The absolute state of film journalism

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Women were a mistake.

This entire timeline was a mistake.

women learning to read and not dying during childbirth was a mistake

It's just white women, m8. They've been jewed beyond repair. Embrace yellow fever and you won't have to deal with these hags.

The Last Jedi is the nihilistic evil that haunts the west made into a film.

It wants to criticize and deconstruct Star Wars but has neither the intelligence to offer substantial criticism or the inclination to build anything out of what it has deconstructed.

The film opens with a farce. This sets the tone and establishes that film does not in fact like Star Wars and actively wants to not take Star Wars seriously. Like many modern westerners the film and most of the people making it can not bring themselves to be truly invested in anything, even a simple story of good verses evil like Star Wars can only be enjoyed by these people through layers of ironic detachment. This is why the bad guys can't be threatening, someone might accidentally care about the plight of the heroes if they were.

Poor Mark Hamill is a dinosaur in that he actually cared about his character and Luke's story.

The film's themes continue this by being subversive for subversion's sake and like self haters in the west it confuses being critical with being intelligent. Every twist is an anti-twist regardless of whether is makes sense logically or thematically. The leader of the bad guys is no one. He's an incompetent shit who gets tricked and killed by his student easily. How did he create a pseudo-empire and subvert the happy ending of Return of the Jedi? Fuck knows but it's not what you expected and therefore it's clever.

The heroine is similarly no one, which I would have liked if they were capable of something beyond taking beats from the original films and using them wrong. Rey now has no stake personal stake in the conflict beyond what Luke had at the end of New Hope, the bad guy killed their mentor figure and they've ended up friends with people involved with the good guys. And this is where they fuck up. She has the role of Luke wanting to redeem the fallen Jedi, but all she has known of Kylo Ren is that he killed his own father and she has absolutely no real connection to him like Luke had to Vader. Luke refused to believe that his father was truly pure evil despite everyone else telling him that he was lost, and was able to redeem his by being unable to kill his own father when he had the chance. Now Luke believes that Kylo is beyond redemption despite being his relative and knowing that the event that set him firmly on the path to the dark side was a misunderstanding.

The handling of Luke and the Jedi is similarly hollow criticism. Luke tells Rey that the Jedi "have to end" but offers no real reason why, no unfixable flaw in the Jedi philosophy, he merely presents a single time that the Jedi failed, in preventing the rise of the Emperor in the first place. Again the film desperately wants to be a clever and cynical look at the idea of the Jedi but is not smart enough to come up with more than nonsense. The premise is faulty, no one would say that "it's time for detectives to end" because Jack the Ripper was never identified, and the substance only works by lying via omission. The Jedi failed to stop the rise of Darth Sidious as Luke says, as of the prequels they were the only ones who tried and Sidious obviously through they were enough of a problem for him that he did try to wipe them out. More damningly it was Luke himself reviving the Jedi that ultimately defeated him!

Every single time someone makes a heroic sacrifice it deals a blow to the First Order; Rose's sister's bombing of the Dreadnaught, Admiral Tumblr's setting breaking FTL kamikaze run, to Luke himself allowing what's left of the resistance to escape. Yet in its quest to destroy it eats itself. When Finn wants to make a heroic sacrifice he is prevented by Rose, who gives him a speech about the futility of self sacrifice. Once again there is no actual evidence for argument for why, and from the list you can see that it actually runs contrary to the film itself. The sacrifice of Luke even taking place immediately after her speech.

The entire adventure of Finn and Rose that failed, again the heroes failing isn't clever on its own you have to actually construct something good out of it like Empire Strikes Back, accomplished nothing expect apparently teaching Poe to not be a hothead. But in the film's confused themes not being a hothead translates into blindly accepting authority. The leadership of the resistance, Leia, scolds him for being impulsive. When authority falls to Vice Admiral Holdo, who is a new character and so has never been proven to be a worthy heroic leader, she continues to scold him for being impulsive, she refuses to provide an alternative to his impulsiveness. She has an alternative but rather than offering it she instead expects blind obedience and submission to her authority. Thinking about it this might actually be the only theme that makes sense. Poe is told not to act and was supposed to accept that even though from all the evidence he had not acting was the wrong thing to do, much like the audience is told things and is supposed to accept them despite the reality presented in the film suggesting otherwise. Perhaps the irony of blindly accepting what your leaders tell you being the correct solution to defeating the fascistic evil empire was intended. Though it was so contrived that it only works if you blindly accept what the film makers put in front of you.

The reason critics like this, beyond event invites and cheques from Disney, is that the western media is in the grip of an insane death cult the revels is destruction. Seeing the heroic myth of Star Wars getting clumsily taken apart is what they enjoy, like they seeing the foundation myths of the west being dismantled and replaced with nihilism. They don't want to see genuine goodness triumph over genuine evil because their minds are too clouded to be able to comprehend good and evil anymore. The heroes should accomplish nothing and the villains should be the butt of the joke because the west no longer believes in heroes and villains.

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This is good who wrote it.

Yeah yeah, 2 years ago the narrative was that nostalgia is awesome and JJ Abrams did the right thing in looking at the past rather than the future.