Well it seems to have been according to all those critics who laughed at Lucas’ “rhyming” and callbacks in the prequels, including The Holy Plinkett.
Yet suddenly now it’s ok. In fact, outright, barefaced plagiarism is now apparently ok.
Right, my final, final word. Apparently, "After sitting through it, Lucas offered another perfectly polite backdoor compliment. “I think the fans are going to love it,” he told Vulture. “It’s very much the kind of movie they’ve been looking for.” "
LOL.
Done well, it can be an ok thing, sure. But this kind of stuff requires some detachment from the emotional, so hand on heart you need to step back and with a cool head compare this new film with Episode 1 (as they are both the starting point in a new trilogy). Whatever the weakness of this film compared to Empire or Star Wars (the crown jewels in the SW series) you have to compare it to what we were getting in the prequels. This is pretty good on that metric?
I don’t think we will ever get better SW films than Empire of the original, just because they were off their time and i believe we are sliding culturally downwards so neither the demand (via the cinema going public) or talent (via the writing/direction/studio concerns) is on hand to better those first two original films. But as long as it is better than the prequels SW can do ok for another generation, which is all gravy in my book of star wars fandom.
See, gurugeorge fought the fight I couldn’t be bothered to engage in. I made my opinions perfectly clear much earlier in the thread and then walked away. TFA is nothing but the result of giving a slightly talented fanboy $200m. Period. Hopefully the next few sequels dare to be creative and original.
It stings a bit because it’s mostly true. But as derivative and shallow as the movie can credibly be characterized as being, there’s a lot of potential for growth and depth that wasn’t there before.
In fact, outright, barefaced plagiarism is now apparently ok.
Ok I will call you out on this bull. This is an authorized continuation of an established mythos. Its not plagiarism, not in any way shape or form. It is instead, cannibalism. Sheesh, some critic you are.
They took a lot of creative risks with this movie. Not putting the original characters front and center, for one. Everyone thought the story would center around the New Jedi Order, which would have been the safe and expected route. I think they did a new job at establishing a new set of characters.
^^^^ That would’ve been more of a creative risk. :D
Hey now that is plagiarism! You stole that directly from my latest script STAR TREK: The Gornian Roadtrip
Dude, I like the movie a lot and I think you’re crazy for saying that they “took a lot of creative risks”.
I would watch that movie.
Me too! Why is Kirk scared? Is the Gorn speeding? Is there an interdimensisonal rift ahead?
I saw it again today.
I still don’t have any major complaints. I love the job the new actors did.
Saw it again, this time at the cinerama in Seattle. Sold out. Was surprised how energized the crowd was, considering most of them were probably on 2nd or 3rd viewing at least. Chatter from the 1st timers around us was how much they loved it.
But I’m sure they will all come to their senses eventually.
A detail I noticed in the flashback is that Kylo seems to be killing one of his own Knights, and the point of view was looking up, as if from a child. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was protecting Rey. Common knowledge at this point, I’m sure, but reinforces my impression that Rey was a student.
There’s something missing, though, because apart from the “what girl?” moment I don’t get the sense that Kylo knows her background or expects her to have force capabilities. I haven’t figured out a scenario that fits everything the movie shows us.
The score is also growing on me after a few listens and paying attention to it in context. There’s some really interesting stuff with kylo and Rey’s themes (and Rey’s actual theme does not seem to be the whimsical scavenger stuff, but the fuller music that seems to have some nice echoes of the Force theme).
We should get a QT3 group together to go see it at the Seattle Center IMAX.
In the novel there’s a line after Rey force-pulls the saber, where Kylo says “it is you”. Then “His words unsettled her: Not for the first time, he seemed to know more about her than she did about herself.”
Interesting. Thanks.
Yeah my main disappointment first time through was what I perceived to be a weak score, but after I spent a week with the soundtrack and then got to see it a second time Rey’s Theme is wonderfully deployed throughout.
Yeah, second time through, the score stood out a lot more. I can’t really say if that is different from the original trilogy, because I saw them all when I was like 10, and I watched them like 100 times in a row.
Last night I FINALLY saw this movie, after having successfully avoided all spoilers and all other spoiler-related debate. I will say that I’m glad I saw it. It looked, sounded, and moved around like a Star Wars movie. It was well-acted, and technically proficient. However, I wouldn’t call it a good movie. It wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t good. So these are my impressions, entirely uninformed by having read any previous commentary. No doubt most of these have already been touched upon at length. So beginith the rambling…
The First Order’s go-to aesthetic seems to be making everything black and chromed.
The First Order… of what?
Poe Dameron was thrown out of the crashed TIE fighter so hard, it threw him right out of his jacket (which was entirely free of burns, somehow).
So uh do I talk first or do you OMFG I like Whedonesque dialoge but get it out of Star Wars.
At least two instances of very un-Star Wars’y but very Star Trek’y technobabble.
The political configuration of the galaxy makes no damn sense. If the Republic is now the reigning government, then their military force should just be, y’know, the army, or whatever. Instead we have this “Resistance”?
What do you do when everyone is looking for the unique, easy-to-spot droid you’re transporting? Hide it in the ship? No, you bring it along with you everywhere, leading to the massacre of everyone around you everywhere you go.
Hi, I was conditioned my entire adult life to follow all orders mindlessly, referred to only by a number, and treated like a generic, disposable combat unit-- until I decided to run away, at which point I act exactly like a regular dude with no residual personality weirdness whatsoever.
Kylo can sense his father when he gets within planetary range, but apparently not when he’s standing 50 feet behind him.
Every inhabited planet in the Republic is apparently within naked-eye distance of each other.
Apparently all a Storm Trooper has to do is ditch his armor to become a ten times better shot.
Yes, it was funny when Han commented on how cool Chewie’s boltcaster was. We didn’t need to repeat the gag.
Way too many ludicrously improbable coincidences. No doubt courtesy of J.J. “Gives No Fucks” Abrams’ influence.
TIE fighters suck… unless they’re being piloted by a good guy, in which case they suddenly kick ass and can take out armored artillery emplacements in one shot.
Speaking of which, also way too many “Yeah! So cool! We kick ass! Did you all see how much ass we just kicked!!! YEAHH!!!” moments by Finn. Yeah, we get it, you have the tools and you have the talent.
Look, we already built this torture chair set for Poe, may as well recycle it for Rey.
Rey gets competent at Force usage stupidly fast. Apparently jogging around Dagobah for weeks is for suckers.
“Snoke” is the least-threatening villain name since “Betty”.
General Hux is taking this shit way too seriously.
So now we know what it looks like when someone puts points into Force Tantrum.
Catwalks man… nothing good ever happens on catwalks.
Stormtrooper janitor? WTF??? So they send their janitors out on combat missions… I guess? And they know the technical details of top-secret superweapons?
The Starkiller is another thing that makes no damn sense. It’s massively larger than a Death Star, yet seemingly the only advantage it has is that it can kill multiple planets at once. Yay? Not much of an advantage. In fact why does it even need to shoot anything? All it has to do is show up in a system, extinguish the local star (by sucking up the entire mass of a sun into an object the size of a sma^H^H^H medium-sized moon, somehow), and leave. Or does it even go anywhere? The film never makes any explicit reference to jumping it to different systems, and in this everything-is-close-together galaxy, who can really tell if it has?
This one is admittedly really geeky, but there’s a moment in the light saber battle where Kylo twirls his lightsaber around, exactly like one would twirl a conventional sword. Problem is, light saber blades are massless-- all the weight is in the handle. So that twirl should be impossible.
Both Finn and Rey light up the saber in exactly the same pose. Yeesh, more repetition.
Either Finn and Rey are really good with a lightsaber (somehow), or Kylo really sucks with a lightsaber.
Behold the onslaught of Kylo Ren: Sith lumberjack.
Incredibly Convenient Chasm opening up there at the end of the light saber scuffle.
R2-D2 inexplicably wakes up, taps his ruby slippers together, and discovers the way to Luke Skywalker was within him the whole time. Somehow.
Final scene courtesy of “Hey, don’t you wish you were watching this in 3D?”
Admit it. Were you taking notes during the movie?
Yeah, most of those have been discussed. Some are simple oversights (we just recently talked about how they explicitly showed Poe taking off his jacket in the TIE Fighter).
I was just wondering about the Starkiller base myself the other day. It’s a planet, right? How does it move to a new system? I started reading wookieepedia about it but I had to stop myself.