So... Star Wars [Spoilers]

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Post by Occluded Sun »

Eh, I'm not angry, just somewhat disappointed. I was hoping for another "Empire Strikes Back", which I acknowledge is unreasonable.

Like the prequels, I've seen the first in the series, and I think I'll let the next movies be.
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Post by erik »

Occluded Sun wrote:Admit it: 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' stinks -- and here's why

The article is far less critical and contentious than the headline, which is kind of a shame, because I think a lot of people are thinking that.
Goddamn me for clicking to read an OS post. I'll be doublegoddamned if I click on that clickbait article. You think a lot of people are thinking that? Based upon the Billion plus dollars in ticket sales over a week? Based upon movie theaters having extended hours showings due to crazy demand and repeat viewings. Yeah, I think any other franchise would murder people to be that unliked.

Star Wars was not the bestest movie ever but it is was good and very entertaining. I wouldn't mind watching it again even. Phantom Menace ruined me on Star Wars such that I never really watched the next two. This movie just guaranteed that I will watch the next one.

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Post by Kaelik »

As resident EU geek + Star Wars nerd, I'll toss in another argument planetary shields are still really fucking useful even if the Falcon can jump past them:

1) Hyperspace transport is prevented by gravity wells.
2) More powerful hyperspace engines can jump to hyperspace from closer into a gravity well (allegedly Duros invented the a more powerful hyperdrive in the super mega distant past that allowed them to make jumps in locations other people where dropped to realspace by gravity wells.)
3) Smaller ships are easier to bring to hyperspace closer to gravity wells (specifically referenced with several different escape from Star Destroyer scenes in a few books)
4) The Falcon has a powerful hyperdrive and is a small ship.
Conclusion: You aren't getting anything bigger than the Falcon, or even as big as the Falcon, inside the planetary shields because the gravity well will prevent hyperspace, and they will instead crash into the shields.

But hey, while talking about Asteroids and planetary shields, did you know that the Yuhzan Vong crashed a bunch of ships full of refugees into the Planetary shields of Coruscant to overload them. So if a planet is entirely dependent upon Planetary shields, and you have time and money to fit a bunch of engines to Asteroids, you don't even need to hyperspace jump them, you can just crash them at high speed until the shields break, then keep crashing them.
Last edited by Kaelik on Tue Dec 29, 2015 11:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Mechalich »

Jumping out inside a planetary shield isn't supposed to work because getting that close to a gravity well in hyperspace is supposed to splatter your vessel across the extradimensional space as a fine blue mist. In fact, star wars hyperdrives are supposed to have emergency systems that pull you out of hyperspace if you get too close to a gravity well (though it may already be too late anyway) and Han presumably had to disable his and manage some sort of split-second impossible transition to accomplish this particular feat. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but of course, since detailed discussions of Star Wars sci-fi physics kind of depended on EU expansions on the movies, its hard to discuss them practically anymore and perhaps the rules have simply been changed.

I mean, the Resistance were somehow able to communicate with Poe's strikeforce while they were still in hyperspace which isn't supposed to be possible in Star Wars either and is actually a pretty fundamental function of the setting - otherwise the Falcon can't open up a lead on the pursuing Death Star and Yavin base is destroyed before the Rebels can even launch.
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Post by Hadanelith »

Yeah, the communication in hyperspace took my partner straight out of the movie for a good 15 minutes. She was just awestruck at how big a fuck up that was. Me, I was too irritated by the Falcon dropping out of hyperspace inside planetary atmosphere to notice that particular gaff. Seriously, the Interdictor has become canon again (apparently it showed up in Rebels), which means that hyperdrives CANNOT DO THAT (because mass shadows). Also, the entire 'firing Starkiller Base' sequence. What the actual *fuck* was Abrams smoking when he thought that was a good idea? Damn it Abrams, you had one job...
Did Disney fire that guy whose only job was keeping continuity straight? Because seriously.
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Post by name_here »

*ahem*
Wookiepedia on hyperspace wrote:In addition to navigational hazards, there was also the difficulty inherent in communicating with a starship while traveling at hyperspeed. Since ships in hyperspace did not exist, in a conventional sense, they were largely cut off from conventional radio or subspace communication, since wavelengths of any signal would be massively distorted even if they reached the vessel. Hypercomm signals could reach a vessel in hyperspace, however it was very difficult to communicate in even this fashion unless the signal was sent from one end or the other of the traveling ship's course, or between ships on the same course
The precise hyperspace physics in the new series are as yet unestablished. In the old canon, it was actually possible to penetrate an interdiction field with the correct equipment. Emerging within a planetary atmosphere is presumably stupidly dangerous and probably requires an advanced hyperdrive, which the Falcon totally has, courtesy of being the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Force Awakens referenced making the Kessel Run in X Parsecs...which as we have been over before are a unit of *distance* not time. Ergo, any justification of in setting physics is going to involve logical and linguistic contortions severe enough to swap cause and effect.

Sure, we can say that claim has to do with how the Falcon's navcomp is sly enough to cut light-years off a standard interstellar smuggling run or we can say that it was Han just trying to fast talk the rubes with some technical sounding mumbo jumbo - but the truth is that Star Wars facts and figures have always been ill-defined and so contradictory that much suspension of disbelief / mind caulk has always been essential to viewers' enjoyment.
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Post by Kaelik »

Josh_Kablack wrote:Force Awakens referenced making the Kessel Run in X Parsecs...which as we have been over before are a unit of *distance* not time. Ergo, any justification of in setting physics is going to involve logical and linguistic contortions severe enough to swap cause and effect.

Sure, we can say that claim has to do with how the Falcon's navcomp is sly enough to cut light-years off a standard interstellar smuggling run
Yeah, you know, that "standard" run next to a giant cluster of black holes.

Look, I mean, you can hate the EU's justification for Lucas not knowing what a Parsec is, but you can't reference it but then pretend it is something totally different.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

EDIT:

Yeah, if a film is popular enough the nerdfans get paid to provide the mindcaulk to cover up initial errors. Give it a couple months and that will happen with all the "errors" in Force Awakens the way it did with Episodes IV-VI
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Wed Dec 30, 2015 5:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by TarkisFlux »

Yeah, the hypercomm thing was annoying, but I think the implications about its timing are even worse. They get the hypercomm approval and then they drop out right where they need to be. Which means either they just happened to get the timing exactly right or you can just sit in hyperspace until it's time for you to drop out and do whatever. The former is extremely unlikely and wouldn't have required the hypercomm in the first place. The second strongly means you can just wait in hyperspace until your base in an alternate system (that is getting real time updates about your target system) gives you the okay to drop out and do your job. It's a better strategy in every possible way than the one used in Jedi, where they threw wave after wave of their own ships at them while they waited for the shields to drop.

As a narrative choice / device it also makes the universe feel so much smaller. Or maybe I just felt that way after all of the other choices they made that made the universe feel smaller.
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Post by erik »

I don't even care about the physics quandaries. As Harrison Ford supposedly said to Mark Hamill. "It's not that kind of movie kid." You have noises in space for ghost's sake.

I did mistakenly think the planet killer thing was really close to those other planets, otherwise they should have shown some wormholes being opened or something since that was very misleading and dumb. But not critical to the story, just badly illustrated. They have an interstellar super weapon, fine. Just don't fuck up the next one so much. And there will be a next one.

All I'll say further on the physics aspect is that the movie has laid to rest the notion that Han was fast talking the rubes about the parsecs since other characters know of that tale legitimately and get corrected by Han for getting the number wrong. So they doubled down on it not being nonsense.

And they totally could have spent more time with exposition explaining what the fuck the First Order was, and what the Resistance was. If you're starting with a text crawl about those two then that's the least you can fuckin do.
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Post by Dogbert »

erik wrote:I don't even care about the physics quandaries.
It's okay, Star Wars doesn't either, if the actual definition of a Parsec is any indicative.

Personally I loved the movie through and through as a love letter to the first trilogy. My only complain were the lightsaber duels, which were a huge step backwards. Episode III had finally given us actual sword fighting choreogaphies, with the young jedi using fencing while the elders used kendo, whereas Ep. VII goes back to two idiots waving laser pointers around like arthritic children playing pirates.
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Post by Maxus »

I actually liked that. Who the hell was around to train them in old-school lightsaber combat? Even Luke didn't get trained.
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Post by Kaelik »

Josh_Kablack wrote:EDIT:

Yeah, if a film is popular enough the nerdfans get paid to provide the mindcaulk to cover up initial errors. Give it a couple months and that will happen with all the "errors" in Force Awakens the way it did with Episodes IV-VI
If your version of nerdfans includes people paid by Lucas Arts to produce content that makes more money for Lucas Arts, then I have to question why JJ Abrams doesn't count as a nerdfan.

And if he does I have to question if anyone besides you wants to hold to your super super dumb system where you criticize everything that isn't a couple movies you decided you liked.
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Post by Dogbert »

Maxus wrote:I actually liked that. Who the hell was around to train them in old-school lightsaber combat?
Fuck Star Wars d20, a blade is a blade, and Stormtroopers are career soldiers in a fantasy setting. It makes sense Finn knows at least the basics of how to wield a sabre, let alone Kylo Ren, who was supposedly trained in the Jedi Academi that existed off-camera before the mouse nuked it along with the rest of the expanded universe.
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Post by Username17 »

Much of The Force Awakens can be seen as a Nicene Creed dedicated to deciding what Star Wars ideas are and are not heretical moving forward. Looked at from the point of view of the movie as a movie, it's wated space and padding. You could probably chop about 20 minutes of these articles of faith from the movie's 136 minute runtime without losing anything.

One of the new articles of faith is the holy spirit the explicitly animist nature of The Force. Bar owner lady very explicitly gives the Empire Strikes Back explanation of The Force rather than the prequels explanation. The movie basically stops so she can read out the whole section of the catechism.

And another of the new articles of faith is that the fanwank explanation that contrary to the original script Han was telling the truth when he spouted that Kessel Run nonsense is now the holy writ.

From the standpoint of Disney, purging the EU makes sense. They acquired a brand with decades of material, much of it under license to other companies that they couldn't reprint even if they wanted to. And it's totally unreasonable to ask any of their brand managers to sort through all of this obscure crap to figure out if there's anything in there that would damage their brand. And just to be clear: Lucas did OK a bunch of racist and homophobic jokes that could potentially harm Disney's multi-billion dollar brand if the internet noticed them.

But these declarations of faith in The Force Awakens only make sense when you realize that JJ Abrams is himself a Star Wars fanboi, and he is effectively calling time in a billion dollar movie to declare himself the winner of message board arguments.

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Post by maglag »

Everybody wins then! Disney is happy, the dudes who made the movie are happy, 99,9999% of SW fans are happy.

Except the EU neckbeards, but nevermind those guys, they basically made it impossible to hold any kind of SW meaningful discussion because there would always be "Ha, but in this EU novel Luke was revealed to actually be an alien plant spy who planned to ressurect cyber chtuchullu, so you're wrong nyahnyah!*"

*(please don't tell me if there's actually an EU novel that confirms this)
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Post by Mechalich »

Dogbert wrote:Fuck Star Wars d20, a blade is a blade, and Stormtroopers are career soldiers in a fantasy setting. It makes sense Finn knows at least the basics of how to wield a sabre, let alone Kylo Ren, who was supposedly trained in the Jedi Academi that existed off-camera before the mouse nuked it along with the rest of the expanded universe.
Using a lightsaber is very different from using a sword. It's a free-rotating weapon, meaning there's no specific edge you have to orient, and all the weight is in the hilt, making the balance exceedingly weird compared to actual bladed weapons. Also, a lightsaber doesn't really need to strike with power, it just needs to hit and it will cleave through flesh without any real resistance at any point along the blade. Finn may or may not have melee weapons training, but if he does that training if likely to be more hindrance than help.
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Post by Chamomile »

Mechalich, I have used swords. I have also used a weapon with a weightless, omni-directional blade that penetrates anything it touches. It is called a Wiimote. Having an omni-directional blade just means that your technique can be slightly sloppier and it doesn't matter, and having a weapon whose weight is spread out across all of eight inches is way easier to deal with than a weapon which, even if perfectly balanced, has a lot of momentum to fight against when you swing it. Going from a real sword to a lightsaber doesn't mean you have to learn anything new, it just means a lot of the things you learned are no longer necessary. Someone trained with a sword picking up a lightsaber is like someone taking off their training weights.
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Post by Kaelik »

maglag wrote:Everybody wins then! Disney is happy, the dudes who made the movie are happy, 99,9999% of SW fans are happy.

Except the EU neckbeards, but nevermind those guys, they basically made it impossible to hold any kind of SW meaningful discussion because there would always be "Ha, but in this EU novel Luke was revealed to actually be an alien plant spy who planned to ressurect cyber chtuchullu, so you're wrong nyahnyah!*"

*(please don't tell me if there's actually an EU novel that confirms this)
I'm sorry, did anyone ever in the history of anything ever have a conversation in which someone who knew the EU "ruined" the conversation?

Because everytime I read this kind of absolute bullshit, I just file it under a similar file to stupid racists complaining about SJWs. In that they probably didn't say that or anything like that, and you are probably an idiot and and an asshole.

Also, while we are on the subject. I like how people who are for some mystical reason butthurt about the existence of the EU like to make grandiose claims both about how no one who liked the EU even exists, and how everyone who liked the EU is now crying tears. Seriously, your position is that people who refused to read star wars books or play Star Wars games for the 30 years after Return of the Jedi are the only real star wars fans? Tell me all about how everyone who ever opened a Song of Ice and Fire book is a filthy nonfan ruining it for the true fans who only watch TV too.

I mean, in this thread we have at least three people who have read EU material, talked about how some of it is crap and some of it isn't, but that they should have gotten rid of it anyway, then talked about how Force Awakens is worse for borrowing plot threads from the EU, but better for borrowing sensible things, like the galaxy map and the existence of a bunch of planets.

As compared to the "true fans" that wish super hard that Han Solo was an idiot, instead of that he navigated closer to some black holes than most people.
Last edited by Kaelik on Wed Dec 30, 2015 3:04 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Kaelik »

FrankTrollman wrote:And another of the new articles of faith is that the fanwank explanation that contrary to the original script Han was telling the truth when he spouted that Kessel Run nonsense is now the holy writ.
Or, alternatively, instead of Abrams being a fanboi who wants to declare himself the winner of internet arguments, Disney on buying Star Wars immediately hired a Story Team who's explicit goal was to sort through Star Wars material and decide what to make cannon, and the decided that instead of Han Solo being an idiot, they would go with the much better and much less stupid explanation provided in material written by actual people employed by Lucas Arts for the actual purpose of fleshing out the world and making Lucas Arts money who invented an actual place called Kessel which has and Actual Black Hole complex right next door, making distance shorter for people willing to travel closer to the black holes.

Seriously, nothing in the universe is funnier than people complaining about material written in Star Wars X-Wing books as "fanwank" because it hurts them so much to admit that Han Solo wasn't a dumbshit. Lucas Arts retcons to correct errors are still retcons to correct errors even when they are written by sanctioned authors paid by lucas arts, you don't have to call it fanwank to keep making fun of the original movies, or George Lucas, or Harrison Ford, or people who take star wars seriously and say movies suck because of minor physics errors, you can totally still do all those things without pretending that the hundreds of EU books and EU games are all filthy fanwank, instead of you know, part of the star wars IP that made money for Lucas Arts.
Last edited by Kaelik on Wed Dec 30, 2015 3:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by name_here »

The original script implies Han is just bullshitting Luke. But the Maw is totally awesome and I unconditionally approve of keeping it in canon.
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Post by Wiseman »

Ultimately, I think this movie's problem is that it's trying to please everyone. OT fans, Prequel fans, EU fans, general fans, casual viewers, people who aren't into starwars and so forth. It's trying to satisfy everyone, and thus wows nobody.
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Post by nockermensch »

Wiseman wrote:Ultimately, I think this movie's problem is that it's trying to please everyone. OT fans, Prequel fans, EU fans, general fans, casual viewers, people who aren't into starwars and so forth. It's trying to satisfy everyone, and thus wows nobody.
Eh, this movie shits profusely on the lore stablished on the prequels and made a huge part of EU "not canon".
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Post by Shrapnel »

I'm with Wiseman. I think the movie really tried too hard to be liked by everyone, like that one kid in class who really wants to get along with everyone and tries to get the other kids to like him, but ends up being really annoying and no one wants to be around him and his name is Eric.

Yeah, The Force Awakens is Eric.
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