The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► All right, The Last Jedi. I don't think we ever talked, I don't think I ever had an episode about Rogue One.

00:00:05 ◼   ► So I guess we could, we should focus on The Last Jedi, I think.

00:00:09 ◼   ► But if we sneak in some Rogue One, I think that's all right.

00:00:15 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm all for that.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Rogue One came out when the world exploded.

00:00:19 ◼   ► So I don't think anybody was in the mood to talk about it.

00:00:22 ◼   ► So at the highest level, what do you guys think of The Last Jedi?

00:00:25 ◼   ► And I'll just say this, by the way, for the listeners of the show,

00:00:27 ◼   ► If you haven't picked up already, this is going to be totally spoiler-ific.

00:00:31 ◼   ► This is an assumption that anybody who really cares about this right now,

00:00:34 ◼   ► at the end of December 2017, you've already seen The Last Jedi, you want to hear about it.

00:00:38 ◼   ► If not, and you don't care about spoilers, keep listening if you want to. But if you really want

00:00:44 ◼   ► to see the movie without having listened to three nerds really get into nitty-gritty details and

00:00:48 ◼   ► spoil anything and everything that we want to, hit the pause button right now and save this podcast

00:00:53 ◼   ► in your podcast player of choice until you see the movie. But shame on you for not having seen

00:00:57 ◼   ► this movie already, honestly. All right, a disclaimer out of the way. What did you guys

00:01:03 ◼   ► think of the movie overall? I loved it. And I have reasons twice. I was trying to go see it again

00:01:12 ◼   ► yesterday and today, but you know, life gets in the way. I have problems with it. I have structural

00:01:20 ◼   ► problems with it, but there's a reason I love it, and I think we'll get into that after.

00:01:26 ◼   ► But all in all, like, such a positive feeling about this movie. It's not even funny.

00:01:31 ◼   ► Some kind of middle of the road on this one. I've seen it twice. The reason I feel like I'm kind of

00:01:38 ◼   ► on the outside here is the things I dislike about it are not the things that I hear other people

00:01:43 ◼   ► dislike about it. Like, there's a lot of noise from the people who don't like this movie, but

00:01:47 ◼   ► whatever they're mad about is not what's causing me to be middle of the road. So,

00:01:51 ◼   ► I enjoyed watching it and it was definitely interesting and it is one of the more interesting

00:01:56 ◼   ► Star Wars movies in a long time to talk about. But I think, I'm not entirely sure it gels as a

00:02:04 ◼   ► movie and as a narrative for a bunch of reasons. Most of which are minor and have nothing to do

00:02:12 ◼   ► with Star Wars and everything to do with just basic movie making stuff. That's the thing,

00:02:16 ◼   ► like a lot of people are mad about this movie for Star Wars related reasons and the things that

00:02:21 ◼   ► that made it not connect to me or not work with me in certain ways don't really have

00:02:26 ◼   ► much to do with Star Wars. So I'm kind of middle of the road on it. I mean, I also know

00:02:31 ◼   ► all those movies that I'm interested to see what it will be like when I see it again,

00:02:34 ◼   ► like when it comes to video or whatever, because I found with Rogue One, speaking of that movie,

00:02:37 ◼   ► that I saw that, I think I saw it once in the theater, but I was surprised at how it

00:02:40 ◼   ► changed when it came out in video and I watched it again. So I think it does help to get some

00:02:44 ◼   ► distance from these movies, and to be clear, I liked Rogue One a little bit better when

00:02:48 ◼   ► I saw it on video. So we'll see how Last Jedi turns out. But it's definitely a change of

00:02:53 ◼   ► pace. And so it's, you know, it's intriguing.

00:02:56 ◼   ► I had the same reaction to Rogue One where I kind of came out of Rogue One thinking,

00:03:00 ◼   ► "Pretty good. You know, good enough that it's over the 50-yard line. I feel like it's a

00:03:04 ◼   ► good movie and a good Star Wars movie, but a little, eh, a little, you know, not even

00:03:10 ◼   ► sure why they made the movie." And then watching it on home video, I was like, "You know what?

00:03:15 ◼   ► is pretty damn good. This is better than I remember from the theater and I don't know

00:03:19 ◼   ► why that is. And it's always to me a good sign. It's a good sign for most movies. There's

00:03:24 ◼   ► a very few movies that shouldn't be rewatchable. But I think it's essential for a Star Wars

00:03:29 ◼   ► movie. It's part of the entire idea of a Star Wars movie is that you should be able to watch

00:03:34 ◼   ► this over and over, like lose track of how many times you've seen it over the years and

00:03:38 ◼   ► still get into it.

00:03:40 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think all these movies for people of our age, the problem with the first watch,

00:03:46 ◼   ► maybe even on the second watch if it's closely followed by that, is there's a whole Star

00:03:49 ◼   ► Wars part of our brain, like those whole brain diagrams to show what people's brains are

00:03:54 ◼   ► divided up into, and they would show like the men's brains, the huge section of sports

00:03:58 ◼   ► or whatever, which is probably true of John's brain. But in all of our brains, I think there

00:04:03 ◼   ► is a big quadrant sectioned off for Star Wars, because it informs so many things about our

00:04:08 ◼   ► So it's very difficult when watching a movie that is a Star Wars movie to disengage that

00:04:14 ◼   ► part and take the movie on its own merits because, at least on initial viewing, the

00:04:18 ◼   ► Star Wars part is fully engaged.

00:04:20 ◼   ► And especially it's like PTSD from the prequels, right?

00:04:25 ◼   ► So it's like fight or flight response is constantly there.

00:04:28 ◼   ► Like what's gonna happen?

00:04:29 ◼   ► Do we have to flee?

00:04:31 ◼   ► Is it gonna be, you know?

00:04:32 ◼   ► And so it helps to relax.

00:04:35 ◼   ► I think I think the force awaken helped my brain to relax a little bit because that was

00:04:39 ◼   ► That was a real important one to get me out of like the dark times

00:04:42 ◼   ► Right and I was able to be more relaxed with the last Jedi

00:04:46 ◼   ► But I still feel even on two viewings that I want to see one more time in video just to see if I can you

00:04:50 ◼   ► know take it in and it's fullness without

00:04:52 ◼   ► that preconceived notions I

00:04:55 ◼   ► almost I almost hesitate to

00:04:59 ◼   ► Presuppose and say what JJ Abrams was trying to do with the force awakens

00:05:04 ◼   ► but I feel in my gut that that what you just said was part of his goals for the the force awakens was to sort of

00:05:12 ◼   ► Here's two hours of this is gonna be okay

00:05:15 ◼   ► This trilogy is gonna be okay

00:05:17 ◼   ► And I say this as perhaps in our gang of Star Wars nerds

00:05:22 ◼   ► The one who's the least critical of the prequel trilogy like I've certainly you know

00:05:27 ◼   ► We've talked about it on past Star Wars holiday spectaculars

00:05:31 ◼   ► There's obviously a lot of problems with it and I I feel though that amongst people of my generation

00:05:36 ◼   ► I'm one of the least critical of that trilogy of the people I know well

00:05:40 ◼   ► Before us far be it for me to fight you for that dubious honor

00:05:44 ◼   ► But I was trying to get Snell to do the prequels cover the prequels on the incomparable

00:05:49 ◼   ► But only have people say nice things about them

00:05:52 ◼   ► hmm, I would

00:05:55 ◼   ► I like you, there's some things that are cool about them. And

00:06:00 ◼   ► importantly, and this will come up later as we talk about why,

00:06:04 ◼   ► while I agree with Syracuse about everything that he's about

00:06:07 ◼   ► to say about moviemaking, I love this as a piece of art. I think

00:06:13 ◼   ► it's great. But the prequels informed a lot of people, like

00:06:18 ◼   ► John was saying that, you know, we have a section of our brain

00:06:21 ◼   ► lot of people like John was saying that, you know, we have a section of our brain

00:06:25 ◼   ► carved out for Star Wars. Like it or not, there's a bunch of people who had the

00:06:29 ◼   ► prequels carve out a similar section for them, right? And this movie sort of tries

00:06:37 ◼   ► to bring that together a little bit. And I appreciate it.

00:06:40 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so. I for Mike, I, John, it's got to be true for your kids. But for

00:06:47 ◼   ► Jonas, Jonas saw no distinction. But I've said this before, it's one of the things

00:06:51 ◼   ► that Jonas really, he loved Star Wars, he still loves Star Wars, but kids, my son is

00:06:57 ◼   ► about to turn 14, eighth grade, and his generation of friends all seem to like Star Wars, they

00:07:04 ◼   ► had lots of toy lightsabers and they all knew him, but the two trilogies, the first two

00:07:09 ◼   ► trilogies just all blur together for them and they don't, there's no, they get it, you

00:07:15 ◼   ► know, but they don't really see them as like two distinct entities, which is crazy to me

00:07:19 ◼   ► because they're so different in style, but the kids just don't. And to me the best exemplification

00:07:29 ◼   ► of this is the Star Wars ride at Disney World where you're like the gimmick of the ride

00:07:37 ◼   ► is that you're going on some kind of consumer flight and all of a sudden you're taken away

00:07:43 ◼   ► into part of the, you know, something bad happens and your consumer little shuttle is

00:07:51 ◼   ► wrapped up in adventures and you, they randomize it so you go through, it's like a flight

00:07:57 ◼   ► simulator like in a big bus type thing. And they have scenes from a whole bunch of movies

00:08:03 ◼   ► and you get like a random like first act and second act each time you go on. So the next

00:08:07 ◼   ► time you go on, you probably will get two entirely different things, but they mix and

00:08:12 ◼   ► match the first half in the second half but what the way they do it drives me

00:08:17 ◼   ► nuts as a Star Wars fan because it's like the first half might be like on the

00:08:21 ◼   ► the Wookie planet what is it Kashyyyk and you're you're in the Clone Wars in a

00:08:26 ◼   ► Clone War battle and then in the next one you're in you know Endor in the

00:08:34 ◼   ► other trilogy it's like just by flying through our aha or something like that

00:08:38 ◼   ► You're in Empire Strikes Back. It's crazy. How can you suddenly you're just jumped 30 years?

00:08:43 ◼   ► It doesn't make any sense, but it makes sense to the kids

00:08:47 ◼   ► You should know it's not the same for my son because I didn't show my son the prequels so he's

00:08:52 ◼   ► Free household here. Oh my that's right. I totally forgot about how could I forget that? You're a terrible no

00:09:00 ◼   ► I'm a great father and he does watch

00:09:03 ◼   ► Clone Wars TV series and Star Wars Rebels both of which are better than the prequel so he does

00:09:08 ◼   ► Understand that that timeline more or less. He still hasn't seen him. He still hasn't seen

00:09:14 ◼   ► I think he saw revenge of the Sith at a sleepover party many years ago

00:09:17 ◼   ► Then I yanked him out of that and no no he saw I mean who knows he might have fallen asleep during part of it

00:09:23 ◼   ► But that was that was several years ago

00:09:25 ◼   ► And I think he's seen bits and pieces of the other ones like in YouTube clips and stuff. That's about it. I

00:09:30 ◼   ► Do love it. I love it where it's like in our family the

00:09:33 ◼   ► The debate was like how old does he have to be before he can see the shining?

00:09:38 ◼   ► I mean the important part for me was to show my kids the real Star Wars movies over and over and over and over again before

00:09:55 ◼   ► They ever knew the prequels existed

00:09:56 ◼   ► So I imprinted them on real Star Wars.

00:09:59 ◼   ► And everything else is properly filed in their mind

00:10:02 ◼   ► as expansion material.

00:10:05 ◼   ► I love that your training technique for your kids

00:10:08 ◼   ► is identical to the clones as we see in Attack of the Clones.

00:10:12 ◼   ► They asked to see Star Wars.

00:10:15 ◼   ► They would ask me, Daddy put in Return of the Jedi.

00:10:18 ◼   ► It's not like I was forcing them to watch it with the Ludovigo

00:10:21 ◼   ► technique to bring up more of Jon's favorite movies.

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00:12:23 ◼   ► to mention this podcast in our one question survey. And I'm pretty sure that one question

00:12:27 ◼   ► is where did you hear about fracture? That's that's what it is. Alright, so my thoughts

00:12:31 ◼   ► I like this movie a lot. I think I liked it better than The Force Awakens, but I'm not

00:12:35 ◼   ► sure I honestly feel like I almost have to. I walked out of the theater on the first viewing

00:12:40 ◼   ► thinking I like this movie better than The Force Awakens. Now I'm thinking, I don't know,

00:12:45 ◼   ► I need to do the Syracuse the thing and wait seven months for it to come out on home video

00:12:49 ◼   ► No, I don't think it'll be on the whole. I don't think it'll be seven months. I like for the record

00:12:53 ◼   ► I like force awakens much better than this. I've always been sure about it. I continue to be sure we'll see

00:12:57 ◼   ► Maybe it'll change my see in video, but very solidly force awakens is head and shoulders above this for me. I

00:13:02 ◼   ► Really like I love the force awakens, too

00:13:05 ◼   ► But all of this talk after this one came out about sort of like stack ranking these things. I don't care

00:13:12 ◼   ► I just gave up. It's tough to stack rack them

00:13:15 ◼   ► I tried to do them too and I start to get fuzzy, you know in the the once you go below Empire Strikes Back

00:13:20 ◼   ► It's hard but but you know, like just two movies forget about all the other movies

00:13:24 ◼   ► Just these two movies Force Awakens and The Last Jedi

00:13:27 ◼   ► They tied I mean you can pick a tie if you feel like you can't pick one or the other but like are they close?

00:13:32 ◼   ► It's the thing and we will get into it. But as a movie, I believe the Force Awakens is a tighter more concise and a better

00:13:39 ◼   ► movie as a sequel or as part of mythology, which I think we'll get into, I think that

00:13:47 ◼   ► this serves a tremendous role that does a little bit of damage to it in terms of being

00:13:52 ◼   ► a coherent movie, but serves the greater whole.

00:13:56 ◼   ► I don't know. I know what you're saying, but I don't think those two things need to be

00:14:00 ◼   ► connected, right? Like, I don't think it's necessary to, like, if you're gonna, you know,

00:14:04 ◼   ► because this last I just changed things up and I get where you're coming from that you

00:14:07 ◼   ► like that, but it doesn't mean that you have to sacrifice being a career narrative to do

00:14:11 ◼   ► that. You don't have to. Maybe it's a higher degree of difficulty, but honestly I think

00:14:15 ◼   ► the degree of difficulty of The Force Awakens coming off the prequels and trying to balance

00:14:19 ◼   ► all these different factors and introduce new characters while, you know, like, it was

00:14:22 ◼   ► a huge, like, the degree of difficulty of The Force Awakens was tremendous. This movie

00:14:27 ◼   ► was perhaps more ambitious, but I think the degree of difficulty at best is a tie between

00:14:33 ◼   ► them. That's so I agree. And there's flaws with it. To be

00:14:39 ◼   ► honest, I walked out being happy that we had Star Wars worth

00:14:43 ◼   ► talking about again. meant a lot to me in a, you know, in a

00:14:48 ◼   ► real, childish way. And, you know, it tickled that section of

00:14:53 ◼   ► my brain that came up on this stuff.

00:14:55 ◼   ► Here's, here's, here's my question. And it's why I

00:14:58 ◼   ► started by including a question of how you like to compare it to

00:15:01 ◼   ► The Force Awakens is is to me the more important question is does this feel like the second part of a trilogy?

00:15:07 ◼   ► Which I think is important to Star Wars

00:15:10 ◼   ► and I do feel that one of the strengths of the

00:15:15 ◼   ► Prequel trilogy is that those three movies all feel like they are of a piece whether you like them or don't like them or feel met

00:15:23 ◼   ► About them those three movies feel like three parts of one long story that is meant to be told three

00:15:30 ◼   ► In three movies and the first trilogy the beloved original trilogy. I think does a great job of it with the

00:15:36 ◼   ► exception of the fact the

00:15:39 ◼   ► Totally excusable exception of the fact that the first movie originally Star Wars then retitled a new hope

00:15:45 ◼   ► But I'll call it Star Wars till I die

00:15:47 ◼   ► Was made in a way that if he never got to make another movie

00:15:51 ◼   ► You know he in the back of his George Lucas's mind was I would love to make a trilogy out of this

00:15:56 ◼   ► I'd love to make a nine-part thing out of this

00:15:58 ◼   ► but who knows if they'll ever let me near a budget like this again.

00:16:01 ◼   ► So it has to stand on its own as a this is the only movie that's ever made in this thing.

00:16:07 ◼   ► And I think even given that, which is reasonable and I thought very smart on his part,

00:16:13 ◼   ► it still works as the first part of what feels like a three part movie.

00:16:16 ◼   ► We have this movie is weird.

00:16:18 ◼   ► I think it's like I get what you're saying.

00:16:20 ◼   ► Like, does it does this feel like

00:16:22 ◼   ► I guess I know what I'm saying is this is feel like a natural follow up to The Force Awakens.

00:16:27 ◼   ► And I think a lot has been made of the director change and like, you know, JJ set up all this

00:16:33 ◼   ► stuff like the mysterious Snoke and wondering about who Ray's parents are and the dramatic

00:16:38 ◼   ► handing of lightsaber between Ray and Luke.

00:16:40 ◼   ► Right.

00:16:41 ◼   ► And it seemed like at every turn that Rian Johnson undercut that you were worried about

00:16:46 ◼   ► lightsaber thing undercut with a gag.

00:16:49 ◼   ► You're worried about Ray parents.

00:16:51 ◼   ► We're going to tell you that that's not important.

00:16:52 ◼   ► You're worried about Snoke?

00:16:53 ◼   ► Sliced in half.

00:16:54 ◼   ► Right.

00:16:55 ◼   ► Like, it seemed like you could say there's disagreement about how this new trilogy is

00:17:00 ◼   ► going to go.

00:17:02 ◼   ► Maybe there is some of that, but I think that doesn't mean that it doesn't feel like it

00:17:06 ◼   ► is a natural follow up.

00:17:08 ◼   ► Part of what a sequel has to do, I think, is to subvert your expectations to some degree.

00:17:13 ◼   ► And all the original Star Wars had different directors, right?

00:17:15 ◼   ► It was Lucas Di the first one, then Kirchner, then the French guy for Jedi.

00:17:21 ◼   ► Richard Marquand.

00:17:25 ◼   ► Can't remember any of the new character names. I can't remember any of the new character names. I remember

00:17:29 ◼   ► Neen Nam. I mean you named the obscure character. I remember Richard Mark when Richard Mark when we could go into that

00:17:37 ◼   ► It is sort of you look at like his IMDB or like you've never heard of any of his movies like Ervin kirchner

00:17:42 ◼   ► You wouldn't think from his body of work that he'd direct a Star Wars movie

00:17:46 ◼   ► but he did direct some interesting movies like the one that hits closest home for me is never say never again the the

00:17:52 ◼   ► One and only non-eon production James Bond movie where Sean Connery came back to the world

00:17:57 ◼   ► Which is actually kind of a terrible movie, but I don't think was Irvin Kirchner's fault, but

00:18:01 ◼   ► You kind of thing

00:18:05 ◼   ► No, it was 80. It was close. It was like 85. Okay, so

00:18:10 ◼   ► Okay. Yeah. No, yes. Yes

00:18:14 ◼   ► Yeah, and you know who knows it is it shows it does show though that the three movies have different

00:18:21 ◼   ► But what I'm getting at is like so the original Star Wars had three different directors and

00:18:24 ◼   ► very different movies, but they still feel like a trilogy. So here's two movies we've

00:18:28 ◼   ► got so far with different directors and potentially one director having philosophical disagreements

00:18:33 ◼   ► about how this trilogy should go and saying all those things, all those pins that you

00:18:36 ◼   ► set up for me, I'm not just going to knock them down. I'm going to undercut them so that

00:18:41 ◼   ► they appear comical or become unimportant or just essentially neutralized. But I think

00:18:47 ◼   ► that's part of the tradition of sequels right down to one of my favorite sequel moments

00:18:52 ◼   ► as a kid was realizing how clever it was to have The Empire Strikes Back open on a snow

00:18:59 ◼   ► planet. This was in years before video games made this trope like hammered into our brains

00:19:06 ◼   ► where you got the lava world, the water world, the snow world, so on and so forth. But like,

00:19:10 ◼   ► you know, the whole thing of Star Wars was this desert planet, right? And then they're

00:19:12 ◼   ► in space and right and the second movie you're like, I wonder what's gonna be happening with

00:19:16 ◼   ► Luke and his speeder and his X-wing and Death Star and space and the desert and it's like snow,

00:19:20 ◼   ► just snow, snow everywhere, right? Maybe that wasn't undercutting, you know, sand and deserts

00:19:27 ◼   ► wasn't set up as like the theme of Star Wars, but that's all we had. So I'm willing to give

00:19:32 ◼   ► wide latitude to contrast with the movie that comes before in potentially surprising ways.

00:19:40 ◼   ► But I do feel like there was so much undercutting that I'm wondering if the narrative is taking a

00:19:48 ◼   ► turn. And this is made more interesting in this trilogy because JJ is coming back for the third

00:19:51 ◼   ► one. So he only gets to have the last word. So this could be a swerve or JJ could take this ball

00:19:57 ◼   ► and run with it wherever they think this ball is going. But this is getting out with this being an

00:20:02 ◼   ► interesting movie. If it didn't have that interest, if it just followed straight through from where

00:20:09 ◼   ► the last where force awakens was headed you could still make a great movie out of it but we'd kind

00:20:15 ◼   ► of start to see where it's going whereas the last jedi threw everything into chaos and it makes us

00:20:20 ◼   ► you know have really no idea what's gonna happen in the next movie but didn't the empire do that

00:20:25 ◼   ► in the in the first trilogy yeah kind of i mean yeah they have the big the big dramatic revelation

00:20:31 ◼   ► there which is like i didn't you know i didn't see that coming even though his name means father

00:20:34 ◼   ► in German like it's not well it's not just that I mean we start with the

00:20:38 ◼   ► rebels in a desolate cold after an immediate victory yeah but they were

00:20:45 ◼   ► getting medals at the end of the last movie you can't go like and now they

00:20:48 ◼   ► polished their medals for the next movie you got to put them back in into peril

00:20:51 ◼   ► so look I can I with you but this subversion of expectations is what a

00:20:56 ◼   ► good sequel does and I think yeah when we see Luke toss the lightsaber over his

00:21:01 ◼   ► shoulder. What do you think you would do if he was presented

00:21:05 ◼   ► with the lightsaber he fought Palpatine with? He would not

00:21:09 ◼   ► make some soup. He'd turn it into a cooking element. Yeah,

00:21:14 ◼   ► that's probably what he would do.

00:21:14 ◼   ► Turn it into a hot burner. I do think that's true. And in

00:21:20 ◼   ► general, it's just as a general idea, people who care about

00:21:24 ◼   ► movies tend to say, I mean, this has been true since they've made

00:21:28 ◼   ► the, I don't know what the first sequel was ever made to a

00:21:30 ◼   ► Hollywood movie. But the general idea is sequels suck, right?

00:21:33 ◼   ► That's, that's just, you know, put a number two after a movie,

00:21:37 ◼   ► and everybody says, Ah, it sucks. It's nowhere near as good

00:21:39 ◼   ► as the original. And many sequels do suck. But that's

00:21:42 ◼   ► only, you know, a that's only true because most movies suck.

00:21:45 ◼   ► It's hard to make a good movie, and it's a lot easier to make a

00:21:48 ◼   ► bad movie. And and but there's also one pattern that most bad

00:21:53 ◼   ► sequels fall into, which is trying to recapture whatever it

00:21:56 ◼   ► was that made the first movie great, but with more whatever it

00:21:59 ◼   ► There was battles in the right there's battles in the second movie

00:22:02 ◼   ► But they're bigger and if you you know

00:22:03 ◼   ► You had this character that people like in the first movie put that character even more in the second movie like not bring anything new

00:22:09 ◼   ► But just taking everything was in the first movie

00:22:11 ◼   ► Bring it over to the new one and turn all the dials up and that always makes for a bad sequel

00:22:15 ◼   ► Well, but wait, I don't think Empire nor this movie did that really yeah, and that's what John is getting at right?

00:22:22 ◼   ► No, I think yeah, that's it. Yeah, I'm not I'm not saying that I think that's why Empire is stands up as one of its

00:22:28 ◼   ► Seriously, I've said this before I will say it till the day I die probably unless unless some really fantastic movies come out in the next

00:22:35 ◼   ► ten years

00:22:37 ◼   ► Forty years and I'm sitting here

00:22:44 ◼   ► We're getting up there but no then 10th for anybody oh by the way it dibs on

00:22:52 ◼   ► org

00:22:55 ◼   ► You got I want the

00:22:58 ◼   ► I you know, I think that's part of what made and you know, my other one of my other beloved franchises the James Bond series effectively

00:23:05 ◼   ► Does exactly what I'm saying a good sequel doesn't do it's just you know, here's a bad guy. He's got a lair

00:23:10 ◼   ► He's got an evil plot to take over the world James Bond falls in, you know falls in love with a beautiful woman and

00:23:17 ◼   ► Gets the bad guy in the end and has a nice car at some point that he smashes into a million pieces

00:23:23 ◼   ► Halfway through the movie. I'm not sure it's really John to be honest

00:23:27 ◼   ► You know the James Bond series, but that you know it's not like it's James Bond 1 James Bond 2

00:23:34 ◼   ► It's like it's almost like the James to me the James Bond series has sort of defined a genre of movie

00:23:40 ◼   ► And they just keep making movies in that genre, so it's not so much sequel itis as

00:23:44 ◼   ► You know there's just a

00:23:47 ◼   ► Like the Daniel Craig ones are you know there's a timeline a little bit right and and you know arguably

00:23:54 ◼   ► sequels they tried to do what was good about Casino Royale but more and not

00:24:00 ◼   ► right you know to me and like yeah they'll hit the reset button and then

00:24:02 ◼   ► they'll get to do it again right whereas the old the older ones with Connery and

00:24:09 ◼   ► Bond you really it doesn't matter what order you watch them in it does there's

00:24:13 ◼   ► no there's really no rhyme or reason to it you know there's no there's the one

00:24:18 ◼   ► stupid scene in the George Lazenby one where he's quitting the Secret Service

00:24:22 ◼   ► and he opens his desk drawer. And there's like mementos from all of the Sean Connery

00:24:28 ◼   ► movies, but you know, that that the movie sucked. No, I think that Empire was part of

00:24:34 ◼   ► what makes Empire my favorite Star Wars movie, one of my favorite movies of all time period.

00:24:39 ◼   ► And I just think a truly great movie, I really think it's so well constructed, but part of

00:24:43 ◼   ► it is that it didn't try to be like the first movie at all. It's just different in so many

00:24:49 ◼   ► And I think that's very true of

00:24:51 ◼   ► The Last Jedi I think that the Last Jedi plays on some things from previous Star Wars movies

00:24:57 ◼   ► But I can't really say that it was like any other story

00:25:00 ◼   ► It was a little handicapped by the fact that the JJ kind of did a lead into the next movie

00:25:05 ◼   ► Which as you noted before Star Wars couldn't do because who knew if there would even be an ex movie

00:25:09 ◼   ► So you can't do that lead in right this up because when Star Wars ends together get all the metals well

00:25:13 ◼   ► But an Empire starts we have no idea that Luke's are gonna go off to see someone named Yoda and be trained as a Jedi

00:25:19 ◼   ► I like. There's nothing in the first movie that mentions Yoda or hints that he's gonna

00:25:24 ◼   ► go on it. It's introduced to us in Empire. You know, Ghost Ben comes and says you must

00:25:30 ◼   ► go to the Dagobah system, right? Whereas in The Force Awakens, we get that part before

00:25:35 ◼   ► the movie ends. It's like, oh, Rey, you're gonna go see Skywalker. Here's the map. You're

00:25:39 ◼   ► gonna go there. And we get to see you go there. And you go there and you see him and we see

00:25:43 ◼   ► what it looks like and you hand him lightsaber. So we kind of know, like in the next movie,

00:25:47 ◼   ► You gotta, there's a thread you have to pick up.

00:25:49 ◼   ► If they never showed that island in the next movie, you know, so this movie was somewhat

00:25:53 ◼   ► undercut and like that thread at least has to go somewhere.

00:25:57 ◼   ► We have to see Luke, we have to see Rey, they have to go somewhere.

00:26:00 ◼   ► Empire got the luxury of saying, you don't even know from Yoda.

00:26:02 ◼   ► You don't know Yoda's a thing.

00:26:03 ◼   ► We haven't even thought of Yoda yet, but this movie is going to be, there's going to be

00:26:05 ◼   ► a ton of Yoda in this movie and it's going to be super important, right?

00:26:08 ◼   ► So that's not the fault of the last shot, but it does show that like when they made

00:26:13 ◼   ► the last, when they made the Force Awakens, they kind of knew there'd be another one.

00:26:16 ◼   ► Pretty much nothing could have happened. They would have prevented another one from being made so it's structured differently

00:26:21 ◼   ► Yeah, so I've got two things about that first going back to the bond thing is a they have a template to make a bond

00:26:27 ◼   ► Movie and they just keep doing it and everyone is sort of a retelling of the story

00:26:31 ◼   ► Ghostly and by gross I mean, I don't mean disgusting. I mean, you know

00:26:38 ◼   ► They're like three degrees into reflection though, it was like again the Daniel Craig bond

00:26:44 ◼   ► It's all about reflecting on the old bonds. Sure. Yeah, exactly and in a lot of ways and this is where I'm bringing back up is

00:26:51 ◼   ► I feel that the force awakens is the same thing for Star Wars. It is a retelling of a modern mythology

00:26:58 ◼   ► That's what I was saying

00:27:00 ◼   ► Now two years ago on the show with Amy who was besides herself because she ever got an overhand dying. Is that is she okay?

00:27:09 ◼   ► So for those of you who don't recall that when the force awakens came out we had the holiday spectacular Amy

00:27:14 ◼   ► my wife Amy joined us on the show and

00:27:16 ◼   ► She really was just bereft over the she had no idea. She went into this, you know successfully

00:27:22 ◼   ► She didn't have to avoid spoilers like her internet doesn't really have Star Wars spoilers

00:27:27 ◼   ► But went into it literally knowing nothing

00:27:30 ◼   ► I don't even know she knew Harrison Ford and Han Solo were in the movie, you know, and it's like hey, there's the old gang

00:27:36 ◼   ► It's 30 years later. There's some stuff and then bing bang boom and the kid kills Han Solo

00:27:42 ◼   ► And she really was upset and she was like nobody told

00:27:46 ◼   ► You tell me

00:27:50 ◼   ► She was like he's the only one in this whole stupid movie

00:27:53 ◼   ► I liked and they killed him and she she still hasn't seen Rogue One

00:27:57 ◼   ► She wouldn't go see it because she said I'm done with it, but she did we drug her to see

00:28:02 ◼   ► This movie and she liked it and doesn't really want to see the then Tom. Yeah, so there's that well

00:28:08 ◼   ► All right, what about this before we before it escapes my mind this is to me at a basic narrative level the most

00:28:17 ◼   ► one of the maybe the most exceptional and I mean exceptional in the way that it's an

00:28:22 ◼   ► An exception like in programming terms would raise an error. It's like outside the rules of Star Wars movies in the trilogy

00:28:31 ◼   ► thing where there's no gap between The Force Awakens and

00:28:36 ◼   ► This movie. I mean literally it the the her presenting the lightsaber to Luke when we've rejoined them

00:28:43 ◼   ► It's it's in the moment. It was obviously shot at the same time

00:28:47 ◼   ► No, they did go back because they went there's also making up things they did go back to the island and they'll actually only had

00:28:56 ◼   ► There's a two days of shooting out and everything else was like on the coast where the island is off of

00:29:00 ◼   ► I know they went back, but from a narrative perspective, it is the moment.

00:29:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:05 ◼   ► I think at the time they filmed it for Force Awakens, I'm not sure that things had been

00:29:10 ◼   ► nailed down to the point where they knew Luke was supposed to chuck it over his shoulder.

00:29:12 ◼   ► Well, no.

00:29:14 ◼   ► I'm sure they didn't, but narratively, as we watched the movie...

00:29:17 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, no, they pick up that moment. They didn't have to do that. They had to pick up

00:29:21 ◼   ► that thread, as I said before, but they could have let us join the two of them in a hut somewhere,

00:29:26 ◼   ► having a discussion. We didn't have to pick up from that moment.

00:29:29 ◼   ► I find the scene where Luke takes his old lightsaber, his father's lightsaber, and throws

00:29:34 ◼   ► it off a cliff nonchalantly to be one of the most powerful Star Wars moments we have.

00:29:43 ◼   ► Mark Hamill has some problems with the treatment of Luke, and I have to say I kind of agree

00:29:49 ◼   ► with Mark Hamill, but interestingly, I think I said this on The Incomparable, I think Luke

00:29:55 ◼   ► in The Last Jedi, that character seems to me to be informed by the actual person, Mark

00:30:00 ◼   ► Hamill. What little I know of him from seeing him do celebrity interviews as himself and

00:30:04 ◼   ► not as the character Luke. The Luke in this movie seems very much to me like the actual

00:30:11 ◼   ► Mark Hamill in real life. Which is interesting that both I and Mark Hamill think it's not

00:30:16 ◼   ► a great fit for the character, but because the gap is so long between the last time we

00:30:21 ◼   ► saw Luke and now, anything could have happened in there that would explain this transformation.

00:30:25 ◼   ► and they try to explain it in this movie.

00:30:27 ◼   ► And John, John, you, two seconds, John.

00:30:30 ◼   ► The other, too many Johns.

00:30:31 ◼   ► All right.

00:30:32 ◼   ► The one thing that we do have that we disagree about

00:30:36 ◼   ► is that I have a different perspective upon Luke

00:30:39 ◼   ► in Return of the Jedi than you do.

00:30:42 ◼   ► I think he kind of went dark for a bit.

00:30:45 ◼   ► And we have seen Jedi, including the great ones like Yoda

00:30:49 ◼   ► and Kenobi, just run away and hide for 30 years.

00:30:53 ◼   ► and he's kind of following the same pattern.

00:30:56 ◼   ► Yeah, no, it's not the running away and hiding that I disagree with,

00:30:59 ◼   ► and it's not the being tempted by the dark side I disagree with.

00:31:01 ◼   ► Like, the whole movies are all about him being tempted by the dark side.

00:31:03 ◼   ► Empire and Jedi had Luke being tempted by the dark side

00:31:06 ◼   ► and giving in to it to varying degrees at various points.

00:31:08 ◼   ► But, like, I mean, again, the time gap is so big that I'm not faulting the movie for this.

00:31:14 ◼   ► I'm just saying that it was a surprise, which is fine,

00:31:18 ◼   ► but it was also a surprise that it felt like it wasn't really adequately explained

00:31:22 ◼   ► to the movie which I think is one of the things Last Jedi has some problems with. They want

00:31:27 ◼   ► there to be, you know, a bunch of stuff happening and here's where we are. You're like, "Okay,

00:31:32 ◼   ► I can see that happening. It's plausible. It's been 30 years. Like, tons of stuff can happen.

00:31:35 ◼   ► Like, it makes sense." But you have to put something on the screen to give me like the

00:31:40 ◼   ► cliff notes version of that and they do that to greater or lesser degrees. And the character

00:31:44 ◼   ► things that don't fit for me is the Luke. The Luke I know from the original trilogy

00:31:49 ◼   ► was a relentlessly earnest do-gooder who wanted to do the right thing but was also a little bit of

00:31:54 ◼   ► a hothead but in the end mastered his, you know, his hotheadedness, resisted the Dark Side, refused

00:31:59 ◼   ► to fight, and was triumphant in that endeavor, further reinforcing his earnestness and presumably

00:32:05 ◼   ► his hotheadedness would fade with age and so on and so forth. Now he could still have problems

00:32:09 ◼   ► where he'd become, like as they say in this movie, you start believing your own hype, you know, you

00:32:13 ◼   ► start believing in the legend of Luke Skywalker because everyone tells you you're super awesome

00:32:16 ◼   ► and like, "Oh, Luke Skywalker, you're great. I bet you can do anything," right?

00:32:18 ◼   ► That's their explanation in this movie. I just didn't see enough of it on the screen to

00:32:23 ◼   ► really convince me that this... Like, what I would have expected Luke,

00:32:27 ◼   ► "Sure, he's in exile. Sure, he messed stuff up." I expected him to be more sad and less angry,

00:32:32 ◼   ► because he learned through his arc in the first three movies was to chill out a little bit,

00:32:39 ◼   ► to relax, to be more patient, and to understand, "But don't I have to beat Darth Vader? Don't I

00:32:44 ◼   ► have to hit him really hard with my sword and that's how I'll win and to get it through his

00:32:49 ◼   ► thick skull that no that's not how you win you know he chucks his lights ever away it's just I

00:32:53 ◼   ► will not fight you you know I'm a Jedi like my father before like that's his arc right and he

00:32:58 ◼   ► he's such a do-gooder and so earnest that I you know I need just to have an explanation of how

00:33:04 ◼   ► he ends up in this place because I would sad and broken totally see that depressed sad broken hiding

00:33:09 ◼   ► reclusive, it turning inward, even shutting himself off from

00:33:13 ◼   ► the forest. I totally see all of that. But kind of angry at the

00:33:17 ◼   ► world and and bitter and stuff. Seems more in keeping with

00:33:21 ◼   ► cynical jaded Mark Hamill than it does with Luke. But all that

00:33:25 ◼   ► said, I loved his character in this movie, I just have some

00:33:28 ◼   ► difficulty connecting it back with 30 years ago on and again,

00:33:30 ◼   ► there's 30 years worth of movies that we haven't seen there. So

00:33:33 ◼   ► something could fill in those gaps. But

00:33:34 ◼   ► But we'll go let's go with Luke and what they did with Luke

00:33:37 ◼   ► because that was really good segment right there. And it's

00:33:39 ◼   ► It's a big part of the movie and I think it's a huge part of the movie for us who you know grew up with that first

00:33:46 ◼   ► trilogy right and and it's a he it was a huge huge huge

00:33:51 ◼   ► decision and

00:33:53 ◼   ► You know obviously they knew exactly I say missed opportunity

00:33:57 ◼   ► I want to say missed opportunity

00:33:58 ◼   ► but they knew what it meant that by not putting Luke in the force awakens other than the the

00:34:05 ◼   ► Briefest moment at the very end of the movie almost more as a you know, here's what's coming in the next movie

00:34:11 ◼   ► We never got to see a Han and Luke and Leia and Chewie together again, right?

00:34:16 ◼   ► The last time we saw them together

00:34:17 ◼   ► it was 1983 in Return of the Jedi and they're never they're never gonna be together again and they could have and it didn't have

00:34:24 ◼   ► to be and I get I totally get the idea that hey, you're not gonna make a

00:34:28 ◼   ► 700 billion dollar

00:34:31 ◼   ► grossing movie starring

00:34:34 ◼   ► year old actors, you know, it's time for a new generation. But there's

00:34:40 ◼   ► obviously a thousand different ways they could have written The Force Awakens

00:34:43 ◼   ► where Luke had some kind of role and when you see, you know, you have that

00:34:47 ◼   ► great scene with Han and Leia and you changed your hair and C-3PO and

00:34:51 ◼   ► you might not recognize me because he's got the red arm. You know, it could have

00:34:56 ◼   ► been some Luke in there too, right? And it was obviously a deliberate choice that

00:35:01 ◼   ► We get the heartache that Luke has of never having seen Han again, right?

00:35:06 ◼   ► I mean, that's the the you know

00:35:08 ◼   ► We don't get to see we don't get the joy of seeing them together again

00:35:12 ◼   ► And but then when he says where's Han in this movie?

00:35:15 ◼   ► It hurts it hurts because he could have seen him in the last movie before he died

00:35:19 ◼   ► Even if they still killed Han, you know, so I get it. I get that choice. It works

00:35:24 ◼   ► There's a part of me that wants to

00:35:26 ◼   ► Wants to be angry at JJ Abrams for that and there's a part of me that says I salute you for having the balls to

00:35:32 ◼   ► Do it because it really made it made Luke saying where's Han in this movie a moment that it to me is as good as any

00:35:38 ◼   ► moment in any Star Wars I totally agree and I

00:35:41 ◼   ► Am really not one of the people that wants to get mad at a filmmaker for making the choices

00:35:47 ◼   ► Yeah, you know when it comes down to it

00:35:49 ◼   ► That's a film and this that moment where he says where's Han and they they cut

00:35:55 ◼   ► We don't get there. Well Han got killed by like none of that. It's just and by the guy you see yeah, and it just

00:36:02 ◼   ► It just hits you and I know oh god, that's awful I

00:36:09 ◼   ► Luke hanging out. That's all yeah, I kind of would have liked to

00:36:16 ◼   ► Screen in this movie though

00:36:18 ◼   ► Like there's a lot of characters in the force awakens because you got to do the transition from old to new and then they add even

00:36:23 ◼   ► more here. And so there's just not enough time for Luke and

00:36:25 ◼   ► Chewie to hang out. You barely got Luke to say two words to see

00:36:27 ◼   ► the repo. Yeah, I think Mark Hamill's, he winks at him.

00:36:31 ◼   ► Yeah, Mark Hamill's comments on this, I think are really

00:36:35 ◼   ► interesting. And he's since walked them back and said he

00:36:38 ◼   ► regrets it because you know, and it's the reason that creative

00:36:41 ◼   ► people just don't talk about the creative process. You could even

00:36:43 ◼   ► say, this is why Apple doesn't explain itself as you start

00:36:46 ◼   ► explaining yourself. And it just opens you up. You don't want to

00:36:49 ◼   ► be too honest. Like people don't want to see how the sausage is

00:36:51 ◼   ► made.

00:36:52 ◼   ► Right.

00:36:53 ◼   ► People don't want to see it.

00:36:54 ◼   ► But in a very honest interview, Mark Hamill said that he said to Rian Johnson, "Jedi

00:37:01 ◼   ► don't give up."

00:37:02 ◼   ► This is criticism of the way Luke was written in this movie.

00:37:04 ◼   ► "Jedi don't give up."

00:37:05 ◼   ► I mean, even if he had a problem, he would maybe take a year to try and regroup, but

00:37:09 ◼   ► if he made a mistake, he would try to right that wrong.

00:37:12 ◼   ► So right there, we had a fundamental difference.

00:37:13 ◼   ► But it's not my story anymore.

00:37:15 ◼   ► It's someone else's story, and Rian needed me to be a certain way to make the ending

00:37:18 ◼   ► effective.

00:37:19 ◼   ► That's the crux of my problem.

00:37:20 ◼   ► would never say that. I'm sorry. Well, in this version, see, I'm talking about the George Lucas

00:37:25 ◼   ► Star Wars. This is the next generation of Star Wars. So I almost had to think of Luke as another

00:37:29 ◼   ► character. Maybe he's Jake Skywalker. He's not my Luke Skywalker. But I had to do what Ryan wanted

00:37:35 ◼   ► me to do because it serves the story well. And he's since like two days ago, he had another thing

00:37:39 ◼   ► where he said, You know what, I regret it. I love this movie. Ryan Johnson made a great Star Wars

00:37:44 ◼   ► movie. And I'm happy to have been a part of it. And you know, because he's it's taken out of

00:37:48 ◼   ► He's been taking a lot of heat and honestly, as anybody who has made anything ever, I used

00:37:56 ◼   ► to work on games.

00:37:57 ◼   ► You know how many weird decisions get made when it's fine?

00:38:03 ◼   ► It's not really weird.

00:38:04 ◼   ► I support the ability of him to say that this is the thing.

00:38:07 ◼   ► I actually think Luke is wrong about the Jedi.

00:38:09 ◼   ► All of the Jedi that we know from the original trilogy, the only trilogy that Sir Akusa knows

00:38:14 ◼   ► is when things were wrong, they cut none.

00:38:17 ◼   ► That's the only thing that Mark Hamill knows, too.

00:38:20 ◼   ► Mark Hamill has the same problem that the audience has, is that the last time he was

00:38:24 ◼   ► Luke was Return of the Jedi.

00:38:26 ◼   ► He didn't film a bunch of movies in the intervening 30 years where he got to play Luke at various

00:38:30 ◼   ► stages.

00:38:31 ◼   ► So the last Luke that he knows is the Return of the Jedi.

00:38:33 ◼   ► And he's saying Jedi don't give up.

00:38:35 ◼   ► But what he really means is Luke, that character I played in those three movies, he was an

00:38:40 ◼   ► Ernest Dooker who was a little hot-headed and a little bit impulsive, but he was a boy

00:38:44 ◼   ► scout.

00:38:45 ◼   ► Luke was not, you know, like, you know, you see him in Empire Strikes Back of like, you

00:38:50 ◼   ► know, what, Laus is nobody cares?

00:38:53 ◼   ► He says, I care.

00:38:54 ◼   ► Like, he's just he's just trying to trying to get the girl trying to do the right thing,

00:38:57 ◼   ► trying to beat the bad guy trying to leave his farm, like, and that's the last Luke that

00:39:02 ◼   ► Mark Hamill knows.

00:39:03 ◼   ► So when he sees how Luke is being played in this movie, he's like, I don't get how that

00:39:07 ◼   ► character the end of Return of the Jedi gets here.

00:39:09 ◼   ► And Ryan Johnson should have said, well, there's 30 years, a lot can happen in 30 years.

00:39:13 ◼   ► And so he should have really sat down with him and said,

00:39:15 ◼   ► here's what we imagine happened in 30 years,

00:39:17 ◼   ► and here how it would explain this transformation

00:39:19 ◼   ► or whatever, but he's got the same problem we do.

00:39:22 ◼   ► Like, how do I connect that Luke to that one?

00:39:23 ◼   ► So maybe you could argue that that's a problem,

00:39:26 ◼   ► like a director talking to the actor

00:39:27 ◼   ► and understanding like, here's what your motivation is.

00:39:29 ◼   ► Let me tell you like your pretend backstory

00:39:31 ◼   ► for the 30 years intervening or whatever,

00:39:33 ◼   ► 'cause this is what I want you to be in this movie.

00:39:35 ◼   ► And like I said, I accept that,

00:39:37 ◼   ► but when you have such a well-known character,

00:39:39 ◼   ► it's important to put things in the actual movie

00:39:42 ◼   ► that give you a plausible explanation of how they get to this point. And they tried really

00:39:47 ◼   ► hard to do that with him explaining how he tried to train Kylo, how he started to believe

00:39:51 ◼   ► his own hype, how he started to believe in the legend, how he saw the darkness within

00:39:54 ◼   ► him, but it's like, yeah, but the Luke who saw the darkness, would he take out his lightsaber

00:39:59 ◼   ► and consider killing his sister's son? Like, maybe, maybe the Luke from 30 years, maybe

00:40:06 ◼   ► he would do that, but it's like, what brought him to that point? Because the Luke at the

00:40:09 ◼   ► end of Return of the Jedi, no way in hell would he do that. He wouldn't even fight his

00:40:11 ◼   ► own father who was killing millions of people and gonna blow up all his friends.

00:40:16 ◼   ► And by the way, so in Jedi I do think that he's progressed in his use of the Force, but

00:40:22 ◼   ► in Jedi he's remarkably colder than he is in Empire and certainly in Star Wars.

00:40:26 ◼   ► He's chilling out.

00:40:27 ◼   ► I don't know if he's chilling out because he's strangling people with his brain, so

00:40:31 ◼   ► that's probably not good.

00:40:33 ◼   ► But he's distanced even when he's on the mission.

00:40:36 ◼   ► He's like, "I shouldn't have come on the mission."

00:40:38 ◼   ► But he still has this hot-headed moment where, you know, if you won't join me, maybe

00:40:41 ◼   ► your sister will and he gives in to his anger and fights but that that's what

00:40:44 ◼   ► that that's what convinces him when he finally sees like you know Yoda was

00:40:48 ◼   ► right I got it like you know only what you take with you like the cave you know

00:40:51 ◼   ► remember lesson the cable he figures it out at the end and by figuring it out

00:40:55 ◼   ► that's how he went that's how the good guys win essentially I agree with you

00:40:59 ◼   ► completely but I can see the if you take the transition for Luke from Star Wars

00:41:06 ◼   ► to Empire to the Return of the Jedi and then sort of extrapolate that a long

00:41:10 ◼   ► time you can see him getting more and more disconnected from the world and I

00:41:14 ◼   ► find a little bit believable that he would give up and now here's what I

00:41:24 ◼   ► totally you like the laser sword on your nephew and and depressed and beating

00:41:31 ◼   ► himself up all that but probably like less sarcastic and cynical maybe you

00:41:37 ◼   ► You that is I don't understand that that's a long you guys way to go

00:41:44 ◼   ► You guys I assume might know this John you probably certainly do but you guys know that

00:41:49 ◼   ► Lawrence Kasdan's who co-wrote the screenplay for Empire Strikes Back. I forget if he had a writing

00:41:55 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah

00:41:59 ◼   ► What he had the way he do you guys know the story of how he wanted

00:42:05 ◼   ► Return of the Jedi to end he wanted to die

00:42:08 ◼   ► No had nothing to do with Han dying

00:42:11 ◼   ► It had to do with Luke walking off into the sunset alone like in his is you know

00:42:16 ◼   ► He said like Clint Eastwood in one of the you know

00:42:19 ◼   ► like Western spaghetti westerns that he you know all these things can happen and

00:42:23 ◼   ► He can redeem his father and they can kill the Emperor and the rebels can have this great victory and blow up another Death Star

00:42:29 ◼   ► But that Luke is isolated and he's you know

00:42:32 ◼   ► There's no one else he can relate to and that they're like the last shot of the movie would just be Luke

00:42:36 ◼   ► Walking off on his own, you know how you get from there, you know, but instead of having

00:42:40 ◼   ► Work because the all Jedi is about him connecting with his sister and fighting for his friends

00:42:45 ◼   ► Like the units really really cohesive unit like they're all working together as friends. They plan as friends. They execute as friends

00:42:51 ◼   ► He's worried about his friends out in space

00:42:52 ◼   ► So that would have to be a different script if you want to go in that direction

00:42:54 ◼   ► I've got a little bit of that moment when he's standing in front of the bonfire

00:42:57 ◼   ► He is isolated from everybody

00:43:00 ◼   ► - Well, he can see the four of them.

00:43:01 ◼   ► - I do think-- - Everybody around him, right?

00:43:04 ◼   ► - But he's still, he's smiling.

00:43:04 ◼   ► He sees all his friends and his dead friends.

00:43:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:43:08 ◼   ► - Right, it's like, so they put a bit of that in

00:43:12 ◼   ► with him alone and the bonfire,

00:43:13 ◼   ► but they, you know, it obviously wasn't gonna be

00:43:16 ◼   ► the last moment, the mass emotional cue of the moment,

00:43:19 ◼   ► of the movie and of the trilogy,

00:43:21 ◼   ► but that's what Lawrence Kasdan wanted.

00:43:24 ◼   ► But I think that that Lawrence Kasdan idea

00:43:26 ◼   ► informed this Luke in exile idea, you know,

00:43:30 ◼   ► whether that's where they got it or where they thought of it.

00:43:31 ◼   ► - It's the exile I'm all for.

00:43:32 ◼   ► Like I expected him to be in exile.

00:43:34 ◼   ► I expected him to be kind of like Obi-Wan,

00:43:36 ◼   ► like kind of sad and depressed and sort of mad at yourself

00:43:41 ◼   ► and just kind of like down and like the best I can do

00:43:44 ◼   ► is hide and like that you're hiding yourself

00:43:46 ◼   ► as a dangerous weapon.

00:43:47 ◼   ► Like Obi-Wan definitely had that vibe

00:43:50 ◼   ► where he was just, he was exiling himself

00:43:51 ◼   ► because he had, he had colossally screwed up

00:43:53 ◼   ► and he's like, the best thing I can do is stay away.

00:43:55 ◼   ► And he eventually was brought back in

00:43:57 ◼   ► by the promise of redemption.

00:43:59 ◼   ► But Luke is on this island just being pissed off all the time.

00:44:05 ◼   ► I think it's interesting, and Guy and I have talked about this privately, but I think it's

00:44:09 ◼   ► interesting the way that old Luke that we see in this movie is way more Yoda than Obi-Wan.

00:44:18 ◼   ► You say Obi-Wan is depressed.

00:44:19 ◼   ► Obi-Wan was obviously off on his own and he only got back involved when Leia came to get

00:44:26 ◼   ► him.

00:44:28 ◼   ► He wasn't going to join. He had given up. You know, like exactly what

00:44:31 ◼   ► Mark Hamill is saying that Jedi never do. Like Obi-Wan had effectively given up and I guess the only thing he was doing was, you know,

00:44:38 ◼   ► keeping some kind of Force awareness.

00:44:40 ◼   ► My headcanon is that he's using tinder and going down to the

00:44:43 ◼   ► cantina.

00:44:46 ◼   ► He's going to Mos Eisley every Friday night.

00:44:50 ◼   ► He's obviously looking over Luke. Is he an old Ben Kenobi?

00:44:52 ◼   ► Like, Luke even knows that he exists.

00:44:54 ◼   ► But he's not...

00:44:55 ◼   ► Yeah, but but he and Yoda never decide to go after Vader and the Emperor

00:45:00 ◼   ► No, but once you know things come to a head Obi-Wan doesn't have we don't get to see a moment with him saying

00:45:05 ◼   ► I don't know if I'm gonna answer Leia's call. He pretty much is on board immediately with the message, right?

00:45:09 ◼   ► Whereas Yoda, you know is the one who had the you know, I'm not going to trade. I'm not gonna do my Yoda here

00:45:17 ◼   ► Maybe I can maybe if I have a little bit more of this scotch. I will but take it take us away. Let's go

00:45:21 ◼   ► Come on, man

00:45:24 ◼   ► You can do it in the same way that Luke refuses to train Ray is exactly it felt to me like the way Yoda was

00:45:31 ◼   ► Afraid he is too old. Yes too old to begin the training

00:45:34 ◼   ► He was afraid because like you know everyone has to convince him and Yoda's like remember what happened last time

00:45:40 ◼   ► We ended up with Vader. That was a bad scene. That's why I'm on this you know Yoda does a eco retreat

00:45:45 ◼   ► He's like I got it back to nature back to like what the force is really all about and I

00:45:51 ◼   ► And they've both got a dark side.

00:45:53 ◼   ► Yeah, but Luke is stealing himself off from the Force.

00:45:55 ◼   ► But it's like, but just Luke is so kind of disillusioned and angry.

00:45:59 ◼   ► Like, Yoda is not disillusioned with the Force.

00:46:01 ◼   ► He retreats to a place with all this life to get closer to the Force.

00:46:04 ◼   ► He's not disillusioned.

00:46:06 ◼   ► Yoda may be disillusioned with the bureaucracy of the Jedi Council and blah, blah, blah.

00:46:10 ◼   ► And how, and disillusioned with his own decisions and performance and so on and so forth.

00:46:14 ◼   ► Yeah, he's pissed off about the pink slip more than the actual...

00:46:16 ◼   ► But Luke is like, I'm not even going to use the Force.

00:46:18 ◼   ► Use the force and part of that is hiding yourself, which I think is smart

00:46:21 ◼   ► But part of that is also that he's just like F this force business

00:46:25 ◼   ► Like I'm not I'm not down with that anymore

00:46:27 ◼   ► Like I just you know, I'm just gonna be on this island and I'm just gonna close myself off and get it

00:46:33 ◼   ► You know Yoda is a great character and and Luke is

00:46:36 ◼   ► Evolved into a great character and so I'm not saying they're the same but there's clearly way more Yoda in old Luke then

00:46:42 ◼   ► Yeah, then old Ben and and it just like there's like an impishness

00:46:47 ◼   ► You know like when he's first he says all right three lessons

00:46:50 ◼   ► Here's your first lesson reach out and she literally reaches out and he snaps her hand with the big blade of grass

00:46:55 ◼   ► And he goes do you feel it because I feel it I feel it

00:46:59 ◼   ► Like that's Yoda. That's a total

00:47:01 ◼   ► You know part of the training of the traditional sort of like training from the ancient wisdom is like the student looks foolish

00:47:07 ◼   ► I mean Luke is made to look foolish at many times being trained with Yoda to obi-wan never does though obi-wan never

00:47:13 ◼   ► Yeah, Obi-Wan is a dignified British person who teaches you, "You can do it!"

00:47:17 ◼   ► Like, you know, like he's very encouraging and supportive.

00:47:20 ◼   ► And Yoda is, you know, yelling at Luke for you because he's dropping them when he's floating

00:47:24 ◼   ► the rocks and everything.

00:47:25 ◼   ► Yeah. On the other hand, Kenobi's giving him the basics, right?

00:47:29 ◼   ► Like...

00:47:31 ◼   ► But it's just, you just can't see Kenobi ever doing something like that, right?

00:47:35 ◼   ► Kenobi is...

00:47:36 ◼   ► I just like to block them out. And The Last Jedi doesn't do that.

00:47:41 ◼   ► another thing Last Jedi does is it starts to bring in the prequels because to explain

00:47:45 ◼   ► Luke's disillusionment, he has to make oblique reference to how he makes it explicit explicit

00:47:51 ◼   ► to what's the same Darth Sidious, which is a name we never got during the movies. No, they did say

00:48:00 ◼   ► it. Darth Sidious? No, they told you, right? No, yeah. Yeah, like the prequels, they mentioned it.

00:48:10 ◼   ► But that coming out of Luke's mouth? No, we've never had that.

00:48:15 ◼   ► Where did Luke learn all that? He must have been studying up on the Wikipedia pages after he returned the jedi.

00:48:20 ◼   ► Well, I mean, once you blow up the Emperor and you take over the galaxy, I'm going to guess there's a library.

00:48:25 ◼   ► Well, there's a lot of time for reading.

00:48:27 ◼   ► Yeah, you can look this stuff up.

00:48:29 ◼   ► Boy, these jedi were dumb.

00:48:31 ◼   ► I mean, at some place, he also went and found all those jedi texts, right?

00:48:36 ◼   ► No, no, no, they were already on the island. They were in that temple on the island.

00:48:40 ◼   ► Okay, so he went there. He spent time researching this stuff, is what I'm saying.

00:48:45 ◼   ► That's the other weird thing. Another thing that JJ set up is where Luke is hiding is back where the first Jedi were.

00:48:52 ◼   ► Kind of like how Yoda went to this planet with tons of life, because it's a whole force thing, right?

00:49:00 ◼   ► So, but for someone who is super disillusioned with the Jedi, like, you could take it two

00:49:06 ◼   ► ways.

00:49:07 ◼   ► One, that it's a discontinuity and they just had to deal with it because it's on the island

00:49:10 ◼   ► and like it doesn't quite match up.

00:49:12 ◼   ► Or two, that despite all Luke's protestations about being disillusioned with the Jedi, he

00:49:18 ◼   ► did go to the island where the original Jedi were.

00:49:21 ◼   ► So it seems that he can't let go of the idea that the Force is a thing that's worth holding

00:49:26 ◼   ► on to even though he's close himself off.

00:49:27 ◼   ► I'm very comfortable with that.

00:49:28 ◼   ► I mean, if you're uncomfortable with your religion going back to the first texts, it

00:49:35 ◼   ► totally makes sense to me.

00:49:37 ◼   ► Like, where did we go wrong with the bureaucracy is a completely reasonable thing to do.

00:49:41 ◼   ► But in the end, he wants to burn down that tree, and he's like, just, no, in the end,

00:49:46 ◼   ► when he's trying to teach Ray about the Force, he'll say, basically, the Jedi don't own the

00:49:50 ◼   ► Force, right?

00:49:52 ◼   ► That's a human concept.

00:49:53 ◼   ► It's like the church, and the church is made by man, but like, you know, the difference

00:49:58 ◼   ► the Church and actual God. It's like, the Jedi are human construct. They are imperfect because

00:50:02 ◼   ► humans are imperfect, but the Force is fine. And he wants to burn it down, not because he wants to

00:50:09 ◼   ► burn the Force down, but to say this structure that humans have made around the Force, this whole

00:50:13 ◼   ► Jedi Sith, and that is crap. But he can't quite bring himself to do it because, like, the same

00:50:19 ◼   ► reason he went to the island, he kind of believes in the Force. He believes in all the teaching,

00:50:23 ◼   ► like, but Jedi are good, right? Like, I always totally wanted to be a Jedi and I was so excited

00:50:29 ◼   ► to be one and to like, fulfill my destiny to become a Jedi and blah blah blah, and I can't

00:50:34 ◼   ► bring myself to burn down. And Yoda is the one who pops in and says, I don't have a problem with it,

00:50:37 ◼   ► I can burn it down. You're right. Yoda's always been on the same page of like, Yoda does not tell

00:50:43 ◼   ► him, you know, here is what it means to be on the Jedi Council. He is all about the Force and what

00:50:49 ◼   ► what the force means and all his stuff.

00:50:52 ◼   ► I mean, he does mention Jedi a lot

00:50:53 ◼   ► because a Jedi cares not about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:50:56 ◼   ► He uses the word Jedi, but because the prequels didn't exist,

00:50:59 ◼   ► he makes no reference to the stupidity of Jedi bureaucracy

00:51:04 ◼   ► and the hubris of the Jedi

00:51:06 ◼   ► and their little kiddie training schools

00:51:08 ◼   ► and picking slave children and all sorts of other things

00:51:11 ◼   ► that eventually came out of prequels.

00:51:12 ◼   ► And he's free before-- - Before you lift your X-wing,

00:51:14 ◼   ► have you filled out form JDI 882-6?

00:51:19 ◼   ► No. I thought that that was one of my favorite things about this movie is that it acknowledged

00:51:24 ◼   ► something that to me had gone unacknowledged in including in the Force Awakens in the previous

00:51:29 ◼   ► movies, which was that to me, and again, maybe I was just reading too much into it. And I always,

00:51:34 ◼   ► I do believe very strongly, and I know I'm right on certain parts that Lucas didn't have this whole

00:51:40 ◼   ► thing written out, you know, there were vague ideas about what the prequels would be. And a

00:51:44 ◼   ► lot of the stuff that ended up in them weren't really, you know, he didn't have this grand master

00:51:48 ◼   ► plan and all these screenplays pre-written in 1977. But to me in the original trilogy,

00:51:54 ◼   ► especially with what Kenobi says in Star Wars, it made it to me seem like Jedi were sort

00:52:01 ◼   ► of solo individuals around the galaxy.

00:52:07 ◼   ► Like monks.

00:52:08 ◼   ► Yeah, like monks. And somebody who was called into the force, you'd discover another Jedi

00:52:15 ◼   ► eye and they would train you and but the it was decentralized is what I saw a decentralized

00:52:21 ◼   ► network of warrior monks.

00:52:23 ◼   ► I never saw them as being inherently generals or leading battle having a big Council and

00:52:30 ◼   ► sitting around in a big headquarters.

00:52:33 ◼   ► Well I mean when we can be saying that Anakin a fancy skyscraper you know Stark Tower on

00:52:38 ◼   ► Khorasan Yeah, well like when when Kenobi is saying that Anakin was once his pupil and

00:52:43 ◼   ► was the best of other palates. He thought he could train him just as well as Yoda and he was wrong.

00:52:47 ◼   ► That goes into the whole sort of like master apprentice, you know, system of...

00:52:51 ◼   ► I honestly, right, I believed it more to be like a, you know, I don't know, like a...

00:52:57 ◼   ► Like a blacksmithing. Like a cobbler relationship, like I'll show you how to do this.

00:53:01 ◼   ► The fact that they fought in the war together was incidental to the fact that there was a war going

00:53:08 ◼   ► on. Yeah. Right. I happen to think, and I grew up under the assumption

00:53:13 ◼   ► that Kenobi got involved in and she said you know you fought with my father as a general in the

00:53:18 ◼   ► Clone Wars that Kenobi made that choice as an individual in my mind that Kenobi was one of

00:53:23 ◼   ► however many Jedi that were in the galaxy and when the Clone Wars erupted Obi-Wan Kenobi decided I'm

00:53:29 ◼   ► joining this this war as a Jedi and I'll become a general in this it I did not expect that all of

00:53:36 ◼   ► the that there was something like that and it's one of the things that I like about the prequel

00:53:40 ◼   ► trilogy is that, again, it upended my expectations. And it was like, no, they were more like a quasi

00:53:46 ◼   ► government institution, but sort of anti-democratic, you know, like nobody else really had it there.

00:53:52 ◼   ► They were influential in intergalactic politics, but like answerable to no one. And the whole lot

00:53:59 ◼   ► of them joined the war, you know, and in a way that wasn't what I expected. It didn't seem like

00:54:04 ◼   ► what it was set up. And it also made me feel like this is a corrupt organization. And I can see how

00:54:09 ◼   ► their hubris led to their downfall. Yeah, there was something about Alec Guinness's portrayal

00:54:15 ◼   ► of Kenobi that made you believe that he could have been a general in the war.

00:54:20 ◼   ► That bridge over the river Kwai, right? Well, first of all, the bridge over the river Kwai,

00:54:26 ◼   ► he's a British gentleman in 1977. You could totally see him being an officer in World War II,

00:54:34 ◼   ► It was close enough, historically, to cement that this is a prototype of a character that

00:54:41 ◼   ► could have gone and seen some hard times and now he's moved beyond it and is being called

00:54:48 ◼   ► back.

00:54:50 ◼   ► The whole thing with the prequels, it did subvert my expectations.

00:54:54 ◼   ► And I guess I have to tip my hat to that, but I don't know if it subverted them in a

00:55:01 ◼   ► way that made me richer for it.

00:55:03 ◼   ► If you roughly sketch out what the prequels are trying to do,

00:55:07 ◼   ► you can make a semi-coherent story out of it,

00:55:10 ◼   ► like really bold, like three bullet points per movie.

00:55:14 ◼   ► But in execution, they just failed on every possible front.

00:55:17 ◼   ► So I don't disagree with that part,

00:55:19 ◼   ► with the overarching--

00:55:23 ◼   ► The concept.

00:55:24 ◼   ► --broad strokes of the prequels.

00:55:25 ◼   ► But once you get down below the level three bullet

00:55:27 ◼   ► points for movies, everything falls apart.

00:55:30 ◼   ► I really like, though.

00:55:31 ◼   ► And I thought that Luke's, that rant that Luke has in this movie is as close as, I almost

00:55:39 ◼   ► feel like they don't need to do it anymore, but I feel like they've, cinematically,

00:55:43 ◼   ► Rian Johnson took it on himself to bridge, you know, bridge all seven or eight movies,

00:55:50 ◼   ► I guess, so far together.

00:55:53 ◼   ► And I feel like that was very successful.

00:55:55 ◼   ► In a minimal amount of time, Luke's sort of, "Here's why I'm sickened by the Jedi and to

00:56:02 ◼   ► hell with him," it tied them together in a way that hadn't been tried before.

00:56:07 ◼   ► That the prequels were kind of left as a problem and that The Force Awakens just sort of skipped

00:56:12 ◼   ► over.

00:56:13 ◼   ► Yeah, well, because The Force Awakens, like, I mean, it's centering on Rey, who barely

00:56:16 ◼   ► even knows that Luke Skywalker even is a real thing and not just like a story that she's

00:56:20 ◼   ► heard.

00:56:21 ◼   ► No, she flat out thinks he's a mess.

00:56:22 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:23 ◼   ► not that close to it, but by the time we get into this movie it's time to get down to brass

00:56:27 ◼   ► tacks and see what is ever—because the prequels have now happened, so this movie has to be

00:56:31 ◼   ► informed by it. And it does it in a way of setting them aside—it's taking the broad

00:56:36 ◼   ► strokes from that. Like, look, the Jedi were stupid in the prequels, and we all agree the

00:56:40 ◼   ► Jedi were stupid in the prequels. Sometimes, they actually sometimes not be the way, like

00:56:43 ◼   ► they were shown to be an ineffective organization. And this movie's—I like this movie's message

00:56:47 ◼   ► about the Force with Yoda because it's back on message from the Empire Yoda to say it's

00:56:53 ◼   ► about the Force and not so much about the bureaucracy of the Jedi and the Sith and that

00:56:59 ◼   ► thing. It's about the Force and there is a light side and a dark side and there is a

00:57:02 ◼   ► struggle between them and Yoda is all about learning how not to give in to the dark side

00:57:07 ◼   ► is this quicker, easier, more seductive, you know, like, I'm all on board with that. And

00:57:12 ◼   ► I like that Yoda in this one is most able to let go of the trappings of like, because

00:57:16 ◼   ► first of all, the Yoda is long gone, right? Luke is the last one and he needs Yoda to

00:57:20 ◼   ► to give him a kick over the cliff to say, Look, what are you

00:57:22 ◼   ► even holding on to?

00:57:23 ◼   ► You got a bunch of books and you.

00:57:25 ◼   ► That's it.

00:57:25 ◼   ► There's no more Jedi Council.

00:57:27 ◼   ► Yoda is also long gone.

00:57:30 ◼   ► He's been dead for a long time.

00:57:33 ◼   ► Well, yeah, but he has less and less attachment to the physical

00:57:38 ◼   ► world. We don't know how time passes in the magic Force

00:57:42 ◼   ► Ghost realm.

00:57:43 ◼   ► Okay, well, he doesn't give a crap about the Jedi.

00:57:46 ◼   ► He just blows up the tree.

00:57:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, that's a problem with the Force Ghost, because

00:57:50 ◼   ► Like you gotta, I mean this movie does change a bunch of rules about things, but you know,

00:57:55 ◼   ► as many people pointed out, in some ways they kind of potentially break things down the

00:57:58 ◼   ► line. But like, what's the deal with the forest ghosts? Can they come back forever and ever?

00:58:02 ◼   ► Like why don't we see the forest ghosts from like, you know, 20 centuries coming back and

00:58:07 ◼   ► talking about it? It's just the ones that he knows? Did they ever age in the forest

00:58:10 ◼   ► ghost place? Anakin got to be younger.

00:58:11 ◼   ► Well, yeah. Well, there's two things about that. A, well, okay, just brief aside. I mean,

00:58:17 ◼   ► to say that Kenobi's force ghost didn't put those torpedoes down the hole when Luke fired them?

00:58:23 ◼   ► Well, Luke did that himself. He used the force. I mean, I guess, Kenobi didn't do it for him.

00:58:27 ◼   ► I forgot. The second thing is that Qui-Gon is the one who figured out how to be a force ghost.

00:58:33 ◼   ► There's no force ghost before Qui-Gon. Right. Okay. Okay. But he's still talking from beyond the grave.

00:58:38 ◼   ► All right. As far as we know, though, Qui-Gon only figured it out to the part where he could

00:58:42 ◼   ► like communicate not you know and and because Kenobi does it both ways when Luke is going down

00:58:47 ◼   ► the trench he only hears his voice and only in the Empire Strikes Back do we see the Force Ghost

00:58:53 ◼   ► uh for all we know Qui-Gon never got further than being able to communicate with Yoda

00:58:58 ◼   ► very specific set of skills John

00:59:05 ◼   ► Is my it is my take on it is that?

00:59:09 ◼   ► But Yoda has been able to extend it longer than Kenobi because Yoda was more powerful in the force and it helps that Yoda is

00:59:18 ◼   ► a puppet and

00:59:20 ◼   ► Well Frank Frank Oz is not a prank Oz is is still alive and Alec Guinness is dead and

00:59:26 ◼   ► What's his name you and McGregor in makeup isn't really gonna look like old obi-wan

00:59:33 ◼   ► And we've already established that when obi-wan appears as a ghost. He looks like Alec Guinness not like you and your

00:59:38 ◼   ► But I could you know if they could do it maybe it would be interesting I

00:59:44 ◼   ► It's one of the little things I've picked up on I've thought about

00:59:48 ◼   ► We could go on a whole aside on this but I need to do a break soon

00:59:52 ◼   ► But in the force awakens when Rey has the the vision when she first touches the lightsaber

00:59:58 ◼   ► Among the many things she sees there's things that come in this movie like most probably

01:00:04 ◼   ► Iconically is Luke with his robotic hand on our twos

01:00:08 ◼   ► Helmet or head whatever you want to call the top of our to watching his Jedi Temple burn

01:00:13 ◼   ► But one of the things in that sequence is you hear obi-wan say Rey and

01:00:21 ◼   ► There's a great backstory of how they kind of sampled

01:00:25 ◼   ► a line from Alex Guinness where he happens to say the syllable "rae."

01:00:31 ◼   ► He says the word "afraid" and they take "rae" out of "afraid."

01:00:33 ◼   ► Right. And then they took Ewan McGregor, I think, and had him say "rae," and they put him together.

01:00:39 ◼   ► They also used a guy that doesn't mean the Clone Wars. Like, that was a stand-in.

01:00:45 ◼   ► It could be that that vision was the only communication she ever gets from Obi-Wan,

01:00:50 ◼   ► Obi-Wan, but it could also be that maybe Obi-Wan will come and talk to Rey in the next movie.

01:00:56 ◼   ► I don't know how they would pull it off vocally, but I want that.

01:00:59 ◼   ► So we'll talk about her parentage, but I don't know. I'm a Kenobi nerd. I want him in, but I

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01:03:18 ◼   ► All right. I want to go back to this this thing

01:03:22 ◼   ► I was at about 20 to 30 minutes ago

01:03:24 ◼   ► which is that there's no gap between the force awakens and the last Jedi and

01:03:29 ◼   ► That this literally takes place like minutes afterwards

01:03:33 ◼   ► You know that the the resistance is fleeing their base because the Empire after the last movie is like there's no gap between on the island

01:03:40 ◼   ► But there is a gap when the resistance the two timelines are not in sync

01:03:43 ◼   ► I

01:03:44 ◼   ► Don't I don't think that's true. I think that that's immediately after the last movie

01:03:48 ◼   ► No, I think so. I think the the island stuff is obviously immediately after but the only way you could line up is if

01:03:55 ◼   ► At the end of the force awakens, there's a time jump

01:03:57 ◼   ► But I feel like those two things are not in sync because she's hanging out on that island for way longer

01:04:03 ◼   ► We keep cutting back to the resistance stuff

01:04:04 ◼   ► but we have like

01:04:06 ◼   ► seven hours of the resistance and they cut back and forth between the resistance in the island and it's like

01:04:11 ◼   ► At least a week on the island. So those timelines are I was oh, I think that that chase

01:04:15 ◼   ► I think the resistance is fleeing those ships for a week. I really do

01:04:19 ◼   ► So I'd I

01:04:23 ◼   ► You know

01:04:26 ◼   ► In that I do believe how do you explain the way that they sync back up on the salt?

01:04:31 ◼   ► So here's here's how I do it. All right, so

01:04:33 ◼   ► She's on the island and is doing a bunch of stuff on the island

01:04:39 ◼   ► She's on the island for a long time before the rebels start fleeing their base.

01:04:42 ◼   ► So she's just island, island, island, island, island, island, island, island.

01:04:45 ◼   ► And then the rebels flew their base.

01:04:47 ◼   ► And that's like in her last day or two that she's on the island before she bails.

01:04:51 ◼   ► Right. So that's how they sync up.

01:04:52 ◼   ► It's just what we cut back and forth between the two timelines.

01:04:55 ◼   ► But one is happening back in time.

01:04:56 ◼   ► It's fine. Like, I don't think there's any problem with that.

01:04:58 ◼   ► But that's my the movie I feel like was telling me is these two timelines are not actually in sync.

01:05:02 ◼   ► Yeah, it's it suits the narrative pace of the movie.

01:05:05 ◼   ► And John, the other John.

01:05:08 ◼   ► Too many fucking Johns.

01:05:13 ◼   ► - Just use last names.

01:05:14 ◼   ► Only I can use John 'cause it's unambiguous.

01:05:15 ◼   ► - Okay, okay, Gruber.

01:05:17 ◼   ► Here's the thing.

01:05:18 ◼   ► It would have taken the first order some time

01:05:22 ◼   ► to figure out where that base was, right?

01:05:25 ◼   ► Or else they would have just assaulted it

01:05:27 ◼   ► in the previous movie.

01:05:28 ◼   ► If they knew minutes after,

01:05:30 ◼   ► why weren't they there immediately

01:05:32 ◼   ► as they launched their super-

01:05:34 ◼   ► I'm like, I got to regroup.

01:05:34 ◼   ► Like a bunch of their crap just blew up.

01:05:36 ◼   ► Like they have regrouping time.

01:05:38 ◼   ► Yeah, it takes some time to regroup.

01:05:40 ◼   ► It's a lot, you know.

01:05:41 ◼   ► Plus the Kral tells us that they've like militarily dominated the galaxy.

01:05:46 ◼   ► So they blew up the Republic planets.

01:05:48 ◼   ► And, you know, but then the super weapon was destroyed, but they did blow up like

01:05:51 ◼   ► all the Republic capitals or whatever.

01:05:53 ◼   ► And then the Kral tells us and since blowing up all the Republic capitals,

01:05:57 ◼   ► they have been asserting their military force and they've taken over everything.

01:06:00 ◼   ► I'm on months here, which is a lot longer than what Luke got with Yoda.

01:06:07 ◼   ► I mean, that timeline gets you all whack, too.

01:06:10 ◼   ► Well, this was discussed on the incomparable with the title of one of the episodes was

01:06:14 ◼   ► Jedi Weekend of us trying to figure out exactly how long was he on Dagobah.

01:06:19 ◼   ► And those two timelines aren't in sync either, because the Falcon chase with the asteroids

01:06:22 ◼   ► and everything and Lando and all that stuff like that takes some time.

01:06:25 ◼   ► But it seems like Luke is on Dagobah for way longer.

01:06:28 ◼   ► So it's harder to sync those two things up because there is a sync point in Empire where

01:06:32 ◼   ► they're all on Hoth together. So we know that's the thing. But in The Last Jedi,

01:06:37 ◼   ► it's much easier just to say that, oh, a lot of the island stuff happened before the

01:06:41 ◼   ► rubble base was discovered. Here's the funny thing about that asteroid scene is that it is actually

01:06:46 ◼   ► like the physics are in real life. So it takes about a month between asteroids. And so what you

01:06:54 ◼   ► think is being awesome is really just careful plotting.

01:06:58 ◼   ► He's moving really, really slowly.

01:06:59 ◼   ► Like a complex environment.

01:07:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:07:01 ◼   ► And it's played in fast motion.

01:07:03 ◼   ► And they speed it up for the sake of the narrative.

01:07:05 ◼   ► And also some of the asteroids are potatoes.

01:07:08 ◼   ► Yes.

01:07:09 ◼   ► All right.

01:07:11 ◼   ► I do feel, and I feel like you have to compare it to Empire.

01:07:14 ◼   ► I'm open to this.

01:07:15 ◼   ► I'm open to the idea here that you guys are right and I'm wrong and that their discovery

01:07:19 ◼   ► of the Resistance base is weeks or months.

01:07:22 ◼   ► even at the longest period of time that it is is weeks or

01:07:25 ◼   ► months, right? It's not years, whereas in the original trilogy

01:07:30 ◼   ► and the prequel trilogy, there was all it was always very clear

01:07:33 ◼   ► that it had there had been a few years at least as many years as

01:07:37 ◼   ► in the real life release of the movies, but like, you know,

01:07:41 ◼   ► between Episode One and two clearly more because we saw the

01:07:45 ◼   ► Anakin Skywalker is like a six year old and then he's you know,

01:07:48 ◼   ► like a 16 year old. It was like a full decade who

01:07:52 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

01:07:53 ◼   ► And in Empire, they make reference to, like, their past adventures.

01:07:57 ◼   ► Like, oh, that bounty hunter ran into an Ord Mandel, you know, changed my mind.

01:08:01 ◼   ► And everyone was clearly older.

01:08:03 ◼   ► And, you know, they know each other better.

01:08:05 ◼   ► That one line set off my imagination for years.

01:08:09 ◼   ► Right.

01:08:09 ◼   ► Like, that was...

01:08:10 ◼   ► I'm telling you, I can't remember what I had for lunch today.

01:08:13 ◼   ► And I remember that bounty hunter on Ord Mandel.

01:08:16 ◼   ► That guy was great.

01:08:19 ◼   ► Man.

01:08:20 ◼   ► But you can just tell from the way they relate to each other that they had had adventures.

01:08:24 ◼   ► And the Kral also tells you that they blew up the Death Star, but the Empire is making a comeback.

01:08:30 ◼   ► And so the rebels thought they had the upper hand, but actually they've been chased farther and

01:08:34 ◼   ► farther around, and now they're on this base. So it's clear that time has passed. And the Kral

01:08:39 ◼   ► tries to do this as well, because you have to go from big victory to the rebels are on their

01:08:44 ◼   ► heels again. And that's mostly done by the Kral and by the passage of time. And the Kral in The

01:08:49 ◼   ► The Last Jedi doesn't give us a counter of like, how long has it been, but I think it

01:08:52 ◼   ► has been some time.

01:08:55 ◼   ► I almost feel, I wouldn't even say it was a comeback.

01:08:57 ◼   ► I feel like one of the triumphs of The Empire Strikes Back, and the whole movie is great,

01:09:01 ◼   ► but the triumph of the whole Battle of Hoth was the implication.

01:09:06 ◼   ► To me it was obvious right from the first time I watched it, is, "Oh, you think the

01:09:09 ◼   ► Rebels really set the Empire back by blowing up the Death Star?"

01:09:12 ◼   ► I mean, it was a great win.

01:09:14 ◼   ► It was probably the best thing they could have ever done.

01:09:16 ◼   ► But the Empire was so entrenched and the Rebel Alliance so small that the Empire was still

01:09:24 ◼   ► a massive monolith galaxy-wide.

01:09:26 ◼   ► The Death Star was a tool, not the machine.

01:09:28 ◼   ► And the Rebels were hiding.

01:09:30 ◼   ► Their strategy is hide.

01:09:32 ◼   ► So that's not the strategy where you feel like you could do well in a fair fight.

01:09:36 ◼   ► Right.

01:09:37 ◼   ► It was like, "Yo, you thought that they had a huge win.

01:09:40 ◼   ► Yeah, well, guess what?"

01:09:41 ◼   ► I have to say, too, your theory—I'm really liking this theory that it's at least a

01:09:45 ◼   ► couple of weeks after The Force Awakens where they discover the resistance base, because then that

01:09:50 ◼   ► solves a problem I had, which was that, and I still think it's a problem really, honestly,

01:09:56 ◼   ► is that they had the medal ceremony in Star Wars right there on Yavin, the moon on Yavin 4.

01:10:02 ◼   ► After they'd been outed.

01:10:03 ◼   ► Right. It's like, what should we do? Should we quickly evacuate before they send more

01:10:09 ◼   ► Star Destroyers or should we put everybody that we've got in one small space to get blown up?

01:10:15 ◼   ► And have a slow marching metal ceremony.

01:10:18 ◼   ► Until they had time to polish up R2 and 3PO too.

01:10:20 ◼   ► Right. And put like the most blatant speciesism, racism,

01:10:28 ◼   ► omission of the Chewie metal, you know, open them up to the metal.

01:10:32 ◼   ► Come on.

01:10:33 ◼   ► Well, since Wookiee's lived so long, when they're all dead, he just scoops up their

01:10:37 ◼   ► medals one by one. He's got Han's medal right now. Yeah, he was great in the prequels.

01:10:44 ◼   ► All right, I've got to bring this up. It seems like as good a point as any because we're not on

01:10:55 ◼   ► a good roll right now. Have you noticed that we're not actually talking about the movie at all?

01:11:01 ◼   ► I said I was going to talk about things that I disliked about,

01:11:06 ◼   ► We didn't have to do with Star Wars and I haven't been keeping to that either and and I also said that my things I'm

01:11:10 ◼   ► Mad about not the things other people are mad about and I feel like people are gonna think

01:11:13 ◼   ► That I am NOT keeping to that by complaining about Luke

01:11:16 ◼   ► But the biggest complaints I see about Luke is that he should have been more awesome

01:11:19 ◼   ► And I just think he should have been more pathetic. So I think it's a difference there. He's a new eyes. Oh

01:11:24 ◼   ► But I said the guy go ahead John like I didn't mean to deal with that little quips

01:11:31 ◼   ► I remember we were in were we in we were in Ireland a couple years ago for all right

01:11:37 ◼   ► Mm-hmm, and it was me and you and Jonas walking through a park in Dublin

01:11:41 ◼   ► Yeah, and we were they had first announced the name emoji

01:11:44 ◼   ► and yeah, and and my idea for Luke in the new trilogy was to like

01:11:50 ◼   ► just have him like

01:11:53 ◼   ► Just as just make it so that he was the only he was like holding the galaxy and the rebellion together for 30 years as

01:12:00 ◼   ► the one and only Jedi and put scars on his face, make his mechanical hand rusted, scars

01:12:09 ◼   ► on the face and just make him like, "Wow, you thought Mark Hamill would look better

01:12:14 ◼   ► than this after only 30 years." Make him look worse. Just go into it and really have

01:12:18 ◼   ► him like have the weight.

01:12:19 ◼   ► I remember that well and I think they went that direction a little bit, but...

01:12:23 ◼   ► But with more anger and less pain.

01:12:25 ◼   ► More emotionally than physically.

01:12:26 ◼   ► They went emotionally rather than physically, right. And I love his physical condition.

01:12:29 ◼   ► They did give him a crazy beard.

01:12:32 ◼   ► You can see when he changes it up for his force projection, he's got the "just for

01:12:35 ◼   ► men, just for Jedi" on his beard and it's all trimmed and everything.

01:12:39 ◼   ► I noticed that only on the second—I did not notice that the first time, I have to

01:12:43 ◼   ► say.

01:12:44 ◼   ► When Jenga battle?

01:12:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:12:46 ◼   ► He's got a haircut.

01:12:47 ◼   ► We'll get to that.

01:12:48 ◼   ► Let's put that aside.

01:12:49 ◼   ► He's got the shattered girdle on there.

01:12:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:12:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:12:54 ◼   ► That's okay.

01:12:56 ◼   ► So when you saw this Luke compared to the Luke that you sort of sketched out while we

01:13:03 ◼   ► were chatting on that walk, how did you feel about that?

01:13:08 ◼   ► It was in the ballpark, you know, and like, you know, they went more emotionally scarred

01:13:13 ◼   ► than physically scarred, but I'm with it.

01:13:16 ◼   ► It's not, it is not how I would have written 30 years out Luke, you know, but I'm okay

01:13:22 ◼   ► with it.

01:13:23 ◼   ► to write the Star Wars movie. And I feel like at least I do feel like Rian Johnson clearly

01:13:29 ◼   ► cared about and loves Luke and sees Luke. It's not the way he took Luke and what they

01:13:37 ◼   ► or how much was his decision, how much was the whole story group, how much was JJ involved

01:13:43 ◼   ► with this, including omitting him from the first movie. I don't know who to give credit

01:13:47 ◼   ► for. But at the very least, I think it's very clear that they didn't make any of these decisions

01:13:52 ◼   ► Regarding Luke lightly, you know that that they it wasn't just like that. We don't care about him. He's from an old movie

01:13:58 ◼   ► We're gonna concentrate on our new movies and we're just gonna throw this beloved character in the garbage

01:14:03 ◼   ► That's one of my things like lights about these is that I gave the force awakens a pass because that's got to be I

01:14:09 ◼   ► Assume there would be a transition you have transition from the old people to the new people because that's the future of the franchise

01:14:13 ◼   ► And you just can't have these, you know

01:14:15 ◼   ► So does transition mean you have to kill them all off does it mean they just retire in glory like whatever but you got a

01:14:20 ◼   ► transition. So like first movie you kill Han, probably the only way to get

01:14:25 ◼   ► Harris support in the movie was to promise to kill Han, right? Because he

01:14:28 ◼   ► wanted to die in Jedi. And so I give them that, right? But then with the

01:14:33 ◼   ► second movie, with so much Luke in the second movie, and so like zero of them

01:14:37 ◼   ► basically in the first movie, it's like then I started getting the sinking feel.

01:14:41 ◼   ► I was like, "Wait a second, we're two movies into this trilogy." I thought the first one

01:14:45 ◼   ► would be about the transition and the handoff to the new people, and I thought

01:14:48 ◼   ► The second movie would be like 90% Rey with Luke filling maybe a Yoda role.

01:14:53 ◼   ► And if Carrie Fisher was still alive, it'd be like, so they would do like the third one

01:14:57 ◼   ► would be Leia's movie?

01:14:58 ◼   ► And I was like, you just wasted a whole trilogy phasing out the classics.

01:15:01 ◼   ► And as much as I love the classics, I wanted the new movies to be about new characters

01:15:06 ◼   ► because I think Rey deserves a trilogy that is as centered on her as the original was

01:15:13 ◼   ► on Luke because that's what The Force Awakens sets up.

01:15:15 ◼   ► It's like, guess what?

01:15:16 ◼   ► is

01:15:18 ◼   ► As the

01:15:20 ◼   ► Centered on Poe Dameron as the original was on Han Solo

01:15:23 ◼   ► I'll pose most of dying the first movie so you kind of see that and well and but Finn Rey and Poe

01:15:28 ◼   ► but honestly that yeah, but also like

01:15:31 ◼   ► BB-8 like Han Solo Han Solo was only really supposed to be a you know

01:15:36 ◼   ► A bit character in the first movie and turned into such a yeah

01:15:39 ◼   ► And you can introduce like who's gonna be Orlando in the second movie like you can introduce new

01:15:43 ◼   ► But I expect it to be more about them. And it seems clear to me now that this trilogy,

01:15:47 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know what they're going to do with Carrie Fisher, but like, they've already spent two

01:15:52 ◼   ► movies spending a lot of time talking about the old characters. And I guess it's fine. Like,

01:15:56 ◼   ► they're not going to be alive forever, and they're not going to be able to do Star Wars movies very

01:16:00 ◼   ► soon. You might as well use them while you got them. You'll have plenty more Star Wars movies.

01:16:03 ◼   ► And in hindsight, it makes sense. It's just not what I expected.

01:16:07 ◼   ► Right. So while we're on it, how great...

01:16:10 ◼   ► Well, you go first.

01:16:12 ◼   ► Yeah, well, cuz I'm gonna keep talking until you shut up. So

01:16:14 ◼   ► Two things Carrie Fisher, we love you. Thank you for that was everything that was my point

01:16:23 ◼   ► Yeah, how great was she was so yeah as she was so good

01:16:32 ◼   ► I really really loved her in this movie, you know

01:16:36 ◼   ► I liked her in the the the force awakens - and I was so glad to see her and and I

01:16:41 ◼   ► I like the way that-- I mean, a lot of this isn't like makeup or CGI. It's just the way Carrie

01:16:47 ◼   ► Fisher aged, but I like the way she aged, and I love that she's got this sort of tough old broad

01:16:55 ◼   ► voice now. I mean, that's just what Carrie Fisher's voice ended up sounding like.

01:16:59 ◼   ► Yeah, and this is the case when we talked about how Luke seemed like Mark Hamill, the actor,

01:17:03 ◼   ► a lot. Carrie Fisher, the actress, fits exactly like how you would expect Lea at age, because she

01:17:09 ◼   ► was a fire plug in the first movie and she didn't take no guff from nobody and you would

01:17:13 ◼   ► totally see her turning into modern day Carrie Fisher.

01:17:16 ◼   ► I agree. And one of the things you said earlier about Mark Hamill asserting himself to the

01:17:23 ◼   ► character, I think that even as a filmmaker as talented as G.J. Abrams or Rian Johnson,

01:17:31 ◼   ► when the heroes that you grew up with tell you what they think the character should do,

01:17:36 ◼   ► I think there's an inherent amount of difference to it.

01:17:43 ◼   ► Not because you feel that they can strong arm you or not because you feel it can go

01:17:47 ◼   ► against your plot, but because these people have invested their lives in being these characters

01:17:55 ◼   ► in many ways.

01:17:59 ◼   ► I think it would be in sort of going against the tide or going against the flow of things

01:18:04 ◼   ► to sort of argue with them on where they think characters should go.

01:18:08 ◼   ► But Ryan did. Ryan didn't go with what Mark Hamill wanted. Mark Hamill was much more about

01:18:11 ◼   ► the Boy Scout, earnest, deep feeling, do-gooder...

01:18:14 ◼   ► I agree. And hence why I think that what probably should have remained a private creative discussion

01:18:23 ◼   ► is so fascinating to me. I love the fact that we got to hear that. I mean, we've all made

01:18:28 ◼   ► stuff. How many times have you argued with somebody that we should do this instead of

01:18:32 ◼   ► it happens all the time.

01:18:34 ◼   ► I bet no one argued with Harrison Ford about what Han Solo was supposed to do, though.

01:18:38 ◼   ► No, no, Harrison Ford is like, "No, I'm gonna get--"

01:18:42 ◼   ► Well, you know what? Amy might have just murdered him herself.

01:18:45 ◼   ► Well, imagine if Han Solo had turned, like, cowardly, and he was like, you know, like a little weasel.

01:18:51 ◼   ► It can't happen.

01:18:53 ◼   ► No, but I don't think that happened with Luke either.

01:18:57 ◼   ► Yeah, just slightly off. And like I said, I want to reiterate, 30 years, man, a lot

01:19:02 ◼   ► of stuff can happen in 30 years, but it's up to the movie to make me believe it, because

01:19:07 ◼   ► we all know where we last left Luke. And it's true of a lot of things, to finally get into

01:19:11 ◼   ► some more of the structural things about this movie, if you were to give a rough outline

01:19:15 ◼   ► of what this movie's supposed to be doing and its general themes and the plot threads,

01:19:20 ◼   ► I mean, especially the themes, like, we already went over the themes about how the Jedi and

01:19:25 ◼   ► says they're not the force. The force is separate from them. And those are human institutions

01:19:28 ◼   ► or alien or whatever. Those are leverage it. They use it right. That's not right. That's

01:19:33 ◼   ► not that's one theme and burning down the Jedi tree. So whatever that's that's that's

01:19:36 ◼   ► a thread a plot line there. You've got Ray's thread Ray and and Kylo, they have a thread

01:19:41 ◼   ► about we're going to progress those characters. And we're going to, you know, resolve the

01:19:46 ◼   ► Snoke thing, but bring those two closer together and have them to be kind of a proxy for figuring

01:19:49 ◼   ► out what the Force really is in this new age. Then you've got Finn and Rose are going to

01:19:56 ◼   ► learn about, or going to inform sort of the big picture of what's going on in the galaxy

01:20:02 ◼   ► these days. Like, you know, what is the incoming inequality in the galaxy? How does the Republic

01:20:09 ◼   ► and the Resistance and the First Order and the Citizenry fit in with all that? That's

01:20:14 ◼   ► their thread. And then I guess finally you have First Order versus the Resistance, which

01:20:18 ◼   ► which is a thread we kind of pick up on.

01:20:20 ◼   ► That's a lot of threads already to begin with.

01:20:23 ◼   ► But as you zoom in on those threads and say, OK, well,

01:20:27 ◼   ► brass tacks, how are you going to tell me about income

01:20:31 ◼   ► and inequality in the galaxy?

01:20:32 ◼   ► How are you going to--

01:20:33 ◼   ► Well, John, I'm going to give you a leaflet that

01:20:36 ◼   ► identifies each of them.

01:20:39 ◼   ► Because it's a lot of threads for a movie,

01:20:41 ◼   ► and they introduce new characters.

01:20:42 ◼   ► And in broad strokes, I'm mostly on board

01:20:44 ◼   ► with everything they're doing.

01:20:45 ◼   ► But when it comes down to the execution, I feel like some threads are stronger than others.

01:20:51 ◼   ► Let's put it that way. And if push came to shove, I would say, is it really that important for me to learn about arms dealers and stuff?

01:20:58 ◼   ► Or if we cut that thread, can we give more time to what to my mind are the more like the threads that I care more about?

01:21:05 ◼   ► Right. There was there's a little bit too many characters and a little too many threads, which would have been fine if they had pulled it off.

01:21:11 ◼   ► but some of them are demonstrably weaker than others,

01:21:14 ◼   ► just not just in terms of like how good is the writing

01:21:17 ◼   ► and how good is the acting and so on and so forth,

01:21:18 ◼   ► but like mechanically speaking,

01:21:22 ◼   ► is the movie able to keep the audience on the same page

01:21:25 ◼   ► with it about what they're seeing and why

01:21:27 ◼   ► and what it's about?

01:21:28 ◼   ► And I feel like that falls down

01:21:31 ◼   ► with the Rose Fin thread being the weakest, I think,

01:21:34 ◼   ► not because the ideas are bad

01:21:36 ◼   ► or because they shouldn't have had a thread like that,

01:21:38 ◼   ► but just plain old in execution,

01:21:40 ◼   ► Like in terms of does the audience follow along with what's going on?

01:21:43 ◼   ► Are they engaged?

01:21:45 ◼   ► Are the characters doing things that are like just and that's not about Star Wars.

01:21:49 ◼   ► That's just playing about movie making.

01:21:51 ◼   ► Right.

01:21:52 ◼   ► And here's one we disagree with you, but we'll get to that.

01:21:55 ◼   ► So, Gruber, what do you think?

01:21:58 ◼   ► I'm okay with the fact I've seen people complain about the fact

01:22:01 ◼   ► that the Rose Fin adventure to Canto bite didn't even matter.

01:22:08 ◼   ► You know it it didn't matter because it ended up not playing into the rest of me. I'm okay with that

01:22:13 ◼   ► I like that like a sort of red herring that you think oh, this is how

01:22:17 ◼   ► Don't matter if they're engaged with it, and they love what's going on and it's coherent

01:22:22 ◼   ► But if there's anything off about it people will find things to complain about like oh, yeah, and in the end matter I

01:22:28 ◼   ► Just thought that the whole thread was the one thing and honestly and and and I I feel like I can say this because I've said

01:22:35 ◼   ► Already on this show that I liked the prequel trilogy more than most people my age did

01:22:42 ◼   ► But that whole sequence on kento bite was very prequel II to me. I thought that the the way that it looked I thought that the

01:22:49 ◼   ► CGI ness of it the way the camera moved like when you first

01:22:53 ◼   ► Coming on that man when they're and and just and the camera just sort of goes across this and everybody you see is an alien

01:23:00 ◼   ► And I was it was a homage to what was that movie? You know what it was guy?

01:23:05 ◼   ► I think silent film.

01:23:08 ◼   ► I did a shot that was like that.

01:23:09 ◼   ► And that was an homage.

01:23:10 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:23:11 ◼   ► I did before you actually asked me, but now I'm blanking.

01:23:15 ◼   ► But yeah, everyone who is listening to this knows and is yelling at the podcast right

01:23:19 ◼   ► now.

01:23:20 ◼   ► But anyway, it's a movie bus movie shout out, basically.

01:23:25 ◼   ► But I thought that the chase scene through Canto bite with these escaped whatever you

01:23:31 ◼   ► call their version of racehorses smashing up the city streets looked—I thought it

01:23:38 ◼   ► looked terrible. I really did. In a way that I thought a lot of the CGI stuff in the original

01:23:44 ◼   ► prequel trilogy looked bad. It just didn't look good. It just looked fake. It looked

01:23:48 ◼   ► like it was watching a video game, not a movie. I really didn't like it. And I just thought

01:23:52 ◼   ► it just felt prequelly, like the pod racing scene. It just is going on and on with, "Here's

01:23:58 ◼   ► one of these things busting up another bar. Here it is busting up a speeder. Here it is busting,

01:24:03 ◼   ► you know, over and over and over again. And it just didn't seem there's so much,

01:24:08 ◼   ► you know, it's ridiculous to complain about realism in the Star Wars trilogy. It's not

01:24:14 ◼   ► that it wasn't realistic, but the physics of Star Wars are generally pretty realistic.

01:24:23 ◼   ► And the prequels, I feel like, lost that, where it got very cartoony physics-wise.

01:24:29 ◼   ► And I felt like that whole scene on Canto Bight was like that.

01:24:31 ◼   ► And then the other thing that was frequently about it was the sort of political nature of it.

01:24:36 ◼   ► And I'm not—I, you know, personally even agree with the basic premise of the politics of it and,

01:24:42 ◼   ► you know, being opposed to war profiteering and stuff.

01:24:46 ◼   ► But it just sort of—I don't know. It just felt like it was detached from the rest of the story threads.

01:24:52 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I thought John's summary of the threads of the movie was perfect.

01:24:58 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:24:58 ◼   ► That was a really, really good.

01:25:00 ◼   ► And I really do think that this one, it just doesn't get braided with the other threads.

01:25:04 ◼   ► Not only does it not get braided, but I think it is clumsily executed.

01:25:07 ◼   ► So we get it.

01:25:08 ◼   ► We get the message that they're trying to say.

01:25:09 ◼   ► But the characters that you have in this thread to convey the message,

01:25:14 ◼   ► they spend a lot of time doing things that are not in support of it.

01:25:17 ◼   ► Remember, they're there to get the code breaker and there's also some

01:25:20 ◼   ► McGuffin stuff to get them there, right?

01:25:22 ◼   ► and then they throw in the horses and the slave children and you got to get the other code breaker

01:25:27 ◼   ► the DJ guy right um they do a lot of things that there's a lot of moving around and moving parts

01:25:34 ◼   ► that aren't in service of the message the the few bits they get are in service of the message are

01:25:38 ◼   ► DJ shows them that on the ship they steal this person sells arms to to the first order but also

01:25:43 ◼   ► sells them to the resistance so you get that one scene which is it's okay it's it's you know it's

01:25:49 ◼   ► It's a little bit on the nose, but it's still fine.

01:25:52 ◼   ► You get the kind of--

01:25:55 ◼   ► the thread of Rose and Finn seeing the slave children

01:25:59 ◼   ► and inspiring them, but freeing the horses.

01:26:02 ◼   ► Do we care about the horses, or do we

01:26:04 ◼   ► care about the slave kids?

01:26:05 ◼   ► And then Finn being like, but even if we die,

01:26:08 ◼   ► it was all worth it to wreck their town,

01:26:10 ◼   ► but you didn't even really wreck it, and why the hell--

01:26:12 ◼   ► you would never say it was all worth it to wreck their town.

01:26:14 ◼   ► You're supposed to be saving your friends.

01:26:16 ◼   ► It's not-- it's clumsily executed.

01:26:18 ◼   ► I know what they're trying to get at, but you haven't put the

01:26:21 ◼   ► characters into positions where they can convey that.

01:26:24 ◼   ► Like, I don't believe that the thread doesn't connect up with

01:26:28 ◼   ► itself. Just basic mechanics.

01:26:29 ◼   ► Who are the characters?

01:26:30 ◼   ► What are they doing and why?

01:26:32 ◼   ► And you haven't delivered lines like that.

01:26:34 ◼   ► It's like it was worth it just to make them heart.

01:26:35 ◼   ► Like, what?

01:26:36 ◼   ► No, it wasn't.

01:26:37 ◼   ► And you didn't hurt them.

01:26:38 ◼   ► And this is stupid.

01:26:38 ◼   ► So they're literally hours away from the destruction of the

01:26:44 ◼   ► entire resistance.

01:26:45 ◼   ► And they decide that the most important priority is vandalizing

01:26:48 ◼   ► some speeders.

01:26:49 ◼   ► You want to vandalize the town and leave, but have him deliver

01:26:52 ◼   ► the line that it was worth it to show that he's super duper

01:26:54 ◼   ► and supportive, helping like the slave kids and being against

01:26:57 ◼   ► the rich people.

01:26:57 ◼   ► And John doesn't like it.

01:26:59 ◼   ► They say people who gamble and go to Vegas are bad.

01:27:01 ◼   ► And John's already honest.

01:27:02 ◼   ► He also saying, I don't agree with that at all.

01:27:04 ◼   ► Like, they have very reasonable prices for rooms and very

01:27:08 ◼   ► good food.

01:27:08 ◼   ► Okay.

01:27:09 ◼   ► Well, let's not drag each other into the ethical mud.

01:27:13 ◼   ► And why, if you built a casino next to a racetrack, yeah, it was definitely Monaco.

01:27:24 ◼   ► If you built a casino, a high-end, premium luxury casino next to a racetrack...

01:27:29 ◼   ► You're gonna play with the horse to shake the drinks?

01:27:30 ◼   ► That's no good.

01:27:31 ◼   ► Why in the world would it be so flimsily constructed that the race going on, which probably happens

01:27:38 ◼   ► every day, would shake the drinks to the point where they spill?

01:27:42 ◼   ► Yeah, and they're like how much I don't those are just regular horse-sized things and they're running on dirt

01:27:46 ◼   ► Like how could it shake anything that was you know?

01:27:48 ◼   ► There's lots of things about it that are just

01:27:50 ◼   ► Mechanically and they just spend a lot of time there and a lot of us in the mccuffin stuff and you need the codebreaker

01:27:55 ◼   ► And they need a reason to get in there

01:27:56 ◼   ► But like the whole thread like look at you if you can make it you don't need the co-op

01:27:59 ◼   ► You can make that thread work with just like a DJ and the arms dealer like not even have them go to a planet

01:28:05 ◼   ► But as I read work you guys I would love to pull that thread and give more time to the other ones

01:28:10 ◼   ► And that's setting aside, I love Rose. I love her plotline. I love her, like, what she gets.

01:28:18 ◼   ► To the credit of this movie, every character in it, both old and new, like newly introduced in

01:28:24 ◼   ► this movie, gets to have a hero moment and an arc, and that is very difficult to do.

01:28:28 ◼   ► But if you could somehow keep Rose and give her something else to do with or without Finn,

01:28:36 ◼   ► like just I'm not against the characters and I'm not even against the message of the thing I'm just

01:28:41 ◼   ► against like because it gets come the execution right yeah like script like who you know if you

01:28:46 ◼   ► decide this is what this is a message we want to get out in this movie how do we do it and you

01:28:50 ◼   ► write this shaggy dog story it's like let's can we find a different way to get that out with less time

01:28:55 ◼   ► um so so here's I think it could have been done I would have done it the way I would have done it

01:29:00 ◼   ► off the top of my head is I would have the same basic plot where you these two Rose and Finn

01:29:05 ◼   ► are going to defy Admiral Holda's, you know, they're going to go on a secret mission with Po

01:29:11 ◼   ► Dameron, you know, sort of plotting. Yeah, and they go get DJ and it doesn't take any time. And

01:29:21 ◼   ► then their whole adventure takes place on the Imperial ship.

01:29:26 ◼   ► I really think you're missing the whole point of this thing.

01:29:29 ◼   ► I don't think we're missing it. We're just complaining about how it was delivered. Like,

01:29:32 ◼   ► Like we're all on board with the message.

01:29:33 ◼   ► - So okay, so the delivery is poor.

01:29:36 ◼   ► It is definitely shoehorned into a movie

01:29:38 ◼   ► where it doesn't need to exist.

01:29:40 ◼   ► On the other hand, for the first time in Star Wars,

01:29:43 ◼   ► we see two people of color going on a little adventure.

01:29:47 ◼   ► Did they screw it up narratively?

01:29:50 ◼   ► Yes.

01:29:51 ◼   ► Could it be cut and the movie could be

01:29:53 ◼   ► probably better for it?

01:29:55 ◼   ► Yeah, probably.

01:29:57 ◼   ► But you know what?

01:29:58 ◼   ► There's a lot of people that are watching that

01:29:59 ◼   ► and being like, now Star Wars is now talking.

01:30:02 ◼   ► I love Rose and I'm even on board with the Rose Finn kiss, which I heard people complain about. It makes perfect sense to me.

01:30:07 ◼   ► Yeah, no, no, no, I'm not even saying that you guys are against it. I'm just saying that, like, despite the fact that this is clearly a break from making it a good movie, it is in service of it being a new mythology reset of beginning that you watch Star Wars over and over and over and over.

01:30:30 ◼   ► People are going to watch this over and over.

01:30:32 ◼   ► And you can't...

01:30:35 ◼   ► I think you can't diminish what people are going to be able to take out of that little weird side adventure.

01:30:43 ◼   ► And hold us to our own.

01:30:46 ◼   ► And for that reason, I admire it.

01:30:49 ◼   ► Do I think it makes it a better movie? A better coherent narrative?

01:30:53 ◼   ► Probably not.

01:30:55 ◼   ► But I like that they put it in there.

01:30:58 ◼   ► Because it's bigger than a movie, right?

01:31:01 ◼   ► At this point, you can have what you're asking for without

01:31:05 ◼   ► all of the bad things.

01:31:06 ◼   ► And when I first saw the bomber pilot die and that Rose had

01:31:11 ◼   ► the same necklace, I totally thought that they were partners,

01:31:14 ◼   ► right?

01:31:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:31:15 ◼   ► I think we were magically bosses.

01:31:17 ◼   ► Which would have been a different way to go with that.

01:31:19 ◼   ► But either way, which is weird because you and I both have,

01:31:23 ◼   ► like, you know, broken heart lockets.

01:31:25 ◼   ► Right.

01:31:25 ◼   ► Like I always say, I don't know about the whole Magic Lachas thing.

01:31:28 ◼   ► It just always seems like a romantic thing.

01:31:30 ◼   ► But what do I know?

01:31:30 ◼   ► Either way, it works fine either way.

01:31:32 ◼   ► But like, and I like her character and I like her as a foil for Finn,

01:31:36 ◼   ► especially since Finn has been having had a rough day in The Force Awakens

01:31:41 ◼   ► and is still a little frazzled in this and she's so much more grounded.

01:31:45 ◼   ► I'm not sure they did a great job selling you on the fact that she's

01:31:48 ◼   ► romantically interested in Finn.

01:31:50 ◼   ► You buy it based on circumstance, but...

01:31:52 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:31:53 ◼   ► I mean, a kiss in Star Wars is like, what does it mean now?

01:31:55 ◼   ► So there's something you have to do in a movie to set that up, to say, "I see what she sees

01:32:00 ◼   ► in Finn."

01:32:01 ◼   ► All you need is one look or one line.

01:32:03 ◼   ► Here's the thing with these movies.

01:32:05 ◼   ► Movies with lots of characters—and I said this in the uncomfortable—when you have

01:32:08 ◼   ► lots of characters—and there are lots of characters.

01:32:10 ◼   ► You've got the old characters, right?

01:32:11 ◼   ► You've got the new characters in "Judges and Forest of Wiggins," and then they added

01:32:13 ◼   ► more characters in this movie.

01:32:15 ◼   ► That's a lot of characters.

01:32:16 ◼   ► That's a Marvel movie level of characters.

01:32:18 ◼   ► When you have tons of characters, you can't give that much time to all of them, but if

01:32:23 ◼   ► want them to all have meaningful arcs, the writing is so important. You're gonna get

01:32:26 ◼   ► three sentences, five meaningful glances, and four actions the whole movie. Build arcs

01:32:32 ◼   ► out of that. You have to pack so much into those lines and those looks and those actions

01:32:37 ◼   ► that if you burn one on something stupid, then it's like, "Oh, I didn't really pick

01:32:41 ◼   ► up that Rose was crushing on Finn, but now I kind of see it," right? You know, like,

01:32:46 ◼   ► it's so hard to do. And I think some of the latter-day Marvel movies, whether they be

01:32:50 ◼   ► Avengers movies or Captain America Civil War or whatever who just have tons of

01:32:55 ◼   ► characters in them, some that we know and some that are newly introduced, do a

01:32:59 ◼   ► better job of giving cleverly written, concise, information-dense dialogue and

01:33:07 ◼   ► lines. And they're bad Marvel movies too, but like, that is a really difficult

01:33:11 ◼   ► challenge. One way to avoid that challenge is to not do that, to not bite

01:33:14 ◼   ► off that much, to trim down your characters, to concentrate on, you know,

01:33:18 ◼   ► just the Rey and Kylo story thread or, you know, like cut some threads, condense some things, right?

01:33:23 ◼   ► The other way is to just be really, really good at it. And that's hard to do. And I feel like they

01:33:28 ◼   ► fell short in, they fell short of even the Marvel, the best, the highest Marvel bar is set for this.

01:33:34 ◼   ► They fell short of it. How many characters were added in Empire? Off the top of my head,

01:33:39 ◼   ► you finally get to see the Emperor. Lando has a big role. Yoda has a huge role. The Emperor is

01:33:46 ◼   ► seen in a hologram but it's like 30 seconds of imperial officers who Vader

01:33:52 ◼   ► chokes die off but you got you know them given looks to each other like I don't

01:34:01 ◼   ► know if they count as characters oh as an aside as a bit character who dies

01:34:06 ◼   ► quickly I loved the Imperial officer of the I think they called it a dreadknot

01:34:11 ◼   ► not yeah because I think part of the problem one problem I have with this

01:34:22 ◼   ► both of these movies is that hux is is that he's not a badass right it's like

01:34:30 ◼   ► Jesus is like it is loud but he's no he's no Tarkin right he's not terrifying

01:34:38 ◼   ► Well, you know, well, here's the thing.

01:34:41 ◼   ► Hitler was a great orator, and I think Hux served that role under Snoke.

01:34:51 ◼   ► He's mostly there to be Kylo Ren's annoying coworker.

01:34:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:34:56 ◼   ► Yeah, but I mean, the fact that this dreadnought captain was like, "This is an incredibly

01:35:01 ◼   ► bad strategy.

01:35:02 ◼   ► What are we doing?"

01:35:05 ◼   ► I loved it.

01:35:06 ◼   ► he ends up dying for it, which is my favorite kind of bad guy.

01:35:10 ◼   ► The bad guy that's competent enough to know that what he's doing is dumb,

01:35:13 ◼   ► but tells the boss and then dies anyways.

01:35:17 ◼   ► I think we might have been meant to take Hux more seriously in The Force Awakens,

01:35:22 ◼   ► but Rian Johnson correctly, you know, sort of read that the audience is not entirely on board.

01:35:27 ◼   ► Yes.

01:35:28 ◼   ► Seriously.

01:35:29 ◼   ► Right.

01:35:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:35:29 ◼   ► So I'll put him in this movie and show him to be as ridiculous as we all think he is.

01:35:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:35:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:35:34 ◼   ► Same thing with Kylo Ren.

01:35:39 ◼   ► That guy is...

01:35:40 ◼   ► Oh yeah, more undercutting, like the mask and everything.

01:35:42 ◼   ► But I don't even think that was undercutting, because the whole movie doesn't try to pull

01:35:46 ◼   ► off like, "Oh yeah, no, Kylo Ren just likes masks.

01:35:48 ◼   ► No, he's totally doing it because he's a Vader fanboy."

01:35:51 ◼   ► And that bubble needed to be popped.

01:35:52 ◼   ► And even Snow calls him out for it, which I love.

01:35:55 ◼   ► Although I didn't like how they really cranked over the voice to be like, "Oh, isn't this

01:35:59 ◼   ► dumb that he doesn't affect his voice?"

01:36:01 ◼   ► Because I like Kylo Ren's voice in The Force Awakens.

01:36:04 ◼   ► I like that voice effect, it did an awesome job. And then in The

01:36:07 ◼   ► Last Jedi, they totally over crank it and to be like, hey,

01:36:10 ◼   ► don't remember how dumb this voice sounded? Like, oh, no, it

01:36:12 ◼   ► sounded cool in the first movie. So I kind of-

01:36:14 ◼   ► I honestly don't. Well, I mean, maybe it was to sound- So one

01:36:18 ◼   ► thing I do recall is that Gruber, you didn't like when he

01:36:24 ◼   ► took his mask off in the first movie. And I was a big fan

01:36:28 ◼   ► because he was playing it as a power move when he took it off

01:36:31 ◼   ► today. Ray calls him a monster behind a mask, so he takes off the mask to try to...

01:36:37 ◼   ► I guess I'm okay with it now. I think I will rescind my criticism of that. And I see it now

01:36:44 ◼   ► as a, like, you know, exactly what Sir Cusick just said. He had a Vader fanboy complex, and

01:36:51 ◼   ► that can't last three movies long. It was an interesting character trait.

01:36:55 ◼   ► He's always set up to be as an immature thing like that that isn't sustainable and that you would imagine he would be ridiculed about

01:37:03 ◼   ► Yeah, he's got a huggy on his face, and he keeps taking his lightsaber to computer banks. Yeah

01:37:09 ◼   ► He's that's not good

01:37:11 ◼   ► So that that parlays into something that I found interesting about the writing in both of these movies

01:37:17 ◼   ► But especially here is in The Last Jedi is

01:37:20 ◼   ► that

01:37:23 ◼   ► Vader gets mentioned a lot including by Snoke and Snoke seems to have a Vader boner, too

01:37:29 ◼   ► He's you know, he really is talking up Vader and they don't mention

01:37:33 ◼   ► Palpatine once right like Vader is the guy that even Snoke seems obsessed with

01:37:40 ◼   ► from the previous Dark Lords who ruled the galaxy not

01:37:44 ◼   ► The Emperor and I almost feel like that's one of those ways where the characters are speaking

01:37:51 ◼   ► For the fans right like if you think who's the best bad guy in Star Wars it you immediately say with Darth Vader Darth Vader

01:37:58 ◼   ► Is probably the best bad guy in any movie ever made you don't think the Emperor?

01:38:02 ◼   ► Has the things to recommend it, but I don't think it's so much as oh, yeah

01:38:06 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's speaking for the original trilogy because in my world

01:38:10 ◼   ► Vader hunted down and destroyed the Jedi he is the big bad until the M way creeps into

01:38:18 ◼   ► Yeah, oh yeah, I know Ben says that Ben says that

01:38:21 ◼   ► Didn't say Palpatine hunter the prequels tell us basically the Palpatine is the one who killed all the Jedi

01:38:26 ◼   ► But as far as the if you pretend the prequels don't exist the original trilogy says Vader hunted down and destroyed the Jedi so you

01:38:31 ◼   ► Can imagine if if Snoke has not seen the prequels he would be like Vader

01:38:34 ◼   ► That guy hunted down destroyed the Jedi the Jedi were a big problem for us, and he got rid of them

01:38:39 ◼   ► So that's great and oh yeah

01:38:40 ◼   ► There was Palpatine doing some stuff or whatever the prequels put Palpatine in the driver's seat and Vader is this stupid idiot

01:38:46 ◼   ► And we don't like those movies

01:38:48 ◼   ► I thought that was interesting.

01:38:51 ◼   ► I do think...

01:38:53 ◼   ► So that leads me to me, I think it's problematic.

01:38:57 ◼   ► I think it's problematic that we're now two movies into a three movie trilogy and Snoke

01:39:05 ◼   ► is literally just an emperor-like bad guy with very strong force powers and there's

01:39:12 ◼   ► no hint of a backstory.

01:39:14 ◼   ► I'm not asking them to give me the backstory. I'm asking for just the Ord Mandel

01:39:20 ◼   ► Yeah hint of a backstory that makes me

01:39:23 ◼   ► Wish that I do make a movie about that

01:39:26 ◼   ► like I

01:39:29 ◼   ► to me that is the key difference between the four five six trilogy and the

01:39:33 ◼   ► prequel trilogy is that the four five six trilogy had all of these hints of things that had happened like all dates the

01:39:40 ◼   ► The entire description of the Clone Wars is just you fought with my father in the Clone Wars. That's it

01:39:45 ◼   ► You just hear that there was a thing

01:39:47 ◼   ► 20 years earlier called the Clone Wars and you it's up to you to imagine what that meant

01:39:52 ◼   ► I all of these little little touches that hint at this big story and and Vader betrayed your father and

01:40:00 ◼   ► you know

01:40:02 ◼   ► There's none of that about like Snoke none of it

01:40:05 ◼   ► There's no he's just a generic boogeyman force guy and and the thing that makes it stick out to me is I

01:40:12 ◼   ► Mean how old is Snoke in this movie? I mean I

01:40:15 ◼   ► Were 600 years old. I don't know

01:40:18 ◼   ► He certainly looks like he's at least old enough that he was you know, he's not as early as the mileage

01:40:27 ◼   ► Yeah

01:40:31 ◼   ► Yeah, a little bit.

01:40:32 ◼   ► He was a lot, but it seems pretty clear that he was alive 30 years ago when the Emperor and Vader were ruling the galaxy.

01:40:40 ◼   ► Like where was this dark, powerful...

01:40:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's what I was saying before.

01:40:46 ◼   ► It's okay for a sequel to subvert expectations,

01:40:50 ◼   ► but it happens so much in this movie that it's hard not to think that has something to do with some sort of

01:40:57 ◼   ► disagreement about where these things are going between

01:41:01 ◼   ► JJ and Rian Johnson because Rian Johnson doesn't undercut some of them, he undercuts a ton of them and some of them like Snoke are like

01:41:09 ◼   ► undercut in a way that is not only unexpected, but that just drops it on the floor. Literally undercut. Yeah, like

01:41:15 ◼   ► You know so he didn't... And they left him on the floor. And the thing is I like Snoke in this movie

01:41:20 ◼   ► I thought the CG for him was great. Yeah, he's great.

01:41:23 ◼   ► I thought he was a character that was distinct from the Emperor both in style and in

01:41:27 ◼   ► speaking and enforced powers and in many many ways he never seemed like, other than being

01:41:32 ◼   ► like an ugly dude, he didn't seem Palpatine like to me at all. And no we don't know where

01:41:37 ◼   ► he comes from but in the first movie like he's set up to be mysterious and will, you

01:41:44 ◼   ► know, and he'll become more important later and it's kind of like, they do this in the

01:41:47 ◼   ► prequels a ton where like Count Dooku's stupid guy is like he shows up he's gonna be important

01:41:53 ◼   ► no, kill him in the first scene of the next movie it's like whatever like you don't even

01:41:56 ◼   ► care that much. Any one of these things that we're talking about is fine to be changed

01:42:01 ◼   ► in The Last Jedi, but to change all of them and to drop all of them just makes me think

01:42:05 ◼   ► that there was kind of like a hard left turn somewhere in the story plotting for this thing.

01:42:11 ◼   ► And you know, it totally makes it fascinating to see, do we turn back on "on course" to

01:42:16 ◼   ► the JJ course? Or do we continue this hard turn? Or do we like do a spin out and go vertically?

01:42:22 ◼   ► It's gonna be very interesting to see what they do in the next movie. But yeah, in this

01:42:24 ◼   ► movie Snoke gets to be a cool character but John is not going to be satisfied that we

01:42:29 ◼   ► learn anything about him. I mean they can still tell you the next movie stuff about

01:42:31 ◼   ► him but it's like he's dead now so I really hope he's dead now. So whatever we learn it's

01:42:36 ◼   ► like oh that's nice but it's not a factor anymore right?

01:42:40 ◼   ► So I've got a few points about that. First of all, if Snoke had been more compelling

01:42:48 ◼   ► and probably don't have the name Snoke, I would be more interested in hearing his backstory.

01:42:55 ◼   ► More compelling in The Force Awakens, you mean?

01:42:56 ◼   ► Yeah, well, I mean, just, he is just an all powerful thing that we don't-

01:43:01 ◼   ► He's got his thing about being inside your mind and stuff like that.

01:43:05 ◼   ► No, no, I got it.

01:43:06 ◼   ► It's all about projection. But he's not, say, Wolverine. He's not Darth Vader, where-

01:43:15 ◼   ► Yeah, you need to know your name and something about where he came from.

01:43:18 ◼   ► And you don't want it. And as soon as you reveal the backstory, it lessens the character that you actually know and love.

01:43:24 ◼   ► I never got that sense from him. I did not care. I really did. It's like, okay, I don't understand how Luke can light up his lightsaber to kill his nephew without, you know, going out to murder Snoke first.

01:43:44 ◼   ► That none of that makes sense. You're worried about big sources of the dark side, you know, Snoke is manipulating him

01:43:49 ◼   ► Yeah, like maybe maybe go to the source for us yet that that whole that whole

01:43:52 ◼   ► Instead of your nephew. It's it that seems

01:43:56 ◼   ► Pretty straight up to me. Yeah, well and that plays right into my biggest complaint single biggest complaint about the prequels

01:44:03 ◼   ► Which is not doesn't seem to be anybody else's biggest complaint, but my biggest complaint is in

01:44:07 ◼   ► Revenge of the Sith at the end

01:44:09 ◼   ► like I'll go all the way to the end of Revenge of the Sith and like the beginning of the final act and

01:44:14 ◼   ► Why in the world didn't Yoda and obi-wan go to get the Emperor together first and then we'll figure out what never never split the party

01:44:21 ◼   ► maybe

01:44:22 ◼   ► Right, maybe just by killing the Emperor. It'll break the hold he has on Anakin. They won't even have to kill him

01:44:29 ◼   ► You know what?

01:44:29 ◼   ► I mean like but why in the world would they separate there like if they're really worried about how strong the Emperor is and they

01:44:35 ◼   ► Word right to be why in the world wouldn't they go together? It was it's the most ridiculous

01:44:39 ◼   ► Something in the entire ridiculous things that way and you're right. That's not my biggest complaint, but that is a legit complaint

01:44:45 ◼   ► Yeah

01:44:49 ◼   ► I'm at Syracuse. Oh, that's dumb. I like to I'm with you guys. I loved Snoke in this movie

01:44:54 ◼   ► I wish there was a backstory just a hint of it just some sort of

01:44:57 ◼   ► Or like he was a disciple of Palpatine or why did he get that big split right like you don't need you don't need much

01:45:05 ◼   ► You know what? Just call him, uh, uh, oh my God, what was the guy that started cloning

01:45:13 ◼   ► the clones in episode two? The big Q-tip head guys?

01:45:18 ◼   ► No, no, the guy that like when Kenobi shows up and he's like, "Oh yeah, uh, Master blah

01:45:25 ◼   ► blah blah showed up and he wanted…" Just make him mad.

01:45:29 ◼   ► Something, something, Pacificus? Yes, who cares?

01:45:32 ◼   ► -Siphrodias. -Siphrodias. Holy cow, you are a nerd.

01:45:36 ◼   ► -Yeah, that's pretty cool. -Just make him Siphodias. It's fine.

01:45:40 ◼   ► -Yes! Right! Say something like that. -That's fine. You don't...

01:45:43 ◼   ► Then kill him. No problem. I don't care about him.

01:45:46 ◼   ► But at least you've given him a little bit of grounding that he's been being

01:45:50 ◼   ► an asshole for, you know, 50 years, 60 years.

01:45:53 ◼   ► That would be great. That would have been so great. Make him...

01:45:55 ◼   ► He's Siphrodias, he's an old Jedi, and Palpatine sent him into exile as like a plan B.

01:46:02 ◼   ► Decades ago and that's how he also became the head of the first order

01:46:06 ◼   ► You don't have to show any of it just you know, just a hint of it that there was something there

01:46:10 ◼   ► I don't know but in terms of what you actually see on screen I did I have to agree the CGI was terrific

01:46:16 ◼   ► It was a totally bottom totally bottom love the acting from Andy Serkin love the road

01:46:22 ◼   ► I

01:46:23 ◼   ► circus, all right, I love the idea that he's sort of a

01:46:29 ◼   ► Palpatine-like guy who's like, Forte in the Force is sort of mental.

01:46:35 ◼   ► Yeah, he's like a counterintelligence, kind of.

01:46:38 ◼   ► Like, he's in your head.

01:46:38 ◼   ► He's like, his whole move was connecting Rey and Kylo, manipulating

01:46:43 ◼   ► them that way, which is not an inverse style thing to do.

01:46:46 ◼   ► Non-consensual Force time. FaceTime.

01:46:49 ◼   ► Not good.

01:46:50 ◼   ► That's creepiest.

01:46:52 ◼   ► And that his faith and his power, like, his confidence in his power

01:46:56 ◼   ► was his downfall because he saw everything more or less correctly like in the same way that he made

01:47:01 ◼   ► Ray and uh and Kylo both see each other like they saw legit things like oh i see that you're gonna

01:47:07 ◼   ► back me and i see that you're gonna back me all those things did happen momentarily and that's

01:47:11 ◼   ► what made them both believe that they were coming together like that's part of his plan that's

01:47:15 ◼   ► exactly what they use what kyle uses to kill him the only weird thing in the movie though and when

01:47:20 ◼   ► you get ryan johnson on the program we can ask him about that is well we'll get it yeah i'll come out

01:47:25 ◼   ► He'll be coming out of the green room soon.

01:47:27 ◼   ► Well, you know what?

01:47:28 ◼   ► There.

01:47:29 ◼   ► He is in the green room, actually.

01:47:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:47:31 ◼   ► So the movie is telling you, I'm pretty sure having seen it twice now, the movie is telling

01:47:34 ◼   ► you with its moving pictures and the language of movies that Kylo Ren comes up with the

01:47:40 ◼   ► plan, this specific plan, not the general idea of like, "I totally got to kill the

01:47:43 ◼   ► Snoke dude," but the specific plan of how I'm going to kill Snoke comes up with it on

01:47:47 ◼   ► the spot because his lightsaber gets shucked on the floor towards him and spins because

01:47:50 ◼   ► the camera focuses on that and he's like oh like watch it the next time you see it that they

01:47:55 ◼   ► show you that shot and the idea is like oh rotating a lightsaber is that's my way out of

01:48:02 ◼   ► doing and then he executes the plan by saying like you know i see what's happening and he's

01:48:06 ◼   ► you know snoke's reading his mind and he's he's just so slightly off right but that he gets the

01:48:11 ◼   ► idea from seeing his own lightsaber by happenstance spin on the floor in front of him which means that

01:48:15 ◼   ► it was very improvised it's not like he went in there with like it wouldn't surprise me the

01:48:20 ◼   ► the cholera doesn't have a concrete plan. He's just kind of got anger and feelings and he's

01:48:24 ◼   ► kind of sick of the Snoke dude and maybe this girl likes him and like, you know, he's making

01:48:28 ◼   ► a connection here. And like, so he knows what he wants to happen in general, but specifically,

01:48:32 ◼   ► like part of the reason his plan was successful is that he hadn't been thinking about it for six

01:48:36 ◼   ► months leading up to this, like that he came up with it on the spot, and that he was able to be

01:48:40 ◼   ► disciplined for like 35 seconds of just thinking in sort of nonspecific generalities about rotating

01:48:45 ◼   ► lightsabers and lighting it up. And I thought that was very

01:48:48 ◼   ► deftly handled in contrast to the canto byte thread of like,

01:48:52 ◼   ► you know, not definitely handled in the finest possible details

01:48:55 ◼   ► of execution.

01:48:56 ◼   ► Okay, but let's not contrast those. I agree. That's not

01:49:01 ◼   ► contrast so much. That scene was one of my favorite scenes in

01:49:06 ◼   ► All the Strong Wars for a lot of the reasons that you've laid

01:49:09 ◼   ► out. I really, really dislike Calloran. He's a bad guy. To me,

01:49:18 ◼   ► he reeks of this men's rights advocacy. I think it's got to be

01:49:24 ◼   ► intentional. He's awful. He's a bad guy.

01:49:27 ◼   ► I mean, he's nagging her. He's doing the typical abuser abuser

01:49:30 ◼   ► thing of saying, nobody cares about you, but me. You're a

01:49:33 ◼   ► nobody. I'm literally the only person in the galaxy who thinks

01:49:37 ◼   ► you're not a nobody, so you have to stay with me.

01:49:39 ◼   ► That's exactly what that.

01:49:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:49:41 ◼   ► But I think he's painted in a more sympathetic light because I feel in this movie very strongly that what Kylo Ren wants ultimately is a connection with somebody because he doesn't like he's looking for that connection.

01:49:54 ◼   ► And he like he failed like once the falling out with Luke and everything, he failed to have with his idol, Luke.

01:50:00 ◼   ► His parents like sent him off to board Jedi boarding school.

01:50:03 ◼   ► And so he's getting a little distance from them.

01:50:04 ◼   ► Plus he's a solid teenager, right?

01:50:06 ◼   ► his boss and his co-workers are mean to him, right? He just wants a connection. He just wants

01:50:11 ◼   ► a friend. That's the whole hand touching thing, which I think was very effective of like,

01:50:14 ◼   ► he's tolerant and just looking for a connection. And every time he can't get them, then he resorts

01:50:19 ◼   ► to the pick up artist strategy of just being terrible and negative and Ray's having none of

01:50:26 ◼   ► that. So that's not going to work. The finger touch thing was one of my favorite shots in the

01:50:30 ◼   ► movie. It's like I could practically feel it. It was like, I don't know. And Ray's looking for

01:50:36 ◼   ► connection too. She's got a bunch of friends and stuff as well, but she's looking for this

01:50:39 ◼   ► connection to this wider world of the Force, right? And Luke is not really given to her because he's

01:50:43 ◼   ► kind of like yelling at her about the Jedi and everything, and she's like, "But I gotta, we gotta

01:50:47 ◼   ► win this thing, I gotta help my friends." She's better off than Kylo, which is why she's able to

01:50:51 ◼   ► resist them. And when he goes like, "Nobody cares about you but me," he's like, "No, that's not true,

01:50:55 ◼   ► I've got friends. Screw you, Kylo." And so she's out of there. One thing I think we should bring

01:51:02 ◼   ► about this movie is how visually daring it is for a Star Wars movie.

01:51:08 ◼   ► Oh God, it's brilliant.

01:51:10 ◼   ► It's usually daring in ways that make sense if you think about the huge influence of

01:51:15 ◼   ► Kurosawa movies on the original trilogy and westerns, right? And this movie also references

01:51:22 ◼   ► a lot of Kurosawa movies again, but also Japanese animation. I'm amazed at how many

01:51:29 ◼   ► articles I see talking about the light speed thing that don't mention the word anime because that

01:51:33 ◼   ► that whole shot is straight out of anime like yeah how how many times have you guys done like that

01:51:38 ◼   ► exact silent uh low contrast inverted black and white thing with the boom it's still beautiful

01:51:45 ◼   ► have you seen this thing that AMC theaters are putting up a thing before the movie to tell people

01:51:52 ◼   ► the sound isn't broken I mean that they're the sound is not broken there's a scene in this movie

01:51:57 ◼   ► I don't even know what it says exactly, but it's like the sound is not broken no matter what you think because apparently there's so

01:52:02 ◼   ► Many people who are so cinematically ignorant that they don't get that the silence of that

01:52:08 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean you don't expect most people to have this reference because only if you're an anime nerd

01:52:12 ◼   ► Have you seen this a million times and I've been to be no no in the prequels. They did this they did

01:52:17 ◼   ► Yeah, no no

01:52:20 ◼   ► Bob a fat or what? Jenga Jenga?

01:52:23 ◼   ► No, that was just the travel time distance of light and sound difference. They did do that, but that's not the same.

01:52:28 ◼   ► No, no, no. I was sitting in the cinema, the sound cuts out.

01:52:32 ◼   ► The poster you mean? I thought you meant the actual...

01:52:34 ◼   ► No, not the poster. Like, Jagger Fett drops a bomb.

01:52:38 ◼   ► There is about two seconds.

01:52:42 ◼   ► It's less...

01:52:43 ◼   ► That's just the travel time distance between light and sound, like the same way you hear the thunder.

01:52:46 ◼   ► The same sound place.

01:52:49 ◼   ► It is it's cinematically it though it has the same effect exactly

01:52:54 ◼   ► The anime effect is a very specific thing like

01:52:57 ◼   ► Compilations on YouTube like look at this exact scene in anime a million times. It's always about some large

01:53:03 ◼   ► something nice about deep prequels, but

01:53:07 ◼   ► It's a different. It's a different slightly different reference all right and

01:53:10 ◼   ► To be clear this is exactly what great movies

01:53:14 ◼   ► Do is they are inspired by other great movies and they incorporate the right and the reason the last shot is interesting

01:53:19 ◼   ► is it incorporates some new influences in terms of filmmaking and shots? I mean,

01:53:23 ◼   ► the scenes where they cut away from Ray and they have like time lapse,

01:53:28 ◼   ► photography of plants growing. You've never seen that in a Star Wars movie. That is a,

01:53:32 ◼   ► you know, you've seen in other movies, but it's a cinematic language that has not

01:53:36 ◼   ► previously been brought into Star Wars bring into it. So it's broadening the horizon of

01:53:40 ◼   ► the kinds of shots you can expect to see in a Star Wars movie.

01:53:43 ◼   ► I can't agree with you more, and one of my favorite things about the Bond franchise is

01:53:48 ◼   ► that the opening sort of credits are non-literal filmmaking. You can do whatever the hell you

01:53:58 ◼   ► want in those credits.

01:54:00 ◼   ► As long as there's silhouettes of women.

01:54:02 ◼   ► Well, okay, sure, that's the trope. But it is, I mean, at least to me, like, it's like,

01:54:12 ◼   ► this is a visual thing that we can sort of divorce ourselves from trying to tell the

01:54:20 ◼   ► narrative, even though they kind of tell them. But it's divorced from like the actual characters

01:54:27 ◼   ► doing something in a scene.

01:54:29 ◼   ► It's non-literal.

01:54:29 ◼   ► Non-literal, yeah. And I really, really admire them for doing that. And they've stuck to

01:54:35 ◼   ► that for, I don't know, 30 years more?

01:54:38 ◼   ► I thought that the footage of the foliage growing, the grass growing in time lapse,

01:54:44 ◼   ► and it was beautiful too, it's key, but it immediately made me think that it was of

01:54:50 ◼   ► Terrence Malick. Yeah, he does a lot of that stuff. And I mean, his movies have kind of devolved into

01:54:56 ◼   ► nothing but that stuff and I still love it. I should someday do a whole show about his movies

01:55:04 ◼   ► And I love the whole like talk about a guy who went into exile for 30 years, you know

01:55:08 ◼   ► disappeared made some of the most beautiful powerful movies in the late 70s ever made and then

01:55:13 ◼   ► Just disappeared for 30 years and it came back and started making a movie every couple of years

01:55:19 ◼   ► But his movies are kind of devolved into nothing but that stuff

01:55:22 ◼   ► But if you've never seen like, you know, probably the most approachable of his recent movies would be the Thin Red Line

01:55:26 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, it's this war movie

01:55:28 ◼   ► There's just in the midst of this tense

01:55:32 ◼   ► Pacific World War two drama there's just beautiful shots of birds and trees

01:55:37 ◼   ► Very few helicopters flying over rice paddies with like Rolling Stones

01:55:45 ◼   ► But anyway, I thought that was cool and and and it's both beautiful

01:55:50 ◼   ► I thought it was did cinematically daring as you said and it felt like

01:55:55 ◼   ► This is what they're saying the force is about

01:56:02 ◼   ► Here's a, you mentioned the plants growing slowly thing and I kind of want to call that

01:56:09 ◼   ► out.

01:56:10 ◼   ► They're growing faster, yeah.

01:56:12 ◼   ► Yeah, no.

01:56:13 ◼   ► And I, do you have the name of the movie on your mind?

01:56:17 ◼   ► Oh, that's been in a million movies.

01:56:18 ◼   ► I mean, that shot is a trope in itself.

01:56:20 ◼   ► I mean, I'm sure it's been in Terrence's mouth.

01:56:23 ◼   ► It's a tree of life probably had like seven times.

01:56:25 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:56:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:56:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:56:28 ◼   ► I'll look it up.

01:56:29 ◼   ► There's a specific movie about that very slow motion kind of stuff happening.

01:56:35 ◼   ► Kianis Kazi?

01:56:36 ◼   ► Yes, that's exactly what I was looking for.

01:56:38 ◼   ► That's a whole movie about that type of stuff.

01:56:40 ◼   ► Yes, that's exactly what I was looking for.

01:56:42 ◼   ► I thought you mentioned that and I wanted to call it out because I think people should watch that.

01:56:46 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a weird one.

01:56:48 ◼   ► Some of the other references like "The Throne Room", "The Look of the Throne Room".

01:56:51 ◼   ► I wasn't totally on board with "The Look of the Throne Room".

01:56:53 ◼   ► Some people don't, but in the end it's an aesthetic choice and they went with it.

01:56:56 ◼   ► with it. My main complaint with the throne room is unfortunately, I think they do things

01:57:01 ◼   ► a little bit, not in the wrong order, but mechanically speaking, once you kill Snoke,

01:57:06 ◼   ► I don't feel like there's any reason for the red guys to fight anybody. I know they want

01:57:09 ◼   ► to have a fight scene and the fight scene is cool and I appreciate that, but I lose

01:57:13 ◼   ► the plot thread of like, "Why these red guys fighting again? They should be bailing." Because

01:57:16 ◼   ► once Snoke's dead, they're out of there, right? I don't see that they would have any loyalty.

01:57:21 ◼   ► Once the Emperor's dead, Luke didn't have to deal with the Royal Guard. And I didn't

01:57:25 ◼   ► care about this red guys they have no characters they literally have no faces I don't care

01:57:28 ◼   ► about them at all they're disposable I know you want to see Kylo and Ray fight you can

01:57:34 ◼   ► get that in a different way I think they needed to structure that a little bit differently

01:57:37 ◼   ► so I'm I'm not as engaged in that fight as as as I thought that the fight the fight clearly

01:57:43 ◼   ► only served to get Ray and Kylo into conflict without having them fight because they just

01:57:51 ◼   ► They needed to have each other's back. You needed the moment when they joined forces against a common enemy.

01:57:55 ◼   ► It just so happens that the common enemy they joined forces against is kind of nonsensical.

01:57:59 ◼   ► Like, it doesn't work in the movie. First of all, I don't care about the red guys.

01:58:03 ◼   ► And second of all, as much as I do care about them and I understand them, I don't believe that they

01:58:07 ◼   ► have a particular motivation to fight these guys. Nor do I think they would be a match for these

01:58:11 ◼   ► guys, right? So I don't know what you do to fix that, but I understand them wanting those moments,

01:58:15 ◼   ► but I feel like the red guys were... Other people disagree. Other people love it, but like,

01:58:20 ◼   ► Nobody cares about this damn red guy.

01:58:21 ◼   ► I don't even know what they're called.

01:58:22 ◼   ► I enjoyed watching the fight, and I do think that, like, I don't even know what, like,

01:58:27 ◼   ► eight red guys versus two...

01:58:29 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe.

01:58:31 ◼   ► They would have ripped into shreds.

01:58:32 ◼   ► Could have happened.

01:58:33 ◼   ► But in terms of motivation, it leaves me wanting a little bit more explanation as to why they

01:58:45 ◼   ► would do that.

01:58:46 ◼   ► Yeah, but the choreography and the lighting in that fight scene was also the departure.

01:58:50 ◼   ► and it's part of the things I don't like. It kind of looked like a 60s Hollywood musical.

01:58:54 ◼   ► Oh, it's beautiful.

01:58:54 ◼   ► It's very, very well lit.

01:58:56 ◼   ► Yes, yes.

01:58:57 ◼   ► The big backdrop. I like the fact that they burned the backdrop, which is a cool look.

01:59:01 ◼   ► But it was very strange for a Star Wars movie.

01:59:04 ◼   ► I loved it.

01:59:05 ◼   ► Yes!

01:59:06 ◼   ► And I like... Here's the thing. I know that as a movie this falls short in any number of ways, but

01:59:17 ◼   ► The chances it takes, given the strictures it could have been under, amaze me.

01:59:25 ◼   ► And this throne room being all red and like the visuals of this, it blows my

01:59:32 ◼   ► mind.

01:59:33 ◼   ► I'm incredibly impressed with this.

01:59:36 ◼   ► What if they made the musical number that would be even more daring?

01:59:38 ◼   ► Just in the middle of Star Wars is a musical number where our Kylo and

01:59:41 ◼   ► Rey sing during this whole fight.

01:59:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:59:43 ◼   ► Well, I'll send you this Star Wars.

01:59:46 ◼   ► Star Wars, Star Wars musical.

01:59:48 ◼   ► Go through some more references the the Luke, the Phantom Luke

01:59:53 ◼   ► Kylo battle, straight references to anime tropes of heels sliding

01:59:58 ◼   ► in the dirt and the exact shots choices of people running

02:00:03 ◼   ► towards each other. I know I know it's like, you know, yeah,

02:00:06 ◼   ► it's Kurosawa but but but anime Kurosawa's shots during those

02:00:11 ◼   ► battles are not the same anime shots of choosing the two people

02:00:14 ◼   ► running at each other and choosing which shots you show,

02:00:17 ◼   ► show the foot show the person show the eyes show that like,

02:00:19 ◼   ► it's straight up anime trope. And yes, I love it for that.

02:00:22 ◼   ► Right. And I love the fact that a lot of people are seeing it

02:00:25 ◼   ► who have no idea it's an anime trope, but just think it's cool

02:00:27 ◼   ► because it is cool. Like this is movies that he brings all his

02:00:31 ◼   ► influences into his movie making, even if it's not the same

02:00:34 ◼   ► genre. So I want more of this. I want more directors who are

02:00:37 ◼   ► enthusiastic about other genres and other ways of visual

02:00:40 ◼   ► storytelling to bring all that into Star Wars because I think

02:00:42 ◼   ► you can support it.

02:00:43 ◼   ► So you mentioned earlier, in Syracuse, that you mentioned earlier that it's a Star Wars

02:00:52 ◼   ► tradition to have like, you know, and elsewhere in science fiction as well. But you know,

02:00:56 ◼   ► Hoth is the ice planet and Endor is the forest moon. And Crait is the salt planet. Like,

02:01:03 ◼   ► I love that's such a clever way to get another, you know, like you're running out of climates,

02:01:10 ◼   ► Like there's art they've had an ocean planet. They've had this they've had that the salt planet is a pretty cool idea and the the red

02:01:17 ◼   ► Ground underneath the white salt is the planet design director

02:01:22 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. I give a pass on it because but I feel kind of bad for them because the

02:01:27 ◼   ► 2000-dj-j

02:01:29 ◼   ► 2009 reboot of Star Trek already kind of did the red planet and I feel bad because like they kind of stole some remember that

02:01:34 ◼   ► one like the opening scene was like

02:01:36 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:01:37 ◼   ► But that was all red.

02:01:38 ◼   ► This was red.

02:01:39 ◼   ► This was covered with the white.

02:01:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:01:42 ◼   ► But anyway, the red stuff, I thought the red planet was cool.

02:01:45 ◼   ► I totally give them that.

02:01:46 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, the only reason they made it red is because it would be cool.

02:01:48 ◼   ► Yeah, that's why they made it red, and it is cool.

02:01:49 ◼   ► So accept it.

02:01:50 ◼   ► It's an alien world.

02:01:51 ◼   ► They can make up any money they want.

02:01:54 ◼   ► I have one last sponsor to thank, then we'll talk a little bit more, and then we'll see

02:01:57 ◼   ► if we have time to get Rian Johnson out of the green room.

02:01:59 ◼   ► But I wanted to thank you.

02:02:00 ◼   ► I want to thank you.

02:02:01 ◼   ► That green room is pretty packed back there, I got to tell you.

02:02:04 ◼   ► Well, the problem might be that it's an open bar.

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02:04:23 ◼   ► My thanks to Backblaze for sponsoring this Star Wars holiday spectacular.

02:04:29 ◼   ► Just to save you from a little known fact.

02:04:31 ◼   ► I want to mention that we did look up while during one of these ad reads that the movie

02:04:35 ◼   ► we were trying to get the reference for that big zoom shot in canto byte is the 1927 silent

02:04:40 ◼   ► movie wings.

02:04:41 ◼   ► Okay, we have it in the show notes and you're responsible for that.

02:04:45 ◼   ► I just want people to feel bad when after they tweet you after the movie is wings and

02:04:50 ◼   ► they keep listening to this podcast.

02:04:52 ◼   ► they're gonna hear me say this go oh I should have kept listening that's right

02:04:55 ◼   ► yeah yeah this is like a battleship attempt component where yeah yeah you

02:05:00 ◼   ► might call it that little known fact our TD - was actually built by backblaze

02:05:08 ◼   ► does it make sense that our - that Luke didn't take our - with him - what's the

02:05:13 ◼   ► name of that planet the Iock - who cares which sounds it's Luke's world that's

02:05:19 ◼   ► That's that's fine.

02:05:20 ◼   ► I don't think it's mentioned in the movie.

02:05:22 ◼   ► So who cares?

02:05:23 ◼   ► I thought that you needed an astromech droid to do the hyperspace stuff with like an X

02:05:27 ◼   ► Wing.

02:05:28 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe maybe keep the out on there and gave him a shuttle back.

02:05:32 ◼   ► I don't know.

02:05:33 ◼   ► Yeah, like our two is one of those characters that gets cut a little bit and out and honestly,

02:05:37 ◼   ► I'm fine to see three p.o. and our to fade off into the sunset with the rest of the old

02:05:43 ◼   ► characters.

02:05:44 ◼   ► You can give them cameos and stuff, but they're they're not the stars of the show.

02:05:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:05:48 ◼   ► Do you think BB-8 has a little bit too much of a role though?

02:05:50 ◼   ► Like BB-8?

02:05:51 ◼   ► Yeah, they give the people what they want.

02:05:53 ◼   ► An AT-ST?

02:05:54 ◼   ► Yeah, I give it mostly a pat.

02:05:55 ◼   ► I know some people are bothered by that.

02:05:56 ◼   ► Honestly, it did not occur to me to be bothered by that at all because I feel like that BB-8's

02:06:02 ◼   ► character from the, unlike R2, and 3PO for that matter, BB-8 has always been a little

02:06:07 ◼   ► bit of an action hero.

02:06:08 ◼   ► Like he's more dynamic because he's not limited by the special effects.

02:06:11 ◼   ► So maybe it's a little bit silly and speaking of more stuff that could get cut like Phasma

02:06:16 ◼   ► and Finn's arc of getting vengeance on Phasma for being mean to him.

02:06:21 ◼   ► I'm okay with that, but why the hell is BB-8 writing an ATSD?

02:06:26 ◼   ► Why is Phasma coming back to fight?

02:06:28 ◼   ► Phasma is kind of like the Boba Fett, but it's like as if Boba Fett, but they knew how

02:06:36 ◼   ► popular Boba Fett would be.

02:06:38 ◼   ► I think the media cycle was too slow in the original trilogy, that fans were all hyped

02:06:43 ◼   ► about Bubble Fett, but the movies treated him like, not badly, but he didn't have that

02:06:49 ◼   ► much screen time. Whereas nowadays, people know, like, how we're going to make a new

02:06:54 ◼   ► Bubble Fett. And we know how cool Fazm is, we know how much people love BB-8, because

02:06:57 ◼   ► in this information economy, we know exactly how much toys they're buying from it. Like,

02:07:01 ◼   ► and so I felt like they felt like they needed to put that in the movie. And you can make

02:07:06 ◼   ► that work. But this is a busy movie. There's a lot of people doing things and you just

02:07:09 ◼   ► don't honestly you don't have time to establish why anyone should care about Phasma and you know

02:07:15 ◼   ► remembering back to Finn's deal with him and then BB-8 doing a weird heroic thing. BB-8 got enough

02:07:19 ◼   ► hero moments he's shooting coins at people he's shoving his head against a panel which I think was

02:07:24 ◼   ► again you want to make BB-8 do a funny thing to help the X-wing I'm all on board with that.

02:07:29 ◼   ► Once you get down to brass tacks and tell me like how are you gonna do it I was on board with the

02:07:32 ◼   ► little fingers in the dike too but when he shoves his head against it yeah I did too I like that I

02:07:36 ◼   ► I like that whole thing. I like that whole sequence.

02:07:38 ◼   ► I don't like it. It's like, I know what you're going for.

02:07:40 ◼   ► Give a better punchline. A lot of the things in this movie felt like,

02:07:43 ◼   ► you know, get Joss Whedon in here to punch it up a little bit.

02:07:46 ◼   ► Because like, I'm totally on board with your joke.

02:07:48 ◼   ► It's a good droid joke.

02:07:50 ◼   ► Just the punchline was just a little bit off, right?

02:07:53 ◼   ► So yeah, but at ST, going around, I didn't mind that.

02:07:58 ◼   ► I didn't think that's ridiculous because I believe BB-8 could totally do that.

02:08:01 ◼   ► But is it a scene that advanced the plot or expanded on the new one's character?

02:08:05 ◼   ► They know it's characters or did you just need some way to get those guys out of a jam?

02:08:08 ◼   ► well, I

02:08:11 ◼   ► Thought and I you know it complaining about the whole rose

02:08:15 ◼   ► fin

02:08:17 ◼   ► Thread I felt like having one more thing come back to climax at that exact moment of

02:08:25 ◼   ► Admiral hold a hold a you know light speeding into the cruiser to have their

02:08:32 ◼   ► execution be seconds away at the same moment was just

02:08:34 ◼   ► Their kiss was simultaneous with the door being breached on the base like in the background when Rose kisses Finn

02:08:43 ◼   ► I thought this was good filmmaking like Brian Johnson has some good good hero moments like that

02:08:47 ◼   ► They when when she kisses Finn in the background out of focus is the door being breached by the big gun that Finn was trying

02:08:54 ◼   ► To fly into oh, I think that's now that I don't have a complaint with that

02:08:57 ◼   ► I'm saying when they were on the ship and they were ready to be executed

02:09:01 ◼   ► this movie making coincidence time. And then you know and then but then it didn't make any sense

02:09:07 ◼   ► afterwards where they were laying where they were laying and nobody else who was around them was

02:09:11 ◼   ► around. Everyone who's standing up was killed like it's a lot of like is like you give you give a

02:09:15 ◼   ► movie a lot of these things like you're like I give you that I give you that but eventually you

02:09:18 ◼   ► feel like I don't you've used your budget of how much how much how much movie coincidence I'm

02:09:23 ◼   ► willing to give you how much plot flab I'm willing to allow um that's another thing like the with so

02:09:30 ◼   ► Finn, this is another arc of the movie of like people and their resistance learning lessons

02:09:35 ◼   ► and perhaps those lessons being taught on the job in a way that is not appropriately respectful of

02:09:40 ◼   ► the lives of the people who are part of the training program. Like let's teach Poe to be

02:09:44 ◼   ► a good leader by having a bunch of people be killed. But anyway, Finn is flying towards the

02:09:48 ◼   ► big gun. He's like, "I'm going to sacrifice myself." Lots of nerd complaints about details

02:09:53 ◼   ► of the movie like, "Why is the steel melting on his guns but his face isn't melting?" Like,

02:09:58 ◼   ► It's fine. The pot is off to the left, the guns are in the path of the beam, the pot isn't, like, whatever.

02:10:03 ◼   ► I don't have any problem. I do not have nerd problems.

02:10:06 ◼   ► You can get nerd problems with anything anyway, but once you're picking on nerd problems,

02:10:09 ◼   ► there's obviously something bigger going on that's the problem.

02:10:11 ◼   ► So I'm not concentrating on those, but the main thrust of that is,

02:10:15 ◼   ► was Rose right to knock Finn off course?

02:10:19 ◼   ► Like, clearly the movie wants you to think that she is right, because it says

02:10:22 ◼   ► they give her, let her have a speech and say, "This is the way we win,"

02:10:26 ◼   ► not by, you know, destroying things we hate, but by saving things that we love and I love you and

02:10:31 ◼   ► that's why I saved you. My read on the movie is that the movie is trying to communicate, and I

02:10:36 ◼   ► believe, that if Finn flew into that big gun it would have done nothing because he's a little

02:10:40 ◼   ► shit and he's flying into a big hot thing that's probably pretty sturdy and even if it hadn't

02:10:44 ◼   ► fired, even if he flew into it before it fired, he's not going to stop that damn gun. And even