstrably untrue.
Nah. Disagree. It is a good movie.
It LOOKS good, I’ll give you that. The salt planet with the red soil was inspired.
It’s too bad Rian Johnson didn’t get an average 5th grader to proof read the script.
For example:
Leia and Rey have this touching scene where Leia gives her this tracking gem that will let her come back to the fleet no matter where they go.
Then, in the VERY SAME SCENE, the New Order pops out of hyperspace and another character says, out loud, “they tracked us through hyperspace???!? THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!!!”
First - you literally just explained how yes, it was possible 2 sentences ago.
Second - Tracking devices have been a thing since the first Star Wars.
“TARKIN You’re sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship? I’m taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work.”
No, I stand by the fact that it is a good movie. Just because it has some flaws doesn’t make it universally bad. It’s not even close to the worst movie in the franchise either. Rise of the Skywalker grabs that without hesitation (That outright is a TERRIBLE movie) but the Prequels are all significantly worse in both writing and direction than The Last Jedi. Revenge comes a lot closer and I’d say personally is tied with TLJ on coherence. George Lucas was a moron. He never had a plan but people constantly think he did. Within all three of the OT movies alone he keeps changing everything from characters to lore. The Prequels got worse because he had no one to temper him. That being said, this is about TLJ.
That being said, there’s no issue with the writing there in my opinion. Leia and Rey do have a touching moment, sure, but that was in the Force Awakens not The Last Jedi. Leia also straight up never gives her that bracelet on screen because JJ Abraams is a complete and utter fuckwit. The scene in TLJ is between Finn and Leia where Leia reveals the beacon to Finn. He asks how Rey would find us and Leia and shows him. He says “A cloaked binary beacon.” She says “To light her way home.” You are right in that the scene does continue immediately into the First Order tracking them but how they tracked them was completely different. The beacon tells Rey (and only Rey) where Leia is when tracked. But Snokes vessel outright tracked them through lightspeed itself. They didn’t check the location of her and then jump to her. They actively followed the fleet through hyperspace itself without needing end coordinates. This was shown later in the movie and Leia directly says it by saying "They tracked us through lightspeed.* Something that hasn’t been shown to be possible on screen.
Yeah. They’re in the same scene but that wasn’t an accident. There wasn’t people behind the scenes who were that monumentally braindead. That scene was written that way with the purpose of making people think that the two would be related. Now I will give you that it’s not well written how they use that throughout the rest of the movie but it was put there on purpose. It was to make people doubt Leia (supporting him through the Poe arc, which worked way too well despite the fact that he did not have a singular leg to stand on with his entire argument despite everyone and their mother thinking he was right) and seem like the clear and obvious fix. They completely dropped the ball there, I admit. But overall I didn’t have a problem with that scene specifically. Just how they used that scene. Especially considering that tracking device was never actually used. Seriously. They added in and then never really used it. I don’t know if it ended up on the cutting room floor or what. The intention was clearly to fuck with the audience because Rey doesn’t ever find the Resistance using that bracelet. She meets up with Kylo on Snokes ship and Kylo is the one who gives her the coordinates.
The logical writing progress would have been to have Finn doing his thing (that arc, I grant you, is fundamentally worthless. The whole casino segment is a waste of screentime and only manages to produce a couple of light gags which all focus on BB-8) and Poe advancing on Leias position during his mutiny. He gets to Leia and gets the bracelet, destroys it and they jump to lightspeed. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and then the First Order shows back up anyway, having tracked them. Holdo has a scene of “I told you so”, probably just by staring at him without saying anything, and then everyone freaks out on what to do. Leia is still out and Holdo is in command so she decides to try and ram them with the last lightspeed jump of the cruiser that they somehow manage to movie magic in the last second from all the X-wings, life support, yadda yadda. Forcing the rest to evacuate to Crait. Movie continues on as normal.
The issue to me isn’t that the writing didn’t make sense. It did. My issue was that they expected the audience to connect too many dots on their own. Ended up with people making different connections than were intended. Too many things were left on the cutting room floor while stuff like that Casino segment was allowed to go on for way too long. Or the kiss between Finn and Rose which was just fucking bizarre. So much so that even Finn in that scene has a look on his face like “What the fuck are you doing?” But with all the issues that TLJ has? I still find it to be a way more coherent story and more interesting one than either of the first two Prequels. And Rise of Skywalker because that movie is idiotic. Like a good script doctor could have fixed it and made it a decent movie but they made so many weird fucking decisions and bizarre writing choices that literally nothing about it makes sense. What pisses me off is people then blame Rian Johnson for the problems of Rise too when half of that was on the studio for not being able to make up their mind on directors/writers (that movie has way too many writers) and the other half falls squarely on the fanbase for reacting as strongly and negatively as they did to the first two sequels.
91% of film critics agree it’s a good movie. That’s more than feel that way about Return of The Jedi. And way more than any of the prequels.
91% of film critics didn’t want to be on the wrong side of a rabid fanbase. ;)
The rabbid die hard Star Wars fans are very loud about hating that film.
Sure, but the critics couldn’t have known that when they wrote the reviews.
Liking a film that 91% of critics gave a positive rating is controversial?
Best film from the 9. Has a very good story and leaves you wondering what is going on. It was exactly what it needed to be and did it in some new ways with older call backs. Seriously such a good flick.