1 minute ago, jivjov said:

His movies have been mentioned multiple times at celebration...and he never fumbled, nor created a mess....

And, that’s like your opinion... Glad you enjoyed it. Wish I did too. The fact that I hate a Star Wars film makes me incredibly sad.

1 minute ago, AnomalousAuthor said:

And, that’s like your opinion...

And the majority opinion among critics and the fanbase. TLJ is a masterpiece of the saga.

1 minute ago, jivjov said:

And the majority opinion among critics and the fanbase. TLJ is a masterpiece of the saga.

Let’s see how that plays out.

Edit: By the force, I’m too easily baited by this topic. Guess I failed my discipline check.

1 minute ago, AnomalousAuthor said:

Let’s see how that plays out.

We're seeing it live in action over the next few years

12 minutes ago, AnomalousAuthor said:

Nice to see that you never change... Keep stirring that pot.

From you, that's a compliment.

4 minutes ago, Stan Fresh said:

From you, that's a compliment.

The feeling is mutual, sir. Have a good one. I’ve got better things to do than stooping under bridges all day.

4 minutes ago, AnomalousAuthor said:

I’ve got better things to do than stooping under bridges all day.

Don't leave your home on my account.

Hey what is it with the need to highjack this thread to discuss TLJ yet again? Come on folks, let it go. For some it was great, for other's it was garbage but TLJ was made and it can't be unmade. It's not what this thread is about so maybe if you're all hot and bothered and chomping at the bit to kick this dead horse go start another thread?

Just now, FuriousGreg said:

Hey what is it with the need to highjack this thread to discuss TLJ yet again? Come on folks, let it go. For some it was great, for other's it was garbage but TLJ was made and it can't be unmade and it's not what this thread is about so maybe if you're all hot and bothered and chomping at the bit to kick this dead horse start another thread?

Well...this is a thread about its direct sequel...it's gonna come up.

2 hours ago, Khazadune said:

TLJ killed the sequel era for me, but that's just one man's opinion. The glaring errors and problems that I see might not be issues for others, I can respect difference of opinion. But please don't try and sell the idea that it is a small minority of people that feel the same, this is clearly not true. From the 44% fan rating on rotten tomatoes reviewed by hundreds of thousands of fans, to the protest against solo that caused it to bomb in the wake of the fans issues with TLJ. If we are going to speak about things as objective facts and not opinions, then that is where disagreement ends and a realization of truth needs to set in. Regardless how we feel, the truth of the divisive elements of TLJ are not only a minor forgettable bump in the road.

Well, if you are going to reply to my posts, please stick to what I wrote, and not what you read.

Because somewhere between those two you jumped from "not a majority" to "a small minority". We could possibly debate if, in fact, the rotten tomatoes scores implies that a majority in fact did dislike it, but then we'd have to account for the quite large number of people that simply don't care about it enough to go vote on Rottentomatoes and whether there was some concerted online campaign to downvote it, and I'd rather not poke that beehive again.

Let's just say that I'm quite comfortable in my guesstimation that at least slightly more people liked the film then those who did not. It's not a hill where I've planted my flag and am prepared to die on, but you'll have to be slightly more convincing for me to back down from it.

2 hours ago, DaverWattra said:

It's interesting, I don't see this sort of fixation on progressive cultural politics among non-Americans very frequently. Except in the UK, I suppose. Are you British? Have you spent much time in English-speaking countries? Genuinely curious.

I think you're mistaken. I think Western Europe mostly considers the US to be quite behind the curve regarding progressive politics, even with the current surge of the conservative right wing. The debate, while heated, tends to be more nuanced, since there's room for more viewpoints as multi-party governments are then norm here, rather than two. The thing is, some of your hotter debates aren't really a thing here, because the debate is long since over on those topics.

You need to remember that europeans to a large extent speak english and watch at least some american news and media. We are quite aware what's happening over there. As for the reverse, you tend to have quite a distorted view on Europe, due to the distortion of the comparatively few viewpoints offered in English. Being from Sweden, the last one is a bit of sore spot for me.

1 hour ago, Rithuan said:

Do you truly believe that Ben Solo was intended as a villain? by the end of ep IX he will live amending his past errors or sacrifice himself correcting his mistakes. That was clear from the first movie (at least for me). In order to do that, you need a big evil and manipulative mastermind.

Not sure what Abrams had planned from the start, but considering Kylo's arc in so far, trying to pull the same redemption arc as Vader with Kylo would requite pretty much a U-turn from what we've seen so far. Vader turned because he was shocked that someone believed he could when he himself hade given up any hope of it long ago. Kylo knows he can turn back. He spent the first movie fearing that he would if confronted by his parents. When had faith in him in the second he outright declared that he didn't want to. Vader stayed a villain because he considered himself irredeemable. Kylo doesn't even think he's the bad guy as much as he needs to do some more questionable stuff to realize himself, and if he is, it's the fault of Luke, of Snoke, of his parents.

I mean, it's possible Abrams still does it, but I'm going to give his competence a little more credit than that.

1 hour ago, jivjov said:

User reviews on RT are a worthless metric. They had no safeguards in place to prevent review bombing, no way to know if reviewers had even seen the film in question, nothing to stop people from making dummy accounts solely to rate it low.

TLJ haters ARE the minority. an A- CinemaScore, near-universal critial acclaim, over a billion dollars at the box office, and being the highest selling Blu-ray release of the year doesn't lie.

If you personally didn't like it, that's fine, no one movie is going to please everyone. But spinning your own dislike as evidence of an organized campaign to make Solo underperform or evidence that everyone else in the world hates it too....that's just being a conspiracy theorist. Solo's failings were in the marketing. They released up against the biggest marvel movie of all time (at the time), and had the most tepid media presence of any Star Wars film to date. And before all of that, it had the problem of ballooning its own budget by reshooting half the film at the eleventh hour.

If JJ or Kathleen Kennedy or anyone at LucasFilm really though Johnson was screwing things up badly, we would not have gotten the TLJ that came to theaters. We literally have hard evidence of what happens when the suits don't like what a director is doing. They get canned, and replaced with a competent workhorse that'll knock things together to their satisfaction on time. Maybe Rian Johnson's ideas for TLJ didn't mesh with any of the original plans...but his ideas were well received enough to make it on screen. The very idea that Johnson secretly cranked out TLJ under the cover of darkness and released it to a global audience, blindsiding JJ Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy, forcing them to rummage through the closet of old villains is preposterous.

So I'm the conspiracy theorist for believing 280,000 user reviews on a website devoted to movie users perspectives...

that argument seems solid, bro.

Facts don't lie, even when they don't support your opinion.

28 minutes ago, themensch said:

Too Late 😀

27 minutes ago, penpenpen said:

Well, if you are going to reply to my posts, please stick to what I wrote, and not what you read.

Because somewhere between those two you jumped from "not a majority" to "a small minority". We could possibly debate if, in fact, the rotten tomatoes scores implies that a majority in fact did dislike it, but then we'd have to account for the quite large number of people that simply don't care about it enough to go vote on Rottentomatoes and whether there was some concerted online campaign to downvote it, and I'd rather not poke that beehive again.

Let's just say that I'm quite comfortable in my guesstimation that at least slightly more people liked the film then those who did not. It's not a hill where I've planted my flag and am prepared to die on, but you'll have to be slightly more convincing for me to back down from it.

I think you may have misread what I wrote, it is consistent, albeit the turns of phrase may have been convoluted. Regardless, as I originally stated, I have my opinion and respect those of others who differ. I also know that empirical and statistical facts do assert that there is a great deal of divisive ideas trapped up in this film that tend to lead to passionate appeals for or against it. I was only offering the point that as it stands the tools we have to measure the fan approval or disapproval tend to indicate that there is a great deal of opposition.

16 minutes ago, Khazadune said:

I think you may have misread what I wrote, it is consistent, albeit the turns of phrase may have been convoluted. Regardless, as I originally stated, I have my opinion and respect those of others who differ. I also know that empirical and statistical facts do assert that there is a great deal of divisive ideas trapped up in this film that tend to lead to passionate appeals for or against it. I was only offering the point that as it stands the tools we have to measure the fan approval or disapproval tend to indicate that there is a great deal of opposition.

...and those tools don't account for the truism that dissatisfied voices have been proven to be far more eager and likely to speak out than satisfied voices. (In point of fact, one of the most frequently cited sources of "proof" - Rotten Tomatoes - has recently stated outright that their system is not only susceptible to being gamed but has been gamed, with those tactics consistently skewing towards the negative views.)

1 hour ago, penpenpen said:

I think you're mistaken. I think Western Europe mostly considers the US to be quite behind the curve regarding progressive politics, even with the current surge of the conservative right wing. The debate, while heated, tends to be more nuanced, since there's room for more viewpoints as multi-party governments are then norm here, rather than two. The thing is, some of your hotter debates aren't really a thing here, because the debate is long since over on those topics.

I did say cultural progressive politics, by which I mean the issues that get labeled as "culture war" issues in the US. I know a lot of progressive Western Europeans through my work, and my sense is that while they consider some issues that are hotly debated in the US to be completely obvious and closed questions where the progressive side has won the debate (universal healthcare, gay marriage), they don't really get why some American progressives are up in arms about issues like cultural appropriation and microaggressions. The only continental Europeans I know who care about those issues have spent a lot of time in the US or the UK and "gone native."

Of course I recognize that Europe is far from being a single culture, but that's my sense.

1 hour ago, Khazadune said:

So I'm the conspiracy theorist for believing 280,000 user reviews on a website devoted to movie users perspectives...

that argument seems solid, bro.

Facts don't lie, even when they don't support your opinion.

RottenTomatoes literally straight up admitted their system for user reviews sucks. This has been an ongoing concern in the "user reviews" realm for a while now. Steam just announced a thing were they can exempt certain periods of review activity from an overall score if there's evidence of off-topic review bombing. RT is great for being a one stop shop to look at critical reviews (which are almost universally positive!), but their user reviews are a garbage fire.

Look instead to CinemaScore, where they conduct exit polls of people who actually for sure saw the film...TLJ has an A-.

I'm all for looking at facts...but we have to make sure we're actually looking at facts rather than a few whiny babies with too much time on their hands.

18 minutes ago, jivjov said:

RottenTomatoes literally straight up admitted their system for user reviews sucks. This has been an ongoing concern in the "user reviews" realm for a while now.

Yup. Look at the GoodReads page for any remotely controversial young adult novel from the past five years and you'll see a similar pattern.

4 minutes ago, DaverWattra said:

I did say cultural progressive politics, by which I mean the issues that get labeled as "culture war" issues in the US. I know a lot of progressive Western Europeans through my work, and my sense is that while they consider some issues that are hotly debated in the US to be completely obvious and closed questions where the progressive side has won the debate (universal healthcare, gay marriage), they don't really get why some American progressives are up in arms about issues like cultural appropriation and microaggressions. The only continental Europeans I know who care about those issues have spent a lot of time in the US or the UK and "gone native."

Well, the debate is alive and well, at least in left wing progressive circles, and since the conservative right tends to be up in arms about it, I assume it has spread outside such circles. At least in Sweden, microaggressions tends to be more or less folded in with master suppression techniques, but the cultural appropriation topic definitely pops up fairly often. CA in particular is particular has gained traction as a topic in part because just importing the debate on american terms doesn't really fit with swedish terms, as we don't have the same kind of ethnic and cultural segregation as the black/white divide the US still struggles with. So much of cultural appropriation needs to be reapplied and redefined to apply to our conditions, cultures and subcultures.

Older generations might be a little behind the curve, but this is fairly basic high school sociology for at least the past decade or so. It's occasionally labeled a culture war here too, but mostly by the far right.

The internet exists. Ideas will be exchanged, imported and applied locally without people "going native". This goes both ways. The european far right and american alt-right have a lot of influence on each other, just look at the current alarmism about border security.

Just now, DaverWattra said:

Yup. Look at the GoodReads page for any remotely controversial young adult novel from the past five years and you'll see a similar pattern.

Here's one that was pointed out to me recently, and its even star wars related. Look at the reviews of the Doctor Aphra TPBs on Amazon. The volume in which Tolvan and Aphra kiss has suspiciously lower ratings than the others.

3 minutes ago, penpenpen said:

Well, the debate is alive and well, at least in left wing progressive circles, and since the conservative right tends to be up in arms about it, I assume it has spread outside such circles. At least in Sweden, microaggressions tends to be more or less folded in with master suppression techniques, but the cultural appropriation topic definitely pops up fairly often. CA in particular is particular has gained traction as a topic in part because just importing the debate on american terms doesn't really fit with swedish terms, as we don't have the same kind of ethnic and cultural segregation as the black/white divide the US still struggles with. So much of cultural appropriation needs to be reapplied and redefined to apply to our conditions, cultures and subcultures.

Older generations might be a little behind the curve, but this is fairly basic high school sociology for at least the past decade or so. It's occasionally labeled a culture war here too, but mostly by the far right.

The internet exists. Ideas will be exchanged, imported and applied locally without people "going native". This goes both ways. The european far right and american alt-right have a lot of influence on each other, just look at the current alarmism about border security.

Fair enough; it may be that I've mostly had these discussions with European progressives who agree with my own take, rather than a representative sample of them.

33 minutes ago, jivjov said:

I'm all for looking at facts...but we have to make sure we're actually looking at facts rather than a few whiny babies with too much time on their hands.

And this is why I no longer argue about TLJ on the internet.

3 hours ago, Rithuan said:

Do you truly believe that Ben Solo was intended as a villain? by the end of ep IX he will live amending his past errors or sacrifice himself correcting his mistakes. That was clear from the first movie (at least for me). In order to do that, you need a big evil and manipulative mastermind

Er...Darth Vader anyone? You know, the main villain for most of the OT, who ends up sacrificing his life for his son? Or you could go the Black Panther route, and have a villain who's a bit more nuanced and didn't need another figure behind him pulling strings.

On a different note, if it was "clear", meaning the course is set and the movies are just filling in details with new aliens and ships, that's kind of proof of what I'm saying. It's just lazy all around.

8 hours ago, Rithuan said:

And this is why I no longer argue about TLJ on the internet.

Yeah, these kinds of arguments are why I took a long hiatus from online Star Wars communities as a whole. It just brings me down arguing about it. I love Star Wars... just hate what TLJ did to it and likewise to our forums/communities. I was so excited leading up to episode 8 and was completely let down by what I saw.

Such a divisive film. People either LOVE it or HATE it, and there’s seemingly no middle ground. I don’t get how people consider it a masterpiece and they don’t get how I see it as a dumpster fire. To me, it’s a bad film. To them, it’s perfection.

I really wish I could be one of the guys who loved it, but I didn’t. I hated it. And, for the record, I didn’t post a review of it to RT or any other sites. Nor will I belittle anyone for their opinion on this or any film. I also won’t insinuate that my fanhood is somehow more legitimate than anyone over one film like some others do. I hope IX is good, but I won’t be seeing it in the theaters and definitely won't be avoiding trailers and spoilers like I did with TLJ. Just not worth my time or energy. And, honestly, showing our displeasure with our money, or lack thereof, is the only thing that Disney/Lucasfilm will ultimately pay attention to.

On a side note, just got done running TFA Beginner Game tonight, and had a great time. Took a couple of sessions and ended it with my players dropping into the aftermath of the Hosnian Cataclysm.

So I have an idea about the title. It probably isn't anywhere on target, but a thought.

Would Rise of Skywalker be them referencing the title Ozyly-esehembo the Cheunh word for Force Sensitives which translated in to basic as Skywalker? I can see them running with the idea there are no more "Jedi", but the Legacy left behind is what found the "Skywalker Order" by Rey.