Maybe the peaceful Republic was resistant to having a big standing army after the big heel turn to Empire at the tail end of the clone wars and the Resistance was a nice little plausible deniability proxy for them to have in their pocket while the First Order was gaining power but maybe didn’t seem like too big a deal?
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A more important Canon question:
How many different aliens do you think Luke has tried to milk on that island?
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damn this is actually a great reading of their boring insistence on retelling the exact same story
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The first half of that statement is a great interpretation! Also, the back half (they didn’t think the First Order was a big deal) is canonically accurate, yeah. Leia is like “yo, there’s Nazis in the outer rim, we REALLY should do something about it” and the Republic is basically “fine geez, go do a damb Resistance, but leave us out of it”
So essentially, over the course of not-long-before-Episode-VII to end-of-Episode-VIII, the ruling democratic government of the galaxy just did a STAGGERINGLY BAD JOB caring about and containing a reactionary force.
Also, though it’s not mentioned anywhere, I can easily believe the Double Death Star is some sort of Star Forge-like ancient alien doohicky that the First Order just found without anyone noticing and was like oh HELL yes. Of course, if tha’ts really the case, then maybe “hey the FIrst Order has a new scary secret weapon where’d they get it?? maybe we should care??” could have been a great plot hook! Hell, Episode VII could have just worked a lot better if you’d gotten some General Leia politics scenes, or even just one, before her eventual appearance in the Rey/Finn story.
EDIT AGAIN: okay yeah, Episode VII starting off mostly the same, with the Finn/Rey stuff, but then, still in the first 30 minutes or so, there’s a smash cut to Leia in the galactic senate, or at a strategy meeting, or something, where you learn about this whole big situation that is happening outside the field of vision of our ostensible heroes? That would have been extremely good. It’s almost like the exact same story structure of Episode 4 wasn’t perhaps as well suited to this more complex world situation!
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I think my favorite shot & simultaneously the most inconsequential shot of the movie was the epic close up of the iron steampressing the badclothes. I thought it was a starship at first, then I said to myself, ‘by gum, that looks like a giant iron, what a funny design!’ And then it turned out it was an iron! Hilarious metatextual layer there, re the funky design of Star Wars tech
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That shot was, of all things, a direct reference to Hardware Wars
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ah, makes sense. I can’t recall if there were any references to Thumb Wars but I’ll have to see it again to be sure
just need to check in, but w all still agree that Savage Opress is the best SW name, right
KIT
FISTO
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kylo stops being a vader wannabe and destroys the whole master-apprentice dynamic to make himself into something new
poe goes from being a wild man to seeing the bigger picture, he pulls out of that attack on the canon at the end, and in what must have been an incredible show of restraint on the part of this character, doesn’t rush out to fight alongside luke skywalker, cause he realizes luke couldn’t be as dumb as he would be and his move there is all about keeping the rebellion alive.
finn still doesn’t grasp the outlaw values. he’s not a true rebel yet he’s still just trying to survive. he gets it a little when he brings up how satisfying trampling the town full of rich people is, and then he gets it a little more when rose adds on yeah, but also freeing these enslaved animal things makes it even better. but he doesn’t reach galaxy brain level rebel until rose knocks his ass out of his suicide run and says the bit about saving those you love instead of fighting those you hate or whatnot.
rose goes from being a pipe fitter to a pipe hitter. like finn at the start, she’s going to be some hero now people are excited to see wake up from her star wars medical coma.
rey is the exact same the whole time though and I have a hard time believing she has anything resembling a dark side. If there was supposed to be any I was definitely not feeling the conflict inside her. but character development is overrated anyway. how many people really change their personalities or grow in real life no matter how many “making some changes, only giving a shit about myself now!” or new age spiritual science personal growth memes they post on facebook
usually my sibling gets me excited for these things (this time they did it by telling me a tagline for the movie was “kill the past”) right before one is about to come out then I go watch it and go back to forgetting star wars exists but I liked this one I think the best of any of them.
but there were a lot of things that felt like a big runaround. once laura dern did the light speed kamikazi couldn’t the other ships have just jumped now, the tracker ship was down. they landed on that planet just to immediately escape out a back exit anyway. why couldn’t c3p0 have took laura derns place. poe and crew fly out in those rickety ass ships at the canon at the end just to peel off and abandon that once they realize how dumb that was and I don’t think they actually accomplished anything. and like finn says seeing the casino planet of war profiteers get trampled is satisfying but that whole little adventure was all in service of some plan that in no way ever comes close to working. since it’s nice looking and somewhat expectation subverting it doesn’t bother me as much but I just got done watching mr robot season 3 so I’m also kind of tired of being narratively jerked around right now.
and this felt like the end of the story instead of the middle. the rebellion is like 10 people on the millenium falcon. nobody answered their distress call. only slave kids give a shit. felt like we were going to have to wait 20 years for the rebellion to regrow and people to get the nerve to fight before we could pick back up again. probably what they should have done anyway since carrie fischer isn’t here anymore.
darth icky and darth insanius
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I do have to say I agree thought Laura Dern’s character was plotted weirdly. I really thought it should have been Leia that stayed behind to pilot the ship, not just because that would have made it more convenient since she died IRL, but because it would have been a totally badass way for that character to go out, after her totally badass force-power cheating certain death (I loved that scene no one gets to crap on it!!) to Just Let Go and sacrifice her (old) corporeal form and become Force Leia while (young) Laura Dern could have been there in a relief capacity and taken the reigns as the new rebel general for the next film—as it is she was really wasted as an actor and a character. I think that this scenario would have worked just as well, if not better.
also I have a feeling that that casino scene, the main point of which I believe was to throw in the bit that the rebel vs. first order is BS and both sides are being funded by the same warmongering elite class (basically real life). so Rian Johnson’s trilogy might go on to play off that fact and get beyond the by-now-very-played-out Resistance vs. Empire story into more shades of grey, darker stuff.
Hey, thanks for the reply! I think that’s a good take on the characters you wrote about and I think the movie does do more than I was giving it credit for. Coming out of the movie I think I was sour about how many ways they teased and could have taken Rey and it was coloring my perception of the other characters, somewhat. I think I wrote them off in my head because they all sort of rely on those narrative twists that I perceived to be just for the sake of subverting expectations rather than actual character-defining moments.
I agree that people don’t change much in real life and that’s why I find it compelling in a movie. Real change is hard and it takes time and I want to feel like if I put forth effort I won’t just keep making the same mistakes until I die.
I can’t believe of all the thousands of words I’ve written in this thread I haven’t once talked about the utterly weird way that the word and concept of “feelings” is expressed in this movie series
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Was enjoying this post and then this happened and then I was really enjoying this post.
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Are you calling her a crack head?
Thinking about the “I like him” line and my skin crawls.
You meet Oscar Isaac and you like him regardless of his brash idiocy.
You meet Oscar Isaac and he immediately pisses on you and ur stomping mad ready 2 piss fite then he looks into your soul with those big brown eyes and suddenly there you are liking Oscar Isaac though you drip with his disrespectful piss.
I mean some people just have that magnetism and one of them is beautiful space guatemalan oscar isaac
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