DragoonKain

I took the day off and saw the new Looney Tunes movie. Loved it. Very refreshing to see a traditionally animated movie in theaters, and with two iconic characters.

I was really happy to see the old DAFFY Daffy Duck back from the 30s and 40s. I feel like his character became more of an arrogant heel in the 50s and he lost a lot of his daffiness. This was definitely a throwback to the old Clampett/Avery Looney Tunes as oppposed to the Chuck Jones loony Tunes.

It's the best Looney Tunes feature length film I've seen. Not that they've had many good ones (and I'm not counting Roger Rabbit since that was more of a Disney/WB collab). It's a shame the marketing was so bad on this. I didn't even know it was in theaters until I saw it on the sign at my local movie theater. I think it would have done better with better marketing.

But it's not too late, it's still in theaters. Bring your kids ... or just go yourself. I think most adults will enjoy this too, especially if they grew up watching Looney Tunes and want to see these classic characters making us laugh again the way they used to.

Let's get the good stuff out of the way first. There were great visuals and sound. You can tell they took a lot of influence from the Peter Jackson films. It almost seems like this is supposed to be a prequel to those films, but since they recast Galadriel and Elrond and changed their characters so significantly, I'm guessing it's their own standalone thing, which is fine ... as long as it's good. But it isn't sadly.

So here's the bad stuff. First there were too many plot threads too early on. I understand they are adapting an epic story rich with lore. But you shouldn't front load your show with so many plot threads and characters. They need to give the viewer time to get invested. And they don't They jump from scene to scene, often times not even telling you the characters names. There's no time to get invested in any of them.

As someone who has read the books and is familiar with the lore, I was able to follow it and stay engaged, but I noticed my friends who hadn't read the books and were only familiar with the Peter Jackson films found it rather boring and confusing. They said the characters weren't very engaging or like-able and I must admit, Cate Blanchett's version of Galadriel was way more interesting and like-able than this one. As was Hugo Weaving's Elrond. I understand those actors are 20 years older since they filmed LOTR, and elves aren't supposed to age, but honestly I still would have preferred if they kept the original actors.

It also wasn't very faithful to the source material. There were a lot of deviations that contradicted what was written. Just a few examples off the top of my head: there aren't supposed to be Hobbits/Harfoots in the second age, Galadriel is supposed to married with kids by this point in the story, and the timeline is way too compressed. The period of time they covered just in the first two episodes was thousands of years in the books, but you don't get any sense of that scale of time. Nor do you get any sense of the great distance these characters seem to be "fast traveling" constantly throughout the show. When you read the books, you get the sense that this is a vast land that takes months to journey through, and that the history of this world is rich and full of depth. This world just seems like a super-simplified dumbed down version of Middle Earth. But not simplified enough for a non-book reader to be able to follow because of the all the plot threads.

And that's just scratching the surface. There were were many other examples of places where they contradicted Tolkien's lore. But if I went to all of them I would run out and space and I don't want to get into spoilers. I understand they didn't have the rights to the Silmarillion or the History of Middle Earth Books, so they had to base this story entirely on the summaries that appeared in the Appendices to Lord of the Rings. They had to fill in the details with their own story. I get that. But that doesn't mean they should deviate so far that they contradict what was already established by Tolkien. Especially if it makes the story worse. There are plenty of Tolkien experts out there who would have freely helped them stay true to Tolkien's vision. But I guess they had their own vision and didn't care enough to follow Tolkien's. It reminded me of the last season of Game of Thrones when the show runners ran out of source material that they were willing to adapt and rushed to the ending in a haphazard and over-simplified way. But at least the other seasons of Game of Thrones were good. This show lost its way right out of the gate.

In summary, I can't really recommend it. Maybe check it out of you're a Tolkien fan and want to see how they adapted it, but even then it's probably not worth your time. There are better shows out there. I give it a 4/10, which is generous. I enjoyed the visuals, and as a fan of Tolkien I still found myself interested in seeing someone else's interpretation. But I think they could have done a much better job adapting these stories. Maybe it will get better in future episodes. We can only hope. But I fear the damage is already done, it might be too late to salvage. I just wish show runners were spend a little more time and effort getting the script right before spending 1 billion dollars on a show.

First let me say that, like all Star Wars movies, I enjoyed this movie while watching it and was on my Star Wars high immediately after seeing it. "Star Wars High" is that great feeling you get after watching a Star Wars movie that allows you to ignore all the "fridge logic" that will make you question whether the movie was actually good or not after seeing it. If you don't know what "fridge logic" is, just google the term, you'll laugh. Star Wars movies have always had a lot of fridge logic, but episodes 8 and 9 were particularly bad when it came to plot holes, unanswered questions and things that just didn't make sense.

This trilogy had the same problem Lost did. JJ Abrams wrote the beginning and the end but let other writers take over for the middle and the ending didn't fit anymore, but it was still awkwardly tacked on. The biggest problem this film had was that it had to continue the story where episode 8 left off. Rian Johnson didn't leave JJ Abrams with much to work with. Episode 8 ended on a dead end, not a cliff hanger. Johnson had written the trilogy into a corner and Abrams had the unenviable task of undoing a lot of what Johnson had written so that he could conclude the story in a satisfying way. He wasn't entirely successful unfortunately, and as a result it seemed more like two movies crammed into one. It was so fast paced that it was hard to follow the plot, and what I was able to follow just seemed like a retelling of "Return of the Jedi" with different characters. But this was the problem I had with all the movies in this trilogy. Ep7 was basically an inferior remake of Ep4, Ep8 an inferior remake of Ep 5 and this one an inferior remake of Ep6. Could they have made something more original and satisfying? Let's examine how this trilogy could have been improved.

There was that great moment in Ep8 where Rey was about to join with Kylo. This was the best moment of that film, and I think if they had the balls to have her join with him it would have saved that movie. It would have truly been "subverting expectations". Rey could have become a powerful villain who continued being tempted by the dark side and then in this film they could have had Kylo save her from the Dark Side. This would have made these movies a lot better ... but I'm not sure it's enough to make it a great trilogy.

The root of the problem goes back to Ep7. The worst part of Ep7 wasn't so much that it was a total rehash of Ep4, it was the fact that everything the good guys accomplished in the original trilogy had been undone by the start of Ep7. The Empire had risen again as The First Order and had more powerful weapons than before. The "New Republic" was in ashes and was reduced to an even weaker resistance than the earlier rebellion. As much as it tried to honor the OT, it took a dump on it.

The Empire was basically the Third Reich in space. Like the nazis, they lost the big war and were forever seen as a force of pure evil. Neo-nazis are a joke today and anyone who tries to revive their hateful ideology is pretty much universally shunned. The idea that Neo-Nazis could rise again to the same level the actual Nazis had, a la The First Order, just isn't realistic. BUT, it is a lot more likely that a different group could unknowingly become just as fascist even while claiming that they are fighting fascism.

Perhaps what they should have done is, instead of a First Order that tries to continue where the Empire left off, there should have been a separatist faction that split off because they felt the New Republic was becoming just as totalitarian as the Empire. Meanwhile, the New Republic sees the separatists as fascist and under control of a Palpatine like figure that is misleading them. Both sides see each other as evil and under control of the dark side, and perhaps it turns out both are correct (Palpatine is leading both sides to war with each other behind the scenes, like he did in the prequels).

It would have been more similar to the prequels in this regard, yes, but the one good thing about the prequels was that the overall story and themes were very good, original, and an excellent allegory to what is going on today even if the execution was poor. They would have retold a story that needed to be retold in an improved way, not one that was already done to near perfection.

Perhaps I am wrong and these changes would have made things worse. After all, I did enjoy these films while watching them. But in order for new Star Wars movies to have a lasting impact in the same way the original trilogy did, they need to have a strong story in addition to great execution. This trilogy delivered, for the most part, on the latter, but not so much on the former ... sort of the opposite of the prequel trilogy that had a great overall story, but missed the mark in many regards on the execution.