star wars: the last gasp - 3/10
felt much the same as i did with the force awakens, that it was fun to watch in the moment but was also just fucking terrible as a film.
it had a handful of *moments* that were moderately cool i guess, but this current iteration of the star wars franchise is just so god damn *stupidly* written that it ruins it for me - basically this feels like the star trek reboot over again.
my major issues with the film:
1. it's just a 2 hour long "remember the first 3 movies you actually liked? remember? member? MEMEBER THEM? YEAH!" with some weak ripoff points of "plot" to gel it all together.
2. the first order: the setup is completely ridiculous and unbelievable. in the prequels and the original trilogy it at least made SOME kind of sense (if even in the suspension-of-disbelief way of movie logic) that the galactic empire exists and functions. but the first order isn't space nazis... it's more like space alt-right, and nothing about their current position in the political sphere of the movie universe makes any sense. it's utterly nonsensical that in a movie universe where the galactic senate has been restored and there is a general democratic government with even a token military simply wouldn't notice that a pepe meme had recruiting a couple million people into an ad-hoc army and acquired the physical mass required to make multiple dreadnaughts and a planet sized death marble.
2a. the resistance: nothing about this makes any sense... so there's what, like 40 people in 'the resistance'? wasn't the resistance supposed to be literally the galactic government? the first order showed up out of nowhere at the start of the first movie and now 8 minutes later just runs the entire galaxy?
what is the narrative purpose of pretending to kill off everyone in the resistance in this film? the first order isn't going to win no matter what, so whittling the resistance forces down to 8 people just means now those 8 people manage to take down the entire first order, probably because jedi or some shit, and that's just stupid.
if there's a significant amount more resistance support, then they are just literally physically retarded because they their entire command and leadership chain in one place, when they could have been spread all over the place.
nothing about this from an organizational level makes any rational sense.
3. everything is still just a fan-fic of the original trilogy, and even when it's not dealing directly with the older characters it's simply referencing them and pretending that's a screenplay.
4. from a technical standpoint i found it very unpleasant that they jammed so many different plotlines into the movie that no thread was followed consistently for more than 5 minutes before jump-cutting to other four stories then back around to the first.
there was no sense of time scale nor of narrative cohesion.
5. waaaaay too much of this movie was just "a thing appears out of nowhere in order to be a visual gag or exposition device and then vanishes and is never mentioned again" or "a shot is set up to look cool but makes absolutely no god damn sense whatsoever why that would happen"
an example of the latter that is a very minor issue but is endemic of what this entire movie is all about: in the "a day in the life of luke" montage he walks up to a cliff edge , grabs a 75 foot long pole, jumps and vaults to a crack in another cliff face, precariously turns around and then lifts the pole out of the water and stabs it down: jump cut to them walking home and he's carrying a fish.
WHAT!?
why would you leap the gap to have a precious and unstable perch to stab a pole in the water when you could have just done that from the cliff edge?
how did he vault back to the other side without smooshing the fish?
how did he pull a 75 foot long pole straight up without the fish falling off the pole? (yes, the end of the pole had something of a hook on it, but the pole itself was substantially wider than that hook)
how does that pole even have a hook on it if he's vaulting with it every couple of days?
what is that thing made out of that it could be that big around and that long and not weigh several hundred pounds?
what is a fish that large doing in a shallow cove in a rocky cliff with crashing surf?
etc etc etc.
it's not that this little scene breaks the entire film, but it's just so idiotic and nonsensical and exists ONLY for this one "badass" shot of luke vaulting across from one cliff to another, which made it really stand out to me as an example of atrocious film making.
and the entire movie is just that scene over and over and over and over again.
