this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Some of these are just awful takes man, I’m sorry.
Like Jar Jar, fair enough, he’s shitty CGI, he has bad writing, and is a pretty weak addition to the prequels. Same with the Leia scene, it looks awful and ruins what could have been an impactful death, with an almost cartoonish feel at odds with the seriousness of the rest of the film.
But the Holdo manoeuvre scene is one of the most visually striking moments in the entirety of Star Wars. It has awesome sound design, great acting, it’s just a really impressive moment with real impact.
The scene where Kylo kills Han is also really well done. The lighting is fantastic, it has some great acting, again, great sound design and a really impactful moment with a lot of suspense, and Chewie’s pained reaction is unforgettable.
The casino planet isn’t a single scene and is more of a story arc, but the introduction of the Canto Bight casino is a pretty typical Star Wars scene, almost formulaic at this point, but is executed well - if you take issue with that one and not the introduction of Takadana, I’d be curious as to why.
I think the worst scene on Canto Bight is where Finn and Rose meet DJ, the hacker. It’s very awkward and stilted, the writing is pretty poor IMO, both the dialogue and the characterisation. I think DJ is a cool character and his writing is fine, but the scene itself and Finn/Rose’s behaviour is really strange.
I actually agree that the holdo maneuver was brilliantly shot, absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately for me it was kinda ruined because it made no sense in the context of the IP.
It's like if you have horrible writing expertly delivered and acted, you can admire the actors skill but still the scene doesn't hit for you. So I think it's a pretty understandable take, as is really enjoying the visuals of the scene in the moment.
Yeah, I understand the perspective, I just feel like it’s a little silly. You can take almost any big moment from Star Wars and recontextualise it so that it makes no sense, but you can also come up with reasons as to why it could make sense -
Why did the Death Star have such an obvious weakness? Because the empire is arrogant and thought nobody would ever get close, or because the designer was incompetent, or because the designer was secretly a rebel (which Rogue One went with), etc.
The hyperdrive has always worked the way that the plot needs it to. It’s an often-repeated fact that hyperspace travel moves at the speed of plot. Pilots and ships seem to have absolutely different restrictions on when, where and how their hyperdrive can be engaged and how it works. We’ve been told that you can’t engage hyperdrive while in a gravity well, but pilots have done it almost as many times as pilots have been restricted by it. We’ve been told that ships can’t jump to hyperspace while they’re engaged immediately by capital ships and snubfighters, but similarly we’ve seen pilots defy those requirements.
We’ve been told that Hyperspace is an alternate dimension where objects have mass shadows and that things travelling through hyperspace have to stay away from those mass shadows, but there’s deliberately no hard facts behind how far away, or what would happen in any given situation, beyond “it would be bad”.
So clearly there are different kinds of hyperdrives, (WEG’s Star Wars RPG gave us hyperdrive classes, but they only control speed, not conditions of when you can enter hyperspace) different kind of pilots, different safety controls… the list goes on forever.
So the question for me becomes: why is this moment in particular the moment the hyperdrive jumps the shark for people? Why can’t we explain it away by saying, “a Holdo manoeuvre requires an incredible amount of control over a ship’s hyperdrive, at a level beyond what even the most powerful droid or astronavigation computer can calculate. Admiral Holdo must have either been force sensitive or incredibly lucky.” or “it’s only possible in situations where both ships have their deflector shields disabled, which almost never happens, but the special tracking ship needs to have it disabled or it can’t do tracking”, or “it’s long been theorised that it can happen, but it requires a battleship-sized ship with advanced shielding and hyperdrive for the mass shadows to conflict in such a way, and understandably few navies have ever been willing to risk a battleship to try it”, or any number of excuses for the scene to happen this one time in a way which doesn’t make it retroactively make us question why it isn’t used in every other space battle.
Yes, in retrospect, the movie probably should have chosen a reason and had someone (Poe, Leia, Rose, etc.) explain what happened, but that’s only with the benefit of hindsight. The writers probably didn’t think that the movie would get an unprecedented amount of criticism from right-leaning trolls looking to make Star Wars a battleground for the culture war for no particular reason, and thought it would make a compelling mystery and talking point for the movie. How did she do it? How does it work? etc. - which it did, just maybe not in the way they were hoping for!
Anyways, I’ve written way more than enough, but I hope I’ve given someone another perspective on the moment.
I don't think it's silly to be frustrated by it, also I think it's fine to think it's no big deal. This has been discussed pretty much to death by this point but I think what it comes down to is different people have different levels they are willing to take their suspension of disbelief to during a movie and that's fine. For me, it was a frustrating but beautiful scene that seemed to cause a lot of important plot points even in other movies to no longer really make sense (why go for the death star exhaust with a fighter squadron when you can have a ship hyperdrive through the middle of it for example). Maybe I was already biased against it and it wouldn't have been a big deal in isolation, but taken with everything else that had happened up to that point made it more frustrating, I don't know.
Anyway, I'm glad you were able to look past it and just enjoy the scene as it was intended, I wouldn't wish disappointment on anyone but unfortunately that's mostly what I got from this scene and the sequel trilogy as a whole.