SPOILERS - The Force Awakens
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A thread to discuss The Force Awakens.
This will be full of spoilers.
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So, how good was it?
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SW is my favorite genre, so I have intense feelings about it, both good and bad. I'd say it was average, but scratched a long awaited itch, making it feel much more satisfying than it would have felt otherwise.
My most glaring thought is that I'm intensely disappointed with the recycled plots. I expected much more.
The death star/planet: The only thing that could have saved that would be a different outcome. Perhaps the bad guys learned from their previous failures from multiple other movies. Nope. A handful of enemies infiltrates their base to allow their superweapon to be easily destroyed just moments before they crush their opposition, while also being the only ones to escape the destruction. Apparently those memos on security upgrades, along with evacuation procedures got lost somewhere. The fact that they upped the power level on the doomsday device did nothing to temper the disappointment in a practically identical 'destroy the doomsday device before it destroys us' SW plotline.
The other recycled elements weren't as bad, if you ignore the cheese factor. For example, the lost Jedi master plotline. BB-8's missing piece of Luke's location supposedly matches 'no known charted space', then ends up to be an unaltered, fairly large section right in the middle of the known galaxy somewhere near the mid to outer rim. They couldn't even do some visual flip or refraction on the image to give it some type of encrypted value to explain why it wasn't recognized initially? Seems lazy, but ultimately forgivable.
And for those flipping out about Han, a major father figure character dies at the end of the first movie in each of the trilogies (all by way of lightsaber), so that should not have been too shocking or unexpected. Sad, but it was definitely powerful. So it gets a plus in my book.
As someone who did not hate the original trilogies, I did not hate this movie either. But I didn't love it as much as I had hoped I would.
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I loved it in every conceivable way. My only tiny reservation was at the very end -- Chewie is right there when they find Luke, and he doesn't go up to see one of his oldest friends in the world but instead they send a girl he's never met? It didn't make sense.
Yes, I'm nitpicking.
Han died. Wow. I guess Harrison Ford got his wish - if anyone feels like it, this is a kickass interview he gave to Rolling Stone. The guy is really smart and completely candid about his feelings on film-making and people in general.
Also, I loved Rey. They got a female action heroine right; she's not written as a man with boobs, she's an interesting character who happens to kick ass. And wields a mean lightsaber. Awesome.
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Also, apparently there's some controversy about Rey and whether she's too perfect or not feminist enough.
Pah.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel said:
Also, apparently there's some controversy about Rey and whether she's too perfect or not feminist enough.
Pah.
Right, because Max Landis has so much to say about writing. Go back to writing indie comic book movies and producing shorts wherein you overanalyze and pontificate about Superman (talk about a Gary Stu), Max. Leave actual literature alone--we need you to, if criticism of Victor Frankenstein is anything to go by.
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@Warma-Sheen said:
BB-8's missing piece of Luke's location supposedly matches 'no known charted space', then ends up to be an unaltered, fairly large section right in the middle of the known galaxy somewhere near the mid to outer rim. They couldn't even do some visual flip or refraction on the image to give it some type of encrypted value to explain why it wasn't recognized initially? Seems lazy, but ultimately forgivable.
Well, let's not forget that space is big. Like, unbelievably big. So big, in fact, that it's doubtful they've explored even a fraction of the stars in that galaxy, and probably just use the ones that are major landmarks for their stellar cartography in much the same way that we do for maps of the milky way. Advanced technology or not, there is only so much of space that a handful of species can conceivably explore in a finite amount of time. Assuming that their galaxy is on par with the Milky Way, even if they explored one million new stars every year, it would take them a hundred thousand years to chart and explore every star in the galaxy, so the fact that the section of the map they had didn't match any known system is rather conceivable. If you take a map consisting of a hundred billion dots and look at just a part of it at a really close scale, and then think of all the possible ways to get from dot A to dot B all the way over on the other side of the map -safely-, then that's not really a stretch at all.
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@Arkandel said:
I loved it in every conceivable way. My only tiny reservation was at the very end -- Chewie is right there when they find Luke, and he doesn't go up to see one of his oldest friends in the world but instead they send a girl he's never met? It didn't make sense.
I didn't find that to be off much. In fact I noticed that right away too, but my first thought was: I probably wouldn't want to see him right now either. As much as we the fans love Luke and wanted to see him. Han (and we can only assume Chewie feels the same) did not particularly really want to put much effort into find him. They probably felt abandoned and were happy to forget about him. Especially since Han entrusted his son to Luke and in his care Kylo Ren turned out to be an evil psycho killer. At that point in the movie, Chewie has also lost Han because of Luke's failure with Kylo Ren.
I probably wouldn't be jumping up and down for joy at seeing Luke either. I don't even know if I'd want him to be found. So I was right there with Chewie in not jumping at the chance to find him. What do you say? Even if you take the reverse view and have sympathy for Luke. He hid himself away because of his failure. Are you gonna be so eager to tell him that on top of everything else, his failure killed Han too? Its a tough call all around.
Rey, on the other hand, has just heard legends about this great and mystical person so she's super eager to find him. So naive... it was great. I thought it was perfect how she bounds up and offers him the lightsaber and he just kind of stands there and looks at it. She's the only one there on that island who doesn't quite 'get it'.
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Another thing I liked was the way power levels fluctuated throughout the movie. Kylo Ren, for all that he lost like a chump at the end, was incredibly powerful - the guy stopped blasters in mid-air, that's pretty impressive. He did things with the Force we haven't seen in the movies so far.
Then he went down to Rey which made him look bad since she's completely untrained and only figured out how to do half this stuff about an hour before their fight) even though he was wounded at the time.
It's hard to say yet if this trilogy is about Ben's redemption or if it'll be dedicated to the rise of the Jedi but I think it's more of the former, especially given how some tropes are being replayed from the original trilogy so far. The lone orphan on a desert planet finding a droid containing the information leading to the last Jedi in the galady, the ending where a small ragtag team infiltrates and destroys a planet-killing machine, etc.
At this point though I think the galaxy would be safer if they just sterilized every damn Skywalker around. Man do they have a tendency to get a lot of people murdered until they figure their shit out.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel said:
At this point though I think the galaxy would be safer if they just sterilized every damn Skywalker around. Man do they have a tendency to get a lot of people murdered until they figure their shit out.
Amen to that.
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@Arkandel said:
Another thing I liked was the way power levels fluctuated throughout the movie. Kylo Ren, for all that he lost like a chump at the end, was incredibly powerful - the guy stopped blasters in mid-air, that's pretty impressive. He did things with the Force we haven't seen in the movies so far.
Then he went down to Rey which made him look bad since she's completely untrained and only figured out how to do half this stuff about an hour before their fight) even though he was wounded at the time.
There could be a ton of reasons for this. For starters, Kylo doesn't really seem like much of a lightsabre duelist. His swings are broad and powerful but lack any real skill, whereas Rey at least showed very early on to be a capable weapon user (sure, it was a staff, but once you're a Jedi, who cares what you're holding?) while Finn, as a new generation of Stormtrooper, was probably trained in using a charge staff (the thing one of them uses to fight him when he's holding the sabre). Plus, at that point, Kylo is wounded, tired, and let's not forget: he just murdered his own father. What, emotional toll doesn't count in a fight? Never mind that he's trying to convince Rey to swing his way.
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This is from Reddit, not my own words.
"When you get into armed martial arts (especially something developed for agility and speed) like WuShu or the various Shao Lin Kung Fu forms, one of your major strategies is to go blade to blade, because your opponent will be using their similar speed and agility (swinging from cables non withstanding) to block In a way that enables them to instantly counter attack agressively. You go blade to blade in a very practiced routine to try to work your opponent's blade into a position to attack, without the counter attack. Also to work your opponents center of gravity over their heels.
If you do that you throw off their center of balance, and this takes away some of your opponent's agility and strength, because they have to use those resources to keep their feet. Especially if two opponents know each other and each others combat styles strengths and weaknesses, even in a competitive environment it can look choreographed.
So those kinds of scenes actually fit the prequels quite well.In the originals we have a different situation. Yoda and Obi-Wan are teaching Luke to be a weapon, not a martial artist. Kind of like the difference between Bruce Lee (absolutely a lethal guy) and a samurai warrior. In fact the sword master hired for the originals based lightsaber combat on single katana combat. It's more direct and designed for single hit kill. Extremely fast but very aggressive and linear moving.
Both kinds of fighting, martial arts and combat, are just as lethal but they're very different.
This kind of combat fits Obi-Wan, Vader and Luke very well. Vader is wearing heavy (Saber resistant) armor. Obi-Wan is not only older and less agile (the force could make up for that though) but Vader is a very different opponent now, and his strategy is to survive long enough for Luke to witness his sacrifice. Now he needs to stop each potentially lethal attack as they happen. Luke is almost on a suicide mission against a titan, and needs to get the upper hand fast. He needs to win at Street Fighter, not chess. Two hand Katana fits these movies with these characters perfectly.
It also makes sense because it keeps the blade in a very tight controlled area, with most of the moves keeping your own blade (made out of magnetically contained plasma) as far from you as possible for most of the fight.So now we have TFA. Kylo Ren is using what essentially boils down to a German or Scottish bastard sword. I used to do SCA tournament combat, and what Ren is doing looks very similar to 11th or 12th century German. He has a lot of flourish though. It's for camera so there's going to be telegraphing. European medieval combat was both for duels and for on field warfare, and this is where we find Ren. Vader comes to a battle, leads and single targets. Ren leads and is in the middle of the battle.
Fin is opportunistically striking, he's not a highly trained martial combatant, and Rey is an efficient street brawler. She only gains an upper hand by calming herself into the force and using its potential.
All of these styles were chosen for their era in the Star Wars timeline and fit very well."
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I know Abrams actually talked about the difference between the fighting styles in the original trilogy versus the prequels and him preferring the less refined, more brutal fights of the original trilogy. I've always agreed with that thought, so I was excited to see fights more in line with that style. And that's a great Reddit quote about it, so thanks for posting that.
Overall? I was kind of underwhelmed. There were moments that I really liked and that I found very affecting, but I actually spent long stretches of the movie a bit unenthused. I'm wondering if a second viewing will let me relax a bit more and be more into it.
One thing I've been bothered by, though: why Ben? That is, why the name? Like, it was Obi-Wan's alias, to begin with, and neither Han nor Leia were the ones close to Obi-Wan. Luke was the one with the close personal connection to him. It just felt like a strange choice to me. I guess it could be more of a note of respect -- Obi-Wan was integral in rescuing Leia and beginning the journey of the trio together -- than personal.
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Who else were they gonna name him after? If they had gone with Anakin only to see the damn kid fall to the Dark Side again... well, then they'd have been asking for it, wouldn't they?
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel CLEARLY THEY SHOULD HAVE NAMED HIM CHEWIE. Chewie would never fall to the Dark Side.
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@Roz said:
I know Abrams actually talked about the difference between the fighting styles in the original trilogy versus the prequels and him preferring the less refined, more brutal fights of the original trilogy. I've always agreed with that thought, so I was excited to see fights more in line with that style. And that's a great Reddit quote about it, so thanks for posting that.
Overall? I was kind of underwhelmed. There were moments that I really liked and that I found very affecting, but I actually spent long stretches of the movie a bit unenthused. I'm wondering if a second viewing will let me relax a bit more and be more into it.
One thing I've been bothered by, though: why Ben? That is, why the name? Like, it was Obi-Wan's alias, to begin with, and neither Han nor Leia were the ones close to Obi-Wan. Luke was the one with the close personal connection to him. It just felt like a strange choice to me. I guess it could be more of a note of respect -- Obi-Wan was integral in rescuing Leia and beginning the journey of the trio together -- than personal.
"Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope."
Hardly a passerby in Leia's life. And "Obi-Wan" is a shit name. Ben is better.
They should have named him Wedge, though.
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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@Coin He was her only hope because she knew he had helped her family decades before. BUT I GUESS HE DID SAVE HER AND LUKE WHEN THEY WERE BORN AND STUFF fine.
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Also Obi-Wan is for some reason very underrated when it comes to what a badass he was. The guy took out every damn Sith he ever fought - from a certain point of view, including his last fight.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel That's certainly true. Don't get me wrong, I love Obi-Wan!
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Okay, that was fucking amazing. My first thought watching it was 'This is the Star Wars I remember.' My second thought watching it was 'This IS the Star Wars I remember.' I don't care. It was amazing. It was a fantastic story the first time and it still is. I consider it an homage to Star Wars in addition to advancing the story and being a damn fine movie in its own right.
I remember watching the original when it first came out in the theater and this took me right back to it. I'll be less pleased if the next two movies are just retellings as well but this brought it alive again.
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It's Finn's expression in the bottom panel that has me in stitches every fucking time.
