9 hours ago, Shadow345 said:

It's a shame The Last Jedi is receiving negative backlash for not catering to low expectations but was instead a great, well written and thought provoking Star Wars film that can compare to The Empire Strikes Back. I've seen reviews slam it for the characters showing emotion. For showing emotion!

Even the often criticised Canto Bight scenes set up important underlying themes.

They could have set up the themes on canto blight without the unneccesary chase scene through (and out of) the city on racing animals.

35 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

I get that this is your level, and clearly you beat me with experience there, but for the off chance that you honestly are believing this and not just using it as a cheap, rhetoric trick:

R2D2 never had the map to Skywalker. He had a map where he and BB8 managed to fit in the part that was the plot of the movie and that was the map.

Why was there a map to luke at all? And why did the guy on jakku have it in the first place? And once they got bb8's "portion" of the map, why do they even need R2D2 with the rest? I fyou'r ejust looking for luke, you odn't need the whole journey he made, just the destination. And they had a large portion of the galaxy on the map that BB8 had, which should have easily been enough to extrapolate what part of the galaxy they were looking at.

On 12/17/2017 at 6:46 PM, FTS Gecko said:

I feel this. There was cheering and whooping in the cinema when the opening crawl hit. There was dead silence when the closing credits hit.

Rogue One's ending left fans buzzing leaving the theatre; The Last Jedi, not so much.

I saw it on base in a sold out theater with other Soldiers and their families. The theater emptied out in near silence.

People who had been buzzing and socializing before it started broke apart in near silence, avoiding eye contact, or even a, “have a good night”.

Silence.

As opposed to Rogue One which there were cheers and high fives and people rushing home to watch ANH.

Even TFA, after a marathon viewing of the entire saga, left people in the theater cheering and excited.

1 minute ago, KelRiever said:

I personally liked the entire movie. Results are in and pretty much the movie is extremely well-received.

Depends on who you ask. Critics tend to give it a high score (93%), with fans giving it a low score (57%). This means it is a pretty divisive film amongst the fans, actually, and there's a massive 36pt gap between Professional Critics and Fans, with professional critics not generally being "Star Wars Geeks" for what that's worth. The next largest gap is RotJ and RotS, which each have only 14pt gaps between critics and fans. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/12/star-wars-the-last-jedi-backlash-negative-fan-reactions-rotten-tomatoes-score


Of course, a lot could explain those numbers. The negative fan reaction could be artificially inflated, just as the reviews of the critics could be skewed by Disney incentives (don't underestimate just how much Disney needs this film to be a success, given that they're banking an entire new trilogy on Rian Johnson's talents and reception).

But "extremely well-received" needs some qualifiers, at the very least.

4 minutes ago, VanderLegion said:

Why was there a map to luke at all?

We don't know. This is never answered, and it's a much more interesting question. We can, however, speculate.

First off, the map doesn't lead to Luke. It leads to the first Jedi temple on Ahch-to. That's an important distinction.

Next, we can speculate that the map is coming from the Jedi archive on Coruscant. That's where the Empire got it. It is not far fetched to believe that some Jedi started to delete valuable information after Order 66 was set into motion. And the spiritual origin of the order can clearly be seen as valuable, right? And R2D2, having gotten the huge data dump from the Deathstar, naturally only has this map.

The piece that was missing was found by Lor San Tekka. He is a follower of the Jedi religion, without being force sensitive himself. He is also somewhat of a historian and archeologist. We don't know how long he spent to find the first temple, but data rarely ever exists in one single place.

Next, we see that this map to the first temple has a relatively fixed route. Maybe Ahch-to is very difficult to find and this route is the way to find it? Or at least was the way to find it when the map was made/modified last time.

LST found the map, but we don't know how or when. The rest by R2D2 was necessary for the way or at least to give enough context. The Resistance base was after all not the Jedi archive where they have all maps from everywhere in every detail. So apparently it was not easy to extrapolate from the available data, because they would have done so otherwise.

2 hours ago, thespaceinvader said:

I'm not saying Yoda wasn't a bit of a jerk, but then, Yoda has always been a bit of a jerk.

Except in the Prequels. George Lucas changed him into a bouncing flea wise master, but Yoda wasn't like that. Yoda was a little crazy and mischievous.

2 hours ago, LagJanson said:

My question though, is how the heck did this guy rise to power?

IIRC His father.

16 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

Depends on who you ask. Critics tend to give it a high score (93%), with fans giving it a low score (57%). This means it is a pretty divisive film amongst the fans, actually, and there's a massive 36pt gap between Professional Critics and Fans, with professional critics not generally being "Star Wars Geeks" for what that's worth. The next largest gap is RotJ and RotS, which each have only 14pt gaps between critics and fans. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/12/star-wars-the-last-jedi-backlash-negative-fan-reactions-rotten-tomatoes-score


Of course, a lot could explain those numbers. The negative fan reaction could be artificially inflated, just as the reviews of the critics could be skewed by Disney incentives (don't underestimate just how much Disney needs this film to be a success, given that they're banking an entire new trilogy on Rian Johnson's talents and reception).

But "extremely well-received" needs some qualifiers, at the very least.

I find Rotten Tomatoes sometimes pretty skewed. There are a few nostalgia 'classics' rated at 100% that are downright painful to watch. I do think fanbases speak strongly through it though...

As to the critics... I don't think Disney has as much pull with the critics right now. They've only just mended their relationship after a PR mishap with critics. They got a bad review, said they wouldn't give anything to that reviewer any more, and had a number of big name sources declare they would boycott Disney releases unless the first critical group had access again. I don't think they're quite ready to full swing into everything is positive just because it's Disney and money. That said - it's a business. Money talks and may have spoken loudly.

I'd also point out that negative reviewers tend to speak up loudest. THIS IS NOT SAYING PEOPLE HERE ARE DOING THAT!!!! I think both sides are speaking plenty loudly on this forum. What I mean is to go through the effort of putting in reviews generally the unsatisfied people go through more hoops than those that were happy with their product.

21 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

Depends on who you ask. Critics tend to give it a high score (93%), with fans giving it a low score (57%). This means it is a pretty divisive film amongst the fans, actually, and there's a massive 36pt gap between Professional Critics and Fans, with professional critics not generally being "Star Wars Geeks" for what that's worth. The next largest gap is RotJ and RotS, which each have only 14pt gaps between critics and fans. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/12/star-wars-the-last-jedi-backlash-negative-fan-reactions-rotten-tomatoes-score


Of course, a lot could explain those numbers. The negative fan reaction could be artificially inflated, just as the reviews of the critics could be skewed by Disney incentives (don't underestimate just how much Disney needs this film to be a success, given that they're banking an entire new trilogy on Rian Johnson's talents and reception).

But "extremely well-received" needs some qualifiers, at the very least.

Open online polls are worthless. The audience score is absolutely being gamed by those who hated the movie. The Bring Back Legends already had experience with this type of attack.

Everything else points to the movie being very well received by the audience, from various more scientific polls and the way the numbers kept increasing over projections.

1 minute ago, LagJanson said:

I'd also point out that negative reviewers tend to speak up loudest. THIS IS NOT SAYING PEOPLE HERE ARE DOING THAT!!!! I think both sides are speaking plenty loudly on this forum. What I mean is to go through the effort of putting in reviews generally the unsatisfied people go through more hoops than those that were happy with their product.

I certainly agree with this point in general, that folks are more likely to log negative feedback over positive feedback. Though this is why the 30+ point gap between critics' positive rating and fans' negative rating is interesting. This is more than double the gap of the next highest discrepancy (14pts), and most of the differences for the Star Wars films are only single digits. So while negative reactions are more likely to get entered as reviews, this ought be true for all the films in the series. So you'd expect to see that same skew across all the films in the franchise, which should make that negative-bias a wash when looking across films. Yet when we look at the other 'recent' Star Wars films of Rogue One and The Force Awakens we don't see anything like the massive negativity difference between fans and critics that exists with TLJ...

So it seems reasonable to conclude there's something particularly hate-able about TLJ amonst the fan base. And a likely explanation could be how it violates so many of the rules and so much of the logic of the established Star Wars world... this would bother fans but wouldn't necessarily affect a critic at all, since they don't spend their free time engaging Star Wars content. If you evaluate TLJ as a standalone epic space story, it's a decent film. If you look at it as being situated within and extending the Star Wars universe... in my opinion it does a disrespectful job of establishing a connection to that world.

15 minutes ago, Sithborg said:

Open online polls are worthless. The audience score is absolutely being gamed by those who hated the movie. The Bring Back Legends already had experience with this type of attack.

Everything else points to the movie being very well received by the audience, from various more scientific polls and the way the numbers kept increasing over projections.

But then why aren't the scores for TFA and Rogue One substantially lower than they are? They are a result of open online polls too...

Compare:

TFA Fan Score: 88%
Rogue One Fan Score: 87%
The Last Jedi Fan Score: 57%

I am going to say what happened in TLJ was more offensive to them than those two movies.

TFA was playing it safe. Nostalgia trip, fan service. TLJ was not. It really is as simple as that. Critics love better movies than the general audience which goes and watches transformer movies as well.

Revenge of the fallen has 19% from critics, while the user rating is a 57%
And the transformers movie get already a lot of zero percent ratings from actual transformers fans. So that 57% is really impressive. °_^
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/transformers_revenge_of_the_fallen/

Just now, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

So it seems reasonable to conclude there's something particularly hate-able about TLJ amonst the fan base. And a likely explanation could be how it violates so many of the rules and so much of the logic of the established Star Wars world... this would bother fans but wouldn't necessarily affect a critic at all, since they don't spend their free time engaging Star Wars content. If you evaluate TLJ as a standalone epic space story, it's a decent film. If you look at it as being situated within and extending the Star Wars universe... in my opinion it does a disrespectful job of establishing a connection to that world.

It's definitely triggered something. I think more telling is that somebody said they enjoyed watching the movie and yet hated it. It's a very unusual response! I can see that being something more along the lines of the movie being 'ok' (I'm not saying great, it's not) but it goes against everything us long time Star Wars fans expected.

I do miss my happier Legends fluff at times...

36 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

Depends on who you ask. Critics tend to give it a high score (93%), with fans giving it a low score (57%). This means it is a pretty divisive film amongst the fans, actually, and there's a massive 36pt gap between Professional Critics and Fans, with professional critics not generally being "Star Wars Geeks" for what that's worth. The next largest gap is RotJ and RotS, which each have only 14pt gaps between critics and fans. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/12/star-wars-the-last-jedi-backlash-negative-fan-reactions-rotten-tomatoes-score


Of course, a lot could explain those numbers. The negative fan reaction could be artificially inflated, just as the reviews of the critics could be skewed by Disney incentives (don't underestimate just how much Disney needs this film to be a success, given that they're banking an entire new trilogy on Rian Johnson's talents and reception).

But "extremely well-received" needs some qualifiers, at the very least.

It doesn't really need any qualifier, because of what you pointed out...that you can always find some stat to bring up a counterpoint.

So, ultimately, the only review that is needed is anyone's personal point of view.

If 99% of people hated this film, I'd still like it.

The point is, when I say well received, I'm going to say critic reviews and a constantly delivering box office weekend. That's not to say my point of view should outweigh anyone else's personal like or dislike, but to say if we're talking success, the film was a success...they'll make another, they'll try their best, etc. etc. etc. That's the Star Wars franchise for you. Hey, even Phantom Menace is still in the top 25 box office films of all time, I recall. But that one isn't exactly carrying so much in the critics department, OR fans You might thank the pre-quells for Lucas shunting his stuff over to Disney, though. And I'd say if you like even just one of the last 3 Star Wars movies released, you can thank the potential to make money and dislike for films for that!

2 minutes ago, Sithborg said:

I am going to say what happened in TLJ was more offensive to them than those two movies.

Okay... and why does that not make their opinion as fans relevant?

And the "BRING BACK LEGENDS" sort of crowd would have still have given both TFA and RO a negative score, just like TLJ... so no practical difference there in how it's measured.

So, I just don't buy your reasoning. It seems like the inference to the best explanation is to just say a lot more fans didn't like TLJ than liked TFA or RO.

1 minute ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

I certainly agree with this point in general, that folks are more likely to log negative feedback over positive feedback. Though this is why the 30+ point gap between critics' positive rating and fans' negative rating is interesting. This is more than double the gap of the next highest discrepancy (14pts), and most of the differences for the Star Wars films are only single digits. So while negative reactions are more likely to get entered as reviews, this ought be true for all the films in the series. So you'd expect to see that same skew across all the films in the franchise, which should make that negative-bias a wash when looking across films. Yet when we look at the other 'recent' Star Wars films of Rogue One and The Force Awakens we don't see anything like the massive negativity difference between fans and critics that exists with TLJ...

So it seems reasonable to conclude there's something particularly hate-able about TLJ amonst the fan base. And a likely explanation could be how it violates so many of the rules and so much of the logic of the established Star Wars world... this would bother fans but wouldn't necessarily affect a critic at all, since they don't spend their free time engaging Star Wars content. If you evaluate TLJ as a standalone epic space story, it's a decent film. If you look at it as being situated within and extending the Star Wars universe... in my opinion it does a disrespectful job of establishing a connection to that world.

The reception of any given movie is really hard to gauge in general. Most people tend to accept scores on IMBD, Rotten Tomatoes and the like, but those numbers are inevitably skewed in both directions.

There are too many unknown variables involved (trolling, fanboism, "incentives", haters etc.), so we might as well ignore all of that. The only real metric is financial success and as sad as that sounds, it is also the only thing that will shape future movies in this franchise. That doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, but it's good to keep in mind when discussing this topic.

shrug

RT's audience rating poll is worthless, positive or negative. The increase of in sales throughout the weekend strongly suggests that the movie is hated and is suffering bad WOM. And we know that can happen within an opening weekend. You just need to examing BvS's numbers.

Things I happened to like about the movie, aside from basically everything

The bombers

The creatures

Luke and Rey

Kylo Ren

Leia's whole space thing.

The awesome battles in general

The end (I presume) of Captain Phasma

BB8 and the scout walker

So, yeah, if a person doesn't like the stuff I listed above, we're gonna disagree

Just some random thoughts: I think, a lot of people now realize HOW different Disney is taking Star Wars in the ST than what they were thinking. People who knew the EU and maybe hoped, that it still would be kinda like that. TFA was still kind of known terrain, even if just because it was similiar to New Hope. Now TLJ goes into completely new terrain. And maybe that bumps some of the Old Guard really off. But who knows, just a thought that crossed my mind.

Here's my review.

I loved the film. The acting (mark Hamil) was superb. The cinematography was beyond superb. The humour was a nice break from the otherwise dark storyline. Luke was definitely the highlight of the film. I liked his story line: going from Jedi master who fails, who runs from his problems, meets Yoda who convices him he needs to focus on what is in front of his nose, instead of running from his failures.

Kylo-Ren was another highlight. he was a whiny teen in TFA, but has grown up into a conflicted young man.

Rey was alright, like last time. I think that everyone has slightly misunderstood her though. She doesn't want to be 'somebody' (daughter of luke or something, that was just us audience) she just wants to know that she has parents who care about her.

Poe was cool, I liked where his character went too, but WHY DIDN'T HOLDO TELL HIM THE STUPID PLAN. Hope we get burn-out SLAM on his T70.

Finn was good, though I wish he or Rose had died at some point.

I thought it was a bit weird how Snoke died so soon, though I do think they left space for him to return in some way.

Other things I liked were Yoda, Leia, that hyperspace thru the ultra-mega-super-duper-snoke-class star destroyer, the TIE silencer, the music, basically the whole movie. I liked how they tried to do something unexpected, and I think Ryan Johnson has created one of the most thoughtful and intelligent Star Wars flicks.

What I didn't like was Leia's time in space (that was a bit cheesy), Canto Bight (but the soundtrack there was great, some of the best, and I really liked how it looked), the random final scene (even though it's important for the point of the film). My main complaint is that it seems we don't get all the good music from Canto Bight on the CD! I haven't actually listened to it all yet, but the music when they see the dude with the red plom thing on his coat (even though only a few seconds long) I loved instantly, and I haven't found it on the album yet, so tell me if you do.

Only reason it's not better than ESB is the lack of romance.

Just now, Captain Nippon said:

The only real metric is financial success and as sad as that sounds, it is also the only thing that will shape future movies in this franchise. That doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, but it's good to keep in mind when discussing this topic.

That's true, in so far as "financial performance" is how TLJ or any film will be evaluated a success or a failure by the studio. But I think that's different from talking about a film's "reception," which seems to be how it is enjoyed or experienced by the viewers (which is certainly much harder to measure and likely will have no impact on a studio's future decisions or even on a Too-Big-To-Fail movie's financial performance).

But I don't think "TLJ has and will make Disney pile of money" is what folks like Sithborg are saying when they say "TLJ has been incredibly well received."

2 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

That's true, in so far as "financial performance" is how TLJ or any film will be evaluated a success or a failure by the studio. But I think that's different from talking about a film's "reception," which seems to be how it is enjoyed or experienced by the viewers (which is certainly much harder to measure and likely will have no impact on a studio's future decisions or even on a Too-Big-To-Fail movie's financial performance).

But I don't think "TLJ has and will make Disney pile of money" is what folks like Sithborg are saying when they say "TLJ has been incredibly well received."

I guess my point would be that it is nearly impossible to make an informed statement about the general reception of a movie, because we have no reliable data at hand.

1 hour ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

Of course, a lot could explain those numbers. The negative fan reaction could be artificially inflated, just as the reviews of the critics could be skewed by Disney incentives (don't underestimate just how much Disney needs this film to be a success, given that they're banking an entire new trilogy on Rian Johnson's talents and reception).

But "extremely well-received" needs some qualifiers, at the very least.

If this had been a stand-alone film (or his own trilogy), I am completely fine with how Johnson handled the Star Wars universe.

But this movie is the next bit of a series. We are left at the end of TFA with a Luke, standing alone, apparently with the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders, looking at the symbol of 5,000 years of galactic history beseechingly being re-presented to him.

After a 2 year wait, wondering how deep the hole in Sad Luke's psyche is, he throws it over his shoulder like it was a used tube of toothpaste.

You either thought that was hilarious, or you were like "WTF??!!"

This movie was completely the wrong tone to nicely fit with TFA. And that is what I need to let go of to try to enjoy this film more on the next pass.

9 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

This movie was completely the wrong tone to nicely fit with TFA. And that is what I need to let go of to try to enjoy this film more on the next pass.

I'd actually be really curious to know what JJ Abrams thinks of Johnson's TLJ. I know JJ has said he regretted giving up the trilogy after TFA, and now with Rian basically having made a joke of all the mystery-boxes JJ set up I could imagine JJ being a little miffed.

"Hey man, thanks for letting me borrow your franchise!" - RJ
"Sure, hope you liked your time with it!" - JJ
"Yea dude. Oh.. by the way, I opened all your mystery boxes but they were hollow and empty!" - RJ
"Huh? Why would you do that...?" - JJ
"Oh, also, you gotta find a way in the next film for 14 survivors on a sixty-year-old freighter to topple a new Empire that I've given BIGGER, BADDER, BETTER, MOAR POWER (*Tim Allen grunting noises*)! Good luck with that!" - RJ
"..." -JJ


It's like lending your friend your car, but when they bring it back it's got an empty tank of gas. Oh, and they smashed it up when they ran a red light and t-boned an elderly woman's car and crushed a few pedestrians and fled the scene.

18 minutes ago, Sithborg said:

shrug

RT's audience rating poll is worthless, positive or negative. The increase of in sales throughout the weekend strongly suggests that the movie is hated and is suffering bad WOM. And we know that can happen within an opening weekend. You just need to examing BvS's numbers.

I feel like you've got a word wrong in here, did you mean decrease instead of increase? If so I'm not sure where you're getting your information. This box office analysis seems to say ticket sales increased through the weekend. It also includes audience polling data further down that seems to suggest the poor reception is mainly from a very vocal minority.

Regardless, as I said before I enjoyed it and that's all that really matters to me.