Last Jedi: Responses to other reviews
Dec. 31st, 2017 03:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI was going to call this "things which are not plot holes" :) but that's not exactly right.
There's any number of things that make no sense, but seem to work well enough for a film. Like, lots of the space combat doesn't make much sense, in any of the films in the series. And this film introduces new things, previously unmentioned, which have about the same level of realism for a space battle. But I feel like, if the film clearly conveys (usually implicitly), what's at risk, what the danger is, how bad the danger is, how likely it is to have alternative options, etc, then it mostly works for a film, even if all those things are not actually realistic.
Yes, the same applies to things I know more about. I'm annoyed by a film that gratuitously gets simple maths wrong. But if it clearly establishes "this is an easy problem, this is a hard problem, this person solves this problem", etc, then I can follow it as a film.
Like, one of the big bits I had a problem with was that the film was trying to show some sort of reconciliation between Poe and Holdo. But if it had clearly indicated "Holdo is out of her depth but doing reasonably well but was wrong about Poe" or "Holdo is right and Poe is wrong not to trust her" etc, I would have been happy to go along with that, even if I still thought the actions she took were unwise in the real world. My problem is not that it clashes with reality per se, but that what is conveyed by the film is inconsistent emotionally as well as factually. If she's supposed to be out of her depth, why isn't there anything showing that more clearly (we're really supposed to deduce that from Poe going behind her back?) If she's supposed to be right, couldn't we see the other characters more doubtful of Poe's mutiny? Basically whatever Leia says is probably "right", but she seemed to expect this infighting to be normal.
But people objected to lots of other things where I didn't care that much. The walkers make no sense. Why don't the ships just scatter. How do you bomb a spaceship? What was Poe doing at the start of the film? The military ranks are a mishmash of real-world ranks from different services. In situation X, couldn't they do Y like they did before? I agree, those are often *small* flaws. But I don't really care. The walkers are clearly SUPPOSED to be terrifying, I don't care whether they actually would be in the real world.
Or the lightspeed ramming thing. I did think it was weird she didn't do it *earlier* and that undermined the scene where she sacrificed herself. But it felt entirely reasonable that ramming might be a strategy which is OCCASIONALLY viable (notably, when your major ship has mostly been abandoned and your enemy has taken their attention off it), without being practical in most situations (where they wouldn't go so close to your ship without being ready to blow it up).
OK, maybe this rant was mostly just that one point again and again.
I did remember another criticism that I agreed with, that where Finn was sacrificing himself to blow up the big siege canon, and Rose sacrifices *herself* to stop him... it was sort of moving, but it just felt like a big waste, like, decide to attack or not, getting yourself killed WITHOUT shooting the cannon is the worst possible outcome.
There's any number of things that make no sense, but seem to work well enough for a film. Like, lots of the space combat doesn't make much sense, in any of the films in the series. And this film introduces new things, previously unmentioned, which have about the same level of realism for a space battle. But I feel like, if the film clearly conveys (usually implicitly), what's at risk, what the danger is, how bad the danger is, how likely it is to have alternative options, etc, then it mostly works for a film, even if all those things are not actually realistic.
Yes, the same applies to things I know more about. I'm annoyed by a film that gratuitously gets simple maths wrong. But if it clearly establishes "this is an easy problem, this is a hard problem, this person solves this problem", etc, then I can follow it as a film.
Like, one of the big bits I had a problem with was that the film was trying to show some sort of reconciliation between Poe and Holdo. But if it had clearly indicated "Holdo is out of her depth but doing reasonably well but was wrong about Poe" or "Holdo is right and Poe is wrong not to trust her" etc, I would have been happy to go along with that, even if I still thought the actions she took were unwise in the real world. My problem is not that it clashes with reality per se, but that what is conveyed by the film is inconsistent emotionally as well as factually. If she's supposed to be out of her depth, why isn't there anything showing that more clearly (we're really supposed to deduce that from Poe going behind her back?) If she's supposed to be right, couldn't we see the other characters more doubtful of Poe's mutiny? Basically whatever Leia says is probably "right", but she seemed to expect this infighting to be normal.
But people objected to lots of other things where I didn't care that much. The walkers make no sense. Why don't the ships just scatter. How do you bomb a spaceship? What was Poe doing at the start of the film? The military ranks are a mishmash of real-world ranks from different services. In situation X, couldn't they do Y like they did before? I agree, those are often *small* flaws. But I don't really care. The walkers are clearly SUPPOSED to be terrifying, I don't care whether they actually would be in the real world.
Or the lightspeed ramming thing. I did think it was weird she didn't do it *earlier* and that undermined the scene where she sacrificed herself. But it felt entirely reasonable that ramming might be a strategy which is OCCASIONALLY viable (notably, when your major ship has mostly been abandoned and your enemy has taken their attention off it), without being practical in most situations (where they wouldn't go so close to your ship without being ready to blow it up).
OK, maybe this rant was mostly just that one point again and again.
I did remember another criticism that I agreed with, that where Finn was sacrificing himself to blow up the big siege canon, and Rose sacrifices *herself* to stop him... it was sort of moving, but it just felt like a big waste, like, decide to attack or not, getting yourself killed WITHOUT shooting the cannon is the worst possible outcome.