+1 on The Last Jedi being a top tier Star Wars film.
Whenever I ask anyone who doesn't like the film why that is, they either can't give a coherent answer or said answer boils down to:
1) women = bad
2) Luke isn't mowing stormtroopers down with his green lightsaber
3) nonsensical stuff like "bombs don't drop in space" (cough*Y-wings since 1977*cough) or "fuel shouldn't matter in Star Wars" or RLM told me not to like it.
Mostly point 2 tbf. All whilst completely missing his heroic actions at the end inspiring an entire galaxy to rise up.
Ive seen all those criticisms too. Personally, I like Luke’s actions and arc. I like that they are both strong and show off both immense psychic/force strength but also an effortless misleading of Ren’s simplistic obsession with aggression and simplistic power and domination, he plays him like a fiddle when it’s
Ren that wants a massively impactful lightsaber fight with one of them skewered at the end, in an IP full of such fights. That’s why I think some angry online men dislike that scene, as it twists the concept of a one-on-one duel between men that the whole town has to watch into a clever distraction of blinkered, childish rage so important stuff can happen. But the film is still full of silly stuff. I mean, sure, it’s Star Wars, it’s space fantasy. But then I’ve criticised stuff on various other Star Wars films too. None of them are immune to it.
Big films like Star Wars and Marvel are full of bombastic stuff that hits right and stuff that just doesn’t (for any individual viewer). That’s OK, the issue is that any attempt to discuss any individual element is tainted by dogwhistles from the Alt Right that have turned it all into easily copy-pasted arguments. I’m not a huge fan of that bit in Endgame where all the superheroes who are women get a shot of ‘he’ll have help!’ so Spider-Man can get the thingy from point A to point B, as they could have just shown these characters doing all the cool stuff they do immediately afterwards instead. But it’s a single shot I thought was a bit cringe in a two hour fantasy film, where stuff like Black Widow holding everyone together in the preceding one and Captain Marvel whacking a capital ship were way cooler. ‘Show, don’t tell’, I guess, was my criticism of that shot, but if I were to defend it, I’d concede that the concept of a splash panel to make a dramatic story point with attached dialogue or cover art of team shots has a fine tradition in comics, so I see where the visual idea came from.
But the whole discussion, like Star Wars, is so tainted that discussing individual elements with nuance and context is hard without either the for-and-against being listed as a series of ready-made bullet points traded around by chuds. I’d like us to be able to discuss media on Fami in good faith without that, or the idea that the biggest fantasy/sci-fi films on the planet are beyond criticism because the alt-right gets to turn everything into a parroted laundry list of points for whatever dumbass reasons.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24869170/image002.jpg)
so get ready for a glut of remasters for even more cynical reasons than the video game industry.
