its a good way to deviate from Palpatine but yeah, its certainly a waste to kill him off so abruptly although ill be interested to see how Kylo runs the First Order
The minute Snoke was revealed in TFA I figured...."Great, this is essentially another Emperor 2.0 villain. Rian Johnson cleaned this mess up fairly well.
Lots of people, myself included, knocked TFA for being safe and not taking any risk. This one was ballsy. I can't complain.
Yeah, it's a pretty lazy way to get rid of him. Espeically since he's saying he sees everything going through Kylo Ren's mind. Oh, but except that he's about to kill you.
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I don't know if we can lay this one at Disney's door. But to my mind they killed him before his usefulness to the plot was done- there feels like a gap there. It did also undercut him as an effective villain (pun possibly intended), which is a shame as they had done a lot to start to build him up.
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quite the opposite IMO, which made it worse. i saw him exhibit abilities that palps/vader couldnt even touch. most notably being able to throw someone around from lightyears away and the way he clearly and casually overpowered kylo and rey's abilities. as for his untimely halving, arrogance and overconfidence was always been a characteristic and weakness of the sith. so to me "why didn't snoke sense betrayal" is just as pointless a question to ask as "why didn't palpatine sense vader's betrayal". pointless because the answer could easily be "they got caught up in the moment and became shortsighted". the reason this is bad is because snoke was kinda established as the most powerful darkside user ever (IMHO) and thus the story's yardstick for power. we don't truly find out how powerful luke became until he took on vader and bested him. kylo can never have that moment to prove himself to be the untimate dark-side user because now this trilogy's yardstick is now cut in half. at this point the only way i can see to resolve this is for kylo to overpower and defeat luke.
i do have other complaints which i don't feel like voicing now.
@ush: i wouldnt pop open the champagne just yet, because i'm still not convinced that there will be no 'grey jedi' theme.
exhibit a: "Rey: Light. Darkness. A balance." -seems to imply that balance of the force is indeed a balance between light and dark, as opposed to 'balance' as in 'undisturbed by dark-side forces'.
exhibit b: the way rey is instantly drawn to the dark side, but yet seems to explore it and gain a non-emotional familiarity with it, and later seems to feel zero desire for power when invited to rule. to me it seems to imply that she will find a way to use that side of the force without succumbing to it, which would really negate everything important before TFA.
exhibit c: the asian girl and her sister who wore the obvious yin-yang symbol around her neck. it's not much of arguable evidence, but simply pointing out sybolism which i don't believe will prove to be non-consequential.
all said i give it a 6.5/10 because i thought it was an overall sloppy and chaotic story which would have really benefited from much cutting. i think the ideal version of that film would be well under 2 hours.
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Last edited by Bashar Teg on Dec 15th, 2017 at 02:44 PM
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I wasn't too worried by that rhetoric. I don't think it was pushing a grey agenda; I took it as seeing the whole as part of one system.
There's much stronger rhetoric the other way- Luke says there was balance for a while after ROTJ, which is after killing off the Sith, which is pretty clear. Luke is sceptical about the Jedi but is effectively shown to be just jaded and explicitly changes his mind by the end of the film (there's a review up on Den of Geek which says that they felt it was going away from the Jedi religion, which seems completely absurd an interpretation to me seeing what Luke said to Ren).
And more broadly than that- although they present a world of some complications (both sides have to buy arms from arms dealers), it's still all fundamentally good vs evil, light vs dark. The ending is us needing the Jedi to champion the light.
What will be weird plotwise there is that I suspect the new trilogy will create a setting (possibly for RJ's new films) which is what we already thought we had after ROTJ- Empire defeated, new Jedi. It's a strange plot cul-de-sac.
(That Den of Geek review also said Rey having no important origin is some sort of freeing up from the Force implying anyone can be that powerful, which is gibberish- she was still born to it and Snoke pretty much explains that her existence is a counter to Ren, which is back to the Skywalkers. I think some reviewers see what they want to)
Still, if IX goes all grey then I am wrong.
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Last edited by Ushgarak on Dec 15th, 2017 at 02:52 PM
I like it. It's refreshing not just to have another standard top villain for everyone to rally and fight against, one who's just there, being a emperor.
They killed him to subvert expectations and keep the focus on the central characters. Good move.
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To see what the conclusion is to the story's of Rey, Kylo, Finn, Poe, etc.? Like... f*cking what else would it be? You don't need an archetypical THE OLD MAN EMPEROR for every fantasy franchise. We have villains enough in Kylo and Hux.
I love how if it has too many similarities to the previous Star Wars, people hate it. But if you do something different like having the apprentice kill the emperor-master in Act 2, suddenly its TOO different! and people hate it.
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you disagree?
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I liked Snoke. His char was unfortunately not delved deeper into but he has some interesting facets. The fact that he is below Sidious, Vader and Dooku makes him more interesting imo. Smart of him to stay away from the main Galaxy till the others are dead and he came out on top after all. A shame he was killed that fast but yeah, makes it less ESB like. It would be worse if he survives till EP 9 and gets the ROTJ treatment like Palp.
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