The Glade 4.0

Upon second viewing, I cottoned to the Canto Bight stuff more (and it's much shorter than you may think on initial viewing, despite the really good stuff coming after). It's the key to the whole thing...Rose and Finn failed at their mission. They failed hard, and that's in line with the general theme of disappointment and loss of hope. But ultimately, their failed mission may wind up being the reason the rebels will win the war. Poe was right about these few stragglers being the spark that will light the fire of the rebellion, but it's not in a firefight, holed up in a cave with their backs against the wall. It's the inspiration of their bravery and kindness to the greater universe, or even just a slave stable boy, to show what's worth fighting for.

“That’s how we’re going to win. Not fighting what we hate. Saving what we love.”

I'm going to pick up the prequel YA book, Leia: Princess of Aldaraan, which delves into the early friendship between Leia and Holdo.

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?

This. I will never every get back the feeling I had the first time I found SW as a kid, so I have very managed expectations. SW isn't perfect, but there's something about being young and not having a wide range of experiences that makes seeing this stuff for the first time special.

Kylo is right, let the past die. You can't go back home again. The new movies will never be like the old ones to you, regardless of their quality.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I'm not so sure that the claim about Rey's parentage was coming from a trustworthy source.

The vice admiral and her evening gown was kind of annoying, especially since she could have defused the entire "mutiny" by just saying "we're going to that planet."

Other than that, I loved it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

FTL scene was cool. But begs the question "why don't you do that all the time?" Seems like space warfare would be pretty much focused on FTLing objects into other objects. You probably wouldn't even need to make a D-Star to blow up a planet...

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Probably because it's a suicide move. They also may not have had their shields etc. fully up since they already had the cruiser on the ropes and may have figured there was no need. Wouldn't be the first time the bad guys have been overconfident.

Also, the mass of even that big-ass command ship is far, far less than that of a planet.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

"Suicide move" is a bizarre concept when we have a world full of robot servants capable of executing the maneuver.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

You also lose the entire cruiser, which is a significant asset.

The rebels were in extremely dire straights; it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that they tried something that wouldn't normally be attempted.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah, was gonna bring this up. The rebellion isn't exactly flush with cash, ships, or people.

But if you're employing it as a strategy, you don't need to build the whole ship. You slap a hyperdrive engine (and enough maneuvering engines to aim it) on a hunk of asteroid or whatever's handy.

Likewise, when you're improvising and doing it out of desperation with a real warship, you let C-3PO (or a droid less sentimentally valuable to leadership) hit the button. You had given up on the warship's survival anyways, so that shouldn't come into the discussion.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

We've never seen them "slap a hyperdrive" on something other than a ship either. We don't even know if that would be feasible since we don't know how a hyperdrive interacts with the rest of a starship in order to work as a package. We only know that they DID do it with a complete ship, and a big one at that, and they did it in extreme circumstances. We can't generalize from "works in an extreme edge case under highly particular circumstances" to "therefore must always work, but hasn't been done before so plot hole."

In particular, we saw in ESB that Star Destroyers could easily vaporize asteroids in a single shot, so there's little reason to think they'd be vulnerable to this attack.

There could be other problems as well. We have no understanding of the transition of an object between the universe and hyperspace, so we have no idea how reliable this is. It might be that it only works within a precise distance from the target. There's a host of other information we would need to know in order to even begin to decide if this was viable on a normal basis.



But they didn't do that. They had a vice admiral do that. At that point, a ship designed for hundreds or thousands of crew was being managed by just one person. This is an obvious edge case and that doesn't translate to "obviously should be do-able all the time."

Prior to that, the New Order had the overwhelming advantage. It's entirely possible, even likely that they simply weren't taking precautions as they should have been which normally preclude the use of this tactic. In fact, it was obvious they were surprised by the move, so it's safe to assume it's not normally done and was a desperation gambit. Their commanders certainly don't appear to be lacking in arrogance as a character flaw which might easily lead to laxity when in a position of advantage.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

That not a bad reason why they maybe can't do that all the time. Though if they could, seems like sacrificing a cruiser to kill that other way bigger ship could be worth it. Though it seems like the Space Nazi have unlimited resources.

Also, the planet destroying thing for TFA had a beam that apparently moves faster than the speed of light to traverse light years between it and it's targets and was also able to be seen FTL by observers.

I just want to ruin everything with SCIENCE!

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In this case, it seems that it was worth it solely because it provided cover for the shuttles to escape.



We don't know what the interaction between an effect like the Starkiller in hyperspace and real space actually is, so this isn't quite as unreasonable as it seems.



I was tempted to say something like this, but it really wasn't necessary here since Kaffis is really not like that and it would have just started a pointless argument.

However in other times and/or places I've certainly seen that. In movies that include a lot of magic or magic-like science we only know what we see on the screen; we don't get a full understanding of "how it works" that the people that live in that world probably have but don't go into long-winded expositions about. People like to invent plot holes so they can stroke their own ego about how they need to "teach the director about physics" or something. This is a common failing of the sort of person who thinks science is really cool and awesome as long as it involves no actual work on their part. The sort of person who likes banging on about science on the internet but would never be caught dead in an actual program that might qualify them for a job at SpaceX for example.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Seems to me you are all arguing on the wrong side of the equation. With the resources they possess why wasn't the Empire/First Order slapping FTL engines on ships, asteroids, whatever and blasting the Rebellion out of the sky. They were chasing the Rebel convoy for over 18 hours waiting for their deflectors to drop when they could have just started FTL blasting Tie Fighters at them. Deus Ex Machina eh?

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This was a major source of my disappointment in the film. This may end up being true, but that mission should have helped shape the plot of this movie in a more meaningful way. Instead, they go on a mission and end up on the star destroyer and accomplish nothing while they're there. The failure isn't even redeemed by linking up with Rey and managing to get her off the ship. Then Finn's suicide run at the battering ram as well accomplished nothing other than giving Rose a pretext to confess feelings she developed for him. This could have been done just as easier with her pushing him out of the way of some falling rocks after the ram punched a hole in the door. Why those two were the ones piloting those things is beyond me. Those two getting back to the base without getting blasted sky-high also seemed too improbable. But this brings me back to the criticism I had of Finn from the first movie: He's there and he's part of the adventure, but his character isn't providing much, other than that he's good at running into important people.

Poe's little mutiny had pretty much no lasting impact either. It didn't really enable the Finn/Rose mission to progress, it didn't change Leia's mind about him, he didn't stumble on information that made him understand the weight of choices a leader makes, and gaining Admiral Dern's approval/respect ultimately amounted to nothing.

I was really let down with the reunion between Luke and Chewie.

Overall, I didn't hate the movie. It just felt like there was too much filler for what little it accomplished. Given the expense of taking the family to the movies these days, I'm really glad I didn't drop cash to see this in theaters.

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The Dude abides.

This, for me, was the weakest part of the entire movie. The entire thing could have been avoided by the Vice Admiral just spelling out her plan to her staff.

That's kind of the whole point of having a staff and subordinate leaders like... the X-Wing squadron leader (his errors notwithstanding). Movies like to brush off any explanation by the Commander with "don't kweschun mah orders, dood!" either in order to surprise the audience with the clever plan or simply because they think that's realistic.

In reality it often comes off as stupid because if your subordinates don't know what it is you're trying to accomplish, they can't intelligently support it. It doesn't just pertain to military situations in movies either; one of the dumbest plot devices there is IMO is people leaving out major pieces of information that are critical to getting their point across, or being excessively secretive to spring something on the audience rather than for an actual reason in the context of the plot.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."