So... Star Wars [Spoilers]

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Post by Mechalich »

Having 'Ben Solo' is dumb for one simple reason: Ben Skywalker exists.

De-canonization didn't suddenly make the pre-existing EU disappear into the ether. It's all still out there, and aside from a tiny 'Legends' label to hide behind much of it is still in print. You can absolutely order any of the 20+ novels with Ben Skywalker in them right now.

While the number of people this will actually confuse is minute, it's still an unforced error.
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Post by Kaelik »

Silly Mechalich, don't you know that it is literally impossible to give characters their own names, people can only name their children the names of people they personally met (or heard about) during their life times and formed bonds with (or didn't but knew existed, and knew were jedi and needed help from).
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Post by Username17 »

Page Two. Spoilers!
Kaelik wrote:Also, I love how you rock in with "we only know four guys that Leia ever interacts with, so it makes plenty of sense that she would name her kid after the nickname she didn't know of a character that we have no evidence she ever met, because a Princess Diplomat probably never ran into anyone else ever that we didn't see, and could only name her kids after other people."
We know lots of guys that Leia interacted with. The original trilogy is a sausage fest. We just know only four dudes that Leia would plausibly want to honor by carrying on a family name. And contra-EU, Anakin isn't one of them. Anakin tortured Leia on the Death Star and then blew up her home planet right in front of her in order to make her feel bad. Even if Leia eventually forgave Vader because Luke claims he had a last minute redemption or even if she subsequently used force powers to make up with his force ghost, naming her son after him is fucking weird. If she was going to name a son after a family member or important friend, the obvious choices would be Luke, Han, Bail, or Obi-Wan. Of those, Han Solo (the other person whose opinion counts as regards baby names) never knew Bail because the aforementioned planet blowing up before they had their meeting. And if Luke was going to have his own kids, it would be slightly weird for Han and Leia to preempt the name Luke. Leaving the two most reasonable "family names" for Han and Leia to agree to as being "Han Jr." and "Obi-Wan."

And Obi-Wan Kenobi is called "Ben" in Han Solo's presence in Episode IV, so the fact that he calls his son "Ben" in The Force Awakens makes sense. Considerably more sense than the EU claim of him calling his son after Darth Fucking Vader. Ben is probably still short for Obi-Wan.

Now the movie tells us basically nothing about the Knights of Ren and presents basically nothing about why he's doing whatever the hell it is that he's doing. I assume that the big twist is that he's a deep cover mole for Skywalker. The alternative that he actually is just a traitor to the New Jedi Order who was trained in evil by Snoke would be kinda dumb. Either way however, it's still not as retarded as the Darth Caedus saga.

What we have on Kylo Ren is very sketchy. Episode VII took the whole Episode IV thing of doing everything in media res and letting the audience catch up later on and turned it up to 11. But what we do have is significantly cleaner and more sensical than what the EU offered us. Everything from his name to his actions makes more sense than the EU stuff on the sons of Solo.

Some people complain about him losing a fight to Rey. That's understandable. Obviously he is much better trained and should kick her ass in a straight duel. I thought the movie did a pretty good job of having him demonstrate that he was seriously wounded and bleeding into the snow before the lightsaber fighting happened. The movie telegraphed everything it did so well that it was kinda boring. As soon as they showed that he was seriously injured I knew that they were going to have him beat Finn and lose to Rey. That was just a given. Because they had established that she was better in close combat than Finn, and they had established that Kylo Ren was fighting below 100%. That meant that his new rank of close combat ability had to fall between Finn and Rey. All the sword fighting in the snow after that was just pretty lights leading to a foregone conclusion.

I'm not going to defend the First Order. They seem to be in no an improvement over any of the Imperial throwback groups from the EU. They have a perfectly good backstory for why they have seemingly endless waves of disposable stormtroopers, but that could have just as easily been the Imperial Remnant or whatever. The entire backstory of Imperial War Criminals fleeing off to the ass end of the galaxy and going on doing more war crimes and using child soldiers and building a new better Death Star could have just been the Imperial Remnant. There's no particular reason that needed to have a new name. Any of the dark side aligned villain groups from the EU could have done literally every single thing the First Order did in that movie. They brought absolutely nothing new, cleaned up nothing, explained nothing, and had no advantages over anything previously written.

It's like JJ Abrams said "You know what would be a really cool idea? If lightsabers came in different colors!" Or some equally wheel reinventing tirade.

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Post by PhoneLobster »

FrankTrollman wrote:That being said, I'm going to be super annoyed when it turns out that Rey is a Skywalker or Solo. That is going to be super dumb.
That's almost certainly what's going to happen. Everyone has to be a god damn child of secret family destiny. And they made very sure her back story and flash backs hit all the stops on the secret family destiny railroad. And while just going nowhere would be fine if they could just let it go we all know that ground work is there for a likely very predictable reason.

But. There is a small. Very small. Chance that she might not be a blood relative of a named (or major named) character and her lost "family" was "just" Skywalker's jedi school and she is "merely" the last surviving student stashed away somewhere.

"I am your father adoptive jedi sensei" is not much better. But at least it's not flat out "I am your father, 2nd generation running one more and we win a prize! Bonus points if I tell you about YOUR secret twin you had romantic interest in during your first movie!".

It would be a lot better if she isn't the last survivor and actually ALL the kids from school are survivors stashed away all over the place by Luke and the new Vader wannabe Solo kid secretly working together right from the beginning. Possibly including Fin and random others. But the odds of THAT being the final story line are so very very very very small.
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Post by Starmaker »

Kylo Ren should've been a woman, for variety's sake if nothing else.
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Post by Kaelik »

Hey Frank you want to take a step back from torching that Strawman that no one was defending any everyone explicitly said was a dumb name and maybe, settle in to defending your actual absurdist parody of a position, that Leia has to name her kid Ben because people can't name their kids their own names?
FrankTrollman wrote:I would say that Leia naming her son "Ben" makes a lot of sense. Much more sense than naming a son "Jacen," which is just a fucking made up name that has no resonance to anything Leia has ever shown or done.
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Re: So... Star Wars [Spoilers]

Post by nockermensch »

FrankTrollman wrote:Star Wars Episode VII is scientifically designed and mathematically calibrated to not disappoint the fans like those fucking prequels. Every part of it, and I do mean every little bit of dialog or piece of background scenery, has been carefully focus grouped to properly callback to the good Star Wars movies and reject the bad Star Wars movies.
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Post by AcidBlades »

So I assume the Star Wars animated film Clone Wars by Genndy Tartakovsky is 3e?
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Post by nockermensch »

AcidBlades wrote:So I assume the Star Wars animated film Clone Wars by Genndy Tartakovsky is 3e?
I don't want to >imply that there was ever a good Star Wars trilogy.

- There was a silly/corny trilogy that we love for the nostalgia.
- There was a trilogy that went in a clumsy attempt to capture a new demographic and failed catastrophically.
- There's the new trilogy with a blatant attempt to recapture fans of trilogy one and try to distance itself as much as possible from the wreck that was trilogy two. But it's kind of uninspired, suffering from a paralysing fear of threading new ground.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Creed is a perfect sequel to a legendary franchise, Ryan Coogler is a fantastic director writer
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Post by Wiseman »

AcidBlades wrote:So I assume the Star Wars animated film Clone Wars by Genndy Tartakovsky is 3e?
Basically. Like 3e, the Clone Wars series is hands down the best thing to ever come out of Star Wars. (Which amusingly makes Rebels the equivalent of Pathfinder. Created to fill the void left behind but a somewhat inferior substitute. Also, the EU is probably then the equivilent of d20 products. Quality's all over the place, but there's so much of it that your chances of finding the good parts are kinda low.)
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Post by Pixels »

I'm a bit surprised that there hasn't been more pushback against the plot being two parts A New Hope, two parts The Empire Strikes Back, one part J.J. Abrams action, shake throughly. It's like poetry, it rhymes.

I understand why they did it. If you want to be sure to recapture the feel of the original trilogy, what better plot to use than ... the original trilogy? But it just doesn't feel like they did much to it. They avoided doing anything offensive to the fans at the cost of telling a new story. This one is old hat. At the end of the day I'm fine with it, but only because I expect them to use VII as a foundation, a solid base that they can build on in different and interesting directions. Hopefully? Please?
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Post by Morat »

Yeah, I like the new characters, and they're not just pure Luke/Leia/Han retreads.

But, an astromech droid carrying a hologram of vital information for the Rebellion is lost on a desert planet until getting grabbed by scavengers, a cantina scene where the heroes are hoping to get a ship to get that data to the Rebels, Han and Chewie infiltrate the Death Star to rescue the female lead, and we'll blow it up with a trench run...that's going too far. I'd have been happier with more subtle references if they had to do all those call-backs. Like, Rey's escape from the base is reminiscent of Obi-Wan in the Death Star, sneaking around and pulling levers, but it's not beat-for-beat the same.

It also irks me that while even Ep 4 has four different fighters and by Ep 6 it's seven, now we're back down to two. Because we all love X-Wings and TIE Fighters.

Overall, I'd give it a B. I was expecting 2009 Star Trek at best, and it was better than that.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

Well, it was full of deus-ex-machinas and total illogic. Utterly lacking in subtlety.

I give it a B at best, for all of the great moments. You can't just put a bunch of moments together and get a coherent film, though.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Oh yeah. I just remembered

And a brief story...
Oh yeah, and so I wasn't that concerned about spoilers for the new star wars movie. I mean, I didn't expect anything particularly unpredictable or mystery worthy.

But still.

There we are going into the cinema to see it and just before we walk through the last door walking out down the corridor past us and all the other people going into see star wars is a Lady and her grandkid.

And she is all talking to the little kid loudly and slowly "And do you know who that was right at the end of the movie? I was Luke Skywalker wasn't it! That's who!".

It's not like you aren't basically expecting that anyway about 5 minutes into the movie, and for the most part I don't care. But still. Lady. Really?
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Post by Mechalich »

Morat wrote:It also irks me that while even Ep 4 has four different fighters and by Ep 6 it's seven, now we're back down to two. Because we all love X-Wings and TIE Fighters.
This has always struck me as particularly dumb. Toys sell. Toys are the single most profitable thing in Star Wars and have made more movie than all the movies combined. New movies should therefore be designed to sell as many new toys as possible. Ergo, don't reuse anything. People already own one or more X-wings (I has a model one and a micro machines one prior to cleaning out all the stuff in my parent's house) and multiple millennium falcons (again, I had 2) and multiple TIE fighters (though these are at least a new variant). Disney couldn't get designers and modelers to churn out a bunch of new, cool, designs that are still recognizable Star Wars throwbacks? Bioware sure managed to do that, and not just once, but twice (for KOTOR and TOR).
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Post by Emerald »

Mechalich wrote:Ergo, don't reuse anything. People already own one or more X-wings (I has a model one and a micro machines one prior to cleaning out all the stuff in my parent's house) and multiple millennium falcons (again, I had 2) and multiple TIE fighters (though these are at least a new variant). Disney couldn't get designers and modelers to churn out a bunch of new, cool, designs that are still recognizable Star Wars throwbacks? Bioware sure managed to do that, and not just once, but twice (for KOTOR and TOR).
Or, again, they didn't even need to bother with something entirely new, they could've just stolen more from the EU. That would have given them the E-, K-, and T-Wings and the TIE Aggressor, Defender, Interdictor, Sentinel, and Stealth (and that's leaving out the most stupid-looking EU fighters); add back in the poor neglected A- and B-wings and TIE Bombers and Interceptors from the original trilogy and they'd have had more than enough variety to play with. Old fans go "Sweet! TIE Defender! Always wanted a model of one of those!", new fans go "Sweet, a cool new kind of TIE Fighter! I want a model one of those!", everyone's happy.
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Post by Pixels »

I will admit, one of the details that niggled at me had to do with the whole assault on Starkiller Base. Send in a team to take out the shields, okay, but then the Resistance attacks this giant structure with fighters. Specifically X-wings, which are dogfighters. It's understandable in IV because the Rebels have to shoot torpedoes down a tiny exhaust port, and in VI because they have to fly through the tight structure of the Death Star itself to get to a reactor, but in VII they're literally trying to blow up a building. Why not use bombers? Why not an orbital bombardment using capital ships? Am I supposed to understand that the Resistance is incompetent, or so starved for resources that they have only two squadrons of X-wings they can muster against an existential threat?
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Post by Occluded Sun »

For that matter, why is the Resistance working from a shoestring base? Didn't they have the Republic supporting them? It would have made infinitely more sense to attack an obviously military target with the Starkiller's FTL cannon.

But then the movie had the attack's results visible to people in another star system immediately, so...
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

The impression I got was that the Starkiller strike blew up all the Republic's heavy fleet assets, and that the two squadrons of X-wings were basically fighting a guerilla war.

Not sure why the Republic didn't spread out the capital ships but w/e.

Still really liked the movie though.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

One thing that I *did* like: the movie makes it obvious why 'Dark Side' practices are so addictive.

They free you from pain, while requiring you to do more and more things that would cause immense pain - if you left the practices aside. So if you ever try to follow another path, you must endure the consequences which the practices have been holding off.

I can't see Ben Solo ever turning to the Light after... well... although I presume that he was the one that left his sister on Pakku.
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Post by hyzmarca »

FrankTrollman wrote:
I'm not going to defend the First Order. They seem to be in no an improvement over any of the Imperial throwback groups from the EU. They have a perfectly good backstory for why they have seemingly endless waves of disposable stormtroopers, but that could have just as easily been the Imperial Remnant or whatever. The entire backstory of Imperial War Criminals fleeing off to the ass end of the galaxy and going on doing more war crimes and using child soldiers and building a new better Death Star could have just been the Imperial Remnant. There's no particular reason that needed to have a new name. Any of the dark side aligned villain groups from the EU could have done literally every single thing the First Order did in that movie. They brought absolutely nothing new, cleaned up nothing, explained nothing, and had no advantages over anything previously written.

It's like JJ Abrams said "You know what would be a really cool idea? If lightsabers came in different colors!" Or some equally wheel reinventing tirade.

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The First Order officers seem to be actual True Believers in their cause, while the Empire was mainly run by cynical power-mongers, so there is that.
Pixels wrote:I will admit, one of the details that niggled at me had to do with the whole assault on Starkiller Base. Send in a team to take out the shields, okay, but then the Resistance attacks this giant structure with fighters. Specifically X-wings, which are dogfighters. It's understandable in IV because the Rebels have to shoot torpedoes down a tiny exhaust port, and in VI because they have to fly through the tight structure of the Death Star itself to get to a reactor, but in VII they're literally trying to blow up a building. Why not use bombers? Why not an orbital bombardment using capital ships? Am I supposed to understand that the Resistance is incompetent, or so starved for resources that they have only two squadrons of X-wings they can muster against an existential threat?
In Episode IV They send in Y-Wings, which are bombers, with X-Wing escorts. And the X-Wings utterly fail at escorting their charges and thus have to try the Trench run themselves in a last desperate maneuver.

Occluded Sun wrote:For that matter, why is the Resistance working from a shoestring base? Didn't they have the Republic supporting them? It would have made infinitely more sense to attack an obviously military target with the Starkiller's FTL cannon.

But then the movie had the attack's results visible to people in another star system immediately, so...
I suspect the Republic had a treaty with the First Order and seriously didn't want to get involved in a war, and Leia is basically the Republic equivalent of Oliver North.
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Post by Mechalich »

A bitter Mechalich reviews The Force Awakens (having been forced to see it against his will by his parents as part of the holidays):
So...where to begin.

Okay, first of all, lets get this out of the way. This is a professional, well-produced movie with competent direction, generally good acting, and no moments of jaw-dropping stupidity, offensiveness, or face-palming. It is much better than the prequels. That being said, so what? Being better than the prequels is not a high bar.

Second thing, and I expect I'll return to it repeatedly, this is not a new movie. This is A New Hope rebooted only it happens to have old Han Solo in it. Anyone who's watched A New Hope in the last decade or two will be surprised at nothing in the film. In fact, though this movie is filled with call-backs to A New Hope such as a trash compactor reference and a little holodiagram of the Death Star, it basically presumes that Return of the Jedi accomplished nothing and the galaxy has spent the last thirty years mostly returning to the status quo of A New Hope, with slightly different labels.

Now, breaking things down by categories:

Story
As mentioned, this story is derivative as it gets from previous source material. Heroes on a desert planet have to retrieve a droid with critical information, rescue the guy who originally had the information from the bad guys, get information in an alien-dominated cantina, and then destroy a world-ending superweapon with small starfighters by hitting it in a specific place. It's not a bad story, but we've been here before, and that robs things of dramatic heft. The original trilogy has a strange sort of magic where everything came together. This one, not so much. One obvious example: the First Order Commander gives a big dramatic speech prior to using the Starkiller to blow up the Republic. It's not a bad speech and delivery on its own, but it obviously recalls Tarkin on the Death Star blowing up Alderaan - and Tarkin was cooler.

This happens again and again: Kylo Ren wants to be Darth Vader, but he comes off as a cheap knockoff in the style of oh-so-many lousy EU villains. The X-wing assault on the Starkiller has none of the dramatic tension of the original trench run. The Band in the new cantina scene, and their song, isn't as cool as the Bith group in A New Hope. It goes on and on. It's a good, fun imitation, but never for a second does it shake the sense that it's an imitation.

Characters
There are no truly embarrassing characters in this movie. Jar-Jar has left us thankfully. However, there's very little that stands out. Everything about the First Order is a pale shadow of the Empire. Kylo Ren wishes he could be half as cool as Darth Vader, the various First Order officers and stormtroopers lack the slick, efficient, space Nazi menace of the original Imperials, and Lord Snoke is so not Emperor Palpatine. On the good guy side things are a actually a good bit better. Leia's return is handled with some deft, Harrison Ford does quite well as old Han and gets in some good quips, Chewie is handled very, very well - a minor highlight, and while Finn is not exactly a shining beacon of awesome his role there's nothing to complain about. Osaac Isaac as the pilot Poe is a major disappointment however. The role feels mostly empty, especially after the escape sequence early (admittedly this is the tyranny of high expectations, he was so good in Ex Machina).

The shining moment of characters and acting is Daisy Ridley as Rey. Insofar as there's any meat to this movie it's all her. Rey is a great character, well-acted, well-rounded, with real motives and scenes showing actual emotional stakes and turmoil. So yeah, that was really good.

Visual Effects and Set Pieces
Star Wars has always been known for groundbreaking visuals. That was even the one thing the prequels mostly managed to do right. This movie, well, it looks good, but its got nothing we haven't seen before in recent Marvel films, the recent Star Trek reboot, or even dreck like the Transformers films. A big part of the problem is that many of the
sequences are too messy. Several of the big engagements - the post-Cantina fight sequence and the assault on Starkiller base are chaotic affairs where the camera spins around in 360 degrees and avoid any sort of intimate engagement. There's no crisp, dramatic, awe inspiring shots like we're used to seeing. In fact many of the best moments are the slower-paced early scenes on Jakku or the scenes entirely inside the Falcon.

Also, the shot where the Starkiller destroys the planets is just terrible. Abrams pulled the same 'we can see the explosions from vast stellar distances away' stunt back in Star Trek (2009) and every astrophysicist on the planet called him on it. Knowing that, it was a total suspension-of-disbelief-breaking moment and the worst single shot in the film.

Also highly underwhelming - the raptar sequence on Han's junk hauler. Just...no.

Pacing
The Force Awakens has a pacing problem. The opening scenes on Jakku move at a decent speed, but once they get on the Falcon and start the escape/chase sequence the film really never comes up for air again. There's a ton of stuff happening and it really could have used a moment to step back and reflect. Big offenders include the apparent destruction of Coruscant and the entire Republic Navy, everything about starkiller base, and the X-wing assault launch (how do you not do 'all wings report in' to make us care about these pilots?).

And of course the one time they deliberately slow down, it's to drag out the 'twist' sequence a good thirty seconds too long. Yes, you're going to stab him, we get it, now hurry up so that Finn and Rey can fight you already.

Design
Overall the movie looks good. Character designs are mostly well put together, with some exceptions. Kylo Ren needs to keep his helmet on! I'm sorry Adam Driver, but you are not intimidating, your haircut makes you look like Jon Snow (who is cooler than you are), and your Vader voice is lame. Also your lightsaber cross-guard looks as dumb today as it did the moment it was introduced.

There were no cool new alien designs, or at least none we saw for more than a few seconds in the background (Maz doesn't count, she looked like an orange 90-year old Chinese woman), some disappointment there. The new stormtooper armor and silver officer armor were fine, but nothing to write home about. BB-8's design did grow on me though, so I give them props for that.

Ship designs, meh. There's really nothing new. X-wings, TIEs, and the Millenium Falcon again. The First Order ships are all Star Destroyer variants, but we hardly get a good look at them at any point. There's a few new transport designs, but, well, they're transports and they look like transports. The best new ship is Kylo Ren's evolved Lambda shuttle variant. That, at least, is cool. Starkiller base is not stupid looking the way droid control ships were, but it's no Death Star.

Ultimately I'll say this, the character designs and ship designs in Force Awakens are slightly less cool than the ones in Guardians of the Galaxy - which doesn't feel like a victory for Star Wars to me, it just doesn't.

Conclusion
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a decent science fantasy action movie. It's got some good action sequences, some fun quips, a bundle of nostalgia references and one awesome action movie performance by Daisy Ridley. I'd put it in the middle of the pack among the Marvel films probably about even with Captain America: The Winter Soldier. By itself its a perfectly reasonable Star Wars feature with nothing to complain about.

Unfortunately this movie doesn't exist by itself. Disney took the EU out back and shot it in order to make this film and it wasn't worth it, especially since there is absolutely nothing in The Force Awakens that couldn't have been easily retconned to match with everything in the EU through Vision of the Future.

All in all not worth it.
PS: I admit I really liked the final sequence, but that's because it was filmed on the Skelligs in Ireland and I've actually been there. Must have scared a lot of puffins during filming though.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Overall Impression: This was the movie I wanted back when we got Phantom Menace instead. Space Opera action, lots of effects and clear cut good vs Evil Space Nazis, with the new Happy Meal Toy being a new model of Droid instead of a walking accidentally racist caricature and a distinct lack of gratuitous camp like fish eating smaller fish montages and starship eating space slugs.

Not that it didn't have a few issues:

Re: First Order as a name.

Why did Kylo Ren fail algebra? Because Quadratics are Second Order. Does Lord Snoke get desert when he eats out? No, that would entail placing a Second Order. Why can't general Hux shop at Costco? Because it doesn't make sense to pay membership fees when you only make your First Order. As names go, it's not "Attack of the Clones" level bad, but they certainly could have done better.

Re: Kylo Ren without the mask:
So how does Han feel about the fact that Leia apparently cheated on him with Professor Snape ? They could have cast someone who at least looked like either of the actors who were playing the parents.
Re: Finn and Rey power levels.
Yeah. I get that they were going for an everyman "you can stop being a cog in an immoral regime and you can make a difference no matter who you are" with Finn, as reinforced by the fact that his Stormtrooper MOS was "Sanitation" (ie janitor), and that in order to be the everyman with a conscience he can't be hyper competent at anything. I also get that the plot required him to lack any piloting skill. But dangit, the dude was still a soldier trained from early childhood, and there are only three types of combat in Star Wars (blasters, light sabers, and dogfights). Since Rey gets blasters, and captain forgettable gets to be the ace pilot, that means that Finn should be the blaster expert - but there he is overshadowed by Han and Chewie, and even Rey (at least once she figgers out how to turn the safety off ), and that just goes to reinforce the whole Jedi > You paradigm of Star Wars - even though reinforcing that particular paradigm undermines the goal of showing that the decisions of even a single common Stormtrooper can save the galaxy.
Re: The very end.

So in a JJ Abrams movie, a guy who doesn't want to be found is hiding in ancient ruins in an overgrown island in the middle of the ocean? I'm surprised that nobody came up with the "Smoke Monster is a Jedi" theory before - it explains the statue with the wrong number of toes and everything.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Thu Dec 24, 2015 7:15 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Mistborn
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Post by Mistborn »

Saw the movie yesterday, thought it was good. Problem is that the movie being overall good makes you resent the flaws even more because you can easily imagine the movie being better.

They needed to have one fewer actions scene in favor of slowing the fuck down for a second to hash some exposition on the political situation.

The starkiller base fell a little flat. There wasn't enough build up and the main plot in no way needed it to exist. It sort of feels like the plot of two better movies got blendered together and the resulting concoction isn't as good as either of them.
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