MovieChat Forums > Ace_Spade > Replies
Ace_Spade's Replies
Best: Terra for versatility (equipment, Morph, magic, batt.pwr), Sabin for Blitzes, Edgar for Tools.
Upper-mid: Locke steals things and I dig his boomerangs (back row, full damage), Shadow's Throw can be rippingly powerful, Stragos has some neat moves, and Gogo's Mimicry makes him very modular. I will admit, though, I knocked Gogo down a peg for being a bit dull as a character.
Lower-mid: Cyan's Sword Technique is *so* powerful and *so* slow, Mog and Gau both have cool powers, but they lack control, Relm's abilities don't work when it matters - kinda random. Setzer gets to be here because of his sweet, sweet gambler vibe and for his interesting weaponry, even though his slots are rubbish.
Worst: Umaro. If you want to leave an enemy alive longer than the others, Umaro is *guaranteed* to kill it first. I found him kinda useful in the Colosseum, however, since his limited move list makes him less likely to use random, foolish moves. His strength also gives him a good edge.
With number 7, I guess my point/ the reason this strays from "unexplained" to "plothole" is the fact that these doors are integrated into future structures and if humanity couldn't use them, I don't know how they would work them into circuitry, mechanisms, etc., and why they would store things (even valuable things) behind doors they can't open. Perhaps "plothole" is the wrong word (since it's not really got to do with the plot), but "world-hole", maybe?
Regarding the trial (number 8): I know it's not *meant* to be dissected, but I kinda have fun over-analysing things...
The thing about the heirloom (number 9), though, is that, even if the king didn't think anything of it, there would have been a whole system of bureaucracy dealing with that stuff. The government, the administration, whoever, wouldn't let this happen. I can imagine a load of reasons how Yakra might have pulled this scheme off, but that's sort of doing the writing for the writer.
Number 10: Good point. I buy that it would be inaccessible and impenetrable to humans and mystics.
Number 11: That explanation would make sense if Melchior had met Chrono at some palace gala, but he didn't. He saw a *very* distinctive-looking guy use the most recognisable weapon in the game (to Melchior, anyway) to deeply wound a world-devouring monster on the day that - to Melchior - the world basically ended.
Number 12: Similar to number 9: I accept that Zeal might have been putting a few different kinds of pressure on Schala to convince her to proceed with the Ocean Palace, but Schala's character is one of self-sacrifice and goodness, and for the game to not show me any of the screws being turned is to ask me to do some of the writer's work.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that it erased parking tickets from records. I can't remember if that was officially confirmed, though.
I don't think SJWs make it through Seinfeld. They just get to "not that there's anything wrong with that" and then their little heads pop.
Well, if you're looking for why other people love the show, here's my reason: I don't consider this a sitcom; to me, it's a satire. Seinfeld is very, very, very insightful into human foibles and social quirks. The idiosyncrasies, annoying habits, odd social customs, and general weirdness of people is skewered beautifully by the show.
When you see four whiny, narcissistic, annoying, self-centred people in NYC, I see cultural criticism in the highest order.
There are a tonne of other reasons: the one-liners are sharp, there's a poetry to the language that is very appealing, and the general sensibility of the show, etc., etc., but at its core, Seinfeld is a show which lampoons the human race, and I find that appealing comedically and intellectually.
I know it's not for everybody, but that's why I like it. It manages to be insightful and it gives me a laugh at the missteps of humankind when normally those follies just elicit depressed cynicism.
1. Batman
2. Batman Returns
3. Mask of the Phantasm
4. The Dark Knight
5. Batman Begins
6. Batman: The Movie
7. The Dark Knight Rises
8. Batman Forever
9. Batman and Robin
I haven't seen BvS or Justice League. I haven't included The Dark Knight Returns, Gotham Knights, Year One, (etc.) because of their DTV status.
Also has one of the best with Through a Glass Darkly.
A rare point in the movie I didn't like; Hennessy's exact plan seemed a bit murky and unclear the more it was revealed.
I disagree. Quan's actions forced Hennessey's hand in a lot of circumstances and put a tonne of additional pressure on him. He was beset from all sides, and adding Quan into the mix really helped with his character arc.
That's not what I meant by "reused old stuff". I was thinking, for instance, of the Quicksilver X-Mansion rescue scene which was (basically) a re-tread of his action scene in Days of Future Past. They weren't being creative, just recycling old material. Time traveling and seeing the past and such is not really what I meant.
Apocalypse could still have disintegrated Scott's visor or melted the ground and suffocated everyone. He is shown to be godlike when the movie wants to impress me, but much less capable of destruction when it needs to protect heroes from death.
My impression is that its not all narcissistic pride, but that Lucas is just very nervous about what Star Wars should be. I agree that the buck stops with Lucas, though. He should have sidelined his own ego - born from misgivings or control freak behaviour or whatever - and put the project first.
You hit the nail on the head, too. The original films had a balance (of the Force...?) where the auteur visionary was at the head, guiding everybody, but he was tempered with the right craftspeople around him. The prequels unbalanced on the side of the visionary, giving him too much control and too much on his plate. The sequels are now showing what happens when there is no vision, no navigator, no great artist at the heart and at the helm.
Sorry. That was a lot of gassing on. What can I say? I love film, and I love Star Wars, and I love talking about it.
I'm ignoring a lot of detail that I didn't like in The Last Jedi (and Force Awakens), but I'm just trying to stick to the big stuff.
There was so much set up in TLJ that a third film can build on it, cap off those storylines, and make everything satisfying. It would be a Herculean task, but it's not impossible. This would be a "never tell me the odds" situation.
The reality is that they probably won't do it. But, I think the sequel trilogy put some pretty big misfires into The Force Awakens alone (how did the First Order get their weapons? how did Han *lose* the Millennium Falcon!?) and that means they probably can't salvage it. But the third film *might* pull it off.
Ultimately, I feel like Star Wars was such a monumental thing that it was impossible to follow up Return of the Jedi. You can't do it and please everybody, which means the cracks in the storytelling will cause the whole thing to collapse. But it still stings because there was so much potential in these films. The prequels wasted the opportunity to show the fall of a Republic mirrored/analogised through the Fall of a soul. The sequels are wasting the opportunity to expand the universe and tell further stories of the characters.
At some point, it became more about just making more Star Wars for the sake of itself, not telling a good story. The first three films put story and character first, and that's how they work. The prequels AND sequels are putting "Star Wars" (whatever that means) first and that's why they're failing to recapture the magic.
(cont.)
So, how does all of this failure (ironically) add up to a potentially-great third film?
Well, if J.J. Abrams takes this bedrock and cashes in, it would work.
1. He has to reconcile the Failures with the Successes. These storylines could weave together to show how success becomes failure and vice-versa. If J.J. presents us with a no-win scenario set up by The Last Jedi, where the heroes have to pick the lesser of two evils, that could be a great place to push these movies into, and would force the characters to deal with some heavy consequences. Notably, the Throne Room scene has to pay off. Maybe the suggestions seeded into Rey and Ren will germinate into them (finally) switching sides. The possibilities are endless. J.J. just needs to pick a great one.
2. He has to bring the sins and glories of the past together with the hope and uncertainty of the future to make this one continual arc instead of just about leaving behind the Baby Boomer heroes to tell the new stories.
3. He has to make the Canto Bight stuff pay off. If the "real" villains in Episode IX, for instance, are the arms dealers, that would be cool. If they are these secret warmongers who supplied the First Order with ships and weapons (explaining how they build Starkiller Base in the process) just to keep war (and profit) going? That's a really great plot twist and a villain we haven't seen in Star Wars: corrupted commerce.
(cont.)
3. Grey morals throughout the film seemed to be adding interesting new tones to the previously black-and-white Star Wars universe. Is Kylo going to be good or bad? What about Rey? The arms dealers on Canto Bight are tainting the Rebels by association...somehow...
...and it starts to fall apart again. The Throne Room scene is my favourite scene in this film. I didn't know who was going to turn who, what was going to happen. I loved the idea of Ren and Rey banding together to neither support the regime of the First Order OR prop up the ineffectual Republic - putting them as kind ambiguously (im)moral people. But, of course, that didn't happen. There were no consequences to that scene, and that ending was a severe misstep.
The arms dealer thing was especially weird. Johnson seemed to be trying to make a point about how everybody's buying weapons, so they're all bad! Except I keep thinking about the original films. The Good Guys weren't bad. They just weren't. And buying a weapon to defend the weak from oppression is not the same as buying a weapon to oppress people, no matter if you bought it from the same person or not.
Canto Bight was a whole other movie's worth of sub-plots and material crammed in. It bogged down the Last Jedi and didn't have time to dig into its themes and morals properly, so the whole thing fell flat and made Finn and Rose's arc worthless. Another good theme down the drain.
(cont.)
2. The theme of holding on to the past for the sake of the symbol, not for the essence of what is important. This got watered down again, but here's my take: Kylo Ren's philosophy is to burn the past and start again. He's wrong: you shouldn't forget the past, you should learn from it and respect those who have gone before, but not revere every detail for its own sake. I like this a lot. Luke's wisdom (a rare moment in The Last Jedi) is solid. He tells Rey, "Don't worry about the *Jedi*, worry about the *Force*," and that's a beautiful message. But...
...again, it's spoiled by the script. Last Jedi presents this theme, not as Luke's wisdom, but as, "ignore the past (old Star Wars movies, Gen X, Baby Boomers), and go get 'em Millennials!" It's just a mess because the script can't stick to decent charactisation for half the people we're watching, it's just shoehorning messages in without a clear focus.
At the end of the film, I'm not sure exactly what Johnson's going for with this one. He seems to be trying to undercut the previous films' characters and moral stances, but not Leia. He wants us to think Luke failed, but doesn't give a reason for Luke to spend ten years in exile - not really (I don't by, "it seems to be what Jedi do", because that's a character/plot problem that falls in the lap of the prequels - not the original mythologies). So, again: I like the theme, but the film mishandles it.
So, I'm assuming you didn't like some of this stuff, but here's what I liked:
1. The theme of failure. I think it's really, really, really interesting to take a cut-and-dry/plug-and-play adventure story like Star Wars and make it about failure and confronting failure. They did this *really well* in Wrath of Khan. They took space cowboy James T. Kirk and made him deal with getting old, facing death, and the inevitable no-win scenario that he never faced on TV. Because of shoddy writing, Last Jedi never lives up to the possibilities here. But I love the idea of noble hero Luke Skywalker saving the universe, redeeming his father's very soul, and then needing to cope with failure. Unfortunately, partially because of The Force Awakens, we don't see him dealing with anything, we just see him moping on an island. He isn't working through anything, he's just given up, which isn't fun or interesting to watch.
Likewise, watching Poe and Finn try to save the universe with their "one in a million" plan and having the plan backfire: great idea, poorly executed. Holdo's refusal to act like a competent leader (reveal your plan OR tell Poe to screw off because he's a pilot and you're a general, but for goodness sake, don't pretend like the only idea you have is "drive away slowly" - of COURSE Poe is going to react badly to that) makes it fall apart because it was a plan destined to fail, but by people who had no other option.
(cont.)
Yeah, I finished it off. I'm now assuming he got most of his data from his "further reading" list, which looks interesting, too.
It's a great series with a lot of good biographical and background information. The central thing I get out of it is that Lucas was trying hard and facing unheard-of challenges from different fronts, but ultimately it boils down to this: he couldn't pull it off. Every time Sonnenburg talks about a deadline coming up and he's not started the script, I'm thinking, "Well...don't be lazy: do your job." A few times, Sonnenburg states that such-and-such "had" to happen because of the timeline, and I can think of a dozen ways out of it. And, ultimately, Lucas' inability to write a character-driven story really fried him on this one. This is from Red Letter Media, but it fits: Anakin's fall to the Dark Side is a character study. Either it needed to be sidelined for the story of the fall of the Republic, or it needed to be written as a character piece. Lucas isn't the best writer for a political film (Aaron Sorkin, maybe...?) or a character piece.
My take on the whole thing, personally, looking at the prequels and now the sequels, is that the writer who could have pulled it off was... nobody. Nobody could or can live up to fan hype and expectations. "Star Wars" sat for too long as a completed trilogy and is revered too highly for this to ever really work to people's satisfaction. Filmmakers can try, but they'll never do the character "right". They won't ever get it right in fans' eyes because they can't.
There's about a 1% chance that they'll use the material generated by Force Awakens and Last Jedi to wrap everything up and bring a magnificent close to their section of the space opera, but I'm doubtful.
My opinion is that The Last Jedi had a lot of interesting ideas without following through properly on them (plus, it's riddled with plotholes, odd character problems, and serious scripting issues). It's not a great film. If the third movie takes the ideas and themes started with Last Jedi and manages to annihilate the script problems, they can pull it off. But JJ Abrams has never been great at wrapping things up, so...it's a long-shot.
I haven't quite finished watching it all yet (there was a lot more of it than I thought there would be), but I'm part-way through Part V.
It's a really interesting series. I find myself wondering how he knows some of the things he knows (he frequently says things like, "What Lucas wanted to do," or, "Lucas wasn't thinking about X - he was concerned with Y") but it's a fascinating look at Lucas' process and journey through the creation of the prequels.
In conjunction with RLM's videos it's very interesting. "This is what Lucas was trying to do," says Sonnenburg. "Sure, but this is what he actually did," replies RLM. I like both series very much.
Sonnenburg hasn't changed my mind about the prequels, though he did change my mind about McCallum, who, assuming Sonnenburg is correct, wasn't just nodding when Lucas talked.