zslane

Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Chris Platt. Am I missing any?

Yep, that did the trick. Thanks!

Same here.

Well, I want to protest the casting of a white dude as the Vision rather than a red-skinned android like he was in the comics. It's like they deliberately went out of their way to get that wrong!

s/whitewasing/white predominance/ ?

Probably true. The SJWs out there have discovered that shouting loudly and often on social media gives them a disproportionate degree of cultural mindshare.

I guess this just goes to show that some folks never tire of a Big Bad Empire (of some kind) always being the main antagonist in the Star Wars universe. In my view, that along with the endless varieties of planet killers they concoct, is why the movies tend to have a monotonous sameness to them. The trick, I think, is to come up with a new plot structure while keeping the core characters intact. Give them new problems to solve, but with a tone and feel and aesthetic that is unmistakenly "Star Wars".

Maybe a rift within the New Republic that threatened to tear it apart before it even got started would have been potentially interesting. No need for some Empire 2.0 as an external threat. Just seeing Luke, Leia, Han, and company struggling to keep the New Republic together, perhaps with the Sith stirring the pot and forcing Luke to "bring balance" to the Force by training new Jedi to help keep the new peace that will last another thousand generations. The problem with the above scenario is that it's not cynical enough, not "realistic" enough for today's directors (like Rian Johnson) who would rather blow apart institutions like the Jedi Order, depicting them as outdated and corrupt, than allow them to regain their former glory as guardians of light in the universe.

When will we get the backlash backlash?

If Obi-Wan and Yoda are anything to go by, the preordained career path for a top-tier Jedi master is to go to some secluded planet, become a recluse into old age, eventually train a young hero for a day or two, and then pass away in a moment of complete Force Enlightenment. Luke is merely conforming to proper Star Wars tradition.

Ah, right, thank you for the correction. They are easy to confuse when the only difference in their names are three or four letters in the middle. Nevertheless, it is one thing to say that Starfleet has de-emphasized its military culture post-TOS, but another thing all together to say Starfleet was never a military organization (which you might not be saying, but which others definitely seem to be saying or at least strongly implying). Even with its subsequent peace-pursuing posture, Starfleet was still a military entity at its core, just with an expanded non-military role to play. After all, maintaining a galaxy-wide peace requires walking softly and carrying a very big stick (i.e., an effective military).

I'm guessing that Thor: Ragnarok opened his eyes to the character's full potential. Next up: The Ballad of Beta Ray Bill. please please please...

Humanity may have rid itself of many of its societal ills by Archer's time, but encountering war-centric alien species necessitated the construction of a competent military. This was even more necessary once it was no longer only Earth that needed protecting, but an entire Federation of united planets, not all of which had the resources to deploy their own space navies. Just because the Enterprise (NCC-1701), a Constellation-class heavy cruiser (a warship class), had been given an exploration mission does not mean Starfleet was solely--or even primarily--an exploration organization. The Enterprise's mission reflected only one small corner of Starfleet's overall charter.

It seems to me there are some fans who are every bit as desperate as Roddenberry was later in life to defang Starfleet. Neither have been very convincing. Particularly since nobody in an executive position within the Federation would have allowed the dismantling of its defense force. Few members of the Federation would have voted for such a thing. Starfleet is, and always was, first and foremost a military entity. It has remained so, to one degree or another, in every incarnation of the franchise ever put to screen, big or small.

"Superheroes in the real world," is an oxymoron.

I thought bringing balance to Force referred to the fact that Vader had hunted the Jedi to extinction, leaving only the Sith and their devotion to the dark side to reign supreme, as it were. Luke was meant to train a new generation of Jedi to balance the scales. It doesn't make sense to me that this so-called "balance" was supposed to be embodied by a single individual. Well, that's why I wrote "(in movie form)" in my post; to qualify the fact that I only consider the movies as canon. Sure, maybe we can consider the Clone Wars garbage as canon too, but that material didn't involve Luke in any case.

I found it to be pretty dull, to be honest. Not much originality was displayed. But being dull and predictable wasn't the worst part. I kind of felt that they wanted the world to feel like it had this deep, rich history with these races, but it just didn't work for me. Too much would be different, in my view, if there had been these fantasy races around for thousands of years, including some great battle with an unimaginably powerful evil entity. They wanted to eat their cake and have it too, with a modern world just like ours but with a history completely different from ours. That just doesn't compute for me. The lack of imagination applied to the names of things was astonishing to me as well. I would have given the creators major points for coming up with unique names for their fantasy elements rather than rehashing clichéd terms like orcs, elves, dwarves, and faeries. And do you mean to tell me they couldn't come up with a better name than "Dark Lord"? Seriously? Or a better term than "magic wand"? This is the laziest kind of world-building there is. It seems like they exhausted their entire creative brain budget coming up with the names Inferni and Shield of Light. And, of course, the movie clumsily telegraphed the fact that Will Smith would be a bright almost right from the beginning. There was nothing I was impressed by in this movie except maybe for how badass Noomi Rapace was.

We have no evidence (in movie form) that Luke became a paragon of Jedi virtues (like Obi-Wan) after the end of Return of the Jedi. Yes, he stepped back from the edge of giving in completely to the dark side by not killing Vader, but we have no way of knowing if he was able to forever resist his darker impulses afterwords. I think fans just assume that he did, and fiercely protect this mythical version of him. Do we know where Lucas was planning to take the Luke character in his own version of episodes 7-9?

I'd very much like to see a citation to a canon source that supports this assertion. Frankly, it makes no sense whatsoever. The Federation has been involved in numerous wars since its inception, and engaging in warfare requires a military. Its officers have military ranks and follow a military chain of command. Civilian vessels do not do this, apart from recognizing the captain of a vessel as its top authority while at sea (civilian maritime organizations do not have admirals, for instance). And all militaries serving a democracy are ultimately under civilian oversight (just like all of our military branches). That does not make them non-militaries. Unless Star Trek has utterly redefined the word military (and for no particularly useful reason I can think of), it is quite plain that Starfleet is a military organization.

Part of the confusion, I think, is that longcoats and knee-high boots are more closely associated with WW2. German field kits of WW1 were more commonly waistcoats and knee-high socks. The Germans in Veld definitely looked more like their future Wehrmacht brethren than like typical WW1 Grenadiers (which they would have been given that they were merely an occupation garrison of less than company strength).

#EwokLivesMatter ?

It's good news for The Gifted, but its long-term future is still up in the air due to the Disney purchase.

That sounds like a shrewd move to me. The DCEU is probably a lost cause; DC/WB should cut their losses while they can and just focus on making good individual movies, rather than trying to build a shared universe, something they've been completely incompetent at doing thus far.

This trilogy is eliminating the old characters, one by one, in order to pass the torch on to a new generation of heroes. I'm sure Rian Johnson feels that Luke's passing was both peaceful and self-sacrificial and therefore very Jedi-like. But after seeing how JJ Abrams dispatched Han Solo in TFA, I was, like, "Whatever," when I saw Luke die because it became clear to me that Disney is just clearing the decks of the old Star Wars to make room for the new Star Wars.

You are the first to say this. At least you are disagreeing with something I am actually asserting.