Star Wars: Episode VIII (The Last Jedi) - SPOILERS POSSIBLE*

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by MLutthans, Nov 10, 2015.

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  1. Daniel Plainview

    Daniel Plainview God's Lonely Man

    Plus they insinuated she was on the wrong side of things which made her completely unsympathetic and likable until Leia woke the hell up and straightened everything out (a weak plot device to send Finn and Rosie on a fool's errand).
     
  2. Bobby Buckshot

    Bobby Buckshot Heavy on the grease please

    Location:
    Southeastern US
    Awesome idea. I agree that "Action" Ackbar deserved better.
     
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  3. Daniel Plainview

    Daniel Plainview God's Lonely Man

    Ooooow, I smell a spin-off film!
     
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  4. bferr1

    bferr1 Forum Resident

    Location:
    MA
    Poe thought he was in line for the promotion, and he didn't get it because of his unauthorized military action which brought no tactical improvement to the Resistance's situation. I think he would have been fine being passed over for Ackbar; being passed over for a relative unknown was too much for his ego to bear.
     
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  5. marblesmike

    marblesmike Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pennsylvania
    I know a group had a troll campaign to skew scores and I'm sure they had an impact on the score. How much, I don't know. I just didn't think that was the only reason scores were low and the common theme that those people are MOST of the people who didn't like the film. I think it was cited above that the audience score was less than 50%? Anyways, for any of us to guess the exact amount of impact they had is just clutching at straws, since none of us know how many scores were submitted this way.

    Then I postulated that internet trolls aren't the only ones to skew scores, but I didn't realize this was to become a thesis paper where I'm supposed to cite surveys or statistics. I was just sharing my opinion. Chalk it up to my cynical worldview perhaps.

    I'm not engaging anymore. Go back and read my posts in this thread and if you feel the need to continue this tit for tat then PM me. I'm not going to continue to clog this thread up with what is turning into a personal argument over what I'm now assuming was likely a misunderstanding.
     
  6. bferr1

    bferr1 Forum Resident

    Location:
    MA
  7. delmonaco

    delmonaco Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sofia, Bulgaria
    My point was that if there's a major manipulation of the scores caused by alt right or whatever you call it, there's no logic this to affect mainly TLJ. See the facts;

    Rotten Tomatoes:

    TFA – critics: 93% / audience: 88%

    Rogue One – critics: 85% / audience: 87%

    TLJ – critics: 91% / audience: 47% (shockingly big difference between critics and audience)

    (“Black Panther”, that was given as the prime and most extreme example for audience score manipulation on behalf of "alt right", shows:

    critics: 96% / audience: 79 % (which is nowhere near to TLJ critics/audience ratio.


    IMDB:

    TFA – 8.0

    Rogue One – 7,8

    TLJ – 7,4 (lowest score of the 3)


    Metacritic:

    TFA – critics: 81% / audience: 6,9

    Rogue One – critics: 65% / audience: 7,6

    TLJ – critics: 85% / audience: 4,6 (highest critic score / lowest audience score)


    So we either have to agree that the scores of the three main and most legit sites are completely useless and they have to be shut down, or to accept that the majority of the fans simply don't like TLJ, and this majority is not dominated by racists, male chauvinists etc, because these ("alt-right") people scores have to affect equally all these movies, and not just TLJ.
     
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  8. CraigBic

    CraigBic Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Zealand
    Such sites are an amalgamation of the opinions of critics, public polling around these sites isn't what I would call a reliable barometer and as far as I could tell no one gave a rats ass about the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes until The Last Jedi came along. If you like the film then it's look at the 91% rating it has 96% with top critics. If you didn't like it you screamed bloody murder and said, "But the audience rating is really low". Your binary view that they are either perfect or need to be shut down is a little silly. Perhaps the majority of upset fans simply chose to write poor reviews because they were annoyed that the critics didn't agree with them. You can say what you like but alt right opinions are not or at least do not seem to be uncommon in those Rotten Tomatoes reviews. The negativity and their writing certainly seems to suggest it, a few reviews were just bragging about how it's not one of the 100 best selling home movies in the USA something which as it happens isn't even true! It's even number 3, 7 and 8 on Amazon at the moment as well as number 9 on the highest grossing of all time.
    But, whatever I guess because as Jones R put it "TLJ is deliberately provocative and awfully smart-assed where it had no need to be."
     
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  9. delmonaco

    delmonaco Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sofia, Bulgaria
    You seems to ignore the essence of what I wrote - why, if potentially all these movies are "alt-right" targets, only one of them (TLJ) shows such a low audience score and such a vast difference between critics and audience score? Speaking of myself, the scores match my own opinion about these movies - I was thinking that TFA is ok, kind a original SW spin-off bringing some nostalgia and setting some new potentially interesting story lines and characters, and very well made, if not very original; as a movie, I liked Rogue One better - it was again very well made, IMO, and nicely filled one plot hole from the original SW; and my opinion about TLJ is that it's visually stunning, but it's extremely hollow and weak as a story. So to me personally these audience scores looks quite legit.
     
  10. bferr1

    bferr1 Forum Resident

    Location:
    MA
    Unless intentionally driving down audience scores was a brand-new tactic deployed in 2017 because the boycott effort of 2016 was a bust. The mastermind behind the score manipulation even said he had just learned how to use bots.
     
    Last edited: Apr 17, 2018
  11. delmonaco

    delmonaco Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sofia, Bulgaria
    Possibly.

    Again – I don’t know how exactly sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic works, but if they offer audience rating section, they must make sure that this function is not corrupted and so easily manipulated. If they are unable to do this, perhaps they have to get rid of this option at least until they find a way to sort it out. TLJ is an important movie, a big box office success, so it couldn’t go under the radar if Rotten Tomatoes perform some basic monitoring of what’s going on at their platform. So by my logic, if they spot such a great and strange difference in critic vs audience rating for a movie that’s made for the general mass audience, kids included (it’s not some over the top intellectual independent film that in theory could have 100 pct critic vs 0 pct audience rating), they have to address and investigate this issue in order to keep their credibility.
     
  12. bferr1

    bferr1 Forum Resident

    Location:
    MA
    I agree. But not unlike Facebook, Rotten Tomatoes claims "there's nothing to see here, move along." Look how well that's turned out for Facebook, though. The problem is that audience score manipulation doesn't quite rise to the same level as alleged tampering by foreign adversaries during a major election....
     
    Last edited: Apr 17, 2018
  13. bferr1

    bferr1 Forum Resident

    Location:
    MA
    One more point for you to consider: The effort to undermine Black Panther's audience score was thwarted before the movie ever opened. That alt-right mastermind's anti-Disney group called for a similar attack on audience scores, and the group was coordinating its efforts and trying to mobilize through Twitter... until its account was closed. So, the fact that this group had such a brief window to operate between The Last Jedi and Black Panther, and the fact that The Last Jedi's score is such an aberration as you've demonstrated, shows that it must have had some success in rigging TLJ's RT audience score.
     
    Last edited: Apr 17, 2018
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  14. daglesj

    daglesj Forum Resident

    Location:
    Norfolk, UK
    Funnily enough I was round a customer's on Friday and a Blu-Ray of TLJ was sitting on her coffee table.

    Apparently she and her family are massive Star Wars fans and had missed TLJ at the cinema due to other commitments. They were going to all watch it over the weekend.

    I was back there yesterday, so I asked "How was TLJ?"

    Her reply?

    "Hmmm...mixed!"
     
  15. delmonaco

    delmonaco Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sofia, Bulgaria
    You had to ask her - shaken or stirred? :)
     
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  16. Godolphin

    Godolphin Forum Resident

    Location:
    Ireland
    I agree with this. If one ignores the politics beneath the surface and the awkwardly clumsy plot I can't help but feel you are left with something completely hollow. A film that fails on all levels to connect to on an emotional level. If you think about it too much it falls apart rather rapidly.

    The ending is also bizarre. Are we watching the end of a saga or a sequel?
     
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  17. Lownote30

    Lownote30 Bass Clef Addict

    Location:
    Nashville, TN, USA
    Hopefully we watched something J.J. Abrams can fix in some way. At least the parts that weren't set in stone. He left Johnson all kinds of open plot points to work with, but then Johnson either didn't address them, or treated them somewhat poorly. We'll see if Abrams can get creative and undo some of the damage in ep. IX.
     
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  18. David Campbell

    David Campbell Forum Resident

    Location:
    Luray, Virginia
    Honestly? I hope JJ Abrams doesn't undo what Johnson did in this movie to " fix" it all, because there's nothing that needs to be " fixed".


    The only real problems I have with TLJ outside of some iffy execution of some ideas and questionable editing choices, was no sign of the Knights of Ren and maybe we should have learned a little bit more about Snoke. But the rest? Im glad Johnson took Snoke away so we don't end up with a Return of the Jedi retread for IX, and I'm glad Johnson didn't do the expected easy thing with Rey and Luke and made them blood relatives because ' that's the way it should be' .

    I didn't need Rey revealed to be a Skywalker, Solo or a Kenobi, and I didn't need Luke be the ultimate Gary Stu running around destroying stuff with the Force and being " bad ass" for the sake of fan service. I know a lot of people ( including myself) made the mistake of going " oh Rey HAS to be a Skywalker and Snoke MUST be Plageous " and coming up with theories to make that work...But that would have been utterly boring and predictable.

    Of course, that probably won't stop Abrams from trying to cater to the fans and suddenly in IX we find out retroactively that Luke is still alive and he shows up to tell Rey that he is indeed her father and Mara Jade is her mother and that Darth Plageous was indeed Snoke and also is alive and the climax will somehow involve have Luke crashing Fleets of First Order ships by snapping his fingers.

    I pray im wrong and we get something as Original, but maybe better realized in certain respects, as The Last Jedi.
     
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  19. delmonaco

    delmonaco Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sofia, Bulgaria
    I wonder if the sole fact that TLJ doesn’t meet most of the fans expectations and theories is enough this movie to be labeled as very original. Originality just for the sake of being original is quite easy, silly and immature. Being original and consistent is completely different story, and it’s not easy to achieve (and IMO this wasn’t achieved by Rian Johnson).
     
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  20. Jim B.

    Jim B. Senior Member

    Location:
    UK
    I agree, the idea that JJ has to fix anything is laughable. I only hope JJ continues to tread new ground and follows Johnson's lead rather than reverts back to type and remakes Return of the Jedi or something. I don't find JJ very inspired or original and he tends to just recycle the past. Like TFA when it was released but it's like his Star Trek reboot - did a job but no-one will be talking about it in 10 years time.

    It will be a real sell-out if they suddenly announce Rey is from 'royal blood' or whatever. Firstly it's not actually Kylo who tells her that her parents were nobody, he says that she has always known this and that's why she starts crying and he is just confirming what she has always known.

    The bare minimum I expect from JJ is that he keeps Luke dead and that Rey's origin isn't altered.
     
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  21. CraigBic

    CraigBic Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Zealand
    I'm sure JJ has something interesting in mind, after all his movie will finish a trilogy rather than tee one off. I don't think it would be bad to bring back Luke on some level. Perhaps people have gotten it into their minds that fading out is how people die in Star Wars but really they are becoming one with the force or whatever. I suspect Luke could make a return to give some pearls of wisdom at the very least though I do think it would be interesting if they could work Obi Wan into the movie. Rey doesn't know the Alec Guinness version so you could reasonably have McGregor in the movie. Really it depends on what they choose to do and how long after The Last Jedi Episode 9 is set. The characters are after all starting from scratch and how well will Kylo Ren transition into ruling the galaxy. Will the First Order fall in line? Or will there be devisions in the ranks? Interesting stuff for them to work with.
     
  22. delmonaco

    delmonaco Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sofia, Bulgaria
    IMO, Rey’s origins cannot be altered, because they are still unclear. What happened between Kylo and Rey could be just a mind-duel, with Rey winning by hiding the truth (just one possibility). If that’s not the case, still, no one is “nobody” – she definitely has some background story (everyone has), and I believe that in the final episode this story must be revealed.

    I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that she’s “royal blood”, and this will make sense, because the premise for these last 3 episodes is that they conclude the “Skywalker” saga. If Rey is not connected in any way to the Skywalker lineage, this would establish Kylo as the sole main character of this last trilogy, and Rey’s character will not be of great importance considering the whole 9 episodes entity, dedicated to Skywalkers. I cannot see the logic behind establishing Rey character as the main hero of the first two episodes of this last chapter, and at the very end to downgrade her, and not to connect her somehow with what happened in the previous trilogies.
     
  23. lambfan68

    lambfan68 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Minnesota
    Rey doesn't have to be a Skywalker or be of "royal blood" to be a "main" character. She's clearly a character of great importance and is the hero of this trilogy. She's very much connected to the Skywalker saga. She bonded with Han and saw him as a father figure. She was trained by Luke. She is working with Leia in the Resistance. She has an evolving connection to Kylo that is still to be resolved. If anything she's the heir to the Skywalker dynasty in a symbolic sense.
     
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  24. Jim B.

    Jim B. Senior Member

    Location:
    UK
    Sorry I think that's very flawed logic. Rey is in no way 'downgraded' because she is not a Skywalker. Just because Kylo is the last Skywalker about does not establish him as the sole main character. I just don't understand how you are looking at this in such a distorted way.

    This whole franchise can't just be about one family as that is dumb and limiting. They have introduced new characters, like Poe, Finn and Rey, that have nothing to do with the Skywalkers. Frankly it's been done to death and is getting boring now. Let's move on.

    They are moving on, try and move on with them instead of being stuck in the past.
     
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  25. delmonaco

    delmonaco Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sofia, Bulgaria
    I'm not talking about the whole franchise, but for the 9 episode saga in particular. According to Disney/Lucasfilm, the episodes 7, 8 and 9 are the final three installments of the "Skywalker" saga, with no further episodes. Everything else they do or would do with the franchise (the eventual new Rian Johnson trilogy, the Story movies, the animations and whatever comes in the future) is set in the SW universe, without Skywalkers as the main theme. If you ask about my personal opinion - I don't think that we needed another 3 episodes of Skywalker story, so if there's a distortion, it's not in my mind.
     
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