I’ve recently played Resident Evil 6 for the 1st time after playing Resident Evil 4 (an absolute masterpiece) & Resident 5 (a pretty good game). I was already aware of the hate this game got over the years. But after experiencing it, it’s only bad in an artificial way. Like yeah, it’s nothing like the classic games and it’s too much in the action category.
Otherwise, as someone who loves action games, it’s a pretty fun game. Especially in Mercenaries Mode, where it’s fun to mow down body-horror themed enemies. As a Resident Evil game, it’s pretty bad. But…as an action third person shooter with splatter punks, it’s quite well executed
The Last Jedi. It took me a while to even process the hate, and I still don’t really respect it, but I think I understand it. TLJ is flawed but by far the best sequel, and an Ep9 where Kylo is beyond redemption and rebels and force users are bubbling up from everywhere could have been really interesting.
Even if they’d backtracked thematically, The Rise of Skywalker made a huge mistake in overtly shitting on it, literally fucking over its own story (such as it was) and pacing to do so, and thereby pleasing no one. Even if you don’t like what your partner did, you have to “Yes, and…,” not go full “Michael Scott in improv class.”
Yeah it’s the best of the 3, but it’s also just about the worst middle part of a trilogy they could do. It rejects the setup and doesn’t really set up well for the finale, while going off and doing its own thing. The trilogy was pretty doomed before it, but it was the killing blow
You see, i don’t think so. I think it is definitely redirecting the setup, but apart from sheer number of remaining rebels, I think it tracks really well with ESB. The great victory from the opening movie reveals vulnerability and removes the threat of clean and instant apocalypse, but doesn’t truly alter the new balance of power (sigh… JJ could have given us a functioning New Republic dealing with an insurgency of its own, but no…). Our chosen one meets a reluctant mentor who eventually acquiesces to train her. She has a troubling but cryptic dark side experience and leaves after learning some but not enough. Hero confronts a dark truth about her history but ultimately can’t truly defeat the villain. Through pluck and sacrifice, our heroes live to fight another day and we are left only with the implication of useful resources (“the fleet” in ESB, the allies who hadn’t yet answered in TLJ).
Now, I’ll concede the time jump would have needed to be more like ANH->ESB than ESB->ROTJ for it to work, but I also think the set up for an Episode 9 where the call is answered/being answered could work. In Canto Bight we’re made aware that the Alliance/Resistance’s iconography is inspirational, and we learn that the Force is out there, and there are people who want to believe in the cause of both. Additionally, we have a villain who is struggling between the light and the dark, but ultimately rejects both, as he understands them, to make his own path and pursue his own goals, motivated by emotional torment and a tragic sense of abandonment. There’s good bones there, much better than “here’s a hatful of fan theories. Pick one and let’s chase some mcguffins.”
It’s always going to be one of my favorite Star Wars sequels because I got into it around the tail end of a deep depression and watched it early enough not to fall for the bad press
Luke’s story hit home in a weird way and I liked that Johnson at least tried to make Rey’s parents irrelevant as a much-needed dismissal of the whole idea that the fate of the galaxy far far away hinges on at least one magical bloodline
On top of that it’s given me a good litmus test for what differences in opinion should actually be respected. Don’t like the movie? Fine, but it is rather telling to me in all the ways people get downright aggressive over hating on it
IMHO it it home because that is almost the only way it could have been done, especially after what JJ set up in The Force Awakens. We know that Luke blamed himself. We know he ran away. We know not even Leia can locate him via the Force. At least being a grumpy hermit was a way to take back a little bit of agency. When you have a hero’s journey, and the hero’s journey ends, you’re not really supposed to revisit them thirty years later with a massive new threat, because now they have to face it, but not as the hero. Once you decide you have to have Luke in the damn story, there is nothing you can do except make him a mentor or a villain. Villain was right out, but having him fall back into old habits (doomerism, jumping to conclusions, whining) and having all that make him start as an ineffective mentor was actually really clever.
It also maybe hit a little close to home for the generation that grew up idolizing Luke, re-evaluating what he was after reaching his heights in his mid-20s. That said, it also tells that same group, “Yes, you are fatter and angrier and grabbing breakfast and a latte is the most interesting thing you’ll do most days, but you have wisdom to pass down, and you have the power to beat back the darkness and learn from your own mistakes, and there is so much more to you than you’ve come to believe about yourself.” I actually walked out of the movie thinking that once you have a Luke that let the First Order arise at all, then this Luke was a god-damn hero and saved the galaxy one last time.
Not that I’m on top of such things but I heard episode 7, 8 and 9 were conceptually laid out together. But the new director for 8 found it limiting or something so threw it in the trash to create something else.
Beautifully said
The biggest issue with TLJ that I don’t see brought up a lot is that it left no where for the story to go.
We enter the movie with the First Order the only force in the galaxy after only destroying a few planets in the last movie, and somehow the resistance is even smaller than it was before.
We end the movie without really anything changing (except the resistance is even smaller - like 20 people).
Unless it was going to be four movies, TLJ doesn’t leave a lot of directions for the story. It basically has to be Rey trying to decapitate the head of the First Order by killing Ben. Rise of Skywalker fails because TLJ didn’t do anything to move the plot, forcing two movies worth of plot into one.
Yeah, that’s the part that bugged me too. There was so much “subverting expectations” to be clever and huff ones’ own farts…But no satisfying storytelling in place.
It was written like an on-the-fly television show like “Ah HAH this will be unexpected and get eyeballs and maybe we’ll explain it in season 6!” . . .but it was a movie, and it was just over…and a bunch of empty threads kinda went nowhere for ~2 hours straight.
It was entertaining! I watched it and first said “WOW. That was like the BEST Star Wars in a WHILE.” Then we thought about it…and realized nothing actually made any sense. Kinda like when you look at Ai stuff, weirdly enough. Lots of flash but it’s clear there was no actual intent behind it.
Also Finn was supposed to be a force-sensitive Stormtrooper who grows a conscience and turns Jedi. Finn was robbed. That bothers me so much that he just got relegated to backseat supporting sidekick to a cardboard cutout who should’ve had some depth.
I thought that most of the movie was somewhere between fine and fun, but that casino planet sequence was so unbearably bad that it soured the entire movie for me. I thought it was poorly-done, ham-handed social commentary awkwardly shoehorned into a strangely long sequence. And then at the end of it, they were in the exact same position they were at the beginning. It took a huge chunk of the second act, and it basically amounted to nothing.
Canto Bight hits different after you burned out doing odd jobs at the sleazy casino on the edge of town
Love it or hate it, and the fact that some people will decide they hate it is what I had to come to terms with, this was very intentional and played into the theme of Poe’s arc while letting Finn get the small amount of character growth they layered on in TLJ. It also made it clear that Rose is not so much a fully fleshed-out character as she is a stand-in for the entire Resistance, so she gets a chance to make its case and show its impact. Fighting the good fight is worth it even if, in the short term, it seems doomed. Narratively, I thought Canto Bight did a lot.
My take away was that the protagonists were too caught up in being the protagonists and the outcome would have been better if they had just done nothing.
Which just isn’t a very good adventure story.
It’s the GOTCHA! (well that’s a good part of it.)
TLJ is just about the best movie in the whole series. The hatred is 85% pissed-off fans who thought the franchise belonged to them. And the rest is just anti-woke hysterics.
In time, TLJ will get the respect it deserves.
I do think the movie was weak on the handwavium when a few lines could have turned the siege/chase into something a little more compelling. Some of the dialogue skewed a bit Marvel-y, and Finn’s TLJ arc was way too similar to his TFA arc, only nudging forward his circle of empathy a bit. I also wish wish wish somebody had simply said the Holdo maneuver worked because she locked onto the hyperspace tracker: BOOM, two birds with one battlecruiser. Casino planet dragged a bit, but I didn’t mind it nearly as much as others. Maz was wasted, and in some ways, the whole movie actually mapped too closely to ESB (subversion indeed).
However, Luke’s arc hit me exactly right given that they were forced to revisit a Hero’s-Journey hero whose journey was done, because JJ Abrams set up the galaxy in possibly the least compelling way possible. Luke’s return from backsliding into his own old habits, accepting his failure, and using the energy he had left to secure a future for the next generation… that’s good stuff, and a lot of the boomers and older X’s who idolized him would do well to heed the lesson.
The initial tone poem with Rose’s sister was beautiful. DJ absolutely fit as a tweak on Lando and commentary on what all this is supposed to mean. The Poe arc that he can’t simply Maverick his way into leadership, the idea that Rey was no one and yet everything, that Force users and resistance could come from anywhere, and that Ren was on a path apart from Snoke’s but equally irredeemable, all these things were HUGE improvements from TFA and were setting things up for a very compelling finale.
Instead, JJ crammed in his own Episode 8 into the first 45 minutes, left no time to have his own movie make any sense, just channelled Harry Potter and the Avengers for its conclusion, and repeatedly reminded people that TLJ was being undone (“come with us, Rose!” “Can’t! Leia gave me homework!”… We picked “Yer a Palpatine, Rey!” from the hat full of fan theories!), thereby reminding TLJ’s fans that it was being undone, and its haters that it existed. Just a piece of shit movie all around, and to top it off, with my “ACKSHULLY” cap on, it still didn’t connect the tracker with the Holdo maneuver!!!
Finally, for what it’s worth, TLJ is the only ST movie to engage in good faith with the PT, which is something you need to do, even if (like me) they’re far from your favorites.