this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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I liked a lot of seven, but knowing that you'd have to eventually watch nine sort of invalidates the rest of that trilogy
Never did watch 9. My biggest problem with 7 ?and other reboots like Jurassic World) is it was literally almost a rehash of 4, except with an even bigger “Death Star”. Rather than going for a unique plot.
I thought they did really well on coming up with new characters, and original stories, I enjoyed most of their arcs and adventures in 7.
The biggest death Star was the biggest letdown of that movie for sure.
But hoo boy, after I watched nine, my irritation at the laziness of a bigger death Star is nearly insignificant compared to some of the plot points in 9.
When I saw the starkiller I rolled my eyes, but I literally could have walked out during 9 from
spoiler
the knife and sith islandI was already bummed out at eight that there was no Luke or character development for finn.
Then all of nine was pretty bad but especially the idiotic plot device mentioned above and a couple other things ruined that trilogy for me and definitely tarnished my enthusiasm for 7
Idk if original stories is something you can give it. The bigger death star is far from the only plot point lifted directly out of episode 4. Seriously, go back and watch ep 4 and ep 7 it's almost shot-for-shot (not really but for some of the story beats it could be).
Maybe what you're saying is that the character back stories are original which, kinda.
Yeah. It didn't seem like a complete waste watching 7. It felt completely redundant, but I enjoyed the Daniel Craig and Yayan Ruhian cameos, which pushed it into a mildly positive territory for me.
What I don't get is why would anyone watch 8, let alone 9 after that. Sounds like some variety of Stockholm Syndrome is at play here. I didn't, and from what I heard it was a smart decision.
I've heard that said, but I think a lot of the accusations of unoriginality between 4 and 7 are mostly because they have similar themes by virtue of belonging to the same series.
"Ugh, John wick found another reluctant health professional to patch trim up after getting shot".
kind of thing.
I think Star wars is pushing really hard to reboot Star wars entirely. 2, so they don't want to do anything new so much as update some of the old stuff with their own characters so that the new movies take over the old ones like the new Canon is taking over the old Canon.
Idk how you could reach that conclusion. Maybe you watched 7 and haven't seen 4 in a while. It's not just your John Wick example. The movie is pretty shameless about lifting the structure of 4, it's not some subtle nuanced technicality.
Watched four through six before checking out 7.
Do you have some examples that you're talking about specifically besides mega death Star?
It seemed pretty clear to me that Disney was trying to remimagine elements of four so that they could have a new series all to themselves, but the movie itself felt new in a lot of ways.
Finn was a huge part of that, there was never a character like him before.
They also didn't have a Kenobi leading them through everything.
It's the Star wars universe so a lot of the themes and elements (spaceships, and overbearing government, manichean forces) are going to be similar, but you had new characters doing different things for different reasons in different situations for most of the movie.
Star Wars is like going to McDonalds and ordering a Big Mac. A lot of people will get that Big Mac and feel nostalgia for when they're young and thought McDonald's was the best restaurant. Even though we all McDonalds is really far from being the best restaurant (we all know that), when you bite into that burger and the nostalgia makes it taste better than it really is.
But it seems foolish to go to McDonalds, order a Big Mac, then getting a Big Mac, then complain about it not being something new and original.
Maybe some people have just grown out of Star Wars, and that's fine. But it seems a lot of people pretend that they aren't action adventure movies designed to sell toys just so they can be disappointed when that's what they get.
I do feel sympathy for George Lucas repeatedly telling people since 1977 that these are movies for children, then he sells it to the ultimate children's company and then people going to see the Disney movies are shocked that it's a fun, light space adventure.
But I knew what I was getting into and I had a very fun time with seven, whereas nine is bad to the point of being insulting to any audience, including a child audience.
I am curious to see if the critical success of Andor, a more gritty Star wars tale, rubs off on the new movies.
Nine has many layers to it. It's the most interesting of all of the Star Wars movies, just isn't appreciated by hot take internet culture that fixates on the nitpicks.
In one of the layers, it has a good message for children that are learning in school that their ancestors did terrible things. You don't have to identify with your ancestors, you can and should identify with the good people in the past. Even those that opposed your ancestors.
Probably don't need to go so far as changing your name because your ancestors did some bad shit, but it's Star Wars, people are always changing their names to signal their alignment.
That's a single layer; choosing your own family was introduced in 1977 and then abandoned in 9 because everyone splits up qnd Rey takes up the name of Skywalker which doesn't have much to do with and goes against her story that it doesn't matter where you come from.
"it's Star Wars, people are always changing their names"
There are hundreds of main characters in these movies and shows and I can't think of any characters that change their names outside of the handful of sith and Rey.
By " people are always changing their names" do you mean the sith and Rey? The four guys required to change their names and the one girl over 50 years of media?
What a tidal wave of change.
"...the most interesting of all of the Star Wars movies, just isn't appreciated by hot take internet culture that fixates on the nitpicks."
This doesn't make any sense, at least with what we've been talking about, themes and main events.
What are you referring to?
Yeah the knife thing was the same as the amulet from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indiana Jones happened to be in the map room at the exact right time of year when the sun would be in the correct alignment to shine a beam to where the Ark was being kept? Why would someone make such an amulet? Like did they know that someone would someday need to know where they stored it and knew the exact day of the year that person would come into the map room with the amulet?
Is Raiders of the Lost Ark a bad movie? Or are we just not supposed to go into an action adventure movie trying to find something wrong with it?
Depends what you mean by bad. Is raiders not enjoyable?
Ppf, I don't think I've ever met anyone who didn't enjoy raiders.
Is it constructed well? God no hahah, it is barely constructed at all. It's like a series of disconnected vignettes.
I don't even think the amulet is as bad as the knife.
It's a valid comparison, but there's so much momentum pushing raiders forward that it seems natural he would get lucky with the amulet as well.
In nine,
spoiler
you're being dragged through 2 hours of zero tension or momentum and then when they arrive at an area that they know the sith are at, instead of the strongest Force character ever using the force to sense what general direction this hideout could be, or scanning for machines or literally anything else, they're like well gee. If it isn't here then it's impossible that we'll ever find it- oh wait, I have this knife that only works from this specific promontory from this specific distance on an area the size of a planet.
Good thing the emperor told them he was back for no reason instead of consolidating his forces and making a plan?
And it turns out that the knife points them, the only characters in an entire galaxy that are a threat to the sith, to an inexplicably accessible and shallow cave on an island super close to shore that someone who has been telegraphing their allegiance to Rey is waiting oh my gosh it was so ridiculous.
You'd have to add a lot of bullshit contrivances to make that amulet scene as insulting to the audience and idiotic as rise of skywalker turned out to be.
I think the strength of the amulet is that they don't explain it too much. There's a feeling of destiny with the amulet, like is nothing else Indiana could have done to get to this point and that's his last resource.
Not so at all with the knife. Not so at all with many things in these movies that could have been accomplished in different, smarter safer ways for the characters or more exciting nail biting ways for the audience.
The specific knife plot could have happened in so many other ways and this way is among the worst.
At this point in the movie,
spoiler
Kylo Ren could have just told her where the island was or she could have intuited it from him because she can literally read mines now and he already told her pretty much point blank multiple times that he's ready to betray empire.
Rey could have developed a force sonar, she has so many new powers and doesn't even need a training montage that would have made perfect sense. She can already sense the sith better than anybody else ever.
The rebels could have scanned the top 10 ft of the apparently otherwise empty planet and found this cave.
Luke's ghost could have pointed her in the right direction and that would have made much more sense.
Almost anything would have made more sense and more importantly, been more cinematically exciting and satisfying for the audience than what they chose to go with.
Nine is a blight.
Raiders is fine. You're not supposed think to hard about why an artifact exists and why it works even when it doesn't make a lot of sense in an action adventure movie. Ideally everything would make perfect sense, but when it doesn't it's no reason to get your panties in a bunch.
They could've accomplished things in Raisers a lot more smarter too. Indy could've just waited until that Nazis dug up the Ark and then stole the truck once it was loaded. Which is exactly what he ended up doing. Would've cut out a lot of the action and adventure by doing it that way. And that's what we want, right? Efficient plot lines which minimizes the action and adventure.
Characters using scanners or fictional magic constantly is boring. And besides, why couldn't a knife that was made by a sorcerer (that had the ability to see the future) have magical properties? Seems you're upset they used one kind of magic instead of a different kind of magic. Odd thing to be upset about when watching a popcorn action adventure movie.
Sure there are a few minor flaws in RoS. But it feels like you went into the movie looking for something wrong with it and it gave you what you wanted. I went into it wanting a fun action adventure movie, and it gave me what wanted. So the movie delivered for both of us, didn't it?
Wow, you get really upset about those movies huh?
That's an interesting take, why don't you want the excitement or adventure in an adventure movie?
I guess if you liked rise of Skywalker, it makes sense that you don't like excitement or adventure in your adventure movies.
You're projecting about this knife thing. You keep making assumptions instead of asking questions and then criticizing your own assumptions.
A few minor flaws? That movie was a train wreck.
Train wreck.
See, you're making assumptions again about what others and then criticizing yourself instead of asking questions.
I'm not upset by neither Raiders of the Lost Ark nor RoS. They have pretty much the same flaws. But whatever, they're action adventure movies.
"A wizard did it" rules apply in both of these movies since magic is real in both of these worlds. And when we're talking about a knife that's canonically made by someone with magic powers... yeah, a wizard did it.
The same flaws? No way.
Raiders defined the successes of its series and genre, nine highlighted and showcased the failures of its own.
That's like comparing a glass of wine to moldy kool-aid, or some verdant garden to a deer tick.
Raiders inspires a zest for adventure and life, nine sucked the vitality right out of both.
Both had a magical artifact that told the hero where to go. The functionality and even the reason for the existence of the artifacts in both don't make a lot of sense. But for some you're fixated on this minor flaw in RoS while imagining it's not a flaw at all in Raiders. It's the same minor flaw, and in neither they aren't worth worrying about.
It's mostly that movies like Raiders doesn't get the same level of scrutiny because nostalgia protects it from the negative internet culture of nitpicking new movies to prove they're bad. When you play that game the prize you win is that you can't enjoy new movies.
I'm not fixated on one artifact. I mentioned one artifact and it's all you've talked about.
So I'm responding to what you keep talking about, the knife.
Which is a major unnecessary fiasco of the film, no matter how many times you say minor.
Since you brought it up again:
Raiders uses an artifact to great effect, are the amulet is necessary irreplaceable and uniquely expressed through the power of the sun on a particular day turning into a laser beam. Very fun, very exciting.
Nine uses a knife whose purpose is completely useless since the island can be found in any number of ways, and when the dull knife is utilized nothing happens except they literally match a shape to another shape that doesn't need to be matched.
It makes me embarrassed for Daisy Ridley just to think that she was put in that position as a decent actor.
Like I said, a glass of wine to moldy Kool-Aid.
The best implementation of something like an artifact versus the worst implementation.
You can ask questions about something other than the knife If you like.
I enjoy tons of new movies. And I can tell you why I enjoy them with the same level of precision and accuracy that I can tell you why mine was so terrible.
Your argument reminds me of a guy I knew who was insisting that NSync will be remembered as culturally as important as the Beatles.
This desperate equivocation of two completely different groups.
You're trying to ignore all of the context and details of the movie and insist they're both just "magic" "adventure" movies.
Those are barely accurate descriptors of the theme of the movie and have no bearing on the quality of the movie itself.
And Indy happened to be there on that day? Odds are he'd have to wait months before things were in alignment. Also why did someone ever come up with this convoluted mechanism to show which building the Ark was in? Like were they planning on their civilization someday ending and there would someday be a scenario where it needed to be kept a secret... but not that secret, so that a hero could find it while bad people wouldn't.
Also who is even maintaining the various booby traps in the places Indy goes? Why design a building to collapse if someone takes an artifiact?
There are so many things in an action adventure movie that exist simply for there to be fun action scenes. You're thinking Raiders is fine (which it is) maybe because you didn't watch it looking for flaws. Maybe because you were a kid when watching it, or maybe because the internet wasn't telling you that you were supposed to hate the movie.
RoS is simply consistent with movies from a different era. An era when people just enjoyed movies for what they were instead of going to movies pretending to be a bitter internet critic. All of the Star Wars Episodes are like movies from another era, it's kinda it's thing, the whole Episode thing is from 1930s Flash Gordon movies after all.
A real criticism of the knife thing could be that's it's unoriginal, since it is the same thing as the amulet from Raiders of the Lost Ark. In fact the early part of the movie is basically an Indiana Jones movie but in Star Wars. But since I like both Indiana Jones and Star Wars, and I don't think action adventure movies need to be 100% original, it was enjoyable for me.
Again, raiders did adventure right and nine failed the genre utterly.
The amulet is a great example.
It's a divine object based on divine mythology, which is all about specific moments and specific ordained destinies , so Indy receives the amulet from the other main character who is as much of a badass as he is and then discovering and entering the map room on the right day at the right time makes sense within the context of the movie.
It fits in with the theme of the movie and is very exciting, as an adventure movie should be.
Rey, having received the dagger from nobody important , standing on a random spot for no reason after nothing interesting has happened in the movie, notices the absurdly shaped dagger matches the island, but only from her perspective from exactly the spot she is randomly standing among the entire surface of the Moon.
Nothing exciting happens, nothing momentous, they all kind of shrug and say "oh that's it."
Raiders did it well, India frantic with excitement, and it makes sense within the context of the movie, nine failed utterly, made it boring and nobody cares even inside the movie.
As for your other questions
" Who maintains the traps?"
"'Why are the temples so convoluted?"
"Why design a building to collapse after the treasure is stolen?"
There is one answer to all three of those questions: to protect the sacred from the profane.
Whoever designed the temple was protecting a priceless artifact. The temples are convoluted to protect the priceless artifact. The traps were designed well to be maintenance free so that they would protect the artifact. The building is designed to collapse to protect the artifact from being stolen.
"You're thinking Raiders is fine (which it is) maybe because you didn't watch it looking for flaws"
The first thing I mentioned to you when you brought up raiders was that raiders does not make sense and has a bunch of plot holes, but is very exciting and works within its own story.
The problem with nine is that it is very boring and doesn't work within its own story.
It's enjoyable for you, enjoy it.
That does not make it a well-crafted or exciting adventure movie.
You keep saying that an audience member just has to ignore all of the elements in nine that are not good and then you'll enjoy the movie.
You don't need to ignore anything in raiders, it's a fun movie despite its flaws that it incorporates into its story seamlessly so that you barely noticed them.
Enjoy your movie, but so far you've made zero valid points trying to equivocate the success of raiders and the failure of nine.
Never watched 9 either. Or 3. Also, fuck Disney.
Huh. I recommend 3, only because it's pretty fun. It's not good, but it's fun.
Three is genuinely the best of the prequels by a pretty big margin (though it still suffers a bit from prequel-itis). Definitely with a watch though IMO.
My reaction upon leaving the theater was "Wow! They did Star Wars almost better than Star Wars!"
In the days that followed, the more I thought about the movie, the less I liked it in retrospect. I was hoping for a continuation of the saga, not "Star Wars: The Remake".
The bigger Death Star was worth it for the Han Solo line "so, it's big... you can always blow those things up." I'm there to see Han Solo giving no fucks, and the movie delivered.
The Force Awakens is pretty meh itself, but we were not prepared for what was coming. It feels as foreboding as rewatching Game of Thrones S5 or S6 and knowing that the deteriorating writing will only get worse.
I'm very glad I never got into the game of thrones TV show.
I read the books, but I couldn't even handle the first season of the TV show.
Kind of feels the same way as never having joined titter and watching it circling the drain now.
I opted out of GoT after trying to watch S1 too. I could tell it just wasn’t my cup of tea.
Then around season 5 the hype got so intense that I caved. Ended up binging seasons 1-5. And I have to say…even despite seasons 7 and 8 (and somewhat season 6) it was worth the watch. When it was good, it was really good.
I do think that bingeing seasons 1-5 really highlighted how bad the writing had gotten even in season 6. I tried to warn my friends that the outlook was not good but I wasn’t able to convince them. Some of them wouldn’t even admit it until season 8. Some as late as the last handful of episodes. But they all eventually came around.
That's good to hear. I have given it a second watch some years back, but couldn't get through The first season again, but it was such a phenomenon I imagine I'll try again at some point
How? They still aren't written yet.
Game of thrones actually came out in 1996.
The first five books were already written and published by the time the TV show started.
The fifth one was published just a few months after that first season of the TV show.
They were being cheeky, cause the author is well into a decade+ writing the 2nd to last novel in the series.
I think most people have accepted at least the final book will never happen, that dudes not living the healthiest life right now anyways.
Oh, haha. I've had to explain it before to people who only know the TV show, my bad
No dramas, I was being cheeky. I've also read the books. I was pleasantly surprised with how well the show portrayed the books (merging of some characters, but expected). Until a point...
Got it, thanks.
I actually had a conversation with someone who had seen the promos for game of thrones season 1 or heard about it somewhere, and we had this huge conversation because I had just finished reading the books and they didn't even know there was a book series.
After trying the first season a couple times and not getting into it, I didn't really follow it so I'm not sure if most viewers even know that it's based on a book series.
I have seen a lot of articles about Martin not publishing any new books though?
I am going to give the show a third try eventually, but I just liked it the second time as much as the first for how poorly I thought the books were being adapted.
It's good to hear that you enjoyed it, maybe I was just too close to the books still. The last time I watched game of thrones was maybe 5 years ago.
Hopefully my brain has decayed enough to give it another shot.
But then everybody hates the last two seasons with a passion, right? And that's like 30% of the show?
Mmm.
Basically once the show outpaced the books it went to shit.
If you didn't like the first season, maybe just jump in at season two for your next watch?
I was thinking the same thing now that a few people have extolled the virtues of the middle seasons.
I'm probably going to do that. Just jump into season 2.
I really do like starting from the beginning of something, but season one is such a letdown I think I'm not going to get past the hump until I find out what it is everybody likes about the TV show specifically.
I thought the show did very well until they ran out of material to adapt and started having to improvise. The showrunners had a great talent for putting things on the screen, but they couldn't write their way out of a paper bag.
(disclaimer, I only watched the first few seasons, plus a couple of episodes in S8 when a friend was organizing watch parties)
Nah, the show was really, really good. I just choose to forget large portions of the last 3 seasons.
Okay. That's a huge part of the show though.
I am glad so many people are still defending it, there must be something to it
I was told not to watch the last season of GoT, and never did.
No regrets so far.
The more I've watched GoT the more I wish they'd have adapted Kharkanas instead. I know the third book isn't out yet but that didn't seem to stop GoT.
It was meh. It's just that on the internet everything is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever, there can't be anything in between. It's hard to monetize a "meh" reaction, so the influencers (and those easily influenced) say it's it's terrible. But it was meh.
I dunno, I've talked to some sane, mostly disconnected people IRL who didn't like it either.
But on the other hand, I've seen the other side of that coin, where a fandom decides to trash something good, so I suppose I can see that.
Don't get me wrong it wasn't great or anything. It was based on the notes of George RR Martin, and you really feel it. Wasn't all that fleshed out. The long night ended up being a slightly longer than average night.
I think a lot of the hatred comes from people who had their predictions about what would happen and still thought there was something to the "prince of light" (or whatever) prophecy even after the Stanis plotline. But nope, the powerful people in Game of Thrones were basically all just assholes and there wasn't anything all that special about anyone. The show famous for doing the unexpected ended by doing unexpected things and people hated it.
I think the issue was mostly how lazy and simplistic everything was. Sure, it was unpredictable, but just doing unpredictable things without any buildup is not a good way to tell a story. Bran becoming King for example is an unexpected twist, but the setup is nonexistent and the reasoning is dumb. The Long Night only lasting about an hour was a massive anticlimax for one of the main conflicts (it’s almost certainly not going to be that short in the books). Most of the characters’ endings were predictable, but some were way too sudden to be believable; Dany’s random fall to madness is particularly bad. They also failed to use interesting plotlines in a meaningful way; Jon being the true heir to the throne is so utterly pointless that it literally could be cut from the show and nothing would change, for example. It doesn’t cause conflict at all beyond an incredibly poorly executed plotline with Varys that goes nowhere. Characters also became incredibly stupid and some lost any traits that made them interesting (Jon in particular is painfully generic by the end). It essentially went from a brilliant, complex show to trite people only watched for the action and/or to see what happened to the characters. The worst part to me is that people endlessly went on about it “not having a happy ending”, but everyone other than Dany, Jon and Grey Worm got a happy ending. The final few seasons also have utterly awful writing, especially dialogue. There’s a video on YouTube where someone edited the final episode to have no dialogue at all, and it’s about 20-40 minutes of footage with nothing happening.
Daenerys had to always be talked out of solving problems with Dragonfire. If she didn't die, it wouldn't be an ending because we'd be left with a question about whether or not she might someday go Mad Queen.
The point of the show is that it's fairly arbitrary who sits on the throne. Robert Baratheon because he won a rebellion, Joffrey because he was supposedly the son of the King (but really wasn't) his brother because Joffrey was poisoned, then their mother because... well she was an important person that was in the capital. Big army diplomacy, claims based on blood relations to dead people who were previously the monarch, fast army diplomacy... that's basically a monarchy in a nutshell. It's really the advisors that run everything so why does it matter who sits on a fancy throne?
So it's fitting that it ends with someone on the throne being arbitrary, it's ultimately what a monarchy is, just some arbitrary person that people agree is the person that site on the throne. And it was the point of the story. It's all just a silly game the powerful play while the peasants die for because of it.
None of the decisions were bad, it was just rushed and clumsy. Just people didn't pay a lot of attention to the fact that Daenerys was using dragonfire to solve her problems more and more. Didn't pay attention to the fact that who's on the throne doesn't much matter, the most important thing is that people agree on whoever it is. Didn't pay attention to the fact that the prophecy was just some bullshit that made Stanis do horrible things (like burning people alive) and didn't notice Daenerys was going down the same path I guess they thought she was the real chosen one. People just didn't pay attention to what the point of the story was, and were disappointed that there was never a real Prince of Light, just a bunch of assholes getting a lot of people killed for their petty game of thrones.