Just catching up this morning. Shit here gets wild at 1am, wow.
But now people are arguing about whether or not they could personally write better movies than JJ/Rian/Kasdan, and I just read a post about Rey the Sex Demon.
What are y'all passing around this morning?
If you're just looking for a quick summary of various common complaints on era, that would be:
-The humor didn't land for a lot of people.
-The casino section was a waste of time.
-Concern and confusion over Holdo's unexplained asshattery.
-Dropping the Snoke plot thread without closure.
-Many people disagree with the direction taken with Luke.
-Retreading of character development.
-Rose being underdeveloped or awkward (or CGI?!).
-Some people didn't like Leia's force scene.
-A lot of fanfiction not coming true, mostly about Luke not hacking a bunch of people up or Rey not being a Kenobi or whatever shit.
Do keep in mind that I don't necessarily agree with everything I listed.
massive contrivances from beginning to end - if you break down even the opening scenario with Poe it doesn't make any sense. Why scramble the fighters at all if they were running away? The scene opens with the Dreadnaught already it weapons range of the fleet, and it shoots the base instead of the already in orbit resistance ships because..... because....? Finn happens to meet a resistance janitor that knows all of these things?
Needlessly convoluted plotting - think about how much simpler all of the convoluted mechanics of the chase would have been simplified if they had simply caught the resistance fleet in an Interdiction field? One small example.
Want another way to simplify this mess? Instead of 'hyper space tracking' just have it so that the FO puts trackers in their storm troopers that will sound off when they get close enough. TFO has been using Finn to find the Rebels faster and faster, because the Rebels are still using hyperspace lanes so the FO can reliably estimate where the Rebels are likely to go from one area to the next.
This also meshes better with Finn trying to kill himself on Hoth!
They've slowly been pushing the Resistance into more and more limited areas in terms of paths that the Rebels can use, until they caught them with the Supremacy that has a MASSIVE Interdiction field.
Disregarding cannon when it comes to spaceships:
Speed: smaller ships has never been measurably faster. Even the Falcon couldn't outrun Star Destroyers. The Falcon is remarkable because of how fast it is for its size.
HyperSpace Ram: that's not how hyperspace works. You can't 'ram' into something like that because you enter a different plane all together.
So the resistance will slowly be losing distance to the the bigger and faster FO ships, evacuating the smaller, slower, ships as they start to fall behind. This will be a good visual element as well to show the increasingly crowded and desperate conditions.
THE FIRST ORDER BEING ABLE TO FOLLOW THE RESISTANCE ANYWHERE ALSO PLAYS BETTER WITH HOLDO NOT TELLING POE FOR FEAR THAT THERE MIGHT BE A SPY.
Too many characters to focus on.
Characters rarely struggle or earn victories.
So instead of the whole sideplot being to disable hyperspace tracking, and then having the stupid new 'tracking' and 'cloak' and nonsensical 'cloak scans' with no reason. It is instead a mission to disable the Interdiction field and main reactor of the supremacy.
Instead of breaking hyperspace and how battles should be fought, you get a dramatic scene of an mortally injured Ackbar with a skeleton crew suicide ramming their larger ships into the a temporarily disabled supremacy. The ultimate sacrifice in an attempt to decapitate the FO by destroying their flagship and leaders.
A la but X100
I'm just going to write up the changes I would have made while staying within the framework of this story.