this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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The problem isn't female leads, it' trash-tier writing. Like introducing a self-conscious stormtrooper and then having him unemotionally kill his mates pretty much immediately. Or introducing a nobody and then make her the child of a somehow™️ returned supervillain. Or having your minor villain and your female lead fall in love and then having them pretty much just revert back to where they were before. Or replacing the Death Star with an intergalactic Death Shotgun. The list goes on
It was lack of common direction through the trilogy. JJ set up his signature mystery boxes in the first movie, only for Rian to ignore those and leave nothing to work with for the next one.
I believe the reason why Palpatine somehow returned was because Rian killed off Snoke, and they really needed some big baddie Kylo and Rey could team up against so Kylo could have his redemption arc.
i much prefer where rian johnson was going, even though the main plot was meh. he left so many open plot threads that tied into the old eu that they could have used, but then jj went back to his first idea.
What plot threads? People keep repeating that TLJ opened possibilities but no one can explain what possibilities it actually opened.
You wanted Rey and Kylo Ren to kiss in the next movie? We saw that happen and it sucked. What other possibilities did it open?
the main thing was that while jj leaned heavily on the ot, johnson took things from the prequels. say what you want about them but at least they continued the story rather than rehashing it. of the top of my head, the most interesting thing they weave into the narrative is the possibility that the jedi and sith balance thing was based on a complete misunderstanding of the force. this ties back to not only the eu but also episodes 1-3, and opens up the gray jedi and force-witch paths again, not to mention that it basically retcons midichlorians. they also tried getting rid of the prophecy crap, which didn't make sense to begin with.
JJ choosing to ignore the second movie doesn't mean "nothing was left". Baring the bizarre casino, TLJ was the most interesting SW story since RotS. Episode IX could've been an amazing finale coming out of that, but JJ did what JJ always does and absolutely failed to deliver.
*Also, I feel it's important to point out the "Mystery Box" was and is bullshit, lazy writing. Yes, it's important to leave things in a story for the audience to wonder about and anticipate. That's not a valid excuse to throw esoteric shit at the wall and call it a day. The audience doesn't need to know where the plot is going, but the fucking writer should. JJ left Rian with hollow shell of "intrigue" with nothing substantial, got pissy when Rian did what he wanted with that, then shit out a boring finale trying to reverse everything back.
What was set up for the last movie?
Nothing new was set up for the grand finale. No new conflicts or threats to look forward to.
Compare with Empire Strikes Back. A bigger villain has been revealed. Han has been captured. Darth Vader is revealed to be Luke’s father. Romance between Han and Leia. Lots of exciting new threads for the final movie.
TLJ had nothing of that. When I went out of the theater I had no excitement at all for the next movie.
Right, "nothing".
Even a subpar writer could've done plenty with half of that, but JJ and Disney got scared and shit out the blandest finale possible.
No. Stop comparing the new to the old, especially at such a minuscule, beat-for-beat level. Not only does that kill any possible innovation, it's a nostalgia trap and exactly why VII and IX were so fucking boring. Nothing will replicate the feelings had watching beloved movies for the first time, and expecting anything to match that is just an excuse to be dismissive of it.
The resistance was not on their back foot, they were fucking dead. It was 30 some people and the Falcon by the end of TLJ.
Kylo makes a terrible villain for the big bad. He already lost to Rey in the first movie even if weakened. He failed to turn Rey with his big join me speech in TLJ, and he gets embarrassed by ghost Luke. There's nothing scary about someone who's been throwing temper tantrums for basically two entire movies. Secondly, there was now way he wasn't going to end up being good, Disney wasn't going to greenlight a conclusion with him being evil.
Rey made peace with her past and admitted it didn't matter, there's nothing to explore there without the retcon Rise did. She also had multiple defining moments of choosing the light, basing a movie on yet another time is stupid.
Other force sensitive people is a meaningless thing to base the conclusion of a trilogy on. Elmer Sleazebaggano son of Elan appearing and being the big good or bad out of nowhere is just as bad as Palpatine. You could do something with an established character becoming force sensitive, but they butchered that anyway.
Leia even if Fisher hadn't passed couldn't be the main plot. Sure she could be a source of help or counsel for Rey, but that's about it. If Leia became the hero of the resistance like she was for the rebellion by using the force and welding a lightsaber it just begs the question why she didn't bother at any point in the last 20 years before everyone was dead. It also doesn't work with Disney's need to sunset the established character is and bring out the new heroes of the galaxy.
It's not about comparing the feelings of empire or the beat for beat replay. It's about comparing the narrative and where it was at that point in the story. Empire left room for growth, there were new questions to answer, TLJ didn't.
After Force Awakens I had the following questions:
It doesn’t take much imagination how to make an exciting follow up with these open threads. TLJ decided that none of these threads matters and went in a completely different direction.
The only question I had after TLJ was:
Much weaker way to build up for the grand finale.
Why? The sequel trilogy is doing itself all the time. So why shouldn't we?
Aren't these also Star Wars movies? Set in the Star Wars universe?
The shot of the kid with the broom left me so hopeful for all the new things I thought were coming. All the retreading that Episode 9 did left me disappointed.
This was done better in ESB.
Who cares? We have no idea who Snoke was. Because of this there's nothing to indicate Kylo Ren is doing anything different than Snoke would've done. There's zero perceptible change because they didn't bother to spend any time defining the First Order or Snoke.
I always assume there's other force users across the galaxy all of the time. I think you're taking the things you see in a Star Wars movie to be 100% of the events that happen in that Galaxy. For those of us that take it as some of the more interesting stories coming from this massive galaxy of who knows how many people (trillions? quintiliions?) that scene is meaningless. Like, yeah that's always happening, all of the time. I generally assume that there are many Jedi out there. The movie is calling itself "The Last Jedi" to present the galaxy as something narrow (which is stupid because Leia would be a Jedi FFS, just another thing they would need to fix later) just so you will think it's interesting to broaden something presented to as being something narrow. It was never narrow, it was only TLJ that attempted to present Star Wars as something narrow. it was always broad, nothing new happened when they suggested it was broader than only TLJ presented it to be earlier in the movie.
Why wouldn't we? First of all TLJ is just ESB and RoTJ thrown into a blender with the point of all of the plot lines they re-hashed removed. Benicio Del Tor is Lando. Kylo Ren kills the old evil guy like Darth Vader did. They have to blow up a super laser. There's AT ATs walking across a white plain. Ah, but it's different because TLJ's version of Lando doesn't learn anything? It's different because Kylo Ren doesn't change? It's different because they fail to blow up the super laser? It's different because the AT ATs are walking on salt instead of snow? Sorry, but it's the same kinda shit just without any point to it. Which makes it boring to anyone familiar with the movies it's clumsily copy and pasting from.
RoS is way more interesting than TLJ. There's at least a point to it, at least it wasn't just blindly copy and pasting things from better movies without even understanding them.
Really? What happened in TLJ that wasn't already done in Star Wars? It felt like they just threw ESB and RoTJ into a blender and threw it onto the screen. Except they removed the point of all the plotines they copied from the other movies.
I know there's a narrative about TLJ being interesting, but the biggest criticism from people that aren't terminally online is that it was boring. And yeah, it was just a bunch of stuff we saw before with the point of the plotlines removed.
The Last Jedi wasn't interesting. It was one piece of wasted potential after another.
We got what looked like the start of what could've been the best buddy friendship in The Force Awakens, only for The Last Jedi to completely ignore that potential.
It turned Finn into a coward, then forced a character he had no chemistry with onto him.
The casino arc was this attempt at rolling in some sort of... Message...? As if we don't already know about neutral profiteers like The Banking Clan. And then it still only pays minor lip service to this message.
Captain Phasma was completely useless. Snoke was completely useless. Luke Skywalker could've been an interesting direction, but nothing was done with him and then he died after one cool moment.
It had scenes and direction that made absolutely no logical sense, even internally. Such as slow as shit bombers getting completely wasted when only one was actually needed. A complete lack in competent leadership causing a mutiny, which would've been interesting if it was meant that way, but it's not. Deus Ex Rose dooming her comrades.
Bringing back Palatine was always the plan. If you rewatch 7, it's painfully obvious that was the plan. Rian Johnson did the right thing by saying "Fuck that, I'm going to make something not shit", and then making the only noteworthy movie of the trilogy. Did he make mistakes? Yes, the gambling planet was a mistake, but The Last Jedi was the only movie with interesting stories in it at the end of the day. JJ Abrams would have made a worse movie, and a way worse trilogy if he got full creative control.
Worst part about the sequels was the compulsive need to regurgitate elements of the prior series.
There's so much lore from the books and the games and the toys and the cutting room floor of the original movies. And they had a ton of good ideas at the outset. A storm trooper who defects? A six foot tall super trooper in mirror armor? A Sith Lord who isn't stoic and morose, but hot headed and self-destructive? These are cool good ideas!
Shame they got drowned out in Disney fueled nostalgia.
A thousand times this. People hate bad female actors not because they are female but because they are bad actors.
Kal el no
Sometimes, but more often bad writing can make a great actress look like a bad female actor.
Natalie Portman can act, but those prequels were rough on her reputation. The camp value od the prequels wasn't immediately apparent and it was rough on her.
I remember someone saying that they thought Ewan McGregor and Liam Neesan were great, and the response was 'yeah, in Trainspotting and Schindlers list.'
Some people just hate women and they suck, but often the something with a female lead just sucks. It sucks that the former complicates the latter.
Wasn't the woman from the Twilight movies accused of being a terrible actress and it nearly ruined her career, until she started getting other roles and her reputation turned right around. She even commented on it saying "Yeaaaah.. Bella was a garbage nothing of a character. I did everything they asked of me, she's just that terrible."
Kristen Stewart I think her name was?
Both the leads had that problem.
I remember Patty Jenkins when Wonder Woman was due to come out saying that the problem with being a female director is That if a man makes a big budget film and it flops then that’s because the film is bad. But if you make a big budget film and it flops then that’s because women can’t direct.
I dunno. The amount of (deserved) flak the likes of Kevin Feige, JJ Abrahams, and Alex Kurtzman are getting for ruining the ships they're running kinda disproves that.
Yeah, I never even noticed "Kal el no" in the movie when I watched it. But it's a meme, so we all have to pile on about something completely forgettable being the worst thing ever!
That's how this shit works. Just short clips about nothing burgers turned into memes and made to loom large in your mind as being something egregious.
No, she really is a bad actress. But the biggest problem people have with her isn't "Kal-el no", it's "Bibi yes!"
I don’t even know what kal el no is, but i do know that it’s often unfair to call out any actor for s line delivery, because it’s often the case that they’ll do the same scene 6-7 times with very different deliveries, each prompted by the director, and then the director will choose which clip to use in editing.
Yup. Redletter Media did a bit about Harrison Ford's delivery of a line in Crystal Skull. On that one they actually used a take that was good for the trailer. In the movie itself (for whatever reason) they used a take which was very flat. In that case we could compare and it's obviously either the director or whoever editing that fucked up. But there's many more cases of that kind of thing we don't know about.
In any case, one line in a movie isn't something to obsess over. But the internet is all about obsessing over inconsequential shit...
Or having a beloved character die off screen
Or faking a death and undoing the fakeout within a couple of minutes.
The other problem is that there were 2 death stars in the original trilogy and another one in the sequels. Like, think of something new, will you?
I'm honestly not even mad at that. What broke my immersion was how everyone was just flat out stunned that they would try it a third time, and with no defensive countermeasures whatsoever. They were caught off guard a third time
And that third time they figured out how to bend space lasers to hit every planet at once and auto win
Come on
They basically turned a planet into a death star and no one noticed or worse, they did and allowed it to happen.
Sir, another death star has hit the big screens.
South park has an entire season about this. They basically tried to make the new Star Wars as nostalgic as possible to people who liked the original trilogy.
Wait you mean rebels are gone and the empire too? Let’s do resistance vs first order then. Let’s make a planet that’s almost the same as tatooine. A villain that’s almost the same as Vader, with a similar ending. And the list goes on. Hell let’s even bring a quick force heal (previously unheard of/impossible) from someone who’s totally untrained. That’ll teach em.
But imo the most frustrating part was when Rey at the end decided that she was a Skywalker. Like, what??? They could have made it end with “Rey who? Just Rey” to mean that we aren’t defined by out family’s actions, but instead she decided she belonged to someone’s family she hardly knows.
Its how they do the female leads. They still have to be "hot," of course. And in order to be "strong?" Well obviously masculinity is the strong gender, and OBVIOUSLY masculinity is toxic. So a "strong female character" is either just toxic masculinity with a pretty face pasted on, or a beige parody of stoicism.
Of course female leads isn't a problem.
This post is mocking people like Ben Shapiro, the crtiical drinker, the quartering and other such douchebags who shit on good movies with good writing that are popular among audiences and critics, because "forced diversity, DEI hire, woke, radical feminist agenda."
Why does the Critical Drinker sound like he hasn't taken a shit in a week and needs to make it your problem?
I agree with the vast majority of his critiques, none of those movies are good or have good writing.
And he's the first to point out examples of good female leads like Sarah Connor and Elen Ripley, as well as diversity done right like Arcane.
But hey, if you think most of the shit hollywood's been shitting out in the past decade is good, all the more happiness to you i guess.
Tangentially, he seems to be a right-wing moron when he's not talking about movies though, at least in one instance i saw him defensing poor Charlie Kirk; but i tend to stick to the movie critics and not the hour long open bars so maybe that was a one-off.