So... Star Wars [Spoilers]

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Post by fbmf »

original trilogy has a strange sort of magic where everything came together.
The term you're looking from is "nostalgia", which is just mind caulk for,things you grew up with.

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Post by DrPraetor »

Finally saw it, it was a fun movie. It was a complete shoutback to a New Hope, including having several plot aspects that just didn't quite make sense, and suspended disbelief:

1) The Stormtrooper captain shutting off the shield for them. They gave her a name and are planning to have her as a significant character in future movies, I guess. But why exactly did she cooperate?

2) The whole thing where they send in just Han, Chewie and Finn to shut down the shield generator. And also to rescue Rey... because they know she's in the same *building* how exactly?

Anyway, my guess is that Rey isn't Luke's daughter or a Skywalker at all. She's one of the paduan or whatever from Luke's new Jedi school, and Luke scattered them around the universe to protect them from Ben Solo after he turned evil. Her "family" isn't Luke specifically, but a whole bunch of children.

Also they appear to have cut a plot element where Rey knew Max von Sydow's character? Wasn't he talking in the background in her memory when Luke left her or whatever? So maybe that's still in the plot but just got glossed over?
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Post by FatR »

TFA is a 8/10 comedy, if you can get a bit drunk before watching it.

No more than a 5-6/10 mindless action movie. Shit-ass main villain and increasing incompetence of mooks led to an unimpressive final showdown. More obvious plotholes than I can shake my fist at spoiled the enjoyment from the good choreography of fights in the first two thirds.

1/10 Star Wars movie. Almost everything good in it, save for a couple of landscapes, I've seen back in eighties. Everything not seen back in eighties is terrible, down to the blasters' design. They had shown absolutely zero respect to established canon, or understanding of core appeal of Star Wars - not merely the appeal beyond superficial flash, but even in the realm of superficial flash. To date every Star Wars movie was mandatory to watch and rewatch on the big screen for me, because every movie pushed the boundaries of what can be done on the big screen and shown me more fantastic vistas of the galaxy far away. TFA ended that at once. It did not offer me anything to compensate for a very literally bad fanfic-tier plot, or characters who with a few exceptions were pathetic twerps and pigmies. Except for shit blowing up. I'm an undiscerning movie-goer, and shit blowing up was sufficient to make me sit through every Transformer film, but here I cannot help but be disappointed.
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Post by Mechalich »

FatR wrote:Except for shit blowing up. I'm an undiscerning movie-goer, and shit blowing up was sufficient to make me sit through every Transformer film, but here I cannot help but be disappointed.
Force Awakens lacks any single WOW! sequence, which is something that even the worst prequels had - Phantom Menace has the big fight scene with Darth Maul, Attack of the Clones has the clone troopers arriving on Geonosis, Revenge of the Sith has a couple.

Force Awakens has fewer truly memorable scenes than Ant Man.

The best thing in the movie are the performances by Daisy Ridley and Harrison Ford, and while it's nice for a Star Wars film to have good acting performances 'Can Daisy Ridley be the next Jennifer Lawrence?' is not the speculation that should be going through one's head while walking out of the theater after the first Star Wars in a decade.

I'm not even sure what was intended to be a 'that was so cool!' moment in the film. The lightsaber fights are all fairly simple - there are at least a dozen Clone Wars episodes with better choreography - and there's really only the one space battle at the end and that's just a bunch of X-wings whipping around. Starkiller Base is kind of impressive, but it's really just a giant beam.
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Post by hyzmarca »

fbmf wrote:
original trilogy has a strange sort of magic where everything came together.
The term you're looking from is "nostalgia", which is just mind caulk for,things you grew up with.

Game On,
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It's more than just nostalgia. The original trilogy was wildly popular when it came out and remained wildly popular for decades without abatement. There is a reason for that. It hits the goldilocks zone where everything is simultaneously incredibly cool but believable. And it was original. It hit all the classic hero's journey beats in new and interesting ways.
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Post by Chamomile »

Just saw the movie. Re: Rey is too competent, I have the exact reverse problem that's been brought up earlier. Kylo Ren appeared very badly wounded by the time Rey fought him, so I'm fine that she was able to overpower him even completely untrained. What bugs me is that she apparently figured out mind tricks completely on her own for little reason except that the plot needed her to have them. This is limited mind control and Luke doesn't use it until VI, it seems like a fairly high-level technique, but Rey manages it just because...Well, I guess they decided that having Finn and Han rescue her would just be one retread of the OT too much, which is a weird place to draw the line.

What bugged me about the fight scene at the end is actually that Finn did as well as he did. He's not even a Force user, Kylo Ren is wounded but for the most part adrenaline seems to be getting him through it without being much impaired. Finn shouldn't have lasted thirty seconds. And also the way he takes Rey out likes she's nothing at the beginning only to have her come back later and be a serious threat seemed contrived, especially after Rey has been shown to be strong enough in the Force to turn Kylo's own powers around on him already.

The really big thing that bugged me is how incredibly unclear it is how powerful the Republic and the First Order are. Frank talked about how the Republic owns the capital earlier, but do they? The not-Deathstar attacks some star system we've never heard of before, and in the speech immediately leading up to it they talk about how today is the day they're destroying the Senate. How literal is that? Did they actually blow up the Senate right then? Was it something they were going to do after blowing up the Resistance? Or does he just mean "this weapon is invincible and the weeks/months of blowing up Republic worlds from here on is just bookkeeping on the way to an inevitable conclusion?" I didn't know until just now when I looked it up that yes, the Senate literally got blown up, because it is no longer held on Coruscant and instead rotates around based on some kind of election, which left me wondering for about half an hour whether that planet they blew up was Corsucant, and then for the rest of the movie, given that they didn't blow up Coruscant, just how important that planet was. Did the Republic have literally their entire fleet stationed in one system? Was it just the only fleet nearby?

The galaxy is also really, really desolate in the Force Awakens. Tattooine had Mos Eisley, Jakku seems like it's barely inhabited. Where do all of Maz's customers come from, given that her castle is the only sign of habitation for miles? The lack of any major habitations like Cloud City or Mos Eisley, and the fact that the Republic's major stronghold is some system we've never heard of before, makes the scale seem very, very local, like the whole thing could've taken place in the same sector and the First Order and New Republic could just be two of several dozen successor states to the Empire and Republic that arose when Palpatine died, squabbling over a comparatively tiny speck of the galaxy. Wookieepedia informs me that this is not actually true, but the movie really should've done that itself. And they had a perfect opportunity to do so by just having the First Order target Coruscant instead of some newly invented planet.
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Post by Whipstitch »

I dunno, I felt it was fairly clear that Kylo was fucking with him.
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Post by MGuy »

Whipstitch wrote:I dunno, I felt it was fairly clear that Kylo was fucking with him.
I think it was like that to start but Finn did manage to injure him further.

The thing about Rey isn't that she 'just' beat Kylo in a fight while he was injured. It's that she seemed to be good at everything save for bartering.
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Post by Chamomile »

I really don't mind a Force sensitive being generally capable at everything she tries her hand it. We don't know how much effort she put into the skills she started with and being Force sensitive makes her talented at everything. The only thing that bugs me about it is how quickly she learns a new skill.
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Post by tussock »

They've always done that. Luke learning to use the guns on the Falcon, Luke learning to fly an X-Wing, Luke learning to be a targeting computer, etc, etc, etc. Han just randomly finding Luke in a white-out blizzard, how hard can it be? Han suddenly navigating asteroid fields, "don't tell me the odds." Luke and Leia need to learn to pilot Speeder bikes? No probs.

Human child in a pod race? Sure. Human child randomly shooting the insides of a ship to make it explode, of course, because he wanted it to work, so it did.

Trained force-sensitives are Jedi and sensible people are all "we will not survive this." But untrained force-sensitives are also super-amazing at everything they try their hand at. Not just successful, but better than recognised experts by a good margin. Especially those who are strong in the force.
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Post by Kaelik »

tussock wrote:They've always done that. Luke learning to use the guns on the Falcon, Luke learning to fly an X-Wing, Luke learning to be a targeting computer, etc, etc, etc. Han just randomly finding Luke in a white-out blizzard, how hard can it be? Han suddenly navigating asteroid fields, "don't tell me the odds." Luke and Leia need to learn to pilot Speeder bikes? No
probs.
This Message brought to you by Tussock is always wrong about everything.

1) Luke explicitly in the movies "bulls eyes womp rats in a T-whatever" Now, you can either pretend that Luke was an idiot talking about something unrelated and no one corrected him, or you can admit that in fact, Luke both had experience flying fighters and shooting things with lazers, covering all three of your Luke did X things.

2) Han isn't force sensitive, so... how is Han doing things proof that force sensitives are good at things?

3) Han is a smuggler, not just a smuggler, but one who either did or lies about doing some run in some impressive way. A space smuggler who can navigate an asteroid field to avoid imperials isn't the weirdest thing in the world. Also, let's be clear, the thing quoting the odds with respect to the asteroid field is a fucking protocol droid. Last time I checked, being fluent in six million forms of communication didn't by itself give you knowledge of ships maneuverability and asteroid trajectories.

3) Luke and Leia are at that point 4 years into a war. Even without assuming some degree of universal technology that allows for either or both to have non-combat speederbike practice, they have been at war with the people using speeder bikes for four years, you have no particular reason to think this is the first time they've ever seen them.
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Post by Mechalich »

The biggest issue of Rey's over-competence is her piloting ability. As a scavenger engineering proficiency and self-defense skills are things she should probably have, blasters aren't an especially complex technology and she's presented as a good shot not a ridiculous one, and I'm willing to forgive sudden Force awakenings and lightsaber proficiency, especially given how bad the movie was at making Kylo Ren intimidating.

What is not explained is how she can not only fly the Falcon, but fly it like a badass. The movie requires that someone be able to fly the Falcon and had established that Finn can't so there wasn't a lot of options (I mean, I suppose they could have let BB-8 fly it, but droid pilots aren't good drama) it would have been nice if they had justified it better though.
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Post by Chamomile »

Rey's flying skills don't bother me in the slightest. It's never established that she can't fly and the very first time piloting skills are required she has them. This very strongly suggests that she just has pre-existing piloting skills. Why? Well clearly she picked it up sometime in the last fifteen years of backstory we didn't see. Maybe she used to have some kind of atmospheric flying job for a while before it fell through and she had to resort to scavenging for scraps. She has her X-Wing pilot helmet so the idea that she has an interest and pursued it in the past is hardly far-fetched. And the super-ace pilots she's outflying in that sequence are...Two tie fighters.
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Post by erik »

Kaelik wrote: 2) Han isn't force sensitive, so... how is Han doing things proof that force sensitives are good at things?
Midichlorians propagate back up the family tree once you have a jedi child, granting force sensitivity retroactively.
And yay. I watched the movie yesterday so I can read this thread now.
I wish there was even more team-building for ReyFinn which also would help improve various scenes:

During the Rey vs. Darth Emo fight instead of Rey having a 15 second close-up before finding her mojo, Fiinn had gotten back up and surprise-clubbed Darth Emo in the head with a smoldering log.

And then with Rey and Finn being separated from Emo by the ground opening up, I'd have liked it if Finn said "This is our side, that's yours." before limping away shouldered by Rey. Having Finn limp aboard the Millenium Falcon would have made me happier than having him carried.

It totally would have been nice if they had 30 seconds of exposition here and there to patch things up. For example having Rey tell Finn how she escaped (say, before cutting to Han and Chewie laying explosives):
Rey: "I had heard stories of the jedi mind trick. I felt something when Kylo tried to use it on me and failed. So I tried it on my storm trooper guard since I'm clearly jedi material... and I did it!"
(Rey and Finn together) "Squeee!"
They needed more moments like when they were excited after their first run with the MF, so two birds with one stone there.

While Darth Emo and Rey's back stories and future stories have the potential to not disappoint me, I totally expect them to.
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Post by name_here »

Rey lived at a place that's got spacecraft parked at it, so presumably she has previously flown them. It's definitely not purely up to force-sensitivity because she was confident in her piloting skills prior to getting in the Falcon. There's both movie and KOTOR precedent for untrained force-sensitives being super-badass at various tasks, which is sufficient to explain that flying through the engine bit.
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Post by TOZ »

Saw it. Enjoyed it. Nothing special about it.
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Post by Shrapnel »

The only thing I have to say is that it wouldn't be a Star Wars film if it didn't have a bottomless pit with no safety railings, and it did not disappoint .
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Post by Red_Rob »

Just saw the film. It has convinced me of 3 things:

[*] This trilogy could be good. It was obviously made by someone who 'gets' Star Wars.
[*] Chewie was always carrying Han. Seriously, he comes across as a real badass in every scene he's in. He even gets the ladies in this film!
[*] JJ Abraham has no idea about scale, distance, speed, numbers or time. Every time anything relating to these things came up it jarred me out of the film a little because it was so obviously, painfully wrong. I get that Star Wars is Space Opera and you aren't supposed to sweat the small stuff, but come on! Seeing other star systems from a planet's surface, instantaneously seeing things happening Light Years away, travelling at Light Speed towards a planet and stopping just in time, travelling around a world-sized battlestation fighting and escaping all in 15 minutes, it was like no=one on the script team had ever been inside a classroom!
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Post by ckafrica »

Red_Rob wrote:Just saw the film. It has convinced me of 3 things:

[*] JJ Abraham has no idea about scale, distance, speed, numbers or time. Every time anything relating to these things came up it jarred me out of the film a little because it was so obviously, painfully wrong. I get that Star Wars is Space Opera and you aren't supposed to sweat the small stuff, but come on! Seeing other star systems from a planet's surface, instantaneously seeing things happening Light Years away, travelling at Light Speed towards a planet and stopping just in time, travelling around a world-sized battlestation fighting and escaping all in 15 minutes, it was like no=one on the script team had ever been inside a classroom!
That was one of the things I thought was stupid though I wouldn't say it made a difference to my enjoyment in any way. The timing in Empire doesn't make sense either and I don't fucking care.

I found the dialogue involving Finn annoyed me most. It just didn't feel Star Warsy. Tried to hard to be modern and edgy.

I'm glad they ditched EU. It had become a convoluted mess by the late 90s. I can't imagine what kind of a clusterfuck it's become in the 20 years since. Had they kept all the fanboys would be doing now is muling about how they contracted a minor fact from some who-gives-a-shit novel that 99.9% of the audience never even new existed. Better to simply ditch it and open the narrative space. People who were going to bitch were going to do so regardless. Why hamstring themselves?
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Post by Kaelik »

ckafrica wrote:I'm glad they ditched EU. It had become a convoluted mess by the late 90s. I can't imagine what kind of a clusterfuck it's become in the 20 years since. Had they kept all the fanboys would be doing now is muling about how they contracted a minor fact from some who-gives-a-shit novel that 99.9% of the audience never even new existed. Better to simply ditch it and open the narrative space. People who were going to bitch were going to do so regardless. Why hamstring themselves?
Actually, weirdly enough, a bit before the prequels they created a Lucas Arts council who started coordinating the EU, so the entire Vong Series, Legacy, and Fate all feel relatively cohesive with each other, very much not a clusterfuck. There was some sort of retconning in Fate, and the Cong series abruptly switched Jacen and Anakin because they were trying to convince people watching the prequels to start reading the books, and they were worried that the character being named Anakin would confuse people, but for the most part the "recent" EU since about 1999 was the least clusterfuck the EU has ever been.

Which is not the same thing as saying it was good. But it was organized.

To me, they had to abandon the EU for reasons (people whining about Game of Thrones Spoilers for seasons of the show covering 10 year old books, the fact that Harrison Ford doesn't want to fucking be in these movies, comes to mine), but aside from them having to, they definitely should have because books are not the same fucking media as movies. It is really hard for me to imagine a good Thrawn movie, or worse trilogy. The Vong at least would have provided good visuals, but there were like, 500 million things that happened in that series, and there is no way you can make a continuing storyline covering the same badguys slowly invading the galaxy for more than 3 movies. The EU would have been a mess on screen.

Which is why it is all the more perplexing that they decided to mash together EU characters and names into what I believe are analogs of the same characters (we'll see more fully when Rey's backstory is revealed).
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Post by name_here »

I'm willing to mostly give the time stuff a pass; the only incident visible to the naked eye at interstellar ranges was a hyperspatial weapon, so I'll put that down to artistic license+FTL side-effect. Coming out of hyperspace inside the shields definitely can't be done manually but is within the range of things a navicomputer could do. The battlestation thing was partially powered by rule of drama, but mostly the prison block was apparently closeish to the cooling system. It's not like they crossed the whole thing. I'd buy it taking half an hour.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Huh, one reviewer I read thought that the starkiller beam had destroyed a single planet and its multiple moons, in the same system as the observers, and I just assumed that was the case, but apparently the much dumber version is the intended one. Not awesome.
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Post by ckafrica »

Kaelik wrote: Actually, weirdly enough, a bit before the prequels they created a Lucas Arts council who started coordinating the EU, so the entire Vong Series, Legacy, and Fate all feel relatively cohesive with each other, very much not a clusterfuck. There was some sort of retconning in Fate, and the Cong series abruptly switched Jacen and Anakin because they were trying to convince people watching the prequels to start reading the books, and they were worried that the character being named Anakin would confuse people, but for the most part the "recent" EU since about 1999 was the least clusterfuck the EU has ever been.

Which is not the same thing as saying it was good. But it was organized.
I stopped reading the novels around 1997. Last ones i remember are the correllian trilogy at which point I decided there was better reading material to be found. I'm vaguely aware of the fact that the story went on beyond that with the children of Han and Leia and whatnot but I ran out of fucks to give.

Even from the extent that I had read I'm not sure how much space there would have been to tell this story. I suppose they could have simply adopted one of the novels but then the question would have been which one? As you said, Thrawn wouldn't have worked for countless reasons and few of the others would have been worthy of it. Plus they would then have had to deal with the backstory of whatever they skipped in some way. It really was a way better call to just turf the whole thing out and scavenge some ideas to use in the new stories.
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Post by Mechalich »

Kaelik wrote:To me, they had to abandon the EU for reasons (people whining about Game of Thrones Spoilers for seasons of the show covering 10 year old books, the fact that Harrison Ford doesn't want to fucking be in these movies, comes to mine), but aside from them having to, they definitely should have because books are not the same fucking media as movies.
For the record the EU was not just the novels. It was novels, and comics, and video games, and even occasional bits of promotional material (like the pre-release Jedi History bits from TOR). It was all one continuity - which is why Kyle Katarn showed up in video games and then became a regular book character, and why Jaden Korr has two novels specifically about him. Disney smashed all of it, including everything that happened before RotJ and even before the Prequels.

Heck The Clone Wars TV series and Rebels are both technically EU materials (TCW specifically references about ten million other EU things) and they deliberately kept those simply because they were TV.

There are good arguments that can be marshaled for destroying all EU material that was dated post RotJ. There are somewhat less good but still valid arguments for eliminating all EU material going back as far as Phantom Menace. Their really isn't any argument justifying the elimination of EU materials from the Old Republic Era like KOTOR or Knight Errant, especially considering the TOR (which IMO has better storylines and characters than TFA (Kaliyo Djannis forever!)) is still available to be played now, has a subscriber base in the mid-five-figures, and is set 3500 years before the films.

Because the EU was organized into discrete 'eras' of the timeline with every product's era known, it would have been very easy to preserve certain eras while eliminating other ones.
Kaelik wrote:Which is why it is all the more perplexing that they decided to mash together EU characters and names into what I believe are analogs of the same characters (we'll see more fully when Rey's backstory is revealed).
Well, there's already a new EU. It's TCW and Rebels, and a rapidly growing number of novels and short stories (I think there's around a dozen so far) and, importantly it's being produced by the same people. So material from the 'Legends' alternate universe keeps being pulled across in giant swipes by James Luceno, and Paul S. Kemp, and David Filoni and a bunch of other people. Also, because TCW is still canon, and because it contained appearances by characters and things who had already been in other EU materials prior to appearing in that series (Asajj Ventress, the planet Onderon, the Lady Luck. Nightsisters of Dathomir, too many things to count) there's a huge amount of crossover.

Given this, aside from specific events, most background elements that existed in the Legends EU are actually more likely than not to eventually be confirmed as existing in the new EU.

So when they were brainstorming they obviously talked to people steeped in EU lore, and its not that surprising that some things filtered across.
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Re: So... Star Wars [Spoilers]

Post by hyzmarca »

FrankTrollman wrote: Without getting into any of the things that happen later in the movie, I'm just going to harp on a bit from the opening story crawl. Why the fuckity fuck are the good guys called "The Resistance?" They work for the Republic. Explicitly. That is not a name that people who work for the legitimate authority have. You're only the resistance if you aren't in possession of the capital. You can be the resistance if you're the rightful government if and only if some assholes have conquered you and your government is in exile.

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The First Order controls some backwater Rim territories that were never part of the Republic or the Empire, but which were sympathetic to the Empire, and so provided a safe haven for war criminals to flee to in the wake of the Empire's defeat.

The premise for the First Order is "what if the Nazis who fled to Argentina got their shit together and took over the country?"

So, in this metaphor, the First Order is Nazified Argentina, the resistance are Argentian rebels fighting against their government, and Leia is Oliver North illegally selling them weapons against the wishes for the Senate, which really doesn't want to get involved in that mess.

Which really should have been explained in the movie.
Mechalich wrote: Well, there's already a new EU. It's TCW and Rebels, and a rapidly growing number of novels and short stories (I think there's around a dozen so far) and, importantly it's being produced by the same people.
Those aren't actually EU. Those are just normal U.

The entire point of old Star Wars canon levels is that George Lucas wasn't going to conform to novels and games that he wasn't involved in when he's writing his movies. Thus, C-Canon was always inferior to G-Canon, and if George ever decided to make a post-ROTJ movie then the entire Rost-ROTJ EU would have been invalidated, anyway.

Disney isn't going with that model. Disney is exercising considerable creative control over all of their non-Legends licenses, including the new novels and comics. So all of that stuff is equally canon to the movies and it's stuff that whomever writes the movies will have to take into account.
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