Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi

If they pandered to the fanbois would it have been so bad, they would have been placated and the rest if the audience would’ve gone along with it anyway as it’s Star Wars. The reason it’s so successful is because of Luke etc, kids would still relate to them and the new characters
 
che_don_john said:
Four examples of bad writing that have nothing to do with fanboyism. They don't even have anything to do with Star Wars - you could replace 'Stormtrooper' with Franco soldier in the Spanish Civil War, Captain Phasma with Radovan Karadžić and so on, and you'd still have badly written subplots and character arcs. The context - Star Wars - is irrelevant and thus so is fanboyism.
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That's not bad writing, that's you not understanding the writing. That's not the same thing.

tormtrooper indoctrinated and trained from a very young age suddenly has a pang of conscience on his first mission, develops a sense of humour and clumsiness and quickly joins the resistance. Do you really think that character arc couldn't have been better-written?
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I think everything not called The Godfather Part 2 could be better written. Not being the perfect piece of literary genius doesn't equate to badly written.

And no, for the record I don't believe that out of tens of thousands of children kidnapped from their families and raised to be a soldier that one of them started questioning his training when brought into a live fire situation. In fact quite the opposite.

- Dyed-in-the-wool First Order stalwart Captain Phasma agrees to turn down shields at gunpoint without so much as a struggle or fight. This is a woman whom we had earlier seen massacre a village in the name of the First Order; surely she'd rather die or be tortured than just go "yeah, sure, I'll turn off those shields because three of you guys told me to". Again, if the writers really needed to get to a point in the story where the shields were deactivated, is that the best they could come up with?
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The key words being "at gunpoint". It turns out that threat of execution is a pretty big motivator - in the real world and also it seems in the galaxy far far away. It also turns out that a Hollywood movie wrote a villain to be a coward really. It's almost as if they wanted you to think this woman some sort of hypocrite and develop negative feelings towards her or something.

Luke Skywalker sees a glimmer of good in Darth Vader and would rather die trying to bring it out of him (over the course of two movies!) than give up and join the Emporer. Years later an older and wiser Luke suspects a bit of darkness in his nephew and considers murdering him in his sleep, because the writers needed a way to explain why he became a hermit and why Ben Solo became Kylo Ren. Do you think that's good writing? Mark Hammill certainly didn't think so.
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No, no, no. This and the next point is where we stray into the "you just didn't get it" territory. You've logic'ed backwards here, starting from the end point and tried to work backwards to why that happened and you blindly missed the point.

The entire theme of the film was pointing to the flawed concepts of 1950s like overly heroic perfect people and tearing them down as an entity to reveal them as realistic and flawed humans who committed great deeds at the time. Luke Skywalker along with characters like Superman are the embodiment of that. The last time somebody with the power of Kylo Ren ascended, TRILLIONS of people suffered at their hands and it was Luke Skywalker himself who had to end this through a remarkably fortuitous (and some might say badly written) series of events. Luke lived with this growing realisation for many months and had a single moment of weakness and anger, almost like he's not actually some robot but a flawed human who isn't constantly 100% heroic at all times. It was the "would you kill Hitler if you could go back in time" problem put into film. And he didn't "suspect a bit of darkness", he literally said that "Ben had already been lost". If you're going to criticise the film's writing, you need to at least pay attention to the film's writing.

- Finn and Rose attempt to help the Resistance escape destruction (because it ran out of fuel...). They end up at some interstellar Monte Carlo where they fail to contact the person they were sent there to contact, only to be conveniently aided by a smart con man who appears out of thin air (deus ex machina) and screws them over just as we all knew he would. That entire subplot feels like an RPG side mission where nothing makes sense and has no impact on the actual story. It was long, dull and unnecessary. As George Orwell always said, if something could potentially be easily cut then it shouldn't be in there in the first place.
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Oh you mean that side story that served to inform Finn's character arc, gave him a reason to actually fight for the Resistance, and showed the idea that the Resistance and the First Order and all of the structures like this are not the REAL enemy but instead the people who finance this state of ongoing war and slaughter in the galaxy are instead the real villians in the Universe? That's the thing you think had no impact? Again, that's just not paying attention.
 
Damocles said:
I think everything not called The Godfather Part 2 could be better written. Not being the perfect piece of literary genius doesn't equate to badly written.
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Never said it did. Straw man.

Damocles said:
And no, for the record I don't believe that out of tens of thousands of children kidnapped from their families and raised to be a soldier that one of them started questioning his training when brought into a live fire situation. In fact quite the opposite.
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Not saying it couldn't happen; I'm saying that perhaps the consideration and deliberation of that character could have been more interesting. Why not take us on that journey with the character, so we can see his pre-conditioning unravel as he learned more about the FO through various actions and events, as opposed to one thing just suddenly 'cracking' his programme? And before you say it; yes, I know the writers had a short space of time to do it, but it's been done in many films before; in fact, they managed it with Darth Vader in half an hour at the end of ROTJ.

Damocles said:
The key words being "at gunpoint". It turns out that threat of execution is a pretty big motivator - in the real world and also it seems in the galaxy far far away. It also turns out that a Hollywood movie wrote a villain to be a coward really. It's almost as if they wanted you to think this woman some sort of hypocrite and develop negative feelings towards her or something.
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The whole character was built up as some kind of badass. I think her crumble at the hands of an old man and a rookie traitor was inconsistent with that. The fact they they went back to her being the die-hard FO badass trooper in Last Jedi further highlights how 'out of character' it was.

Damocles said:
No, no, no. This and the next point is where we stray into the "you just didn't get it" territory. You've logic'ed backwards here, starting from the end point and tried to work backwards to why that happened and you blindly missed the point.
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Kylo Ren tells Rey that he felt betrayed by Luke and that that was what led him along the dark path. What point have I blindly missed? It's clear that the writers wanted to show that Luke was responsible for the creation of Kylo Ren - Christ, Luke even said so himself. That's not logic'ing backwards - that's pure chronology and causality.

Damocles said:
Oh you mean that side story that served to inform Finn's character arc, gave him a reason to actually fight for the Resistance, and showed the idea that the Resistance and the First Order and all of the structures like this are not the REAL enemy but instead the people who finance this state of ongoing war and slaughter in the galaxy are instead the real villians in the Universe? That's the thing you think had no impact? Again, that's just not paying attention.
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How was it necessary for him to fly to a casino planet, fail to recruit a hacker, accidentally recruit a bastard, escape in some owl-camel stampede and then make it back to base having gained nothing order to relay that message? The whole sequence was jarring and suggests that the writers felt that had to do something with Finn because he was doing nothing.

Your answers to my criticisms about the writing has simply been, for each point, "oh, you're stupid, you just don't get it". Come on, you know that is lazy and just not true. You can't presume lack of intelligence in someone simple because they prefer a different standard to you. I wouldn't presume you to be stupid for thinking that the writing is good and you should not do so likewise.
 
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