What movie have you seen recently?

At the beginning of The Last Jedi, Poe was a Commander. After he inadvertently got the entire Rebellion bomber fleet destroyed, Leia demoted him to Captain. I have no idea if that would entitle him to Leia’s and Holdo’s plans or not.

But here’s the thing… The Rebels are trapped on a troop carrier running away from the First Order. Why not just tell EVERYONE the plans? It’s not like they’re going to broadcast it to the First Order, at no time is Leia or anyone else worried about spies.

There is no logical reason why Leia and Holdo just wouldn’t tell the entire ship what the plan was.

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They were literally worried about spies. At the time, Holdo and Leia were acting like there was a mole, and playing cards close to the vest. Rose’s job before Finn katamari’ed her up was to stop anyone grabbing an escape pod, because they were concerned about moles and deserters. Remember, they didn’t know at that point if they were truly being tracked through hyperspace - something they thought impossible - or if they had a mole or a tracker on board.

The only people that really knew about it were Rose, Finn and Poe(because Rose told them) - they didn’t tell anyone in a command position, because they thought they’d get told no. Poe deliberately withholds the information about the tracker from the command structure, indicating the command have no idea how they’re being tracked, which gives them every reason to worry about moles and spies.

Sure, it didn’t turn into a spy-hunting plot, because the film is focused on Rey, Finn, Poe and Rose, rather than everything Rebel command is doing.

It would not. They bumped him back to being a Junior Officer(Or a Company Officer, as some call it), which would not make him privy to the details of whole-fleet level plans, unless they directly concerned him, assuming that the Rebel military command structure works pretty much the same as real-world military command structures, as has been generally depicted.

That may be true, but if you know you have a hot-head guy who likes to go off on his own, especially when he’s frustrated, and he’s clearly frustrated, you tell him the goddamn plan.

Either that, or you confine him to quarters so he can’t go about causing trouble until if/when you need him to actually cause trouble.

It also doesn’t help that the entire crew looked to be scared shitless over what’s going on, not sure if Holdo knew what she was doing, etc. It wasn’t just Poe, Finn, and Rose. At the very least, a bit of reassurance that, “Trust me, this looks bad, but I have a plan to get us somewhere safe and this is part of the plan” probably would’ve been beneficial.

Take a step back from the actual story and ask yourself what the goals of the directing/writing/storyboarding/whatever staff were to set up that entire movie. I feel pretty weird about it in that context. I guess it’s still possible that the third movie in this set redeems it, but I feel like what we’re actually being sold is Disney trying to wrangle a property into an “easier” money maker and not quite understanding what they’re dealing with. It would take a lot to really research and lay out how I get to that point, so all I can say is that’s my intuition. Probably made worse by conflicts between corporate, directing, and existing canon… even as near as the previous movie.

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To the guy who is literally being punished for refusing to follow the plan and doing his own thing, getting other people killed in the process?

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Not necessarily. But to the entire crew. Poe was a jerk in how he reacted to it, but the whole crew was on edge and worried and Holdo just stood there and said nothing at all.

Tell the crew what’s up, or at least just enough of them to reassure them that Holdo knows what she’s doing without putting the operation at risk. Then confine Poe to quarters and post a guard so that he doesn’t do anything until he cools his hot head down and is considered “stable” enough to return to duty.

To be fair, I’d be okay with throwing him in the brig instead of just confining him to quarters for his insubordination, but I’m feeling a bit merciful.

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Right. If you’re worried about spies, you don’t have to tell everyone what the plan is, but it might help morale if you tell your subordinates that you at least have a plan and that it’s working.

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He was demoted one rank, but it’s not like they had a lot of Starfighter Pilot left after Kylo nuked the hanger bay.

The thing is Holdo kept telling Poe to stay at his post. He didn’t have a post anymore, as a senior pilot he should have been partly responsible for partially organizing the shuttle operation. You can’t keep secret “Get all of the shuttles fueled and ready to fly, ASAP.” from the Lead Starfighter Pilot not if he does his job remotely competently. It should not have been this shocking revelation that should have had Poe got “Whelp, Mutiny!”.

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I really find it odd to go these lengths on going back and forth on something so irrelevant. The movie has sufficient excuses for things for a children’s movie, and shouldn’t that be enough.Going at this detail level next there will be two months talking about the weaponized hyperdrive jump. Or maybe questioning why Rey learned Jedi tricks so fast.

At some point we might start questioning the merit of Midichlorean theory and whether the Jedi invented it whole cloth, or if it’s just, you know, heroin.

I wouldn’t say it’s irrelevant. Poe being a complete dumbass is the primary driver for the entire movie.

Why did Finn and Rose go to the casino planet? Poe.

Why were the Rebel’s stealth troop transports discovered? Poe.

Why did Luke Skywalker have to cause a distraction so the remnants of the Rebels could escape, possibly causing his own death? Poe.

All movies have plot holes and faulty logic, but just to compare two Disney properties, Star Wars and Marvel, the quality of writing and storytelling going on in the Marvel Cinematic Universe seems orders of magnitude better than what’s going on in the Star Wars movies. These are both hugely important properties, and both probably have all kinds of corporate oversight. But you’d think that Disney would be capable of the same relative level of quality for both of them.

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A Wrinkle in Time

Having just read the book and been underwhelmed (the book isn’t written for a 38 year old man, so I don’t hold anything against it), I had super low expectations for the movie.

And those expectations weren’t met, not even close, not even slightly. The movie is utter garbage from start to finish.

Actually not from the very start, because in the opening scene, the father shows his daughter a physics demonstration, the look of wonder on her face was quite delightful. Unfortunately nothing in the rest of the movie elicits the same sense of wonder in me, the viewer, nor in the eyes of the actors on screen.

For a story that is about time and space, the pacing was way off, and there is no sense of location or geography. Basic things like establishing shots are left out, so there’s no way to know where people are or what they are looking at or where they are going.

Juliane once said “don’t they know what editing is?” and I laughed because I had been thinking the same thing.

We started fastforwarding and skipping to the end of chapters on the DVD. Like as soon as Zach Galifianakis turned up? Skip!

Incompetent filmmaking with an already difficult story is not a good combination.

The Fast and the Furious

We watched this as a palette cleanser after A Wrinkle in Time. As opposed to that film, this movie has an incredible sense of time and space. We are told these street races take just 10 seconds, even though it takes them about two minutes each to play out on screen, and it all works because the rules of the movie are set out beforehand so clearly, we can just relax and go with it.

For example, at one point a helicopter shot shows the cranes and the movie lighting gear. But this is the establishing shot, and showing how long the race is going to be is more important than worrying about being able to see the lighting towers.

The CGI is super stylised, but it doesn’t matter that it isn’t realistic, because it is only used to establish where people are in relation to other people.

The acting and story and all that is just whatever, but it’s obviously enough because we are here for the action, and we can only care about the action if we care about the people, and we did.

I have a feeling this is going to lead to a Fast and Furious marathon over Christmas.

The end of 7 is really touching and poignant.

I’m not crying you’re crying.

It takes until the fifth one for them to actually make a good movie. 6 tries to recapture the lightning in a bottle of 5 but… eh. Didn’t bother with 7 or 8.

I can’t help but look at this through the lens of – would you think those concessions or assurances would be necessary if the leader was male (both as a character in the story and as audience)? The first proposal is to take an entitled subordinate who clearly disrespects and disobeys direct commands, at repeated cost to the overall mission, and give him special treatment so he will do his job. Additionally, that would reaffirm that his opinion of their decisions was informed or even relevant. The second proposal buys into the validity of the doubt in the leaderships’ decision & judgment – subordinates never get the full picture, but the dynamics of assumed trust (and assumed competence) play very differently for male & female leaders.

BUT FREEZE PEACH.

It’s a fictional representation of very real situations faced by women in positions of power, where no solution is going to satisfy everyone. In this case, any of these choices would weaken their authority, or foster more doubt. I think that’s why the plotline was framed in the way it was, to illuminate the Sophie’s choices that come with female leadership, and the way the deck is stacked. It may have felt awkward as a part of fiction, but it is completely believable as an event that 100% would have happened in this situation.

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Daaaaang, finally saw The Handmaiden. It has supplanted Lady Vengeance as my favorite Park Chan-wook movie. Be gay, do crimes.

Umm, yes, if Holdo was male, I’d expect the same sort of communications with the crew. They don’t need to know all the details of the plan, but some sort of confidence-building statement to reassure them that there was a plan would’ve been beneficial. It’s not just a case of assuming a level of competency or trust in the commanding officer. It’s a case of noticing that crew morale was in the tank and any good officer, male or female, should do what they could in order to boost morale. There have been documented histories of male officers ending up with grenades being thrown into their tents due to letting the morale of their troops getting too bad. The fact that Holdo didn’t end up with more people attempting to mutiny was an affirmation of the trust most of the crew had for her, despite all of them being scared out of their wits.

That may be a separate issue. Women in position of authority in the real world do often face all sorts of complex issues, that is true. Then again, Star Wars generally has always shown female leaders as being respected and capable, so I’m not sure it was necessary to insert a real-world allegory in here.

I just chock it up to bad writing for that plotline.

Edit: and for reference, here’s what the US Army says is required of a good leader. One of the requirements is:

Communicating horizontally and vertically, openly, transparently, and continually.

Holdo failed the communication part. If you read the entire article, you’ll find other examples of where she failed.

From my experience, there are some people, and I fully expect Poe would be one of them, for whom no assurance is good enough, unless it’s their plan. In some contexts, as a woman, you can assure & assure and people will still assume you’re X because they want to. And as a fiction, while it’s nice to assume that reasonable behavior begets reasonable behavior, that’s not how it works, and telling those stories is difficult because of the simplistic expectations of fiction.

Depends on what the purpose of your story telling is, but this Star Wars seemed to want to focus on the parts of the narrative that are repeatedly glossed over real-world weaknesses of the classic hero’s narrative: when the “hero” is wrong, when the “hero” abdicates heroism, when a leader has to deal with unmerited insubordination – and what subordinates are and are not entitled to from a leader, when well meaning people with limited information try to be the heroes, the ways in which they succeed and fail.

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