27 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

Yea, I always sort of figured that elongation was like some sort of 'phasing' into hyperspace, or a visual artifact thereof. Could be that the ships aren't actually physically occupying that elongated space.

If ships in hyperspace were just going really fast along straight lines and could crash into other ships... my goodness, think of how risky hyperspace travel would be. Let alone an entire fleet jumping, like the Rebel fleet does at Endor. If just one warship behind the fighters jumped a millisecond early it'd wipe out all the ships in front of it...

Seems to be the cannon case now though at least. There's a battle cut scene in Battlefront 2 showing a GCW era star destroyers exploding a cr90 in the same fashion and hera manages to destroy a half fleet of tie fighters in rebels by jumping through a hanger.......

@ 0:44

20 minutes ago, Animewarsdude said:

Part of the issue with Snoke and Rey is that they were part of JJ's mystery box approach, that being the whole have some mystery there to keep your audience guessing and interested, but the thing is if they aren't really answered then you are left with a rather lackluster/blueballed feeling about the whole thing. A "Why did I waste my time thinking about this" sort of thing. That said, they could always go with her parents not being special but her, herself being special, I mean Shmi Skywalker wasn't special herself, she just happened to give birth to Anakin, granted some Plagius mess behind it likely but still. That would explain her ability in the force as a reincarnation, could act as a big reveal, and more importantly EXPLAINS WHY THE HECK ANAKIN NEVER CAME BACK TO TRY AND TALK KYLO DOWN WHEN THE GUY WAS EFFECTIVELY WORSHIPING HIM!!!!!

Humor was probably because it is a modern/2010 movie and they feel every movie must try and have as much humor as in any Marvel movie.

Shmi wasn't anything "special", but she was only half of Anakin's "parents". And being created with the force or whatever by plagueis counts as "special". And I REALLY don't want rey to be a reincarnation of anakin or a "chosen one" at all.

2 minutes ago, Ralgon said:

Seems to be the cannon case now though at least. There's a battle cut scene in Battlefront 2 showing a GCW era star destroyers exploding a cr90 in the same fashion and hera manages to destroy a half fleet of tie fighters in rebels by jumping through a hanger.......

@ 0:44

Whelp... that sucks. Makes every space battle of the franchise pretty pointless, and fleets might as well contain several "hunter-killer" ships that are just big cheap hunks of minimally-functional mass that have a single droid captain ready to plot a jump through enemy vessels or into an enemy base or a hostile planet....

16 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

True, and I still think it's very likely we'll find out more about Rey's lineage in Episode 9, seeing as the only confirmation we have comes from Kylo who was trying to pray upon her insecurities at a moment of weakness and vulnerability. I wouldn't call him a reliable authority on the matter...

Maybe, it certainly doesn't explain much of her force vision in TFA....... but then we need to remember too that for much of the old EU the Skywalkers were a an exception, and not the rule of force sensitives. The jedi order and sith both sought them out but testing/scanning was required, it wasn't just a case of "you're of X bloodline, therefore you're force sensitive"

13 minutes ago, RedHotDice said:

Hehe, true dat.

The only good thing about this movie: it made me like TFA more.

Actually I like the TFA movie less. Granted this movie is full of Macguffins, Plot Holes, Fillers, and Deus Ex Machinas almost to the point where you could have said it needed another year. But granted that it wasn't as predictable as TFA and I think the structure was a lot better where as the last episode had a rather mediocre ending, this one was better. But yeah it isn't exactly perfect, you actually have to suspend much disbelief to actually buy the story line here. I like how they improved Kyloe Ren, they were a little too meta with Luke calling his lightsaber a Laser Sword and Snoke calling Kylo's mask a stupid thing. The 1st Order now seems more incompetent than a whole fleet of Admiral Ozzels though and Captian Phasma went out like a sap still.

But as far as character development I think it had more than Episode 7. Granted Episode 7 didn't have much character developed. Then again what do I know about character, I liked Rogue One.

But I can see why some people didn't like it. I expected it to be awful and I ended up liking it, I guess others hope it would re-kindle the epic feeling Empire Strikes Back and they didn't get that. So all in all I guess the movie is a solid Meh.

9 minutes ago, Ralgon said:

Seems to be the cannon case now though at least. There's a battle cut scene in Battlefront 2 showing a GCW era star destroyers exploding a cr90 in the same fashion and hera manages to destroy a half fleet of tie fighters in rebels by jumping through a hanger.......

@ 0:44

That one's a bit different, because the star destroyer is coming OUT of hyperspace rigt on top of a the CR90. I'd expect that to destroy the CR90 in that case, though I'd expect some heavy damage to the star destroyer at the same time. And its way harder to plan exiting hyperspace right on top of an enemy ship on purpose.

4 minutes ago, VanderLegion said:

That one's a bit different, because the star destroyer is coming OUT of hyperspace rigt on top of a the CR90. I'd expect that to destroy the CR90 in that case, though I'd expect some heavy damage to the star destroyer at the same time. And its way harder to plan exiting hyperspace right on top of an enemy ship on purpose.

The hera reference is still relevant, i just couldn't put my hands on footage right now......

7 hours ago, Hawkstrike said:

Well, minus the part where a hyper-capable enemy would have projected the enemy's course and jumped ahead to trap them, rather than chase them from behind for 18+ hours.

The First Order doesn't have a very competent military.

Or sent fighters and bombers ahead of them, or whatever.

More to the point, multiple ships can split up. This, along with the lack of fighters, is one of the points where having the four (I think?) destroyers along with the supremacy rather than just the supremacy itself actively undermines the story, because jumping just one or two destroyers ahead of the Raddus would have done the job nicely - either they get shots, or else the Raddus has to turn tightly enough to avoid their fields of fire, which means slowing relative to the Supremacy and allowing it to catch up - and you can keep doing that as often as required.

25 minutes ago, VanderLegion said:

That one's a bit different, because the star destroyer is coming OUT of hyperspace rigt on top of a the CR90. I'd expect that to destroy the CR90 in that case, though I'd expect some heavy damage to the star destroyer at the same time. And its way harder to plan exiting hyperspace right on top of an enemy ship on purpose.

For that case, there's a similar situation in Rogue One, where a CR-90 (I think) hits the destroyer that wasn't there a few seconds ago.

22 minutes ago, Ralgon said:

The hera reference is still relevant, i just couldn't put my hands on footage right now......

True. Although I'm pretty sure she doesn't hit anything directly. I'm not sure exactly what's meant to be happening.

Just came back from my second viewing. Initially I was pretty lukewarm on the film, but it is a lot better the second time around. There are a number of things that, frankly, seem outright stupid without knowing the direction the film is trying to take you, so many of the reactions here (including my own initial one) are understandable.

The primary theme of this film is the danger of hubris and the failure that it brings. Most of the major characters have to deal with this theme and either overcome their own pride or are destroyed by it.

Luke probably has the most development here. Post-RotJ Luke became a legend: a hero of the Rebellion and heir to the Jedi teachings. He saw raw power in Ben Solo and sought to pass on his teachings to him, but was blind to the darkness growing within Ben until it was too late. He failed Ben, but instead of confronting his problems he ran away from them and became secluded. It is not until Yoda appears to him that he realizes he needs to learn from his failures and secure the future of the next generation. That's why he projects onto Crait and stalls to allow the Resistance/Rebellion enough time to escape. So they can live to fight another day. I know many people were disappointed they didn't see Luke swoop in on an X-wing and confront Kylo in person, but honestly that goes against the whole point of the film. Luke isn't trying to be a hero anymore. He may be the strongest Force user in the galaxy, but even he can't take on the entire First Order on his own (as he tells Rey earlier in the film). He's no longer the kid from ESB who dashes off to Cloud City to confront Vader without a plan. He's grown to understand that saving the lives of those who can live to fight oppression another day is more important than his own pride. I thought Luke's arc was near perfect at the end of this film.

Many of the Resistance characters battle with this theme too, namely Poe, Finn, and Rose. Poe especially begins the film as a trigger-happy pilot more interested in hurting the FO than saving lives. With the initial battle and the subsequent failed mutiny he learns that heroism is not always the right choice. By the time we get to Crait you can see his growth into a capable commander in at least two scenes: when he orders the speeders to break off their attack run due to the mounting losses, and when he's the first person to realize Luke is on the planet to buy them time instead of fight the FO. I'm actually interested in seeing how this growth carries over to Episode 9. The Finn/Rose arc had many elements of this too, although I don't think it was handled as well as Poe's (more on that below). They both learn the same lesson as Poe by the end of the film as their plan fails and actually causes the deaths of several hundered Resistance fighters.

The FO suffers no shortage of arrogance. Their overconfidence in the wake of SKB's annihilation of the New Republic was readily apparent, although it seems mostly concetrated at the top. The opening scene shows this pretty clearly as Hux underestimates Poe's gambit. Meanwhile the unnamed Dreadnought commander seems pretty aware of what's happening: "we should've scrambled fighters 5 minutes ago!" and "he's taking out the surface cannons for a bombing run" (heavily paraphrased). Yet there's nothing he can do about it because the people above him (namely Hux) are too incompetent at their jobs. Snoke is another example of this. He is shown to be an incredibly powerful Force user throughout the film, yet he's so full of himself he doesn't realize that Kylo's about to betray him.

There isn't much to be said of Kylo and Rey that hasn't already been said. They had the most interesting arcs of the film (besides Luke) and it was a joy to see them both grow. Both of them finally choose to kill the past: Rey accepts her origins as a nobody and Kylo becomes his own man, "killing" both Snoke and Luke. I'm excited to see where Episode IX takes these two.

All that said there are still problems with the film even after second viewing. The premise of the sublight chase is pretty poorly thought out. Holdo's refusal to tell Poe of the evacuation plan is sort of perplexing. Leia's spacewalk is really cheesy. Most of the humor is actually pretty good but occasionally it kills the mood when it shouldn't. Hux devolving into a comic relief character was kind of sad. And finally, my biggest complaint is Canto Bight. It actually managed to be worse than I remembered from the first viewing. I understand the point of Finn and Rose's subplot as it relates to the main theme of the film. But this portion was still just a huge filler and felt like someone inserted a cheesy made-for-TV Disney movie about animal cruelty into a Star Wars movie. It was just baaaaaaad. When I rewatch TLJ, this is the part that I'm going to dread coming to every time, much like the Anakin/Padme scenes in AotC. One thing that I really hated was the ridiculous amount of plot armor on Finn and Rose. For a film that's not shy about killing off major characters, this just felt weird, especially in the context of what they did. Finn and Rose go on a highly risky mission to disrupt the FO tracking system, manage to completely and utterly fail, and on top of that get hundreds of Resistance fighters killed when DJ sells them out. And yet they come through all that relatively unscathed and don't seem to suffer any repurcussions? I get that the Resistance needs everyone they can get at this point, but it really rubbed me the wrong way compared to how we saw Poe and Luke take responsibility for their actions.

That was a lot to unpack but basically I really liked the movie the second time around. It's definitely flawed, but it has a nice message and tons of development for the major characters. Take out Canto Bight and it's basically a 9/10, but for now I'd say it ranks below the OT and just a bit below Rogue One. Miles better than TFA. I'm pretty excited for the future. Now that we've had a film exploring the danger of hubris, I'm hoping that we can see Kylo grow into an interesting villain for Episode IX. One thing TLJ was sorely missing was a strong, intelligent villain character, and I think that was almost by design. My biggest hope for IX is that Kylo becomes a credible foil for the heroes.

1 hour ago, Animewarsdude said:

Part of the issue with Snoke and Rey is that they were part of JJ's mystery box approach, that being the whole have some mystery there to keep your audience guessing and interested, but the thing is if they aren't really answered then you are left with a rather lackluster/blueballed feeling about the whole thing. A "Why did I waste my time thinking about this" sort of thing. That said, they could always go with her parents not being special but her, herself being special, I mean Shmi Skywalker wasn't special herself, she just happened to give birth to Anakin, granted some Plagius mess behind it likely but still. That would explain her ability in the force as a reincarnation, could act as a big reveal.

100% certain, the next movie reveals Kylo to be a lying(-sith) telling Rey her parents were nobodies.

They are connected in the force and it is not unbefore seen lineage relationships suddenly being revealed.

“Everything I told you were true - from a certain point of view” Ben Kenobi (Force ghost)

1 hour ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

True, and I still think it's very likely we'll find out more about Rey's lineage in Episode 9, seeing as the only confirmation we have comes from Kylo who was trying to pray upon her insecurities at a moment of weakness and vulnerability. I wouldn't call him a reliable authority on the matter...

What do you mean the only confirmation comes from Kylo? Rey says it! We first (e: not only) hear it from her mouth, because she always knew and never wanted to admit it

I....Didn't love it.

I've thought about it for a while and I think one of the major reasons I didn't is because they spend a lot of time trying to inject a bit of grey morality into the film:

- Luke 'creating' Kylo

- War is bad for everyone

- The resistance use Arms Dealers (shock horror?)

In another series, or even a spin off film, this can work. However, in a movie where one side is a band of resistance fighters and the other side is literal space Nazis it just doesn't work. It reminded me a lot about what I hated in KOTOR 2, with Kreia and her baby's first Nihilism lectures. I know some people loved it but I think it always rung hollow and there's the same problem here.

Both Snoke and Phasma are enormous wastes of time and Phasma in particular is wasted. Though, hey, she survived one unsurvivable situation already so maybe she'll be back yet again.

Also didn't love that Finn and Poes storylines are not only completely useless, they're actively detrimental to the heroes. If Finn doesn't go to that planet, they don't get the hacker who then doesn't betray them and tell the First Order about the cloaked transports. Also, how did he know about that? I may just not remember but did Finn and Plucky Sidekick actually tell him? Or even mention it?

I get that they're getting Poe ready to be the leader of the Resistance and instilling leadership lessons etc. but here's a leadership lesson: Maybe tell the no. 3 ranked surviving officer about the super duper hidden planet you're trying to reach? I mean, is there any good military reason for not telling him and shutting him up? You can do it in private, away from everyone else and he'd suddenly be on side.

Finally, and I know they're doing this to make it underdogs vs massive superpower again, but was the entire New Republic fleet seriously parked in that one system? Like they didn't have any sector fleets, or even just a few ships out on patrol?

Pearl Harbour was devastating to the US Pacific fleet but it still wasn't 100% losses. But no, in order to force it back to the scrappy kids narrative we're gonna ignore that and only this one Mon Cal cruiser survived...

Rey/Luke/Kylo storyline....was alright.

@defkhan1

But did we really need a Star Wars film to explore the perils of hubris? I mean, this has been a pretty consistent theme throughout Star Wars, and it's been amply explored without needing to hit us over the heads with it for an entire 2.5 hours.


A New Hope: Here, the Empire embodies hubris, most notably through Tarkin but also through Vader and Motti. Vader and Tarkin's plan to let the Falcon escape to be tracked. The minimal threat from the snub-fighters. "Evacuate, in our moment of triumph!?"

Empire Strikes Back: Here, we see lots of hubris from Luke. He is defiant to Obi-Wan's and Yoda's warnings, and walks right into the trap on Cloud City, losing his hand and nearly getting himself captured by Vader.

Return of the Jedi: Again, Luke is bold (Jabba's Palace), but unlike rushing to Cloud City without a plan he's laid a multi-layered plan in place to get Han back from Jabba. He's learned from his hubris and grown. On the other hand, the Emperor personifies hubris, risking himself and his Death Star for a chance to turn Luke as his next apprentice. Luke even says "Your overconfidence is your weakness..."

Prequels: In the prequels, we see (generally speaking) the hubris of the Jedi and most notably Anakin. Qui-Gon's defiance in wanting to train Anakin, Obi-Wan's belief that he could do so despite the Council's warnings. The Jedi becoming generally blinded to the growing Sith presence and believing that they could control the war and maintain the Galaxy during a war (to the dismay of many defector Jedi, including Dooku). Anakin is the personification of hubris, believing that he was the greatest and deserved recognition and reward, and believing that he could embrace the Dark Side without paying the iron price.

The Last Jedi: We gather from the opening crawl that the Republic did not view the First Order as a threat and wouldn't heed Leia's warnings about them, believing they could never truly threaten the Republic. And this gets the entire Republic (somehow) killed by a blast that wipes out five systems. One could also point to Kylo's arrogance as setting him up to fail against Finn and Rey in the forest, I suppose. Or Han's belief that he could sway his son and failing.


I mean, hubris is old, well-treaded territory for Star Wars. I don't think there was anything novel in TLJ that made it's exploration of that topic particularly revolutionary or interesting, and we've seen failure for hubris (for both heroes and villains) throughout the trilogies. And they've typically been able to explore it without such poor plot-lines and violations of the basic premises of the Star Wars universe.

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.

1 hour ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

Whelp... that sucks. Makes every space battle of the franchise pretty pointless, and fleets might as well contain several "hunter-killer" ships that are just big cheap hunks of minimally-functional mass that have a single droid captain ready to plot a jump through enemy vessels or into an enemy base or a hostile planet....

Wont work, excluding the super structures, all the SD are made for ramming and being rammed. The Imperial 1 and 2 are 40 million tons and have small strong surface impact areas. Three moving faster than light rammed a Executor class SSD all at the same time, bringing down the shields only 40%.

37 minutes 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.

There is more salt here than on the entire surface of Crait.

It's like people are comparing a film, done in the style expected of this year (think Marvel, DC, Guardians of the Galaxy, the new Star Trek films) and dragging it back thirty years to "the golden era" of when they were a kid and everything was done for the first time.

Essentially, it will never meet people's expectations.

It's a movie that feels unpolished and unfinished, Like the loss of or work put into Carrie left no time or resources for the rest of the editing. Despite the plagiarism from several movies and some monstrous plotholes that could have been easily written around as some note the storytelling was decent.

90% of the porg animation grated on me (I could live with teh cute but WTF Lucasfilm? Did you decide to stopmotion/puppet it all and give that job to the interns??)

Several scenes feel unfinished or cut to the point it really shows (rey's "dark place", the snoke confrontation, and wasn't there more to the temple destruction flashback in the trailers?)

It appear we have to go to the new eu cannon to get backstory and motivation on our protagonists (So much screen time from their supposed leader and not 1 mention of the knights of ren?)

If you can get over all that it's an entertaining watch that for the most part doesn't go the way you think, and i really wonder what will happen if/when we get a remastered edition/directors cut......

52 minutes 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...

15 minutes ago, Viktus106 said:

There is more salt here than on the entire surface of Crait.

It's like people are comparing a film, done in the style expected of this year (think Marvel, DC, Guardians of the Galaxy, the new Star Trek films) and dragging it back thirty years to "the golden era" of when they were a kid and everything was done for the first time.

Essentially, it will never meet people's expectations.

In fairness, people may just not like the new style or think it works.

I didn't bring up the humour in what I said earlier but yeah it also didn't really land in several places.

I made excactly the same complaint about Thor: Ragnarok which I found just bizarre in places.

Bruce: I'm scared if I go Hulk again I'll never turn back.

(Time Passes)

LOL Hulk Smash!

Same thing here.

Bomber Explodes, half a dozen people die.

LOL BB-8 did a thing

Not everything can be Guardians of the Galaxy.

43 minutes ago, Black Knight Leader said:

Wont work, excluding the super structures, all the SD are made for ramming and being rammed. The Imperial 1 and 2 are 40 million tons and have small strong surface impact areas. Three moving faster than light rammed a Executor class SSD all at the same time, bringing down the shields only 40%.

I know the source says they rammed at c but well, the three ISDs most probably were ramming the Executor just while dropping out of hyperspace. Otherwise three impacts with near infinite energy were tanked by the Executor.
FTL ramming is just breaking the setting.

1 hour ago, KellenC said:

Finally, and I know they're doing this to make it underdogs vs massive superpower again, but was the entire New Republic fleet seriously parked in that one system? Like they didn't have any sector fleets, or even just a few ships out on patrol?

The Disney EU explains it this way:
After the fall of the Empire the New Republic demilitarized almost entirely, only keeping a fleet in their Capital System.
All other sectors had to create their own militias to fight pirates and smugglers. At the point the FO rose the NR was unable to do anything due to their lack of ships.
When the Hosnian system was destroyed they lost all ships they had. Including all T-85 X-Wing and their production facillities to explain why these ships don't appear in the movies...

Suspension of disbelief: Not available.

1 minute ago, RogueLeader42 said:

The Disney EU explains it this way:
After the fall of the Empire the New Republic demilitarized almost entirely, only keeping a fleet in their Capital System.
All other sectors had to create their own militias to fight pirates and smugglers. At the point the FO rose the NR was unable to do anything due to their lack of ships.
When the Hosnian system was destroyed they lost all ships they had. Including all T-85 X-Wing and their production facillities to explain why these ships don't appear in the movies...

Suspension of disbelief: Not available.

...Wow knowing the explanation actually made this much worse.

2 minutes ago, RogueLeader42 said:

Suspension of disbelief: Not available.

Why? We have several historical examples where former military dictatorships demilitarized heavily.

8 hours ago, LagJanson said:

Dang it. Unexpected logic!

I hope he was joking, because a full rotation takes in our own galaxy about 200 million years.

1 minute ago, GreenDragoon said:

Why? We have several historical examples where former military dictatorships demilitarized heavily.

Yes, but demilitarizing heavily is going from the Empire to maybe a handful of patrolling fleets.

Not literally one fleet all in the same place. Noone has ever disarmed so thoroughly that they had nothing to defend their borders with.

Also, this means that StarKiller Base was an even bigger waste of resources. We've seen (so far) the First Order has Dreadnoughts, Snokes Super Ship, Loads of Star Destroyers and Legions of troopers. They could have used the SKB budget to build more of this stuff and just walked into Republic Space with no one to stop them. I mean, this whole movie shows how outmatched Leias resistance are.

9 minutes ago, RogueLeader42 said:

The Disney EU explains it this way:

After the fall of the Empire the New Republic demilitarized almost entirely, only keeping a fleet in their Capital System.
All other sectors had to create their own militias to fight pirates and smugglers. At the point the FO rose the NR was unable to do anything due to their lack of ships.
When the Hosnian system was destroyed they lost all ships they had. Including all T-85 X-Wing and their production facillities to explain why these ships don't appear in the movies...

Suspension of disbelief: Not available.

And now they've also lost...

All Resistance T-70 X-Wings
All Resistance RZ-2 A-Wings
All Resistance B/SF-17 Bombers
All Resistance capital ships and most personal
The support of all their former allies (apparently)

Basically the entire Resistance can now fit on a single small frieghter. Fortunately it's a frieghter with the most powerful plot shielding in the known universe...

...I don't know about you guys, but I'm excited for Episode IX! The Falcon solo's everything (no pun intended)! How can this not be a good way to lead in to the final episode of a new trilogy?