Being my all time favourite movie I’d have to agree!
1 Like
Blade Runner 2049
Just another quick “eating my hat”-moment.
The first time I saw it (in the cinema) I thought it was great to look at but boring and pretentious.
Which goes to show that expectations (why isn’t it about the young Blade Runner teaming up with the old Blade Runner in order to hunt other replicants?) and mood (my life was very complicated at that time, I had carved out a few hours to see this, the cinema was ice-cold, I was hungry and sad and angry - yeah, perfect conditions to see any movie) will completely influence one’s opinions. (Oh, yes, and the projection broke down at the beginning, so there was no sound, and they had to restart it.)
So, finally, watching it at home, relaxed and ready to really appreciate it, I was completely and utterly mesmerized by the greatness of this film. It is not only visually perfect but also narratively. It is one of the best, if not THE best sequel to a magnificent film ever made (yes, along The Godfather II, The Empire Strikes Back and Aliens).
I can’t wait how Denis Villeneuve will transform DUNE into his movie.
2 Likes
I get a slightly different reading.
I feel there’s a zeitgeist out there where professional critics are generally frustrated with franchise-oriented storytelling and crave something radical and disruptive. Consequently they embraced TLJ for the same reason some hardcore fans hated it; it did the unexpected, upset the apple cart and created problems not just for the characters (which is part of storytelling) but also for the fans (which should also be part of storytelling, but must these days be balanced against the often contrary goal of keeping the gravy train going).
Critical response to TLJ was largely positive, while the audience scores were much lower. So far this one seems much less popular with critics, and the negative reviews (and even some positive ones) mostly boil down to one complaint: this one plays it safe, labors to win back the fans upset by TLJ and is, at heart, as much a trace-over of ROTJ as TFA was of A New Hope. That is, I’m not so sure they went in determined to hate it: more they went in hoping it’d upset fans even more, but instead found it conciliatory to fans, and so they’re resentful. It’ll be interesting to see if the dynamic is totally flipped this time, with a high audience score to balance the low critical one.
I feel like the critics and the devoted SW fans have set up opposing camps and are pretty much at war, maybe in their eyes a war to decide the future course of moviemaking (a war the critics may have already lost long ago, frankly). Anything the critics like, the fans will bemoan as disrespectful of the legend, social justice propaganda, etc, and anything that pleases the fans will be dismissed by the critics as pandering, cowardly, creatively bankrupt “fan service.”
However gratifying the media may find it to watch Star Wars “nerds” fight amongst themselves, I feel like that’s the more interesting “divide” to monitor.
1 Like
If “fans” and critics had exactly the same opinion as groups, sure, but they don’t. TROS and TPM arn’t low across the board, they both sit around 50% from critics, so perfectly split between love and loath, whilst TFA and TLJ both sit at high 90’s from Critics, despite being very different films. Thanks to organised review bombing, and the fact it’s release date is TODAY, respectively, we have no clue what a true audience average would be for TLJ and TROS.
Having seen TROS, I advise anyone interested in seeing it to not waste your time. I won’t give spoilers but I’ll just say Abrams’ movie tries to fit square pegs in round holes and it doesn’t work.
Save yourself the trouble. You’ll wish you had sat thru Cats instead.
Which just goes to show: you can’t win them all.
I‘m just back from watching it - yes, I can spend working hours at the cinema, but there’s a price for it; mainly spending working hours at the cinema… - and I‘d like to mirror most of what @secretagentfan already said. It is, for lack of a better word, satisfying. And I say this as a fan of the original films who didn’t expect a lot from the ones that came later.
TROS ties many loose threads, answers the most pressing questions, at times even elegantly. It‘s - of course! - also a sentimental journey for my generation, you will find many borderline geezers sniffing at times in the theatre. But overall it’s one huge farewell show to that part of the Star Wars universe.
2 Likes
Not movies, but Tv…
I wasn’t looking at the series overall (I’m not a big SW fan, so it took me a couple minutes to figure out what TROS and TPM are!), more at what I perceive as the current mood. And I may be way off.
In fact, I didn’t know TFA was critically liked, so there goes my theory about critics souring on formula and predictability.
I was thinking about it this morning and I doubt I’m in for this one. The first film was fun enough for me in '77 but not enough to see it more than once like my friends. “Empire” was technically brilliant but on first viewing I thought it wasted a lot of time on side stories I didn’t care about, only to run out of time at the end before anything was resolved (Hard to remember now, but at one point in the dim past, we weren’t yet used to the notion of “sagas” and "chapters; we though movies should tell a full story). “Jedi” I thought was phoned in but managed to wrap everything up without the wheels coming completely off the cart.
What strikes me is that with the possible exception of Empire (which again, felt unfinished to me), I never left an entry with a burning need to see the next one. I didn’t see any of the prequels in the theater (and still haven’t seen two of them in any form). TFA I found entertaining but hollow, TLJ didn’t make much of an impression at all. I would wait for ROS to stream, but now I’d have to get Disney+ to do it. So unless my kids pressure me to go to the theater (which is unlikely as they care even less than I do), I’m probably not seeing this for a long time. But I hope it does well and makes a fun holiday season for those interested.
1 Like
Welcome to the internet In the social media age - “You heard a film exists? talk only if you’re bitchy and massively entitled”
No such thing as “meh”, or “it’s ok”
it’s “the best movie EVAAAAA”
or
“they destroyed my childhood!” (To use the toned down version)
I do miss “meh” 
3 Likes
In the days of “rotten tomatoes” and “metacritic” one thing also gets forgotten quickly: that genre blockbuster fare never got uniformly great reviews back then when the originals were (only) in theaters. In the 70´s and 80´s most reviewers at best begrudgingly admitted that those movies were made professionally and obviously crowd pleasingly.
These days, with the hard core reviewers gone or replaced by people who are told not to offend anyone, they take genre fare much more seriously and try to get on the side of that kind of zeitgeist which generates the most clicks.
In other words: the bad reviews for “Star Wars” are actually in line with the reviews for the original films.
And this applies for Bond films as well. Bad reviews for these films are not always proof for a bad film and not seldomly characterizing the reviewer´s taste and intent.
I´m glad you liked it! Satisfying is probably the best word to describe it. And, yes, I was one of those geezers 
1 Like
I grew up in a succession of small towns where there was at best one daily paper in an age where the internet was still science fiction. My first exposure to big-time critics was Siskel and Ebert on PBS.
In a way, I guess we have it better now with exposure to a wider assortment of opinions, so we’re not reliant on a single local critic to provide the only comment on a film we’re considering seeing. On the other hand, Rotten Tomatoes has inspired a kind of groupthink and a competition to out-snark everyone else, so maybe it’s a wash.
2 Likes
I completely agree.
Reviewing has become ‘democratised’, which ought to be good. Sadly, the understanding of reviewing has not, which has taken us where we are now. The process of reviewing doesn’t simply consist of having an opinion about a film - anybody can have one - but being able to identify the how and why and argue it. In short, to make a conscious effort with one’s intellectual faculties. This goes beyond just giving an out-of-five rating.
The reviewer will also find himself at times confronted with questions where there simply is no clear b/w y/n answer, where he has to decide himself, like, is HEAVENS GATE a masterpiece or a misfire, did it ignore or expand the limits of its genre? Has it any relevance at all from today’s perspective? And so on, from the history of stage and cinema to the performance of actors and the reaction of audiences, from film theory to the present day headlines. Reviewing films can resemble a science.
Most of such considerations will not be of interest to the casual moviegoer who just wants to know whether it’s worth the effort and the ticket price. Nowadays people will be more inclined to listen to fellow audiences, simply because they tend to be more or less on the same page when it comes to judge whether a film is fun or not. Of course, if there is - for whatever reason - a huge opinion tsunami few people will be tempted to swim against the stream and build their own opinion.
2 Likes
And now for something completely different (it’s about a 2019 movie and I don’t want to start a new thread for this):
Saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for the first time tonight (missed it in the cinema, had to go with a BluRay). I usually watch the complete end credits upon first viewing of a movie (if possible), and that’s what I did - and noticed something really funny: In the last minute of the end credits the theme from the old Batman TV series starts to play. Turns out that it’s not the actual theme but and old radio commercial for a phone-in competition. But after 20 seconds, when Batman and Robin start to talk, the Batman music in the background fades out and turns into something (no, really) completely different. But listen for yourself:
Holy Disco Volante, if that isn’t some Thunderball underwater music! 
Anyone else noticed this before?
3 Likes
Yes, now I remember it again, but I had to admit I completely had forgotten about that. My girlfriend and I were one of the few still in the Cinemaroom, everyone else were already gone when this Thunderball music started in the background. I remember I told her that this was no Batman music, but Bond music from Thunderball, but she looked at me and her eyes were telling me: “Why should I know this and care?” Hahaha!!
But thanks for showing this.
Good catch.
I haven’t seen Star Wars yet but I would like to weigh in on the subject of Rotten Tomatoes. I’ve noticed a string of videos on Youtube declaring that Rise Of Skywalker has the lowest RT score of any Star Wars film as if it’s some kind of victory. Have these people forgotten that TLJ had the highest RT score of any Star Wars film? It seems people only like to cite the Tomatometer only as long as it supports their opinion.
DC films had the same problem. ‘Fans’ campaign to shut down Rotten Tomatoes after Batman V Superman is given a low score yet used Wonder Woman’s rating as ‘proof’ that the film was great about a year later.
And all that doesn’t get into the whole idea that these people don’t seem to understand what the score means. It seems the internet has spawned a whole fanculture where people can’t talk about films so they just compare stats (RT, Box Office etc.) like they’re playing Top Trumps.
3 Likes
Exactly. And it isn’t about enjoyment or dissatisfaction anymore, it´s about hate and getting the most yes-men on your side.
Which is, as we know, just the dark side.
3 Likes
Really liked your initial post on TROS, secretagentfan. I concur in that it is the best third installment of a Star Wars trilogy. Before 2000, a lot of trilogies had trouble sticking the landing, or at least had a major weak link (the Back to the Futures, Star Treks II-IV, The Matrix, The Godfather, Alien.) A horror spoof once declared “Great trilogies come in threes” on its poster. But Star Wars’ original trilogy seemed the most consistent of the bunch. But then Lord of the Rings, Dark Knight, and Captain America (arguably the MCU’s best trilogy) seemed to reverse this trend. Now I’m feeling similarly of the sequel trilogy, even though it’s clear there was not a unifying vision from day one. Still, each film is solid in its own right, and one day it will be fun to watch all three in one sitting.
The sequel trilogy had to return to the big bad to tie in all three trilogies. And I appreciate how they explicitly acknowledge the prequels, their reputation notwithstanding, instead of handwaving with a Jedi mind trick “these are not the Star Wars movies you’re looking for.”
The people I know who’ve seen it like it, and only one refuses to see it. I tell my friends don’t let the haters deter viewing of the film. It’s fun for Star Wars fans, especially casual ones. It’s filled with Easter eggs for those who have some other SW knowledge (I’ve only seen live action series, and just read the first three Timothy Zahn novels that kicked off The Expanded Universe.)
I’ve never let a negative review deter me from seeing a film I wanted to see, but I have been influenced to see some due to positive reviews. Critics have to sit through a lot of crap so I understand when something pleases them because it subverts their expectations. But a lot of us have enough strife and struggle with life personally, professionally, and now of course, politically, so it’s great to spend a few hours in a different universe completely detached from reality. In that sense, this Star Wars film gave me exactly what I wanted.
2 Likes