Star Wars Episode VII THE SPOILERS AWAKEN

[ab aeterno]

Well, the first part of A New Hope is centered around finding and saving Leia, while only late in the movie it becomes about the Death Star.
Like here, it started with finding Luke but in the end it was about saving Rey and destroying the starkiller.

 

A New Hope actually started with Leia trying to deliver the Death Star plans to the Rebels, so that they could destroy the Death Star. They just happen to save Leia along the way, because their destination, Alderaan, was destroyed, so they have to rescue Leia to destroy the Death Star (they don't know where the Rebel Base is).

The Force Awakens starts with the Resistance looking for Luke, and Rey gets taken aboard Starkiller base /it attacks them along the way, so they have to destroy it in order to find Luke/not die.

So the Death Star is always the primary objective in ANH, whereas Luke is always the primary objective in TFA.

 

[Mack Kilimaro]

I was so scared to get excited for this movie because I thought it was going to let me down. Then the squadron of X-Wings came flying in, kicking up water in their wake, and Poe (or however his name is spelled) looped through the skies blasting TIE Fighters while Finn ran across in the foreground. A big smile broke across my face and I thought, "OK, now this is Star Wars. I'm happy now."

It sure wasn't perfect, but it was good.

[red snow]

I haven't seen it yet, but this does seem to be a fair criticism. I guess you can forgive the filmmakers this given that it is the first episode. I just hope they breath a little bit of originality in going forward. 

It's also really selective in ignoring all the factors that are different. It seems to pretend that Finn wasn't even in the film.

[Veltigar]

Count me in as one of the people who would really dislike a Darth Plagius reveal for Snoke. I feel like it's very important not to diminish the Emperor's station and by making him into a guy who was so easily tricked into believing that he had killed his master, you do just that.

Plus, an all powerful Darkside user feels a bit melodramatic. It doesn't fit the theme of people getting inspired by the ideas of the Empire or the Rebellion and forming things like the First Order. 

[Jace, Extat]

Didn't like it, didn't hate it. Which makes me a hypocrite because I kept saying "just don't suck!" and it definitely doesn't suck but I'm still super disappointed.

You guys have already dug in pretty deep so I'll just add my likes/dislikes

Liked:

-Rey. Her 'I have to wait for my family!!!' thing got really old really quick but that's basically my only gripe on her, though it could be explained if Luke brainwashed her to stay on Jakku in hiding and she had to overcome that mental conditioning rather than just pure naivete.

-Finn. He was kinda annoying sometimes because his dialogue was clunky, but I liked watching him. A bit too informed for a grunt on his first mission, though.

-Everything before they left Jakku was perfect. After that...

-The Force. Shit was mysterious, Kylo Ren entered doing crazy badass brain stuff and freezing shit that we hadn't seen in a film. I also liked the way the interrogations were shot. I didn't need anything besides the hand and Poe/Rey's face to know some mind shit was going down. I also just really got a kick out of when Ren captured Rey he basically just put her to sleep with a wave of his hand. It was shit like that which had me thinking 'oh, this guy's a total badass!'

Disliked:

-Major plot holes. Han and Chewie stumbling across Rey and Finn 5 minutes after they escaped Jakku? Seriously? Did everything in this film happen in the same goddamn solar system? The sense of scale was just all wrong. The starkiller eats suns, but kills 5 planets at the same time... Can it move? I actually thought the gun was gonna be the engine in the trailers but... where do they get another sun to eat? Is it a system with multiple suns, because how many could they have, eventually you'll run out of suns to eat? How did they send the lasers into hyperspace (really poor effects)? How do they survive on the planet with no sun? Do they realize that eating a star will kill entire solar systems at a time? They don't even need to shoot individual planets. How did the rebels not know about the base? Why is there a Republic and a resistance and a First Order... is there an Empire? Why can't the Republic deal with the First Order directly if they're building lazersunguns? Why does the Republic not know about the lasersungun? Everyone seems to know who Snoke is and that he's bad and that the First Order are bad, but step one in everyone's plan seems to be finding Luke. Is Luke the only one who knows where to find starships to go to war with? Why is R2-D2 in a robot depression? I totally get giving him space to deal, but if finding Luke is that important...HE'S A ROBOT! PLUG HIM IN, DOWNLOAD WHAT HE KNOWS! Why does Kylo Ren just fucking suck at swinging a lightsaber? Do we have to be this vague about every character and their motivation? I get leaving threads for the next one, but for the love of Jeep Chryst, can you give me something to work with? How can I ever take Kylo Ren seriously when he got fucked up by a coward and deserter (we'll get into that later)?

-Snoke. Eh, I don't care about his silly name. But I felt like they either didn't know what exactly they're doing with him, or were trying WAY TOO HARD to remind us of the Emperor and Vader's relationship. We get it, he wants to be Vader, you want to be Emperor. But your fatherly evilness doesn't quite work when the guy you're peptalking is kind of a loser. Vader was Emp's right hand man because he got shit done, and people died on the way. Ren is Snoke's right hand man... because his daddy (or more accurately, his mommy). Meh, total meh. Just wasn't jiving.

-Carrie. Wow, this kinda sucks because I was looking forward to her the most. She looked great, don't know what jerkfaces are calling her old and gross saw. But the acting! Yikes, that was just atrocious. I couldn't quite tell if they'd had to redo her dialogue or spliced it heavily from other takes or if she just doesn't move her mouth when she talks, but that was extremely jarring. Yeah, disappointed.

-Kylo. It... this one's tough. It wasn't him taking off the helmet. I was ok with that. I have no idea who Adam Driver is, so I was hoping for him to look a bit older. Like late-twenties 'I'm pretty sure I know where I'm going with my life' kinda age. Instead he looked 12 to me, so that was kinda weird. So it wasn't taking off the helmet, and he was a total badass early in the film just fucking shit up with the force and freaking out with his store brand lightsaber, that was all cool. But then he gets all crying-face with his daddy... eh, ok. But then he lets Chewie shoot him, which is an excuse to give the crowd a cheer (yay, Chewie!!!) and give him an excuse to lose to Rey. I would have preferred he blocks Chewie's shot, Chewie sets off bombs, Ren is then injured escaping the building.

Anyways, then he goes outside and has a meltdown. Still with it when he force pushes the fuck out of Rey, maybe he can be a badass still... he's pounding on his wound, that's really weird how he's doing that.... and he's being fought to a standstill by Finn (who we saw get beat up by another clone trooper)... Yeah, not cool. Not buying it anymore. I get he may have been fucking with Finn or may not have taken him seriously... but !?! that's just embarrassing. Finn had a clear upper hand at one point, which just can't happen.

Then we get to him being beaten (thoroughly) by Rey, and I'm ok with that in a vacuum. Since I fall into the 'it's not about the lightsaber, it's about the force' camp, I can totally see her coming online and just going zen mode on his ass. But that works for Ren as well. If he's so powerful like we've seen... he should at least be able to beat Finn. I'm also ok with the mindwipe Rey theory, but still... how powerful can she be that Ren (the guy who's supposed to be a superbadass) got totally destroyed in one-on-one with her. Basically I think Ren lost all of his power at the end, I can't really take him seriously. I would have been on the level of Rey fighting him to a standstill, especially in light of his injuries, and then they get separated and can't fight no more, but that was the kind of asskicking in the snow that one person never wants a part of again.

There's more bad, a lot more bad. But I'm tired and depressed now. I'm gonna go do something else.

[ab aeterno]

This is from Deadline.com just now, and it's glorious:

"Distribution executives are in complete awe and just can’t believe what they’re witnessing hour by hour. After shattering the box office industry’s preview-night record with $57 million on Thursday, Disney’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens is set to knock over opening-day and weekend records left and right. You can scratch out that $110M opening day we heard about earlier. Force Awakens Friday — which includes that $57M it made in Thursday previews — is between $130M-$145M per industry estimates (not Disney). This puts Force Awakens in an opening-weekend range of $250M-$275M; a gross that sends Universal’s Jurassic World current opening-weekend record of $208.8M back to the Stone Age."

[felice]

Fun and pretty, and I liked the characters, but the plot had some serious problems. The biggest being the Starkiller, which you could actually remove entirely without drastically changing the film. The concept is fine, but the way it's handled in the film is pretty awful. A threat even bigger and more dangerous than the Death Star that the rebels only find out about it when it destroys... er, some planet for some reason? By seeing it happen? Good thing they just happened to be in the same solar system as wherever-it-was, but not close enough to get destroyed at the same time. Compare that to A New Hope, where Leia's home planet is destroyed to punish her and demonstrate the power of the Death Star to the galaxy, and the heroes find out when they arrive in the Alderaan system and are shocked to find the entire planet (and their goal) destroyed. And there's no visual indication of it being a faster-than-light weapon, just an after-the-fact bit of dialogue (better than nothing, I guess). And how does it aim? (Oh yeah, and the sun going out was ridiculous; a star should be able to power a massive number of shots before being depleted) None of the main characters on either side are involved in the X-wing attack on the Starkiller (and why are they using X-wings instead of capital ships anyway?); it's just a distraction from the main story.

Instead of the Starkiller, why not have the climax simply being a raid on the nearest First Order outpost to rescue both Rey and BB-8? If the rebels don't get them back, the First Order will be the ones to find Luke. And rather than seeking out the big bad during a vitally important covert operation, have Kylo and Rey fight first, have him beat her, but just as he's about to swing the killing blow, "Ben!" Basically the same conversation follows, but it's saving Rey, Finn, and indirectly Luke in the process, rather than being just a failed attempt to redeem Kylo.

The alternative would be to integrate the Starkiller into the story better, but it would be hard to do that without making it even more a retread of A New Hope.

[Jace, Extat]

Fun and pretty, and I liked the characters, but the plot had some serious problems. The biggest being the Starkiller, which you could actually remove entirely without drastically changing the film. The concept is fine, but the way it's handled in the film is pretty awful. A threat even bigger and more dangerous than the Death Star that the rebels only find out about it when it destroys... er, some planet for some reason? By seeing it happen? Good thing they just happened to be in the same solar system as wherever-it-was, but not close enough to get destroyed at the same time. Compare that to A New Hope, where Leia's home planet is destroyed to punish her and demonstrate the power of the Death Star to the galaxy, and the heroes find out when they arrive in the Alderaan system and are shocked to find the entire planet (and their goal) destroyed. And there's no visual indication of it being a faster-than-light weapon, just an after-the-fact bit of dialogue (better than nothing, I guess). And how does it aim? None of the main characters on either side are involved in the X-wing attack on the Starkiller (and why are they using X-wings instead of capital ships anyway?); it's just a distraction from the main story.

Instead of the Starkiller, why not have the climax simply being a raid on the nearest First Order outpost to rescue both Rey and BB-8? If the rebels don't get them back, the First Order will be the ones to find Luke. And rather than seeking out the big bad during a vitally important covert operation, have Kylo and Rey fight first, have him beat her, but just as he's about to swing the killing blow, "Ben!" Basically the same conversation follows, but it's saving Rey, Finn, and indirectly Luke in the process, rather than being just a failed attempt to redeem Kylo.

The alternative would be to integrate the Starkiller into the story better, but it would be hard to do that without making it even more a retread of A New Hope.

I mean to say the same thing but got mentally exhausted. The only reason Starkiller base was there was because someone needed more Ep IV parallels. Which is just dumb. Especially because if Ep VIII doesn't literally start with the general guy being executed, we know that the First Order didn't even give a fuck about that base. It was just a thing going on.

[ab aeterno]

I just wish they hadn't destroyed the base so quickly/easily. It would have worked well surviving into the next movie, looming over events, as it were. 

But yeah, agreed that it's not really necessary. But then, neither was Death Star 2.0 - the movie was about killing the Emperor and Vader more than the Death Star.

[Jabronius Maximus]

This is from Deadline.com just now, and it's glorious:

"Distribution executives are in complete awe and just can’t believe what they’re witnessing hour by hour. After shattering the box office industry’s preview-night record with $57 million on Thursday, Disney’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens is set to knock over opening-day and weekend records left and right. You can scratch out that $110M opening day we heard about earlier. Force Awakens Friday — which includes that $57M it made in Thursday previews — is between $130M-$145M per industry estimates (not Disney). This puts Force Awakens in an opening-weekend range of $250M-$275M; a gross that sends Universal’s Jurassic World current opening-weekend record of $208.8M back to the Stone Age."

ooh lordy lordy Michael Jordy. I was expecting it to beat Jurassic but not by that much. 

[ab aeterno]

ooh lordy lordy Michael Jordy. I was expecting it to beat Jurassic but not by that much. 

Honestly, I'm just as excited about the box office gross as I am about the movie. Star Wars is reasserting it's dominance as the popular culture mega-franchise, obliterating everything in its path.  Fingers crossed.

[Marcus Agrippa]

Not shocked nostalgic presence is legit now a days. Remember there are more adults then there are children. What gets me is that they would shorthand it by so much. My friends in New York city weren't able to catch it. 

[Jace, Extat]

Anyone else noticed the reduced effectiveness of the lightsaber? In the OT, the lightsaber can cut the shit out of stuff, but you don't just slice people up with barely a thought. Luke swung his like it was a goddamn broadsword on Jabba's barge and people weren't getting sliced and diced left and right. The only time we saw it take people apart was when it was hitting shit like y'know... arms and/or wrists.

It wasn't just Ren's shitty saber either, Ren got hit by Anakin's saber like 5 or 6 times and he wasn't lying on the ground in chunks. I liked that, because just like in the OT, it's a lasersword... but it's still a sword. It'll fuck a person up, but it's not instant god weapon either.

[ab aeterno]

Anyone else noticed the reduced effectiveness of the lightsaber? In the OT, the lightsaber can cut the shit out of stuff, but you don't just slice people up with barely a thought. Luke swung his like it was a goddamn broadsword on Jabba's barge and people weren't getting sliced and diced left and right. The only time we saw it take people apart was when it was hitting shit like y'know... arms and/or wrists.

It wasn't just Ren's shitty saber either, Ren got hit by Anakin's saber like 5 or 6 times and he wasn't lying on the ground in chunks. I liked that, because just like in the OT, it's a lasersword... but it's still a sword. It'll fuck a person up, but it's not instant god weapon either.

Unless you upset Obi-Wan while he's having a casual drink. Then you're gonna get fucked up.

 

"Oh my god, Ben, it was only a bar fight! You didn't have to cut his entire arm off!"

[RumHam]

I liked it but agree with those who have said the Starkiller was unnecessary. My other main complaint is that alien lady having Luke's lightsaber and then handwaving it away with basically "you'll have to wait for that anthology film." I mean he dropped it into a gas giant right? It's not just the contrivance of Han unknowingly taking them to the lightsaber but also how did anyone recover it in the first place?

Oh and the R2D2 sleep mode thing could have been handled better. Even if he was just damaged and then repaired, or came back online when BB-8 delivered the map fragment. 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

 Star Wars as directed by Ken Burns...

[Jace, Extat]

I think the lightsabers were noticeably weaker, but a lot of that can be attributed too them just scraping or slicing someone rather than directly hitting them. I don't think for a second that in future films when someone is required to lose a limb, they'll do the trick. Notice they very little trouble going through trees when they hit them full-on, even pretty thick ones. 

For a second or so, I genuinely thought Rey was going to decapitate Kylo Ren. 

I was hoping she would. That would have been an ending. Rey standing in that dark forest over Ren's body, slowly losing her innocence as it's replaced by undying rage.

[A True Kaniggit]

 

For a second or so, I genuinely thought Rey was going to decapitate Kylo Ren. 

Yeah. The Mortal Combat phrase "Finish Him!" went through my mind at this point. 

[RumHam]

I thought it was funny how Kylo can take a hit from Chewie's blaster (that they seemed to stress earlier in the film was quite powerful) and still be able to walk and fight. Meanwile an armored stormtrooper gets hit and they're done. Why do they even wear the armor? It's been established it can't even protect them from Ewok thrown rocks.

[dooog]

I thought it was funny how Kylo can take a hit from Chewie's blaster (that they seemed to stress earlier in the film was quite powerful) and still be able to walk and fight. Meanwile an armored stormtrooper gets hit and they're done. Why do they even wear the armor? It's been established it can't even protect them from Ewok thrown rocks.

Lol I was just saying this to my mate the other day. They don't protect against ewok arrows either

Also in the original Star Wars, Obi Wan deduces that the scrap merchants on Tattooine must have been massacred by empire storm troopers because of the "precision" aiming. The same storm troopers that didn't hit a single thing for the next 2.5 movies