Was The Last Jedi Really Subverting Expectations?

[hammerofglass]

That wasn't Snow White, it was Sleeping Beauty.

Anne Rice really lets her freak flag fly sometimes.

[Frustration]

The second movie tried to subvert the expectations generated by the first, and the third tried to return to those expectations. Do we agree on that?

[Mabus]

Yes. People were expecting a movie better than TFA and instead they got a worse film

More seriously, the big issue with TLJ is that no one had any clue what to do next because Disney had no plan for the trilogy, other than "let's redo the original trilogy, but with the serial numbers filed off", which basically meant that rather than trying to make a good Star Wars film, or hell, just a good movie, they were trying to make a better TESB, except no one there seemed to have understood what made TESB a good movie, since everybody there had was a cartoonish view of what TESB was, which is what we ended up with.

[Frustration]

So to a degree we had that problem with "The Return of the Jedi": the parts about Luke confronting Vader are emotionally powerful and meaningful, and the parts with the Ewoks are painfully childish - that word has a bad as well as a good sense, and this is the bad one.

After "The Empire Strikes Back", people expected complexity and depth, and if it wasn't for the non-Ewok parts they'd have been rather annoyed. The process of making the movies 'appeal to children' intensified with the prequels, particularly with Jar-Jar. Even the first film, which is closest to the old campy serial adventure stories Lucas was inspired by, has moments of seriousness and depth. Particularly the scene where Luke finds the corpses of his aunt and uncle - that was very real, and it was shocking to me as a child, because my media generally shielded me from that sort of reality. It's clear that Lucas didn't understand what made the movies good, but he at least had a vision that he tried to achieve.

"The Last Jedi" doesn't have a vision, or a story it wants to tell. They needed make a movie, and they came up with an excuse for a story that let them. The closest thing they had to a set of unifying principles was a desire to pander to demographics, so they tried to appeal to the Chinese, and they tried to appeal to SJW young women. I know they didn't manage the first, I don't know about the second. But it's sort of a shame, because the first movie had some potential at the beginning, even despite being a thematic copy of the very first movie.

[hammerofglass]

The closest thing they had to a set of unifying principles was a desire to pander to demographics, so they tried to appeal to the Chinese, and they tried to appeal to SJW young women.

That is a very politically charged and sweeping claim to not include examples to support.

[McAvoy]

The closest thing they had to a set of unifying principles was a desire to pander to demographics, so they tried to appeal to the Chinese, and they tried to appeal to SJW young women.

That is a very politically charged and sweeping claim to not include examples to support.

The general consensus is that the Holdo scene dressing down Poe and subsequent scenes is a pro feminist scene. Rey and Luke and their interactions including the stick fight. Rose was placed in for the Asian viewers. Those are the ones I can think of off of the top of my head.

A few months ago I did watch a YouTube video on a very liberal review of The Last Jedi talking about these sort of things.

I will see if I can hunt it down.

[McAvoy]

https://youtu.be/mWqVJZMh6-w

I don't know if that will work.

Title: How The Last Jedi defies the expectations about Male Heroes.

[Lazerlike42]

I'm not so sure, but I think that the closest answer may be that TLJ subverted expectations in the eyes of its creators and in the eyes of the average viewer, but that it ultimately relied so heavily on drawing material from the EU that it didn't exactly subvert anything for the franchises' biggest fans.

Most of what was in TLJ had been seen/read before by a lot of Star Wars fans, so even if they didn't know it was specifically coming in this film, it wasn't anything new to them - BUT the average viewer and, to some degree, even the creators just didn't know this material well enough to realize it was old hat for people who really knew Star Wars, and one consequence of this can really be seen in just how poor some of the arguments made against the films' critics are.

For example, I'm always some mixture of amazed, frustrated, and amused when I see people throw the charge at long-time (i.e., not the "new life in the franchise") fans that they are just whining about their hero Luke being flawed or falling backwards like any human being can do. The reality, of course, is that most of these fans already read Dark Empire and have been complaining ever since Disney de-canonized it. They don't object to Luke having flaws - they object to the film doing a lousy job of telling a story about the subject.

So how subversive is TLJ, really? I think it's subversive in its intentions, even if the end result is largely a bunch of poorly rehashed plot odds and ends. I also think that what most of those who hate the film hate isn't that it was subversive, but simply that it did a bad job.

[McAvoy]

Honestly I have more issues with other parts of the movie than just the subverting our expectations.

Like, the bomber run. The use of humor. The Holdo Maneuver. Holdo's whole interactions. Leia's Poppins scene. The Red Room fight. Rey being her Mary Sue self. Kylo looking like a school shooter emo teen than a credible threat in the movie. Military aspects of the movie.

I could go on.

[hammerofglass]

You can't really blame TLJ for Kylo. He was a pathetic manchild throwing literal tantrums in the first movie too. That's basically the whole point, his emotional immaturity combined with his raw power is what makes him unpredictable and dangerous. "School shooter" is about on the nose.