The codebreaker/casino arc in The Last Jedi
I have so many complaints about that movie but THIS is number one. The entire thing is a complete waste of time, all set about because Poe got turned into an insubordinate, hotheaded moron. Doesn’t help that Holdo has a perfectly functional plan she won’t share with anyone instead preferring to let them believe they’re all going to die, but frankly the movie is just a series of stupid, terrible decisions in a row from every character and above all, the director.
Can you tell I hate this movie?
The hyperspace collision as a weapon is worldbreaking.
If that works in the Star Wars universe, in A New Hope, why didn’t the Rebellion just get large asteroids and attach hyperspace engines to them and aim them at the Death Star. Asteroids traveling at hyperspace speeds, especially hundreds of them would be unstoppable and not a single Rebel life would have been in danger.
Poe got turned into an insubordinate, hotheaded moron.
This made no sense to me. Poe, in the Last Jedi, acts completely different that Poe in the prior movie where he was calm, collected and rational. If they wanted a character to be hotheaded, introduce a new character.
Forget the rebels, why build the death star(s) in the first place?
It’s easier, faster, and waaaaay more effective to just send a few dozen small ships throughout the galaxy with an extra hyperdrive or two to be ready to blow up any planet with some space junk. Any time. Any place. No centralized base for the rebels to stop.
Agreed on both points. Poe was done dirty, the Holdo Maneuver is OP af, and the entire movie was designed to show off and put the director’s personal stamp on the franchise more than it was attempting to respect the lore and its audience.
Not to be that guy but I’m still complaining about the silent space scene. The Last Jedi was the 10th movie in the franchise (12th if you count the animated movies and 13th if you count the made for tv Ewok movie) and it was the first time there was no roar of engines, no sounds of weapons fire, the sound effect of jumping to hyperspace didn’t even play. Star Wars isn’t 2001. It’s not set in our universe. In the Star Wars universe sound waves travel through space.
Be that guy! Part of being part of a storied franchise is staying in your lane. TLJ deliberately went out of its way to set itself apart, which is NOT how you’re supposed to do it.
The trilogy would’ve been much better if either director had done all 3. Either J.J. Abrams with a fun nostalgic return to form, or Rian Johnson with a fresh new take. The whiplash from them fighting with each other over the direction of the plot just ended up being a huge mess. I’m pretty surprised they weren’t just told what the plot was going to be, kind of seems like a screwup by whoever handled that.
I still have no idea what Snoke’s role was. F Rian Johnson.
He just needs to stick to Knives Out and stay away from other franchises.
If I had the chance to make edits to the script, I’d have done the following:
- Replace the animals in the racing with podracers
- Have the hacker guy drop the dreadnought’s shields for a moment to permit the Holdo manoeuvre
The podracer stuff is basically just fanservice, but it’s very minor and not adding any more distractions than were already there, so I think that’s fine
The hacker does have a motivation to ensure the empire doesn’t get a clean win. He profits from the war. He wants both sides to struggle. Doing this just as he leaves gives him an actual role beyond betraying Finn and Rose, makes sense for his motivations, and also explains why hyperspeed ramming doesn’t usually work in Star Wars
These are good changes. Also I would suggest that they should have switched it to the Leia maneuver instead of Holdo, have her use the force to put Holdo to sleep or something to save her life. If I remember correctly Carrie Fisher had passed away while it was still in post production?
Ahh, I forgot about that. I think they should have just committed to having Kylo Ren kill her. He pulled the trigger, after all, the intent was there.
I liked Holdo as a character. I believe she was meant to come across as overbearing and arrogant because part of her role was to teach Poe that his recklessness was doing as much harm as good. He had to learn to work with other people, and Holdo was the one to show him that. She had to be (initially) unlikeable so that Poe would chafe against her command
More precisely: Anything in The Last Jedi
In episode 17, when Commander Taggart is about to escape the neutron field in the omega-13, he used the auxiliary of deck B… But in the next episode, the schematic shows that deck has been totally vaporized. I was just wondering, do you think that’s a continuity error, or do you think there’s a justifiable reason for it?
You are our last hope.
This feels like a murderbot reference, but I haven’t read them all
Never give up, never surrender
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The whole last season of GOT.
Just rewarched on a TV in a background and it’s so bad. I thought maybe given some time it would clear up a bit as GOT hype died down but it’s just awful, can’t believe the actors managed to keep a straight face.
You can just watch the Pitch Meeting next time. Shorter and internally consistent.
It’s incomprehensibly bad. The later seasons ahead of the books all had their problems, but the last one is just…
It’s completely lost on me how something like that can happen to such a big production. GoT was the hottest pop culture shit for years but after season eight, we just collectively stopped talking about it.
In Prometheus at the start… right until the very end.
“Hey, alien planet we’ve never been on before. Let’s take our helmets off.”
“Hey our map guy got LOST inside an underground tunnel and tried to pet an alien snake and now he’s infected.”
“This medical machine is configured for men. Caesarian mode is on the left.”
I call the movie Fuckwits In Space for these and many more reasons.
Expecting humans in a sci-fi monster movie not to be cocky before their sudden yet inevitable demise is kind of cheating.
I don’t understand the last point.
PS I really really like Prometheus, so I’m biased
I liked it’s world-building and greater lore implications for the Aliens universe, but I can still admit it has flaws and pacing issues
I will never stop calling any scene where an object is moving towards people and they run directly away from it while it’s gaining on them as “the Prometheus school of running away.” This was only slightly less stupid than trying to outrun a train…on the tracks.
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Ant-Man
spoiler
The first Ant Man had this rule where any objects that are shrunk will stay as the weight they originally were. Yet Hank Pym carries around a shrunken tank on a keychain! Scandalous!
One can surmise it’s actually a life-sized model kit tank made out of cheap plastic, akin to how it works in Ground Defense Force! Mao-Chan.
But it drove through a concrete wall!
It’s a really well made toy tank?
Or a very badly made wall…
Tofu dreg construction, perhaps.
Wrll there is also a scene in one of the movies where a plastic thomas the tank engine toy gets huge and crushes a police car. The toy that should jot weigh more than 200g crushes a car …
I think one of the theories is that Hank doesn’t actually know how Pym particles work and it’s basically magic. Because if you watch it keeping weight in mind none of it makes sense.
Did they explain why in endgame a pym particles vial is only used once per person? While in other ant-man movies a vial of pym particles can be used multiple times.
Yes, they didn’t have enough left because Hank Pym was dusted.
Remember when Scott was about to test the time machine? They have 2 vials to use. He accidentally shrunk himself and he said they only have 1 left for the test. The 2 vials are full before they used it. He used a full vial of pym particles just to shrink down.
Because they have to shrink down to the quantum realm and come back. It uses more. It’s also never made clear how many particles are in the vials or if they’re full or how many a normal shrinking takes. But it is established multiple times that they have a limited supply and only enough to the job. Also, it’s a comic book movie.
didn’t he “refine/improve” the process or something?
Comic book movies are cheating at this game.
Last Jedi:
Leia gives Rey a hand held tracking device and tells her that with it she will be able to find them wherever they go.
In THE SAME SCENE, they come out of Hyperspace followed by the First Order and claim it’s impossible to have followed them.
The tracking plot point is not mentioned again.
(p.s. A similar tracker was placed on board the Falcon in the OG Star Wars to lead the Death Star to the rebel base on Yavin 4).
Last Jedi
That’s cheating, none of that movie made any sense whatsoever.
The plot point is that you cannot be tracked while in hyperspace. Something the first order was able to do so they could follow them to their destination instead of waiting until they are out of hyperspace to pursue them.Trackers are well established in the universe otherwise. They just only work outside of hyperspace.
Last Jedi was so angering that it killed all desire I had for watching rise of Skywalker, rise was the only star wars movie I’ve ever skipped, and still haven’t watched.
When instead of sacrificing ackbar, they kill him in the background and we’re supposed to care about the sacrifice of this random purple haired woman we’ve never ever met before and just shows up to die? Should have been ackbar or Leia or even wedge. And one thing I liked about TFA was the budding relationship between Rey and Finn, they had great chemistry. Then suddenly you separate them for the whole second movie, add a second love interest that’s awful and for some reason Rey likes Kylo? The fuck??
I feel really bad for Rise of Skywalker, it was really in an impossible position.
First, Last Jedi painted them into a fucking corner. It was like nobody told Johnson he was making the middle part of a trilogy.
Second, what little structure the trilogy had was 7 was about Solo, 8 was about Luke, and 9 would have been about Leia, but then Carrie Fisher up and died. :(
They had to really scramble on the 3rd one and losing the original writer/director didn’t help. Abrams had to come in after 8 shit the bed and Fisher died and tried to make the best of it…
The twist ending of Now You See Me. Just stupid.
have you seen the sequel? barf
Nope. Nothing about the original made me want to see more of it.
In Memento
Spoiler about Clothing
He just puts on someone else’s expensive tailored suit, and it magically re-tailors itself to fit him perfectly.
That’s not how fabric or thread works. And it was deeply disorienting in a film that is otherwise careful to ensure that details like that matter and are reasonable.
What? The suit clearly does not fit him. The dead man is bigger than him, so it’s over sized. It’s even mentioned by multiple characters that it doesn’t quite fit.
The suit clearly does not fit him.
You and I remember this film very differently. I could swear it was excellently tailored suit in a number of really close up shots, early in the film. To the point where I thought the film was telling me
A lie that Memento seemed to be telling the audience
“This is absolutely his suit. Look how well it fits. Look how expensive it is. There’s no way that what is happening here is as simple as he took this off of a dead mobster.”
That suit had absolutely been tailored to his body. I understand that actors want to look great, and so I figure they let him wear a suit that fit for most of the film.
After the reveal
Memento Spoiler
that it’s not his suit,
they do have some lines about it not fitting, which felt very dishonest, after the earlier close-ups.
I would have been satisfied with a throw away line of dialogue about the suit not fitting before the reveal. I would have laughed at it (the suit clearly fits great in almost every scene), but it at least would have made the reveal cool instead of silly.
I would have also settled for (and I expected) a scene where he gets the suit trailored properly. But if I recall, there was no reasonable way to fit such a scene. Which I get. I’m not saying this film would have been better by addressing my pedantic complaint.
I’m not really mad that actors get to wear clothes that fit - it was just a stand out moment in an otherwise seamless (pun absolutely intended) film.
ever see cowboys vs aliens? Daniel Craig puts on a dead cowboys clothes and it fits like it was painted on lol
Lol. I noticed that too. But I expected less from Cowboys vs Aliens, so I wasn’t as confused by it.
kingsman movie, first one. he did some parkour in the beginning to get away front bullies, then never again.
lessons in chemistry. crazy contraption to feed the dog, then never again anything like it.
Those scenes are just there to establish that he’s capable, intelligent and talented in the ways the agency needs, so it’s plausible they would recruit him. Never-mind that they also establish the way he looks at the world and approaches problems which is then forgotten immediately.
The whole UFO scene in “Life of Brian”.
Maybe not for the plot (since it’s never referenced or brought up ever again in the film) but I think it does work thematically:
This would be the one real miraculous event in Brian’s life. If anything, you would expect that a man who fell from a tower, got picked up by a flaming ball, and returned safely to the ground would be hailed as a holy person by all witnesses.
Instead, nobody gives a fuck and in the next couple of scenes Brian becomes a holy figure through entirely unrelated and mundane means.
Yeah, my main problem is with the whole “never mentioned again” thing. As it is, you could as well just leave it out.
The biggest one for me is in Butterfly effect, when he goes back in time and gives himself the scars, it goes against everything we learned about time travel in that movie. If he did that he would have had the scars all along, they would not have appeared out of thin air, also the timeline would have diverged there.
In the same vein, in looper where they start crippling the past version of a person and the future one who is running away from something gets starts stumbling more and more until he can’t walk, but the first few hundred meters he still made somehow.
But that is internally coherent from what I remember. I.e. time always works that way, changes in the past are propagated, and time travelers get the effects sometime after it.
Ah maybe it is. I don’t remember it very well anymore. Then it wouldn’t be a bad scene and more of a bad overall setup.
Yeah. It is consistent with the time travel rules in Looper, and the rules in Looper are just kinda silly.
It makes me sad because there’s no real need for it - the plot to Looper would still have worked without the silly bits.
Looper when they’re “torturing” the one guy and his body parts are disappearing one after another.
The whole Looper premise doesn’t make sense.
Criminals in the future send people back in time to get whacked. If you get an abnormally large payout, that means you whacked your future self and are now retired.
Why have someone kill themselves with a large payoff? Why retire them? If they’re retired in the future, why have them killed?
You have present day hitmen, A, B, and C. Future victims, a, b, and c.
A -> a, B -> b, C -> c results in stupid large payouts and retired killers.
A -> b, B -> c, C -> a has normal payoffs and no retirements.
Still doesn’t explain why you wanted a, b, and c dead in the first place.
Looper is a great LOOKING movie, those shotguns were on point! Just don’t go thinking about it for more than 5 minutes.
Their concept of time travel is definitely unorthodox compared to other time travel movies. One of the main characters literally said not to think too much about it.
Everything else was pretty much explained by the protag.
He did mentioned that his line of work doesn’t attract forward thinking people. This is quite realistic, I mean, have you seen how a lot of people (and companies) sacrificed long term benefits for short ter ones? It’s also posible that they think they can beat that system.
Their future selves are killed to tie up loose ends. The change in power dynamic with Rainmaker’s takeover definitely plays a role. This is actually a common trope in crime dramas (and probably also in real world).
It definitely is not a perfect movie, but it’s a damn good one to me. I definitely think Joseph-Gorden Lewitt and Emily Blunt lack chemistry, and the sex scene was forced, but I guess it’s somewhat realistic someone living in a farm out of nowhere all by themselves can get so horny…
The part that pisses me off. “We can’t kill people in the future because the forensics are too good.” Then armed men come for him in the future. They can’t kill him or they’ll get caught, why are the guns a threat?
Can still shoot him? Could be stupid and kill him anyway?
Still sucks to die even if they get caught
I didn’t like that movie, but do people really analyse movies like this as their watching them? I don’t usually unless I’m really bored, or afterwards if I really liked it.
I’m trained in literary analysis and criticism, so, yeah, I’ll sit there thinking “well, lets see how they explain this…”
The best fiction actually does.
Have you watched Primer?
Primer is excellent, and a great double feature with The Fountain.
The #1 thing to know about the Fountain though is that it’s super hard to get unless you read the companion graphic novel.
To clarify, do you mean it wouldn’t make sense that his body part would dissapear as they were severed in an alternative past. Or do you mean it doesn’t belong on the plot/add to the story?
Not Op, but…
Spoiler for the torture scene in Looper
At the start of that scene, they’re inflicting harm that would still allow the dude to do everything he’s done so far, just scarred. And the scars are appearing on his future self. It makes a kind of weird sense, if we stretch our imagination.
But they cross well past anything reasonable into injuries that would have just made anyone’s past self decide to retire and hide out in the woods in Florida.
It made no sense at all by the end, that his future self was somehow still working for them.
The first. Those injuries were done decades ago, and yet they are just appearing now to the surprise of the character.
If that’s how the time travel “works” in this universe somehow, then Bruce Willis disappearing at the end contradicts this.
Claudette:
He’s always bugging me about my house. Fifteen years ago, we agreed, that house belongs to me. Now the value of the house is going up and he’s seeing dollar signs. Everything goes wrong at once. Nobody wants to help me, and I’m dying.
Lisa:
You’re not dying, mom.
Claudette:
I got the results of the test back. I definitely have breast cancer.
Lisa:
Look, don’t worry about it. Everything will be fine. They’re curing lots of people every day.
Claudette:
I’m sure I’ll be alright.
Using The Room is cheating. There are only, like, two scenes in the entire movie that make sense according to the plot.
And also, I would have probably gone with the playing catch (with a football, I think) in tuxedos scene.
In Rock ‘n’ Roll High School Forever, the scene where they go over to someone’s house and pretend to worship their refrigerator doesn’t further the plot or character development in any way.
This Scene from Designated Survivor. I’m still chuckling when thinking about it.
😂
