Nitpicky Details in The Last Jedi

This is the second part of my review of The Last Jedi. This focuses on really nitpicky details that kinda bring things down for me. Now you might be rolling your eyes and asking "why can't you just relax and enjoy the film." Well, other movies have not gotten any slack for similar issues. Everyone gave Prometheus crap because the map guy got lost. No one gave Jurassic World a pass when Bryce Dallas Howard ran away from a T-Rex in high heels. Even the iconic A New Hope has never lived down the 12 parsecs line. I do have a certain tolerance for these things. Sometimes you can let them slide, sometimes they bring down the film. In my opinion, both as a Star Wars fan and a storyteller, I can't let them all go. Not only are they numerous, but they make it seem like everyone in the film is an idiot and the only reason the plot moves at all is because someone does something stupid. Anyway, you can decide how much these things bother you. I can't most of them go because they're so inexorably linked to the plot.

You may have noticed that in my last review, I didn't talk much about Poe's story with Vice Admiral Holdo. I left it out for 2 reasons. One, I thought as far as characters go, it was the most believable. We got so little of Poe's character in The Force Awakens, other than he was a nice guy and a super ace pilot. I thought it was a very natural progression that he got too caught up in his own awesomeness that he thought he knew better than his superiors. Two, it contained almost all of my little fanboy grievances. There's so many little things that could have been done, both by the Resistance and the First Order, to avoid this entire part of the story.

The Bombing Run

The opening action scene started really well. I liked Poe's "can you hear me now" routine to get General Hux monologuing. His solo attack run really made me laugh (in a good way) because a similar thing happened when I was playing the Star Wars RPG a few years back. And when he said "bring in the bombers" I got excited that we were gonna see B-Wings. I was wrong, and I probably could have gotten over this small disappointment had they not been replaced with these big, fat, clunky ships that were carrying way too many explosives for their own good. Let me break down how bad these things are. 

1. The Very Definition of Sitting Duck: As Poe showed in his attack run, a small fighter going against a capital ship has the advantages of a small target profile and that ability to be a fast moving target, both of which make them hard to hit. Anyway, the bombers sacrificed both of those advantages just to carry more bombs, which turns out, did more harm than good. 
2. Too Many Eggs in Too Few Baskets: The problem with having that many bombs on so few ships is that if one blows up before making its attack, which is likely in a space battle, then that's a lot of wasted ordinance. All the enemy forces have to do is concentrate their fire and their risk of defeat goes down significantly with each ship destroyed. 
3. Big Badda Boom: But let's say there were the only bombers the Resistance could get, maybe they just got a good deal from one of those casino arms dealers. The pilots took a bad situation, and then made it worse. For some reason, they flew them in a tight formation, so that when one blew up, it took out almost the entire wing in secondary explosions. Again, this is an obvious risk given how much of a payload they were carrying. If they had flown farther apart, they could have prevented this from happening AND divided up the enemy fighters so that there would be fewer TIEs attacking each ship. 
4. Gravity Bombs: As a final insult to common sense, the bombers used WWII style bomb bay doors that opened from the bottom and dropped the bombs on top of the enemy ship. It appeared that their sole mode of propulsion was gravity pulling them down. I can give this a little bit of slack on this, since there was a planet below them, but that's still a terrible design for a space bomber. Having a planet underneath your target so your bombs work is a very situational situation. This is why other franchises, including Star Wars, heavy ordinance is depicted as missiles or torpedoes that shoot forward at high speed. You can use them from any angle and they won't be affected too much by nearby celestial bodies. Now before you try to out-fanboy me but saying the bombs might have other means of propulsion, let me stop you right there because almost any other possibility wouldn't make the situation better. If they were magnetic, they might hit friendly ships, including the bomber that dropped them. If they used repulsors, they wouldn't be able to accelerate very well once they're away from the ship and they would interfere with the trajectory of the the bombs behind them. The only way they might work is with some kind of sensor guidance system like what modern smart bombs use, but that just makes them less efficient versions of guided torpedoes.  
5. Stay on Target: Because of the massive payload and inefficient delivery system, these bombers have to get right next to their target to make their attack and have to stay there for an extended period to drop all its bombs. This is why long range missiles are just better. A pilot can make the shot from a distance and immediately maneuver to avoid enemy fire before lining up another shot. Plus the forward velocity of their engines supplements the speed of the missile, making them much harder the shoot down. 

So to summarize, these bombers are 1) easy to shoot 2) explode easily 3) caused a lot of collateral damage to friendly units 4) have a terrible delivery system and limited range. I really hope the Resistance got these as a gift with purchase because otherwise they got ripped off. 

NOTE: I do have a fan theory that these might have been designed for attacking land bases, but just happened to be spaceworthy so they can be launched from orbit. It would explain a lot, but the movie doesn't back this up, so I can't give them a pass. If the new Expanded Universe verifies this, then... maybe I'll let it go.

Pursuit

Once the First Order tracks the Resistance fleet through hyperspace, we spend much of the film in this constant chase, where the fleet is just at the edge of their range. Hux's officer says that the ships are faster, but if that were true they would have eventually gone out of range. It's probably more accurate to say that they just couldn't top their speed so they remained at a constant distance. 

Since most of the middle of the film is about helping the Resistance escape this situation, let me start with all the First Order blunders that dragged this out. 

1. Let's pull back our fighters and shoot them ineffectively from afar: For some reason, General Hux pulls back Kylo's fighters AFTER they had destroyed a good chunk of the Resistance fighter squadron, not to mention the cruiser's bridge. As mentioned earlier, small fighters are hard for big ships to hit, which is why they have fighter escorts in the first place. Once Kylo's first strike succeeded, Hux should have sent every fighter he had to pound down the Resistance shields, especially with a Force user like Kylo making precise kill shots all over the place. Once the shields went down, THEN Hux could bring the big guns to bear and blow everyone away. Instead, Hux pulls back his fighters, fires impotently at the fleet, while maniacally cackling 'we have them now'. 
2. Pincer Attack: Assuming, for some reason, that Hux couldn't launch his fighters, then the next solution would be to wall off any escape for the Resistance ships. Since he had such a huge fleet with him, most of which wasn't really doing anything, all he had to do was send some ships to lightspeed, have them turnaround, and then jump in front of the Resistance ships. He also could have called for backup, if it was available, and have them do the same. If they were really precise about it, they would jump right in front of the Resistance ships. If they weren't then they could try to jump some distance in front of them, and fly in at sublight speed. In either case, the Resistance would either fly right into enemy fire or have to change direction which would close the distance between them and Hux's flagship. There's no reason Hux had to sit around and give them time to figure a way out of the situation.
3. Partial Scan: This is getting a little ahead of things, but the Resistance's evacuation plan is foiled when the First Order is tipped off and they employ an "Anti-Cloak Scan". We know cloaking devices have been around since OT, and the First Order officers don't act a bit surprised that the Resistance has them, nor do they make it seem like the scan was that big a deal, so that just begs the question why they weren't Anti-Cloak scanning before. And I don't want to hear a "well maybe they can't" explanation because it's just a feeble defense of lazy storytelling. If the bad guys have a thing that can counter something the good guys are doing, and the good guys know they have it, there better be an explanation for why they're not using it. Because otherwise everyone looks like idiots. 

Operation: Might Want to Pack Your Bags

Poe being full of himself and acting against his superior felt like a natural flaw for him to have. That said, I don't think it automatically puts Admiral Holdo in the right. Even though its her prerogative what information to disseminate to the crew, there's no established reason for her to withhold the evacuation plan. We get the impression that she doesn't tell Poe because she's either trying to teach him a lesson, or spite him. Except that being under fire isn't really the best time to discipline officers with passive aggressiveness, especially when there's critical work to be done.

It's also apparent she withheld the information from a lot of other people because Rose mentions all the personnel who tried to jump ship, not to mention Finn and a Poe's fellow pilots who would probably have mentioned it before he blundered into the bridge. Holdo didn't have any beef with them, so we're back to having no reason to keep it a secret. Bear in mind, these are people who would probably need to know that they should pack up their stuff and be ready to leave at a moment's notice. You may be thinking she wanted to keep it a secret for security reasons. What if there were spies on the ship? That's plausible, but also unsubstantiated speculation. The movie doesn't do anything to suggest that's a concern. Bear in mind, the only reason the plan was compromised was because Rose and Finn brought an untrustworthy scoundrel into the mix. If you have to make up information for something to make sense, well that inherently means it doesn't make sense on its own.

Let's talk about the plan itself. She has all the transports fueled and loaded up, then launches them all at once. From a tactical perspective, this is just silly. The best thing to do would have been to launch them one at a time. Not only does that reduce the chances of detection by having a smaller target, but it also reduces the losses if the cloaking tech doesn't work, which she should have known was a possibility. Regardless of Poe's interference, the success of her plan hinged on the First Order not pressing a few buttons.

Poe's plan was low risk, high reward (it only became high risk when Finn and Rose brought in an outsider and then mentioned the plan in front of him). Holdo's was high risk, low reward. The only reason Poe is the antagonist in the story is his plan involved disobeying orders, and  it's failure messed up hers.

They'll Never Suspect a Thing

After Finn and Rose sneak aboard the First Order ship, they make the head scratching decision to disguise BB by placing a crate over him and letting him roll around. Unsurprisingly, someone noticed a box rolling around on its own and found that suspicious, which is why they ended up getting caught. The breathtakingly awful disguise is bad enough, but on top of that, there's no reason Finn and Rose needed to take that risk because they didn't need BB to complete the mission. Just think about the roles each member of the team was to play. Finn was to guide them around and do the talking if they were stopped. DJ was to get them past any locked doors any do any computer hacking. Rose was there to disable to Hyperspace Tracking System once they found it. They didn't actually need BB. It would have been far more logical to leave him on the ship, or stash him in hiding somewhere rather than make a spectacle of himself by bumping into everything. I would say Finn should have known better, but he's never struck me as the sharpest tool in the box.  

Lightspeed Rescue

One the greatest visuals in the film is Admiral Holdo taking the cruiser to lightspeed and cutting a swathe through the First Order fleet. It looked awesome, was a great sendoff for her character, and was definitely something we hadn't seen before. It just begged the question of why didn't they do that earlier. They had two hyperspace capable support ships that they knew they were gonna lose (one of which still had a pilot aboard). An obvious strategy would be to turn those suckers around, point them at the enemy ships, and let a rip. If you're gonna lose them anyway, at least do some damage. I mean, this is very obvious last stand stuff. Not to mention it takes Holdo a really long time to decide what to do once her plan goes to shit. 

With a Grain of Salt

Once the Resistance gets planetside, we have a callback to the Battle of Hoth as the First Order tries to storm their stronghold. Poe leads a counter attack, but again, instead of seeing an updated version of a popular craft (the Snowspeeder), he brings out these crappy looking, idiotically designed land skimmers. Much like the bombers from the beginning, these things are ridiculously bad. They have this ski leg thing that drags along the ground and somehow keeps them in the air. Even assuming that the repuslors aren't strong enough to hold up the craft on their own (which is kind of like needing extra support for your car wheels) the fact that it's a flat ski means it creates a lot of unneccessary drag. It'd a little more sense for it to be a wheel that can roll on the ground, but not by much. The point of having land craft that hovers is to avoid any small obstructions in the terrain. A leg dangling from the bottom negates that advantage. All it would take is for that thing to hit a large rock, and the speeder would either tilt forward or fall down. So it's not really good for anything really, much less combat.

They make a point of mentioning that they're from "the old days of the rebellion" but that doesn't really explain anything. For starters, all the speeders we saw in the OT could float on their own. On top of that, all the speeders from the Prequels could float on their own. Even Anakin's homemade pod racer could float on its own. There's no in-universe justification for these things to be designed the way they are.

As a final insult to tactical intelligence, the Resistance doesn't make use of the most powerful weapon in their arsenal: the Millennium Falcon. The second it showed up, Poe should have ordered Chewie to attack the First Order laser battery. It was more maneuverable and had better attack vector than the skimmers. Instead, it flies away to dick around with the TIE fighters, ensuring the Resistance assault will fail. It's not often a hero messes up arriving in the nick of time, but they pulled it off here.

Pay No Attention to the Lightsaber Behind the Curtain

Last on this list, and admittedly the least offensive, is Luke's lightsaber in his final confrontation with Kylo. He's using his blue A New Hope lightsaber instead of the green one he used in Return of the Jedi and in the flashbacks. Throughout the whole duel, it bothered me that he was using the blue one instead of the green one since we saw his original get pulled in half. Did he make another for some reason? What happened to the green one? Did he rebuild Rey's really fast? Finally, it was revealed to be an illusion, and I thought, oh, I get it, it was just a visual clue that Luke was playing a trick. But then that didn't make any sense either. Why would Luke want to give a clue that he was tricking Kylo. He would want the illusion to be as realistic as possible up until the moment he chose to reveal it. If anything, having the green lightsaber would work to his advantage because it would have given Kylo flashbacks to when Luke nearly killed him in his sleep. Choosing to use a lightsaber that Kylo would know he shouldn't have was an unnecessary risk, and only worked because, like all the other First Order leadership, Kylo was just a bigger idiot than his opponent.

UPDATE: Rian Johnson has since clarified this choice, but his reasoning has just as many holes. Like how would Luke, who has spent years sitting on his planet being cut off from the Force, know any of Kylo's feelings about his lightsaber? The explanation presumes Luke knows more than he should. Furthermore, its not really apparent in the scene that Kylo cares about which lightsaber Luke is using.  

Idiot's Plot

Like I said, you can decide how much these ruin or undercut the film for you. To me they are part of a larger issue of largely poorly written characters. Since so many problems, for both sides, had obvious better solutions than what they came up with, it turns into a race between two chimpanzees at typewriters trying to pound out Shakespeare first. The only reason the protagonists squeeze out any kind of victory is not by being smart, but by being less stupid. 

I'll be going into a larger comparison between OT and the new films as the root of the modern problems, but for now, I'll say that as far as storytelling goes, Johnson is not much better than Abrams. He's much more focused on style than substance. The Last Jedi might be an enjoyable film, but it's not a good one.