CharlesPhipps wrote: ↑Wed Aug 08, 2018 4:52 am
I have the opposite view on Holdo but I view it in the larger sense of Poe is a traitor.
Poe acts like he's second in command of the Resistance but he's been demoted because he didn't answer to LEIA. Yes, I'm entirely okay with roguish heroes who don't play by the rules. However, that runs into a brick wall like the Coyote chasing the Roadrunner into a painted tunnel when it's the most beloved heroine in sci-fi history (rivaled only by Ripley). Poe disobeyed Leia, got hundreds of Resistance soldiers killed for a meaningless victory, and then demanded to know classified information.
He's...been...demoted.
And never acts like it.
Trusting in Holdo is not trusting in Holdo, it's trusting in LEIA. Which Poe doesn't and he has nothing but my contempt and disdain for that.
There's so many problems with how they tried to portray Poe as a loose cannon and then flip Holdo to make her "right all along".
The first is how the Universe works and that all the information is withheld from the viewer. Throughout the movie things suddenly appear from offscreen, or brand new technobabble is spouted to solve or foil the next immediate problem.
Did Poe save the entire resistance in his disobeyal of orders? He risked the fleet (which could have jumped away without stranding the fighters, as they're hyperspace capable) and Leia didn't countermand the orders to the rest of the wing. Would the Dreadnought have destroyed the fleet if it had followed them?
Since all the Resistance fighters were destroyed after they were tracked through Hyperspace doesn't Poe's action result only in a net gain?
Would Leia's command to retreat have ended the movie in the first 5 minutes with a complete Resistance defeat as surely as if the First Order had been even marginally competent.
The answers to this question is, stop trying to apply logic to a script in where events simply occur to progress the author's intent. Poe is wrong guys. Don't think about it.
The next part is Holdo. In British OTC there's the CLM or Command, Leadership, Management course which covers the trinity of aspects of leadership theory for British Officers. I don't lie when I say that Holdo would hard fail on all three accounts. In fact Holdo would probably make an excellent example of what not to do in a leadership scenario short of collapsing on the ground hyperventilating.
When it's revealed Holdo had a plan all along, it's not a Jellico style twist where it turns out he actually was a competent officer with his alternate command style. All the unnecessary decisions, demoralising speeches that left crew fleeing for the escape pods remain. That one scene where suddenlly she says how much she likes Poe while chatting with Leia feels so disingenuous. I honestly thought that once the rebels left the cruiser she'd signal the First Order they were now helpless and to come pick them up, as it looked like she was manipulating the Princess. There I was
thinking again.
You throw on top of this the absurdity of the whole plan. It looses the resistance all their valuable military assets on the hope that the First Order that's following them doesn't scan slightly harder than normal to spot the entirely visible shuttles using suddenly available stealth technology to go to that conveniently nearby planet that just appeared from off screen.
What exactly is the message of this story here?
If someone appears entirely incompetent and their plan looks like it will doom you all, don't question their leadership because even in their plan will lose you all your assets leaving your organisation a shadow of it's former self, trust me it is the best possible outcome all things considered.
I suppose that would be the same argument that the story writing group is making to Disney to keep their jobs.
After that whole series of nonsense. What really got me was the strange dreamlike unreality of everything that happened on Krait. Subconciously it was all those random teleportations and the illogical nature of unfolding events (and the dumbest line ever spoken in Star Wars) that left me in such bizarre mood when I left the theatre. It took some time to parse why exactly so much was wrong with it.