zlacker

>>tortil+(OP)
Rotten tomatoes is actually very useful if you know the magic formula:

* 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)

>>ernest+d93
Okay, let's give that a whirl

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The Last Jedi

Tomatometer 91% Audience 41%: Artsy Fartsy

[Really?]

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The Greatest Showman

Tomatometer 56% Audience 86%: Fun, not oscar worthy

[Won Oscar for Best Original Song]

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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.

>>pauldd+8d3
I can't comment on "The Greatest Showman" since I haven't seen it, but on a certain level "The Last Jedi" was kind of artsy fartsy; Rian Johnson spent so much time on cinematography and color grading[0] that he ended up with a movie that was visually very striking, without any plot fundamentals that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.

[0] Think space-walrus cliffs, or red-salt Hoth, or lightspeed kamikazee, or the Snoke throne room battle

>>eindir+ng3
FWIW I was a Star Wars nerd and read all the books and played the games (even the obscure ones—Yoda Stories rocked) and my Windows cursor was a lightsaber and 70% of my Christmas toys were Star Wars (the rest were Lego, and those two things didn’t yet have any overlap) and all that, until the prequels put me off it (and thank god, as really I’d had quite enough of that in my life)

So far as betrayal goes, from the perspective of someone with that background, TLJ and Rogue One are the only two Disney Star Wars films I’d save from a fire, and I’d give it a hard think before I bothered with Rogue One. Nothing about TLJ struck me as “a deep betrayal”, and on the contrary, it felt like a return to the franchise’s roots in a lot of ways, but with enough of a twist that it wasn’t just a mediocre lazily-plotted remake (cough).

>>hotnfr+Jp4
Would you say you care about consistency and coherence when it comes to the things you fanboy/girl?

Not everyone cares and that's fine, but for the people that do care about how the pieces all fit together, TLJ was a travesty.

>>fastba+ZL4
I do a bit, but when something breaks that enough I don’t have trouble pretending it’s something else and still enjoying it, if it’s good.

I didn’t find I needed to with TLJ, and complaints of that sort about it don’t resonate with me at all.

>>hotnfr+aB5
Fair enough. There were a number of things that didn't jive with me about the film as I watched it: the fight choreography was meh, Luke's behavior given his previous characterization, Rey's almost complete lack of actual character development, and of course Admiral Holdo being portrayed as a wise leader by the filmmakers, but when you look at her actual actions and the consequences of them, it's unclear if a leader could be less competent.

The Luke thing was the only one of those that really bugged me though.

However, the moment I walked out of the cinema and the spectacle faded and I thought about the implications of certain other things in the film, the less happy I was.

For example, a ship going lightspeed was used as a weapon in TLJ. The implications of this are pretty huge. Shooting lasers around in a universe where you can apparently have kinetic lightspeed weapons is dumb. If treated as canon, TLJ makes every other space battle in Star Wars nonsense.

Similarly, I would say in Star Wars up until TLJ, it was somewhat clear (to me at least) that space in Star Wars is not a vacuum, but more of an "ether". People get out of their spaceships on small asteroids without any sort of vac-suit and breathe fine. Sound propagates during space battles. Spaceships (their engines, their ability to open/close, etc) seem to operate in approximately the same way on a planet as they do in space. So when they used Leia's first onscreen usage of the Force (which is actually a whole 'nother thing) to totally break that system and treat outer space in Star Wars as if it's what we experience in our universe, it kinda sucked. And all for the sake of a "she's dead, actually she's not" gotcha thing.

In summary, Rian Johnson explicitly said one of his goals when making the film was to "subvert expectations". But I think there is a huge difference between "subverting expectations" and "indiscriminately shitting on existing canon", and he was definitely just doing more of the latter. Yes, it is very easy to "surprise" people when you make characters do things that they have no reason to do from previous character development and when you ignore the laws of physics (or lack thereof) that had previously been established.

In summary: Rogue One is the only Disney Star Wars film I would save from a fire. Though I also greatly enjoyed "Andor".