* If tomatometer & audience score are within 5% of each other, you can trust the ratings to give you a decent indiciation of movie quality.
* If tomatometer is more than 15%+ higher than audience score, it means it's an artsy fartsy movie that critics like and movies don't.
* If audience score is 15%+ higher than tomatometer, it's a fun movie even if it's not oscar worthy. (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/old_school is a perfect example)
---
The Last Jedi
Tomatometer 91% Audience 41%: Artsy Fartsy
[Really?]
---
The Greatest Showman
Tomatometer 56% Audience 86%: Fun, not oscar worthy
[Won Oscar for Best Original Song]
---
EDIT: Truthfully, it was the release of these two films (both Dec 2017) that caused the Tomatormeter and I to part ways. Simply indefensible, IMO.
[0] Think space-walrus cliffs, or red-salt Hoth, or lightspeed kamikazee, or the Snoke throne room battle
1. Luke went from the most optimistic and positive Jedi in the world, who found the good in Darth Vader, to a dude who tried to kill his own nephew without any explanation on how he got to that point aside from "I had a bad dream". Pathetic even if you ignore he also had dreams about becoming Darth Vader himself, and overcame those.
2. They completely destroyed any sense of time or speed with their "this turtle is so slow but too fast" race as the main plot point
3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???
4. They kept the elderly Leia around, instead of having her do a hero's sendoff at the end. Instead, they killed the only good character that was set up perfectly to be the new cutthroat cunning but likable leader of the rebellion.
5. They ruined every other fight in star wars with the hyperspace joust. Why was any other fight a big deal when they could have just rammed a few ships with jump drives into the star destroyers, or hell, the death star.
6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.
And this is just what I can remember on my phone while sitting at this bar. If you think this movie wasn't a deep betrayal to the universe, you didn't pay any attention to it.
Luke was always fragile. He barely trained with Yoda, then he basically failed up to celebrity status. His weakness has always been his impatience, and his preference for the quick and easy out.
He became an icon, he got old and disillusioned, he realized his naive view of the world and the Force didn't apply to reality, as he saw the Jedi being just as corrupt as the Sith, and just as the Jedi did he fell back into a rigid orthodoxy that led him to repeat the cycle of generational darkness that he never took the proper effort to address because he was never properly trained. And in the end, he regained a truer and more grounded faith in the force than he had before. What Yoda literally said would happen, happened.
That isn't pathetic, it's an actual character arc. Unfortunately, people like yourself only wanted Luke Skywalker to remain a cardboard cutout.
>3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???
Leia is the sister of one of the most powerful Jedi in history. She has the Force, too.
It's weird how many people completely missed that.
5. They ruined every other fight in star wars with the hyperspace joust. Why was any other fight a big deal when they could have just rammed a few ships with jump drives into the star destroyers, or hell, the death star.
I've never understood this argument. Why don't we simply kamikaze aircraft and submarines into our enemies now? Why bother with guns and missiles?
I mean, it's a risky (potentially deadly) maneuver that a rebellion lacking in personnel and equipment can scarcely afford to lose through normalizing. It's not something you do all the time even when it is effective. Japan only resorted to kamikaze missions out of desperation.
And I'm curious what exactly you think the effect of ramming into one ship with another ship transitioning into hyperspace should be, and why it shouldn't be an effective weapon at all?
No, this is just finding shit to nitpick about.
>6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.
It was established that the Force is a constant, distributed amongst all Jedi. The fewer Jedi there are, the more powerful each becomes because they have access to a greater portion of the whole. Rey was as powerful as she was because, as one of the few Force users left, she had potential access to nearly all of it.
>If you think this movie wasn't a deep betrayal to the universe, you didn't pay any attention to it.
I don't know, it seems like you're the one who didn't pay attention. Did you even see any of the new trilogy or just jump on the hate train when it was popular? Because I've seen all of your criticisms, verbatim, repeated ad nauseum, by people who just seem to be repeating memes.
It has to be nothing, or else none of the other movies make sense at all. Kinetic energy attacks (accelerate a mass to a great velocity) are the most obvious attack there is, from the dawn of time with throwing rocks to bows and arrows to muskets to cannons on up. And in a universe where you can accelerate a mass immediately to light speed, nothing else will really compare.
So yes, at some level it makes obvious sense that a kamikaze of one starship to another "should" work. But in the Star Wars universe we had had to suspend that disbelief (in some ways justified because light speed jumping isn't real, so maybe it just doesn't work that way) because otherwise X-wings could take out Star Destroyers and the Death Star is unnecessary because you can just strap the hyperspace drives to large hunk of rock.
The Empire was just that arrogant and self-confident that they never noticed such an obvious flaw until it was too late? Still bullshit.
Sabotage? Better, and it got us Rogue One, which was a great movie. But even then it stretches credibility.
The walkers in Empire Strikes Back are ridiculous, no one would actually build those, with their obvious (and easily exploited) weakness. And in a universe with blasters, no one would ever be using lightsabers. Hell, if you can force choke someone, which even Luke did with that Gammorean guard, why not just force pinch an artery in your enemy's brain or heart? Why bother with all the spinny flips and shit? Just force heart attack from a concealed location, done.
Realistically, you wouldn't even have dogfights in space at all, much less with plane-shaped ships that bank through turns, you would have fully automated, spherical droids attacking from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away or just, as you mentioned, toss a big FU asteroid through hyperspace into the orbit of a planet. And yes, the elephant in the room is that any FTL drive is by definition a weapon of mass destruction.
None of it makes much sense. It never has, because it has always been more important that things look cool than make sense. But the point is, ramming a ship with another ship while going into hyperspace makes no less sense than anything else. The transition to hyperspace isn't instantaneous, you can see the ships zooming in and out of hyperspace and see the starfield warp. So logically there must be a point at which it works. Maybe the margin of error for that is so razor thin that it's not worth trying most of the time. Maybe the particular shape of the ships involved made it an optimal strategy that one time. I don't know, but one can come up with excuses a lot less goofy and contrived that the "maze of black holes" that justifies the parsec line about the Millennium Falcon to justify it.
People are just being particularly nitpicky about this one element while they're willing to forgive the decades of patent ridiculousness that came before.
I mean if I start taking apart every single aspect, logical issues are there. Why use useless troopers who can't hit barn when robots are so much better? Space bombers that drop bombs in WWII style doesn't make any sense at all. Empire of first 3 movies is bunch of incompetent idiots who couldn't run a local 7/11, not a galactic empire. Literally pick any aspect, it doesn't make much sense in real world.
I had blast watching new trilogy in cinema, simply because I expected same level of brainless fun as original movies, and it delivered. And that's enough, making SW into some infallible religion is as stupid as other religions.