solarbird: (Default)
[personal profile] solarbird
Saved from a discussion elsewhere, about the Holdo Maneuver (the kamikazi jump in The Last Jedi), where one person was saying that it "broke Star Wars" but couldn't explain why, and others had commented on how it didn't fit within the rules of Star Wars combat, and others had said that was nonsense, that Star Wars space comment doesn't make any sense anyway.

(My position on The Last Jedi was that while certainly flawed, it was very good. I respect it quite a lot, particularly that it both tried to do new things in the universe and dared put you in a position of surviving a Star Wars film more than enjoying it, ala Battlestar Galactica.)



Star Wars space combat makes literally no sense at all, except emotionally, where it kinda does. But that gets right to the flaw with the Holdo Maneuver in this context.

Don't get me wrong. In isolation and in its specific context, it's one of the most amazing scenes in Star Wars collectively. It's visually and cinematically just stunning. I was in awe.

But...

...compared to everything else mechanically in Star Wars space combat, it actually does make sense. And it's utterly devastating. It's about the most effective single-strike action we've seen (except the Death Star, yes). And if you automated it - and there's no clear reason why you couldn't - you wouldn't even lose the single pilot. It all becomes robots against robots.

And that has the extremely unfortunate effect of making you go, "...then why are we bothering with all this other nonsense? What's the point?" Not at that moment, because it's spectacular. But when you think about it a little later.

And by doing so, by prompting you to think all this less unreal space combat vs. the more unreal regular Star Wars space combat, it robs that regular Star Wars combat of the sense it makes emotionally, because...

"Why do we do anything else? What's the point?"

It moves that regular Star Wars space combat from heroic to wasteful and foolish. Which, I'll say freely, does echo the bombing run at the beginning of the film! And it might have been the point. But if that is your point, there's nothing new here to say "this changes the game, so all that other stuff wasn't pointlessly wasteful," and...

...that does kinda break Star Wars. Or at least that part of it. And given how much Shooty Shooty there is in Star Wars, that's kind of a lot.

And that's brave and maybe all that needs to be broken! But if you're gonna do that, you'd better have the followup that builds something new out of the wreckage.

And thanks to Abrams, they most certainly didn't. :(

Date: 2020-12-07 04:04 pm (UTC)
kitewithfish: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kitewithfish
So, confession, I really loved TLJ, both at the time and later, and my affection for it has become more wistful post JJ Abrams.

And that has the extremely unfortunate effect of making you go, "...then why are we bothering with all this other nonsense? What's the point?" Not at that moment, because it's spectacular. But when you think about it a little later.

I've never really thought about this issue, but I actually suspect that there's a lot of The Last Jedi that does exactly this thing - it changes the emotional impact of past elements of Star Wars and calls them into question -why are we doing it like this? why don't we try something else?

Oddly, tho, (and now I'm definitely getting tangential!) the thing that makes me think about this element the most for the sequel trilogy is NOT the elements introduced in TLJ, but the elements introduced in The Force Awakens - Finn. Finn turns the Stormtroopers from disposable clone mooks (ignoring the cartoons) into kidnapped children brainwashed by fascists - annnnnnd then we're just supposed to be okay with shooting them. Which makes the emotional impact of scenes where Stormtroopers are just dying in the background by droves to show that the Rebellion are big damn heroes... complicated. I really would have liked to see what, if anything, Rian Johnson would have done with that.

Date: 2020-12-12 12:53 am (UTC)
wrog: (howitzer)
From: [personal profile] wrog
Note that if one is going to break fundamental Star Wars concepts, TLJ was absolutely the right place to do it.

Just like the way the last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer completely trashed the core framework (... in particular, the idea that there's only One Slayer, which they'd been sort of picking away at for a while, what with having Buffy die, and activating Kendra and Faith). The point being that if you're going to trash your framework, you should go big and do it in the grandest way possible (They are all Slayers, now. Suck on that.)

I'll grant that it would have been a huge problem if they'd attempted to continue after The Last Jedi, but, fortunately, they had the good sense to end the series there.

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