Star Wars: The Force Awakens... More of a gripe than a question. spoilers within?

Cannot disagree with you there @Esedess I too wondered the same thing.

@rojo I know they won’t, but it’d be nice if they actually acknowledged that incident and made it a new weapon moving forward.

…not that it would “fix” the franchise by any means.

*Last Jedi
“Why the hell isn’t that a weapon?”
Because the writer is a hack. Introducing a solution to a problem, without thinking about what effects this would have on the world and its rules previously established.
That is also how you get scenes that give big fat middle fingers to the set-ups from the previous film.
That whole plot about bringing back the laser sword to Luke? He throws it off the cliff, like it was a piece of junk.
The big bad built up in the last movie, Snoke? Gets killed like a chump.

*whoops, you’re right

How can a person who has successfully made a career and millions off writing, be so inept?
So many people think more effectively in these matters. I don’t doubt that you or I could do a better job of it. I’ve been lead to believe that Hollywood is an intensely competitive industry. But then how do these hacks keep ending up at the wheel of these huge productions? It doesn’t make sense to me…

“Why the hell isn’t that a weapon?”
– As @ragingloli wrote: Because stupid authors who don’t care about continuity or making sense and who lack any kind of tactical thinking continue to make Disney Star Wars films.

“How can a person who has successfully made a career and millions off writing, be so inept?”
– Because Hollywood screenwriter/publisher culture is the way it is, sadly. The screenwriters I have met have all been tunnel-vision-fixated on making a compelling “pitch” for a story (often even when they aren’t pitching a script), trying to make some idea out to be hypnotically fascinating in the way they present it . . . which is not about rationality or understanding situations or having anything really make sense. Sigh.

I think that very often part of the element of what makes a Hollywood film idea or plot point seem fascinating for a moment if you’ve disengaged your critical thinking skills, is that it doesn’t make sense and would never happen, and you subconsciously know that but it seems fascinating and magical until you realize why… and some people are willing to vegetate along with very low bars for plausibility… and I think Hollywood in general tends to have let that bar sink lower, and lower… (Or maybe the entire culture in the USA has. See our journalism and political candidates!)

@Esedess
Because the movies still make money. That is all that studios care about.
There is no other explanation for, for example, Damon Lindelof still getting work.

And somehow, Rian Johnson still got 2 nominations for “best writing”.

Kind of makes you nostalgic for The Phantom Menace…

No.

Eh, there was really only one good star wars movie and two more that were “ok”
The last Jedi was worse than the phantom menace. At least the phantom menace had darth maul.

I mostly enjoyed watching each of the prequel films the first time I saw each of them (and the second time I saw the second one). But they all suffered the more I thought about the dumb aspects of them.

Before The Force Awakens, I tried to re-watch & like the prequels, even heavily critical-fan-edited versions, and I couldn’t even make myself sit through them. But TFA and TLJ mostly annoyed me as I was watching them for the first time, and it just gets worse the more I think about them.

I honestly don’t know much about how light speed transportation works in the Star Wars universe. I do know that the movie very carefully framed the light speed collision as a move of last resort, done out of desperation, (and that it only worked because of certain circumstances like the First Order ships not realizing what was being done until it was too late to act). Based on that, I’m willing to believe there are legitimate reasons why it’s not used as a normal weapon in the rest of the franchise—reasons that, in this particular case, were overshadowed by the desperation of the situation. That’s how the event was framed.

And if we look through the Star Wars universe and find that there really isn’t any reason for this technology to not be used this way… isn’t that more of a plot hole in the Star Wars universe as a whole, rather than in this latest movie? To have had a technology as powerful as light speed be presented as ubiquitous as it is, and then not use it to its full potential? (I mean, collisions have clearly always been possible in the universe. Isn’t it in the very first movie that Han explains to Luke the necessity of calculating a precise path, lest they crash into a tiny piece of debris that destroys the ship? Yet the previous movies never had to explain why this technology wasn’t already weaponized.)

Perhaps that’s where the upset at this scene is coming from—that a previously unrealized plot hole has been realized (not introduced). (But again, that wasn’t something the movie itself was saying, given the way it framed the scene).

I really liked The Last Jedi. I thought it was remarkably respectful and aware of the movies that came before it while also (quite explicitly) taking the story forward—something which is necessary for the franchise to last.